ENDVIEW PLANTATION SLAVES FREE

3, ‘The Black Methodists', in The Black Church in the African American Experience. The condition of enslaved humanity, it could perhaps be said, was a condition that was at once thoroughly determined and insistently transcendent’ (‘On Agency’: 116). To borrow the words of Walter Johnson, and apply them to the late nineteenth century, post-war black beliefs about the afterlife ‘cannot simply be reformatted as resistance in a liberatory gesture which paradoxically reduces even the most intimate actions of human beings to (resistant) features of the system that enslaved them. 15, ‘A Black Belt County, Georgia’.įoner, Reconstruction Blight, Race and Reunion. On African Americans' responses to Reconstruction, see Foner, Reconstruction.ĭu Bois, The Negro Church, 84, 89, ch. Turner, ‘Emancipation Day’ Turner, ‘On the Anniversary of Emancipation’, in Redkey, ed., Respect Black, 11–12, originally printed in Augusta Colored American, 13 January 1866. Turner, ‘Emancipation Day’, in Redkey, ed., Respect Black, 4, originally published in The Negro in Slavery, Philadelphia, 1913. Scott draws heavily on Raboteau in his discussion of slave resistance. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll Pierce, Hell Without Fires, 7 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.

Walker, Walker's Appeal, 49 Garnet, An Address to the Slaves, 94, 93. On slave ideas about the afterlife see: Baldwin, ‘A Home in Dat Rock’ Raboteau, Slave Religion Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness Sobel, Trabelin’ On. Sernett, Black Religion and American Evangelicalism, 167 Emily Burke, Pleasure and Pain: Reminiscences of Georgia in the 1840s, quoted in Raboteau, Slave Religion, 291. I have largely confined my research to those writers who were born before the Civil War, and thus had some first-hand knowledge of slavery, whether or not they had actually been enslaved.ĭu Bois, ‘Of the Faith of the Fathers', in The Souls of Black Folk, 121 Frazier, ‘The Negro Church in America,’ 20–21. I have sampled widely, and at the risk of oversimplification, have chosen not to limit this study to a particular subgroup, denomination, or region.

With a topic as nebulous as the afterlife but as pervasive as religious rhetoric, one could conceivably look at everything written by African Americans in this period to find how and when they invoked the afterlife, either in visions of what it would be like, or to convince their audiences of some practical point. Other scholars have since used the term to describe the period of disfranchisement, violence, white supremacy, and disappointment that characterised the late nineteenth century for the black community. The term ‘Nadir’ originated in Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901. Marx, ‘Toward a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law’, in Pals, Introducing Religion, 146.

Church Review, for instance, or on their own. Most of the intellectuals considered here had a larger audience than one particular congregation, publishing texts in journals like the A.M.E. The difference between a freedman and black intellectual could certainly blur when, for example, a slave received education prior to emancipation and rose to a leadership position within his/her church after the War. See Harvey, ‘That was about Equalization after Freedom’, 86, and Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree, chs 6 and 7. Other scholars have described a similar division in post-war black society. Many of these intellectuals were ministers who were involved not only in the religious sphere but also in politics and social work.

ENDVIEW PLANTATION SLAVES FREE

I define black intellectuals as those post-war men and women who were well-educated and well aware of their education, often free before the war, of more material means than the new freedmen, and constantly aware of how they and their people appeared to white society.

‘Black intellectuals' were not homogeneous, nor were ‘ex-slaves'. Thomas, July 16, 1886, Washington, D.C.’, in Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 443–444.

Endview plantation slaves