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Slavery from the slaves perspective
Spirituals inspired by african music
The plight of slaves
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When one thinks of African American spirituals, images of a church service with a choir singing in beautiful harmony swaying in rhythm to the music usually ensue. Spirituals are far more significant than hymns sung by Christians in a church setting, as we shall soon see.
Spirituals are religious folk songs that were created and sung by enslaved African Americans to express the emotions and thoughts of a people in bondage. More importantly, they are detailed, accurate historical documents that give us great insight into the lives of African American slaves. Slavery was legal in the United States from 1650 until the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. During this period, slaves were torn from their homeland of Africa and were forced to live in North America. As such, they were forced to adopt the language and the religion of Christianity by their masters, while giving up customs and traditions from home (Small).
Slaves were required by their masters to attend church. The slaves soon realized that many of the biblical stories they learned about in church paralleled their own...
Douglass continues to describe the severity of the manipulation of Christianity. Slave owners use generations of slavery and mental control to convert slaves to the belief God sanctions and supports slavery. They teach that, “ man may properly be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained by God” (Douglass 13). In order to justify their own wrongdoings, slaveowners convert the slaves themselves to Christianity, either by force or gentle coercion over generations. The slaves are therefore under the impression that slavery is a necessary evil. With no other source of information other than their slave owners, and no other supernatural explanation for the horrors they face other than the ones provided by Christianity, generations of slaves cannot escape from under the canopy of Christianity. Christianity molded so deeply to the ideals of slavery that it becomes a postmark of America and a shield of steel for American slave owners. Douglass exposes the blatant misuse of the religion. By using Christianity as a vessel of exploitation, they forever modify the connotations of Christianity to that of tyrannical rule and
Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were both published in the early 1860’s while Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story came almost forty years later I believe there were things overshadowing Charles’ attention. While the man does give credit to a supreme being, his relation to the Christian culture comes from his encounters to which he documents in great detail with fellow slaves. As previously stated, I believe the significance of the slave’s ability to maintain reverence for the religion they practiced provided insight into what gave them hope. The story of Exodus is linked to many slave narratives and it was no different for these three Slave-owners looked upon the African Americans as lesser people who were in desperate need of support.
Slave-owners forced a perverse form of Christianity, one that condoned slavery, upon slaves. According to this false Christianity the enslavement of “black Africans is justified because they are the descendants of Ham, one of Noah's sons; in one Biblical story, Noah cursed Ham's descendants to be slaves” (Tolson 272). Slavery was further validated by the numerous examples of it within the bible. It was reasoned that these examples were confirmation that God condoned slavery. Douglass’s master...
Slavery, the “Peculiar Institution” of the South, caused suffering among an innumerable number of human beings. Some people could argue that the life of a domestic animal would be better than being a slave; at least animals are incapable of feeling emotions. Suffering countless atrocities, including sexual assault, beatings, and murders, these slaves endured much more than we would think is humanly possible today. Yet, white southern “Christians” committed these atrocities, believing their behaviors were neither wrong nor immoral. Looking back at these atrocities, those who call themselves Christians are appalled. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Harriet A. Jacobs describes the hypocrisy of Southern, Christian slave owners in order to show that slavery and Christianity are not congruent.
African-American slaves may not have had the formal education that many of their white slave owners possessed, but they intuitively knew that the labor they toiled through each and every day was unjust. This dynamic of unfairness brought about a mindset in which slaves would critique the workings of slavery. To many people’s understanding, slavery was an invasively oppressive institution; Levine however, noted, “for all its horrors, slavery was never so complete a system of psychic assault that it prevented the slaves from carving out independent cultural forms” . Slave spirituals were a part of the independent cultural form that enslaved African-Americans produced; these songs had numerous functions and critiquing slavery served as one of
Soul music was developed in the late 1950s from African American church music called Gospel music. After slavery ended in1865, African American were not welcomed in the church of White Americans, so they built their own churches and sang Christian songs with African American vocal styles and rhythm. As the civil rights movement, staged bigger and bigger demonstrations and increase in African American pride “Soul music” became more than party music for young blacks: it became a rallying flag for the Black nationalist movement. Soul music was born thanks to the innovations of continuous post-war musicians who essentially turned Gospel music into a secular form of
In the early 19th century, the Atlantic slave trade had brought close to five hundred thousand African slaves to the United States. The slaves had brought ingrained musical traditions with them. These consisted of call-and-response patterns, single-line melodies, and a counter-metric structure. These early slaves also drew influence from the harmonic style of the church which they incorporated into their spirituals. (Early)
In their quarters, slaves expressed themselves with some what more freedom from white slave owners. Religion provided a feel of similar freedom and also gave slaves mental support. By attending church, slaves created a Christianity that emphasized salvation for every race, including slaves.
Today, these lyrics have crossed barriers and are sung in many churches across America as spirituals. However, such songs as Wade in the Water, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, and Follow the Drinking Gourd, were once used as an important tool of survival by the slaves of the antebellum era. The content of many Negro spirituals consisted of a religious theme. However, Negro spirituals were not intended to be religious. The primary purpose of Negro spirituals was to mislead an overseer or the plantation owner.
In From Slavery to Freedom (2007), it was said that “the transition from slavery to freedom represents one of the major themes in the history of African Diaspora in the Americas” (para. 1). African American history plays an important role in American history not only because the Civil Rights Movement, but because of the strength and courage of Afro-Americans struggling to live a good life in America. Afro-Americans have been present in this country since the early 1600’s, and have been making history since. We as Americans have studied American history all throughout school, and took one Month out of the year to studied African American history. Of course we learn some things about the important people and events in African American history, but some of the most important things remain untold which will take more than a month to learn about.
Each time I have read this narrative several times and each time I learn more about history and my interpretation of historical content. This particular has allowed me to focus closely on interpretations of Negro spirituals and mainstream media trivialization of the slave song. Frederick Douglass in his autobiography spoke of the “Ring Shout” and I learned that the music is not about shouting. In researching the ring shout, the word shout is a derivative of the Arabic word “shawṭ”. Scholars have commented that the word origin probably comes from enslaved Muslims from Africa and subsequently was engrained in the slave culture before Christianity was forced upon the culture (Stuckey). I would surmise that it would infuriate Douglass and the enslaved people of history to know that their heartfelt spirituals are now trivialized by the media and entertainment industries. One particular spiritual that comes to mind is “Go Down Moses” which contains the famous line “Let My People Go”. There are countless references to that one particular line in movies, television and other media sources. Most of the time, especially in the visual entertainment industry the line is part of the dialogue for a laugh.
In chapter thirteen, “The Psalms across Space and Time: The Nineteenth Century,” the author discusses the implications of the usage of the Psalter throughout the world during the 19th century. First, and most interestingly, the author notes the use of the Psalms as a beacon of hope for the African American community (p.238). The Psalms originally served as songs of worship and hope of the Israelite community who experience oppression by the hand of Egypt, and thousands of years later, the Psalms once again served as songs of worship and hope for the African American slave community that underwent the oppression of slavery in America. This insight is crucial because it emphasizes the ability of the Psalms to be used as worship, even in the
African Americans are being gathered in worship regardless of denomination. By this we give thanks to God and through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It extends fully through the aspects of sharing the common historical reflection in which the community can cooperate to the strength to provide Africans its diaspora. The world viewed itself by the African ways of life due to the cultures that developed.
The video lecture argues that the specific verses in the Bible that mention slavery fall into three categories: 1) verses acknowledging that treatment of slaves was unjust and stating that slaves should treat Christian masters better than non-Christian masters, 2) ambiguous verses that don’t mention slavery by name, which the reader interprets however they want, 3) or explicit regulations which promote non-Israelite slavery.
African-Americans utilized American Christianity as an embodiment of hope and comfort during a time of oppression. While they endured backbreaking labor and physical abuse from their overseers, they likely sought a spiritual experience characterized by movement and loud vocals such as when they were “seized by the spirit” for a positive physical ritual in their life. Additionally, God to them was an entity outside of the plantation that was rooting for them because he believed in universal human equality and the evils of slavery and abuse. For slaves, especially in the South, this encouragement was likely hard to come by. If this was the case, slaves believed that judgment would set things right and that hopefully they would not live their whole lives enslaved. However, the teachings that slaves were given during white sermons were fragmented and they knew it. Specifically, African-Americans acknowledged the emphasis on servitude expressed in white interpretations but the lack of passages related to their masters’ wrongdoings.