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by Hildi Hendrickson (Author)
Building Beloved Communities traces the life of Rev. Dr. Paul Smith (b. 1935), an iconoclastic black minister who has channeled his civil rights work into establishing multi-racial churches in four cities--Buffalo, NY; Atlanta, GA; St. Louis, MO; Brooklyn, NY--over a six-decade career. Following the lead of his mentor, Dr. Howard Thurman (who was also a key influence on Martin Luther King Jr.), Smith has concentrated on building thriving multicultural congregations to create the sorts of communities envisioned by King and others.
In 1979, he became the first black minister of all-white Hillside Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia, making him a unique leader among the 4,000 Presbyterian congregations in the United States. In 1986, he was elected the first African American pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Throughout his ministry in various churches, he has consciously moved his congregations toward being explicitly multi-cultural and multi-racial, as well as more politically active and welcoming of LGBTQ communities.
Based on archival research, historical analysis, and original interviews with Smith and his colleagues, Hildi Hendrickson offers a critical biography of the preacher and his work from the 1960s to the present.
Author Biography
HILDI HENDRICKSON is a recently-retired associate professor of anthropology at Long Island University. She is the editor of Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa.
