Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

James H. Cone

Jan 2018 · Orbis Books

About this ebook

James Cone is widely regarded as the "father of Black Theology"--his own synthesis of Gospel message embodied by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the black pride of Malcolm X. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of his first book, Black Theology and Black Power. This new work is truly the capstone to that career, showing how he was compelled by events to articulate this theology, how it led to his career at Union and his succession of books--along the way learning from his critics, his students, and the ongoing challenge of his principal models--King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin.

About the author

James Hal Cone was born in Fordyce, Arkansas on August 5, 1938. He received a bachelor of divinity degree from Garrett Theological Seminary and a master's degree and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He became a central figure in the development of black liberation theology in the 1960s and 1970s. He spoke about racial inequalities that persisted in the form of economic injustice, mass incarceration, and police shootings. He joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in 1969 and was appointed to the distinguished Charles A. Biggs chair of systematic theology in 1977. He wrote several books including Black Theology and Black Power, A Black Theology of Liberation, Crosscurrents, and The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which received the Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 2018. He died on April 28, 2018 at the age of 79.