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Slave Culture & the Foundations of Black America

Sterling Stuckey in his book Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America examines the folklore of Black America and how the Black American experience developed through the slave era as African cultural elements were reshaped and adapted to slave society in America. How these cultural elements then developed after slavery is also considered. In particular, much attention is paid to the development of religion in the Black community in America and how the early African American religion was adapted into Black Christianity.

In the past, it was often assumed by historians that African culture, skills, and religion were so unimportant that they disappeared when Africans were brought to America as slaves. The current view is that the earlier view was racist in nature and that in fact African culture was stronger than that and survived in modified form, often modified so it could be continued while also being hidden from the slavemasters who might want to stamp it out. African religious practices came under this heading. Religion was important in the society of the slaves, and Christianity would also become an important element in their lives and in the control exercised by slavemasters given that Christianity said accept the problems of this world because there would be a better life in the next.

The Great Awakening at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries was an extension of religious fervor and spiritual awareness that included blacks and whites in varying degrees. It was this movement that fueled the creation of several early African American Baptist churches. At the same time, there were elements of African religious practice that survived in one form or another, often because whites did not understand or recognize them for what they were. One place where African women expressed themselves was in their slave quilts fashioned from throwaway cloth. These quilts we...

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Slave Culture & the Foundations of Black America. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:54, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690639.html