ture and imprisonment of potential slaves by their captors and clients, who ranged from other Africans to Arabs, Jews, the Portuguese, the French, the Spanish, and the English. As James M. Cone wrote in The Spirituals and the Blues, "Black rebellion in America did not begin with the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, nor with Black Power and Stokeley Carmichael or the Black Panther Party. Black resistance has its roots stretching back to the slave ships, the auction blocks, and the plantation regime. It began when the first black person decided that death would be preferable to slavery" (Pratt 1990 51).
Since open rebellion by violent means was understood to be suicide, as the brief revolts of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and others demonstrated clearly, the cultural forms of resistance open to the slaves through music and other forms of artistic expression became their chosen means to maintain sanity and dignity. Thus music became much more than entertainment and diversion, and took on a mostly covert political function. While on the one hand
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