Cone explores two classic aspects of African-American culture--the spirituals and the blues. He tells the captivating story of how slaves and the children of slaves used this music to affirm their essential humanity in the face of oppression. The blues are shown to be a "this-worldly" expression of cultural and political rebellion. The spirituals tell about the "attempt to carve out a significant existence in a very trying situation".
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Summary: A explication of the theological roots of spirituals and the blues. A good example of why White seminary students need to be reading Black and other authors of Color.
Over the past couple years there have been several minor controversies in US seminaries about assigned texts. Masters Seminary (started by John MacArthur) about a year ago had a former student write about the fact that he had not read a single book by a Black author during his seminary studies. That prompted a response by another former student that was (is?) a staff person at the seminary. The response includes this quote:
“I don't mean to be dismissive of their contribution, but African-American Christians are a small portion built upon the main foundation, that just so happens to be, according to God's providence, a white, Western European/English one.”
“The essence of antebellum black religion was the emphasis on the somebodiness of black slaves. The content of the black preacher's message stressed the essential worth of their person. “You are created in God's image. You are not slaves, you are not `niggers'; you are God's children.”36 Because religion defined the somebodiness of their being, black slaves could retain a sense of the dignity of their person even though they were treated as things.”
Satan is not merely an abstract metaphysical evil unrelated to social and political affairs; he represents the concrete presence of evil in an society. That was why exorcisms were central in the ministry of Jesus. The casting out of demons was an attack upon Satan because Jesus was setting people's minds free for the Kingdom which was present in his ministry. To be free from Satan meant to be free for Jesus, who was God making Iiberation a historical reality. Anyone who was not for the Kingdom, as present in the liberating work of Jesus, was automatically for Satan, who stood for enslavement.
Howard Thurman's explanation is closer to the truth. He contends that the slaves had been so ruthlessly treated as things by white masters that blacks soon learned to expect nothing but evil from white people. “The fact was that the slave owner was regarded as one outside the pale of moral and ethical responsibility.... Nothing could be expected from him but gross evil—he was in terms of morality— amoral.”
Slave catechisms were written to insure that the message of black inferiority and divinely ordained white domination would be instilled in the slaves. Q. What did God make you for? A. To make a crop. Q. What is the meaning of “Thou shalt not commit adultery”? A. To serve our heavenly Father, and our earthly master, obey our overseer, and not steal anything.
The spirituals are slave songs, and they deal with historical realities that are pre-Civil war. They were created and sung by the group. The blues, while having some pre-Civil War roots, are essentially post-Civil war in consciousness. They reflect experiences that issued from Emancipation, the Reconstruction Period, and segregation laws. “The blues was conceived,” writes LeRoi Jones, “by freedmen and ex slaves — if not as a result of a personal or intellectual experience, at least as an emotional confirmation of, and reaction to, the way in which most Negroes were still forced to exist in the United States.” Also, in contrast to the group singing of the spirituals, the blues are intensely personal and individualistic.
