Augsburger Lecture Series

Rev. Dr. Almeda Wright

Teaching a Better World: Black Religion, Activist Education and Radical Social Change

Monday, October 27, 2025, 7:00 pm

This event will be held in Main Stage Theater, UC170.  

About Rev. Dr. Almeda Wright

Professor Almeda M. Wright’s research focuses on African American religion, adolescent spiritual development, and the intersections of religion and public life. Prior to her arrival at Yale, she served for four years as assistant professor of religion and youth ministry at Pfeiffer University and, before that, from 2004 to 2009, was an adjunct faculty member and teaching assistant at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. At Candler, she also served as program director of the Wisdom of Youth Project for one year and in various positions over four years with the Youth Theological Initiative. She has served as a consultant to the Women’s Theological Center in Boston and has taught at several schools in the Greater Boston area, including Shady Hill School, the Young Achievers Science and Math Academy, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Open School. Professor Wright’s publications include a book she co-edited with Mary Elizabeth Moore, Children, Youth, and Spirituality in a Troubling World, and an issue of Practical Matters Journal that she edited. She has given presentations at a number of conferences, including the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, and delivered the keynote address at the Children, Youth, and a New Kind of Christianity conference in Washington, D.C., in May 2012. Professor Wright is an ordained minister of the American Baptist Churches and has been on the ministerial staff of several churches, including Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Victory for the World United Church of Christ in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

This lecture explores the lives and pedagogical genius of 20 th century African American
educators. We will wrestle with the ways that teachers are often underacknowledged as
exemplars of faith and social change. We will focus on the lives of Anna Julia Cooper and
Septima Clark, who like many other 20 th  century African American women teachers, embodied
an unwavering faith in God, in their cause, in their students, and in themselves that pushed them
to continue working for justice despite efforts to thwart them. The lecture makes connections
between the type of leadership development that was essential to the Citizenship
Education program of the Civil Rights movement alongside earlier movements that empowered
youth and adults to faithfully respond to the calls to work for change.
Looking both at this historical legacy of and contemporary work of African American
religious, activist-educators helps us to explore how we can design new ways of being the church
and of learning with and from the communities we purport to teach and serve. Almost a century
later, their lives still challenge us to wrestle with myriad questions: such as in what ways has
religiously inspired activism of the early and mid-twentieth century evolved? Does it include
wider religious inspirations? Does it challenge the efficacy and legacy of organizations like
Black Churches in inspiring social change? Their lives also push us to explore the current
educational systems and the current work of teachers, who often are working in ways that do not
capture national headlines but is truly transformative of entire communities.

This event is open to the public.