Overlooked: Black Ministers in a White Denomination
Recovering the Lives and Ministries of Black Swedenborgian Ministers
By Sue Ditmire
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About the Book
For more than a century, Black ministers, educators, and congregations helped shape the history of the Swedenborgian Church in North America. Yet many of their stories have remained hidden in archives, scattered across forgotten records, or omitted from the denomination’s collective memory.
In Overlooked: Black Ministers in a White Denomination, historian Sue Ditmire brings those stories to light. Drawing on decades of archival research, church records, correspondence, convention journals, newspaper accounts, and personal interviews, she reconstructs the lives and ministries of Black Swedenborgian leaders whose contributions were too often minimized, misunderstood, or ignored.
Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through the Civil Rights era, Ditmire traces the remarkable efforts of Black ministers who founded churches, established schools, educated children and adults, organized communities, and worked tirelessly to expand opportunities for African Americans in the face of segregation, discrimination, and limited institutional support. Their stories unfold alongside major events in American history, including Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the rise of the NAACP, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ongoing struggle for racial justice.
At the same time, Overlooked examines the complex relationship between a predominantly white denomination and the Black congregations within it. The book neither condemns nor excuses. Instead, it offers a carefully documented account of good intentions, missed opportunities, institutional blind spots, and persistent inequities. Through these histories, readers gain a deeper understanding of how racism can operate not only through hostility, but also through neglect, indifference, and silence.
More than a denominational history, Overlooked is a story about memory, justice, and the importance of telling the whole truth about our past. It challenges readers to recognize those whose contributions have been forgotten and to consider what genuine repentance, reconciliation, and repair might look like today.
Richly researched and deeply human, Overlooked is an essential contribution to American religious history and a powerful reminder that the stories we choose to remember—and those we overlook—shape the future we create.
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About the Author
Sue Ditmire has been a member of the Swedenborgian Church of North America for over 50 years. She has been active on both local and national levels, which includes founding the Swedenborgian Heritage Center in Cincinnati, where she currently resides. Her passion for social activism and the arts have led her to become involved with the Swedenborgians in Action Against Racism and proudly serves on the Board of the Eckstein Cultural Art Center in Cincinnati. Ditmire was originally enrolled in secretarial school which led to her being recruited to work for the US Government in Washington, D.C., in 1969. After marrying her first husband, she and her family moved to rural Ohio and lived on a farm. She then worked with computers at Cincinnati General Hospital before moving to South New Jersey where she worked varied jobs including bookkeeping. She received her AAS in Accounting and continued working as a bookkeeper eventually meeting her second husband at a foreign car shop where she worked. In 2001, Ditmire began a 20-year battle with an undiagnosed medical illness leaving her physically disabled with limited ability to work. When her health improved, she started to build New Jersey history websites for the American Local History Network. Upon finally receiving proper diagnosis and proper medication, Ditmire retired back to Ohio where she reconnected with her passion for historical research and writing. Overlooked: Black Ministers in a White Denomination is Ditmire’s first novel, sparked by the death of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 “as we were challenged to examine our own histories of race relations.”
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ISBN (Paperback): 979-8-9949705-6-0
ISBN (E-book): 979-8-9949705-7-7
Publication date: 06/23/2026
Pages: 402 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 0.91 x 9 in
- RELIGION / History
- HISTORY / African American & Black
- RELIGION / African American & Black
Book Summary – About the Author – More Information