Professor of Religious Studies Mary Beth Mathews
Professor of Religious Studies Mary Beth Mathews has published a new book entitled Contentious Unions: Black Baptist Schools and White Money in the Jim Crow South with the University of Tennessee Press (2025).
The book tells the interconnected stories of three institutions (Macon’s Central City College in Georgia, Virginia Union University in Richmond, and American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville) and demonstrates that these three historically black colleges and universities used the white financial support they received to subvert the racist politics of white Baptists and white Southerners in general. In these “oppositional spaces,” Black Baptists constructed and developed ways to combat the systems that marginalized them.