Black children are often relegated to the margins of society and scholarship, including disciplines in childhood studies and religion. This interdisciplinary panel disrupts Black childhood exclusion and centers critical interpretations and examinations of Black childhood in religious studies. Toward that end, paper presentations will investigate dimensions of agency, identity, and ways of being that are integral to Black childhood as well as wrestle with what it means to situate Black childhood in religious institutions, practices, and scholarship.
This paper explores the materiality of African American childhoods in light of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15th, 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. Conceptually, the paper serves as a dramaturgy of the events orbiting the bombing, with attention to characters such as the Birmingham Children’s Crusade in May of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council, the children murdered apart from the bombing, and the politicized funerals of the victims, with hopes to interrogate the ways Black childhood destructibility is cyclical and an object of commodification.
Drawing on ephemera and oral histories, this paper tells a story about Southern Black childhood and religion in the Jim Crow period. The school’s administrators and faculty, I argue, linked the Christian transformation of its students—whom they described as “little wild things untamed and undeveloped”—with gendered performances of childhood.[1] Simultaneously, I attend to moments in which the archive reveals the perspectives of students themselves. Ultimately, I show that histories of educational institutions are productive sites for engaging the intersection of Black childhood and religion.
[1] “The Miracle of Mather,” n.d., Mather School Records, 42-G6, American Baptist Historical Society, Atlanta, GA, 9.
I am interested in the sundry ideologies and tools which render black children, and by extension black childhood, as illegible in religious communities. In order for a kinship structure or collective to cohere as a “legible community,” it determines not only who belongs but who does not; and by extension, it regulates which individuals or collectives are afforded rights and privileges, or which individuals or collectives are susceptible to additional harm or violence. Further, I want to parse out a distinction between visibility and legibility for black childhood. Visibility, or even representation, does not guarantee that an individual or community has a better chance of being humanized or normalized. I am interested in exploring how these machinations develop, for whose benefit, and to imagine what “care” might look like in such uncaring institutions. This paper seeks to both investigate the investments in not seeing children, and to inspire theological commitments to seeking.