City of Black Souls : Chicago, Ethiopianism, and the Black Apocalyptic Imagination

How Black Protestants in Chicago created Ethiopianism, a transnational religious movement against Western imperialismCity of Black Souls uncovers the history of how, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Black Protestants in Chicago created a transnational religious movement that connected the Black struggle for freedom in the United States to the global Black fight against Western imperialism.This was a movement of Ethiopianism-meaning a movement for Black religious and political independence inspired by biblical references to “Ethiopia,” particularly Psalm 68:31, “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.”Through Ethiopianism, Kai Parker argues, Black Chicago Protestants drew from Coptic and Ethiopian Orthodox Christian traditions and worked with West African Christians to imagine that Afrodiasporic Christian faith heralded the apocalyptic end of imperialism and white supremacy.Parker illuminates the apocalyptic Ethiopianism