Daughters of Thunder is a wonderful compilation of thirty-eight first-time-published sermons of fourteen African American female preachers, many of whom were the first African American females to pastor churches, receive ordination, and be granted terminal degrees.
The author, Dr. Bettye Collier-Thomas, is the founding executive director of Washington, D.C.'s Bethune Museum Archives, Inc., the first institution in the country to focus on preserving and documenting the history of African American women. A historian and publisher of numerous articles in the areas of African American and African American women's history, Collier-Thomas also is currently an associate professor of history at Temple University, where she directs the Center for African American History and Culture. She has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Collier-Thomas's scholarly achievements are a testament to the thorough attention that she gives in her analysis and discussion of the sermons. Each is analyzed in light of the life experiences and theological orientation of the speaker, as well as within the context of the prevailing ideologies and social forces of the era in which each preacher lived.
Collier-Thomas's choice to draw the book's title from Shango, the West African god of lightening and thunder, was most befitting of the force and authority with which these women spoke to the social, political, and economic issues of their time. The sermonic messages of renowned and obscure figures such as Julia A.J. Foote, Harriet Baker, Mary J. Small, Florence Spearing Randolph, Mary G. Evans, Ella Eugene Whitfield, Ruth R. Dennis, Mrs. Raiff, Rosa Horn, Ida B. Robinson, Rosa Edwards, Quinceila Whitlow, F.E. Redwine, and Pauli Murray are included in the collection.
In her exploration of works by these ordained sisters, Collier-Thomas found that despite the writers' denominational differences -- African Methodist Episcopal (AME), AME Zion, Baptist, Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME), Holiness, Pentecostal, and Spiritual -- gender issues, holiness doctrine, moral and social issues, and theology were common themes addressed in many of the sermons.
