Until now, the public life of James Walker Hood (1831-1918), bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church and a major political and religious leader of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, has gone largely unexamined. For God and Race recovers the public career of Hood as a representative of the major builders of independent black Christianity during this period who understood faithfulness to God as inseparable from the quest for racial justice, and it explores Hood's role in the AMEZ Church, a denomination known for its singular success in promoting leadership for the abolitionist movement.