Black Spirituals as Poetry and Resistance

Ellis Wilson’s “The Funeral Procession” (circa 1950).

SO THERE IS the spiritual as it was performed for white people and there is the spiritual as our own poetry, as a way to understand the interiority of enslaved people, who were repeatedly assumed to have none. In the middle of the 20th century, Howard Thurman, the great theologian (and mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) chronicled the imagery embodied in Black spirituals. He found that they provide us with a glimpse of thoughts and feelings of enslaved people that were otherwise erased from recorded history. Spirituals are a key primary source in understanding how enslaved people made meaning from the world around them. With their references to the natural world, they offer a glimpse of the experiences enslaved people had outside of labor — what it may have felt like to watch the sun rise, to walk beside a river, to hear water flow, to watch a sparrow fly. In recognizing this aspect of the spiritual, we honor the consciousness of the enslaved and thus continue the resistance to the enslaver’s definition of reality. Kaitlyn Greenidge, NYT

Un bellissimo, e lungo, saggio sugli spiritual.