By Joel Brown
“As I look about me in this veiled world of mine, despite the noisier and more spectacular advance of my brothers, I instinctively feel and know that it is the five million women of my race who really count. Black women (and women whose grandmothers were black) are today furnishing our teachers; are the main pillars of those social settlements which we call churches; and they have with small doubt raised three-fourths of our church property.”
—W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
W.E.B. Du Bois’s words from 1920 remain as provocative today as they were when first penned a century ago, challenging both the historical record and contemporary perceptions of leadership in the Black church. While his own legacy on gender was complicated—both an advocate for women’s rights and a product and perpetrator of patriarchal structures—his reflection on the Black church and its social infrastructure made clear that Black women “really count.” It was Black women who sustained the church’s spiritual and material life, yet their contributions have often been overlooked, both in history and in the historiography.
This oversight is not unique to the study of the Black church but extends to broader narratives of the church’s role in social transformation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Black women were central to movements for racial justice, social reform, and Christian mission, yet they were too often relegated to the margins, both by the institutions they built and by the historians who later chronicled those institutions. Within the Black church, they embodied what one womanist theologian, Eboni Marshall Turman, has described as a “sacralized schizophrenia,” a form of double-consciousness (à la Du Bois) that forced them to navigate the paradox of being the backbone of religious life while simultaneously being subjected to male authority.
Nannie Helen Burroughs, the pioneering educator and Black social gospeler, addressed this exclusion directly in her 1900 speech, How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping, delivered before the National Baptist Convention. She spoke of Black women’s untapped potential for Christian service, lamenting that their contributions were obstructed by what she called “the clutches of men.” Burroughs and countless others did not passively accept these constraints; they resisted them, expanding the reach of the church beyond the male-dominated pulpits and into the lived realities of their communities. They were preachers, teachers, organizers, missionaries, and institution-builders, working tirelessly to embody a faith that sought justice, even as they were denied full participation in the formal structures of church leadership.
The history of Black women in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) reflects these broader patterns of struggle and persistence. Whether in the leadership of the National Christian Missionary Convention (the forerunner of the National Convocation) or in local congregational life, Black women played indispensable roles—roles that demand further study, recognition, and incorporation into the church’s historical memory. Their work in education, missions, and social uplift was not secondary to the story of Disciples history; it was foundational to it.
As we celebrate Black History Month, the challenge remains: how do we recover and amplify the stories of Black women whose labor, faith, and courage has helped to build and sustain the church? Womanist scholar Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas explains that the historiography of Black women challenges and seeks to rewrite dominant historical accounts, which have been constructed largely by the “perpetually conjoined gazes of white supremacy and male superiority.”
Working to correct this historiographical oversight is to confront a kind of violence in our sacred history—one that has not only erased Black women from the record but also diminished our collective understanding of the church’s true story. But recognition alone is not enough. We must do the work of restoring these voices to our histories, our pulpits, and our theological imaginations. We must actively center Black women’s leadership, scholarship, and wisdom—not as an afterthought, but as essential to the church’s witness in the world. This means committing to research that prioritizes their stories, supporting institutions that elevate their voices, and shaping church communities where their leadership is not just acknowledged but empowered. Only then can we begin to tell the whole truth about those who, in Du Bois’s words, “really count.”