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Aug. 30 – Dr. Christopher Cameron: ‘African Americans and Unitarianism from the Civil War to World War I’

This lecture explores the significant but often overlooked role of African Americans in shaping American Unitarianism and religious liberalism from the Civil War through the early Twentieth Century. Focusing on figures including Frederick Douglass, Peter H. Clark, Maria Baldwin, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, it examines how Black intellectuals and activists found in Unitarianism and the Free Religious movement spaces for intellectual freedom, social reform, and challenges to racial and gender inequality. It also demonstrates that African Americans were not simply recipients of Unitarian ideas but active participants in debates over the meaning and future of liberal religion in the United States.

Christopher Cameron is Professor of History at UNC Charlotte. He is the author of To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement and Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism. He is also the co-editor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition and Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter: Essays on a Moment and a Movement. His current book project, The Faith of the Future: African Americans and Unitarian Universalism, explores the intersection of race and liberal religion dating back to the mid-18^th century and the varied ways that liberal theology has informed African American religion and politics in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.