MARY BETH SWETNAM MATHEWS, the author of Rethinking Zion: How the Print Media Placed Fundamentalism in the South and Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars, is a professor of religious studies at the University of Mary Washington.

"In Contentious Unions: Black Baptist Schools and White Baptist Money in the Jim Crow South, Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews interweaves the stories of the founding and development of Richmond Theological Seminary (Virginia), Central City College (Macon, Georgia), and American Baptist Theological Seminary (Nashville, Tennessee)-colleges that saw challenges, complexities, and hard-won accomplishments in the Post-Reconstruction era. Her study begins just after the Civil War, when one of these institutions provided educational opportunities for newly freed slaves, and follows the fortunes of the schools through the 1960s"--