Christopher Cameron is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where his research and teaching interests include early American history, the history of slavery and abolition, and African American religious and intellectual history. At UNC Charlotte, he’s also founding president of the African American Intellectual History Society, and the founding secretary of the Black Humanist Studies Association. He’ll speak at 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy as part of the African American Heritage House Speaker Series.
“I think historians recognize that what’s going on now cannot be understood without reference to past events — our identity, our political development, culture, religion,” Cameron told the University of Illinois at Chicago in a guest spotlight post following his appearance on the Grace Holt Celebration panel on “The Future of African American Studies.” “We need to understand the past in order to know what’s going on today.”
Cameron is the author of To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement and Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism; he is also the co-editor of Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter: Essays on a Moment and a Movement and co-editor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition. His current book project, The Faith of the Future: African Americans and Unitarian Universalism, explores the intersection of race and liberal religion dating back to the mid-18th century and the varied ways that liberal theology has informed African American religion and politics in the 20th and 21st centuries.
“I look at the rise of black atheism during the era of slavery and then its growth during the Harlem Renaissance and the radical politics of the 1920s and 1930s, also the role of Black atheists and agnostics in the civil rights movement,” he told the University of Illinois at Chicago. “… This would actually be the first history of Black freethought.”
