Uplifting Black Souls: the African American Jeremiad

Uplifting Black Souls: the African American Jeremiad

Mission Statement

A black jeremiad is a writing or a speech that constantly emphasizes the need for and methods to achieve social change. David Howard Pitney in his book The Afro-American Jeremiad, rightly suggests what the components of a jeremiad are: "1) citing the promise, 2) criticism of present declension or retrogression from the promise, 3) resolving prophecy that society will shortly complete it's mission and redeem the promise"(Howard-Pitney 8). The authors we have chosen have written prominent jeremiads, and we will show why they can be considered jeremiads; why they were important when they were written; and why they are still important today.

History

David Walker (act.1828-1829), Frederick Douglass (act. 1852-1880), Booker T. Washington (act. 1895-1915); and W.E.B. DuBois (act. 1895-1968) are some of the most important African-American jeremiads in our history.

Black jeremiads stem from the Jeffersonian idea of "natural and divine law." This law emphasizes the right to freedom as well as liberty. The American jeremiad originated amongst 17th century Puritans who believed that their destiny was to form a utopian society in the Americas. By the 19th century, black jeremiads had adopted these Puritan ideals and used them to incite the need for the abolition of slavery and to serve as a warning of the punishment that would await those who continued with the sins of slavery. The writings and speeches of these jeremiads was used to uplift and unify their race and to promote blacks to take action in order to achieve equality but not self-separation from the rest of American society. This idea of unification without self-separation, illustrates the idea of black nationalism with established the rhetoric for jeremiads.

On David Walker

One of the most persuasive African American writers of antebellum America, was able to shake the American society with his pamphlet: Appeal to The Colored People of the United States. Walker, A free Negro born in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1796, although enjoyed a little more "freedom" than the rest of his colored brethren in bondage took on the role of a Jeremiadic speaker and writer to his people. In Walker's Appeal, Walker followed a method used by a Free black man in 1788 using the pseudonym of "Othello" in a two-part essay responding to Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia , called Essay on Negro Slavery. Following "Othello's" Jeremiadic essay, Walker had a warning for white Christian America about the wrathful vengeance of God that would befall upon them because of the institution of slavery.