Nealy, Lisa Nikol. African American Women Voters: Racializing Religiosity, Political Consciousness, and Progressive Political Action in U.S. Presidential Elections from 1964 through 2008 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008), $47.50, 314 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7618-4457-0 (paper).

With the conceptualization, definitions, literature overviews, and theoretical matters that are presented and properly structurally organized, Professor Lisa Nikol Nealy moves to collecting data that allow her to test and analyze the relevant variables embedded in African American women’s political behavior. Up until this study, most of the major data sets on African Americans combined the genders simply because of the high cost of generating a survey instrument that allowed greater focus and detail work on the female gender within the African American community. For the pioneering study, the author has designed a first of its kind instrumentation, which includes forty-one focus group participants from four different religious communities in the African American communities in Washington, DC, and Meridian, Mississippi. Combined with this focus group data are the survey data collected by the National Opinion Research Center from 1972 to 2006 with the over samples of African Americans included.