Candler’s Black Church Studies Program will welcome AnneMarie Mingo 13G, associate professor of ethics, culture and moral leadership and director of the Metro-Urban Institute at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, as distinguished guest speaker for the 2024 Anna Julia Cooper Lecture. Mingo will present her lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 27 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. in Room 102 of Candler’s Rita Anne Rollins Building. The event is free and open to the public, with registration required.
Mingo’s lecture, “Cultivating Courageous Resistance: Black Churchwomen’s Activism in Freedom Struggles,” will explore the virtue of Courageous Resistance that Mingo identified through the liberative ethics and lived theology of Black Churchwomen during the Civil Rights Movement and offers applications for contemporary freedom and justice struggles. Maya Angelou described courage as “the most important of the virtues, because without it, no other virtues can be practiced consistently.” The resilience of Black women during the Civil Rights Movement is rooted in their faith and courage to resist the systems and structures that sought to dispute the dignity of their womanhood and personhood.
About the Anna Julia Cooper Lecture
This annual lecture is named for Anna Julia Cooper, one of the most influential Black scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries. Born into slavery in 1858, Cooper graduated from Oberlin College and the Sorbonne, becoming the fourth African American woman in the U.S. to earn a PhD. She served as a public school teacher and principal in Washington, D.C. for more than 30 years, and remained a prominent educator, activist and author until her death at age 105.
About AnneMarie Mingo
Mingo previously served as assistant professor of African American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Penn State University, and an affiliate faculty member in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. In 2018-2019 she was the Ella Baker Visiting Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Drawing on oral histories and ethnographies, her work in social ethics centers on the lived experiences of Black Churchwomen who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century Black Freedom Struggles with a specific focus on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, South African Apartheid Movement and global Movement for Black Lives, socio-religious activism of Black women and theological and ethical influences in social movements. Her first book, “Have You Got Good Religion?: Black Women’s Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement,” will be published with the University of Illinois Press in 2024.
She also writes in areas of Black Church activism, peace and reconciliation, and the influence of Black music and media on social activism. She is the founder of the Cultivating Courageous Resisters project that works collaboratively to expand the work and equip intergenerational religious activists to help meet critical contemporary needs for social justice.
Prior to entering the academy, Mingo worked as a corporate marketing executive with The Procter and Gamble Company for over eight years. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in business administration from Florida A&M University, her MBA from Rollins College – Crummer Graduate School, her MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary and her PhD from Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion.
An internationally known speaker, Mingo has inspired and empowered people throughout the United States, Caribbean, southern Africa and southeast Asia. An ordained itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, she has served as an associate minister at Big Bethel A.M.E. Church in Atlanta; St. James A.M.E. Church in Newark, New Jersey; and maintains membership at St. Mark A.M.E. Church in Orlando. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated, and active in numerous academic guilds.
Mingo is the founder of Sister Scholars, an organization that supports Black women with or pursuing doctorate degrees.