10 - Peace and Justice through Black Christian Education

Summary

The development of appropriate Christian education curriculum materials for Black people owes much to the pioneering work of Olivia Pearl Stokes, in the late 1960s and early 70s. Stokes argued for the need for Christian education within the Black church in the United States of America to be informed by the discipline of Black theology.

When Olivia Pearl Stokes argued for the need for Black theology to be the first point of departure for Black Christian education, she was making recourse to a basic conviction of Black existential experience: namely, that central to the development of a Christian religious experience is the ontological reality of Blackness: the condition of being Black in the world.

The rationale and import for Black Christian education has arisen, in part, due to the encounter between White Europeans and Black Africans some five hundred years ago. The emergence and development of the Atlantic slave trade unleashed a terrible legacy of oppression and exploitation upon the African self. Upwards of ten million African people were transported from continental Africa to the “New World” for profit. The major historic denominations of the West were involved directly and indirectly in this pernicious and violent assault upon African people. Prior to the development of this movement in capitalistic greed and economic expediency there had been in existence a philosophical belief in the inherent superiority of European peoples over and against those of African descent.