Black Liberation Theology and the “Black Manifesto”

The year 2019 marked several significant and substantially intertwined anniversaries. The same year that marked the 400th year since the earliest arrival of “Twenty and more negroes” were brought by force and sold into bondage as human chattel into the floundering Jamestown colony in 1619 was also remembered as the 50th anniversary of the debut publication of late theologian James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power and, to no lesser extent, the “Black Manifesto,” a boldly prophetic document that sparked a landmark debate about the nexus of race, religion, and reparations. This paper explores the common ground between Cone's Black liberation theology and Forman's presentation of the “Black Manifesto.” On the one hand, Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power was the first academic treatise to merge the contemporaneous struggles for racial, political, and socioeconomic equality with the critical concerns of Christian systematic theology. By offering a forcefully prophetic call for a theology rooted in the Black experience, this pioneering work established Black liberation theology as an undeniable force within theological education and Black church praxis. On the other hand, prepared largely by James Forman in conjunction with the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, this statement endorsed by the National Black Economic Development Conference (NBEDC) on April 26, 1969 in Detroit, Michigan. Reflecting its genesis at the tail end of the 1960s within that sociopolitical crucible, the “Black Manifesto” called on white religious institutions across the theological and denominational spectrum to pay $500 million in reparations for the historic ravages of Black chattel slavery in the United States as well as the ensuing structural oppression that still impacted people of African descent contemporaneously. Within this legendary statement, the manifesto outlined a visionary programmatic agenda for how this money would be used to redress the systematic and systemic forms of oppression that plagued Black women, men, and children as a result of centuries of both enslavement and segregation. In an effort to recognize and engage the importance of both cultural artifacts, this paper will compare and contrast the theo-historical significance and impact of Cone’s and Forman’s respective contributions to Black religious thought as well as the lessons to be gleaned from their mutual legacies within the ongoing scope of Black Church Studies and the broader Black theology project.