Black American Spiritual Songs

No discourse of Negro spirituals can reach meaning without reference to American slavery, which became progressively more embedded in the consciousness of the people who were progressively less thinking of themselves as English or European than as Americans. Indeed, the readiness of the English colonists in the New World to accept the fact of Negro slavery and to consider it as the sanctioned enslavement of alien peoples who could not properly be called colonists has been well documented. In his account of the migrations from England to America on the part of people who were seeking to practice their religion in a condition of absolute freedom from state interference, Becker explains with some irony (165ff) that the freedom-loving Puritans and religious dissenters were little troubled by depriving others of their freedom; it was part of an evolving uniquely "American" attitude toward personal independen

. . .
aves to preserve in an encoded aesthetic structure their African cultural origins and referents while also embracing the possibilities promised in Christian belief from the standpoint of faith and the standpoint of full personhood. The complex nuances of spirituals were given scholarly treatment in 1939 (three years after publication of the novel Gone With the Wind and the same year as its release as a motion picture) by John Lovell, Jr. In an article for the Journal of Negro Education, Lovell develops the view that the spirituals that emerged between 1830 and 1865 may have meant to give religious expression but were especially evocative of social concerns--notably the desire for escape from slavery and a call for social justice unfairly seized and long denied. He explains contra Phillips that proprietry, proportion, and cooperation were far from the order of the day and then, with that foundation laid, analyzes the metaphysical import of the spirituals as their greatest power. The slave revolts both recorded and unrecorded, Lovell argues, are enough to belie the "acceptance" theory of slavery that obtained in the first half of the 20th century: "Almost universally [the slave] did not accept slavery, and laws compelling every abl
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
England America, Arab Africa, Lawrence-McIntyre African, Creation Creation, American Negro, Satan Moore, Education Lovell, Theological Seminary, Canal England, African American, negro slavery, journal negro education, negro spirituals, journal negro, negro education, african slaves, moore cites, idea slaves, university press, longing freedom, meanings spirituals, slave shaped sense, relation planter slave, sense propriety proportion, shaped sense propriety,
Approximate Word count = 4893
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Black American Spiritual Songs