ABSTRACT
This personal experience chapter situates the development of my Womanist consciousness within the twentieth-century movement for Black women’s assertion of Self. This liberatory development among Black women paved the way for the diminishing impact of “respectability politics” in the twenty-first century. A section of the chapter narrates the story of the numbers game, which, though technically illegal, was widespread in the Black segregated community of yesteryear. The numbers has now been taken over and legalized by state governments in the form of “the lotto.” The chapter concludes with a commentary on 1960s pronouncements of “God is dead,” which clash with the Black Church Tradition and the Black Freedom Struggle.
