BAACW Oral History Project :

The purpose of the Brooklyn's African American Clergywomen's Oral History Project is to record the oral histories of black clergywomen who have been ordained in historically black and mainline Protestant denominations. To date no oral history project of black clergywomen has been undertaken in the black religious community generally. Nor has an ecumenical project of this nature, with this population included, been launched. It portends to be the first of its kind.

Primarily, the oral history project seeks to record the life stories of Brooklyn's African American clergywomen—their struggle to overcome tremendous racial, gender, cultural, and class obstacles in order to include, expand and empower women’s leadership in a non-traditional occupation in black and white churches: the pastoral ministry.

The oral history project will reveal, according to sociologists C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya—in their 1990 classic work, The Black Church in the African American Experience—the difficulties black clergywomen have encountered in their pursuit for positions involving church leadership, including the preaching and pastoring ministry in the black church.

Second, the project aims to educate the public about the historical and current issues—many still are relevant—defining and informing as well as delimiting the representation and contribution of black clergywomen.

Concomitantly, in producing the oral histories, it is also to acknowledge the rightful recognition of black clergywomen in the development of black and ecumenical religious and social history — a necessary gender corrective, given the decidedly patriarchal milieu suppressing these clergywomen coming into historical consciousness and gaining a voice.

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