A Pursued Justice

The narrative of Civil Rights often begins with the prophetic figure of Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. City squares became a church, the body politic a congregation, and sermons a jeremiad of social change--or so the story goes. In A Pursued Justice , Kenyatta Gilbert instead traces the roots of King’s call for justice to African American prophetic preaching that arose in an earlier moment of American history. In the wake of a failed Reconstruction period, widespread agricultural depressio