The Imposing Preacher

Book excerpt: As a distinguished pastor, educator, and public servant, Samuel DeWitt Proctor made it his mission to serve American life by fighting racism. In The Imposing Preacher, Adam Bond shows how Proctor, as the product of a prophetic black church tradition, a social gospel-laced liberal Protestantism, and a black middle-class integrationist ethos, envisioned a pulpit activism through which the United States could realize an integrated civil society and was able to anticipate themes articulated by black religious movements of the late twentieth century. Proctor presents an alternative model of religious and social leadership and for studies of African American religion.