Abstract
Black theologians in the past twenty or twenty-five years have demonstrated that African Americans have not traditionally been a part of the Western theological enterprise and, therefore, have not participated, until recently, in the construction of modern theology, or generally been involved in mainstream theological discourse. Nevertheless, within the past two to three decades much work has been done in the academic world to discover, capture, and build on the theological bases that have undergirded African American religious development over the past three hundred years. The Black theology movement, begun in 1969 with the publication of James Hal Cone’s pathfinding Black Theology and Black Power, has grown to dynamic proportions over the years and has generated national and even international attention. In making its case, this way of doing theology has interacted with major Western theological personalities, theologians of the so-called Third World, and both feminist and womanist theological proponents in the United States.