|
Books on Black Religion
The Negro and His Music
(Locke) /
The
Spiritual and the Blues: An
Interpretation (Cone) /
Best Loved Spirituals (Mahalia)
The Book of the American Negro Spirituals (Johnson) /
American Negro Songs: Folk Songs and Spirituals (Work)
Deep River and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death
(Thurman)
* * *
* *
The
Spiritual and the Blues: An
Interpretation
By James H. Cone
Black Affirmation Through Song
Reviewed by Cornish Rogers
At a time when some so-called black
theologians are beginning to “universalize” their systems of
thought (thereby reducing their dependence on a peculiarly black
experimental base), James Cone continues to inform and
illuminate his theology by exploring the common experiences of
black people, as voiced in song and story. Cone’s belief that
the black spirituals and blues are significant cultural and
historical expressions of the black ethos has led him to
examine, in this small volume, their sociological and
theological implications.
Having made a cursory survey of what others
have written about the spirituals, Cone scores critics who
dismiss them as escapist songs based on white musical forms and
white fundamentalist “pie-in-the-sky” theologies. He
disagrees also with scholars who view the spirituals as
political documents devoid of transcendent dimensions. He takes
exception even to Howard Thurman’s thoroughgoing religious
interpretation and suggests that Thurman does not go far enough
toward acknowledging the serious theological content of
spirituals. Cone contends that Benjamin May’ theological
analysis reflects a too-narrow sociological viewpoint. In fact,
only W.E.B. Du Bois’ views are accorded his unconditional
approval.
Central to Cone’s own interpretation is his
conviction that a very evident theme of liberation pervades the
spirituals. “So far from being songs of passive resignation,
the spirituals are black freedom songs which emphasize black
liberation as consistent with divine revelation.” Through the
skillful use of illustrations from the spirituals, he
convincingly demonstrates that “the theological assumption of
black slave religion as expressed in the spirituals was that
slavery contradicts God, and he will therefore liberate black
people.”
But, Cone adds, the spirituals do not provide
a simplistic or escapist solution. Black suffering is faced
honestly and realistically in the spirituals; there is no
attempt to explain it away or to dismiss it as unimportant.
Rather, these songs gave a theological perspective to suffering
– as expressed, for example, in the line “I’m so glad that
trouble don’t last always.” Cone likens the spirituals’
treatment of the problem of suffering to that of the Old
Testament books of Job and Habbakuk. Christian hope, he says,
“is a vision and promise for the poor, the sick and the
weak.” In this regard he excoriates those white theologians
who have promulgated a theology of hope based on “theological
abstractions” rather than on the sufferings of the oppressed.
Cone’s artful interpretation of the blues
owes much to the existential cast of his theology. He cuts
through the sexual and personal-conflict imagery of the blues to
characterize the songs. Charley Patton called those “mean black
moans” as poignant attempts by blacks after slavery to affirm
their “somebodiness” in the cauldron of a white racist
society without pointing to a transcendent referent. These
“secular spirituals,” according to Cone, “are about black
life and the sheer earth and gut capacity to survive in an
extreme situation of oppression.” Through songs notable for
their beat and their utter truthfulness, the blues singers
sought not to escape their world but to make black life bearable. Once, disputing the white racist myth that
blacks are no more than animals, Big Bill (William Lee Conoley)
Broonzy asked, “You never seen a mule sing, have you?”
In
Cone’s view it is this affirmation of black existence through
the power of song that connects the blues theologically with
spirituals: “The blues tell us about a people who refused to
accept the absurdity of white society. Black people rebelled
artistically, and affirmed through ritual, pattern, and form
that they were human beings.”
In summary, Cone sees the blues as the vehicle by which
black people sought to deliver themselves through song from the
oppressiveness of the existential moment; spirituals, on the
other hand, promised liberation to blacks through the agency of
the transcendent in their midst. This book represents another
step in James Cone’s continuing search through black
experience for a deeper explication of his black theology of
liberation. Source: Christian Century (September 20, 1972)
* * * * *
* * *
* *
* * * * *
 |
Hands on the Freedom Plow
Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
By
Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan
Judy Richardson, Betty Garman
Robinson, et al.
The book opens
a window onto the organizing tradition of the
Southern civil rights movement. That tradition,
rooted in the courage and persistence of ordinary
people, has been obscured by the characterization of
the civil rights struggle as consisting primarily of
protest marches. In rural Dawson, Ga., Carolyn
Daniels housed SNCC workers organizing for voter
registration, and whites retaliated by bombing her
home. But at the end of a vivid depiction of this
and other anti-black terrorist acts, she writes, in
an apt summary of the grass-roots organizing that is
the real explanation for civil rights victories, "We
just kept going and going." |
Organizing involved the
kind of commitment and willingness to face risk that Penny Patch
conveys in only a few short sentences describing covert
nighttime meetings in plantation sharecropper shacks. Patch is
white. But that did not lessen the fear or reduce the danger of
remaining seated while poll watching in a country store as
whites came in and out, giving her and her black co-worker
menacing stares.
Full journalistic
disclosure requires me to say that many of these women are
friends and former comrades. But knowing the movement that we
were all a part of also demands that I share my observation:
While these pages look back, looking forward from them reveals
that there are many useful lessons for today in the strength of
these women.—Charles
E. Cobb Jr.
* *
* * *
 |
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
* *
* * *
|
The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
 |
* *
* * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
|
