African American slave culture
The culture of African American slaves includes the customs , everyday culture , costume , art , music , dance , oral tradition , education, and religion of the African-born slaves in the United States and in the 13 colonies that made up the United States from 1776 onwards have emerged.
education
Colonial times
During the colonial era, the formation of slaves was not only tolerated, but even encouraged for religious reasons. The two major Protestant groups, the Congregationalists and the Anglicans , felt a religious obligation to convert slaves and saw the ability to read the Bible as an essential prerequisite for Christianization. This tendency was further reinforced during the Great Awakening .
While reading was desirable, writing was often thought to be dispensable. The ability to write was seen as a status symbol that many members of society, including slaves, believed contemporaries did not need. The basics of teaching were memorization , the catechism and the Bible.
Only a few slaves received extensive education. The most famous example is Phillis Wheatley , who was owned by its owners and the like. a. received Latin and Greek lessons and later appeared as the first African-American poet with publications.
The first colony to restrict the education of slaves by law was South Carolina (1740). The law forbade teaching slaves to write, with a fine of £ 100; reading could continue to be taught. This law is to be understood as a reaction to the Stono revolt of 1739, which had increased the planters' concern that slaves who could communicate with one another in writing would easily be able to organize further revolts.
Georgia passed a similar law in 1755. Throughout the entire colonial period, literacy was a prerequisite for Christianization, so that a ban on teaching slaves to read was not yet considered.
In the United States
The most severe restrictions on slave education came after the slave revolt organized by Nat Turner in Southampton County , Virginia in the summer of 1831. The planters were shocked by the uprising and feared not only further uprisings, but also the spread of abolitionist literature. As a result, they put pressure on the legislature to drastically restrict the slaves' freedom of assembly and travel. Since only ignorant slaves who did not question their fate appeared safe, the slaves' right to education was also restricted.
The southern states did not all respond in the same way to the insurrection, but in some states the legislature reacted in particularly characteristic ways. In Mississippi laws already passed, which restricted the formation of slaves. In 1831, however, a law came into force here, forcing all free African Americans to leave the state; these free blacks should not be able to teach or stir up the unfree. The same law required black preachers to obtain permission before speaking in front of a church. Even far north Delaware passed a law in 1831 prohibiting blacks from gathering at night with 12 or more people; black preachers needed judicial authorization to speak in front of a church.
While the slaves in South Carolina and Georgia had long since been deprived of educational opportunities, after 1831 they were also restricted in states that had been comparatively liberal up to that point. For example, in 1832 Alabama passed a law prohibiting schooling of slaves with a heavy fine and prohibiting African Americans - free and unfree - from assembling without permission or in the absence of at least 5 slave owners. In North Carolina , too , where free African American children were still allowed to attend schools, they were banned from attending school in 1835.
There are few figures on the literacy level of African American slaves. According to an estimate by the black civil rights activist WEB Du Bois , born in 1868, up to 5% of slaves were at least moderately literate in 1860. Historian Eugene Genovese , born in 1930, suspects that the number was actually even greater. In cities in particular, there were illegal but varied educational opportunities for slaves; black and white activists have even run illegal schools in Baton Rouge , New Orleans , Charleston , Richmond, and Atlanta . Even on the plantations, some slaves were always literate.
Communication systems
Although the slaves lived in spatial isolation, especially under the conditions of the plantation economy , i. H. They hardly left the plantation, and most of them could not write either, i.e. communicate by letter, they were not completely cut off from communication systems. Both personal messages and messages about the world outside the plantation could be transmitted orally in very different ways. To catch news was z. B. possible slaves who were sent to the post office to pick up letters there. Slaves working in the house could, if they served at the table, overhear the slaveholders' conversation. The term Grapevine Telegraph (German for "grape tendrils telegraph", "bush drum") has become naturalized for this oral transmission of messages .
music
The documented best musical forms that were maintained by the African-American slaves, who sung at work Work Song and sung in the 19th century in worship Negro Spiritual .
Family life
A coexistence of slaves with their partners and their children was more possible on larger plantations than in smaller economic units in which only a few slaves were kept. The latter, of course, formed the great majority of slave-keeping companies. There, children often only stayed with their mothers until they were old enough to be rented or sold.
Resistance to social work paternalism
The planters, who under the influence of the ideology of White Supremacy increasingly saw themselves as Fathers familias who took a paternal and benevolent part in the lives of their slaves, often interfered in the affairs of their slaves into the most intimate areas and not only tried to to improve or control their living conditions and diet, but also to control their way of life, their family relationships and their religious life. The slaves offered as constant resistance to these efforts as they did to the appropriation of their labor. The efforts of the planters, who acquired new ideas of hygiene in the 19th century , to provide the slaves' quarters with whitewash , or to replace the healers and midwives of the slaves with doctors of European descent were particularly rejected . The planters, in turn, felt the slaves' resistance to their social work efforts as confirmation of their basic conviction that African Americans were not ripe for a life in freedom.
religion
→ See also: African American religions
The Christianization of the Afro-American slaves took place in several phases. In the early colonial times, when the structures of the slave-holding society were still in a state of flux, many slaves of the so-called charter generations tried to improve their social status by trying to integrate into the colonial community and therefore also into the Anglican community To believe.
When the plantation economy emerged on the North American mainland and slaves were imported directly from Africa in large numbers for the first time, these "salt water slaves" initially continued their traditional African spiritual life in America. The planters, who see the “ paganism ” of the slaves as a sign of a civilizational deficit, had little interest in Christianizing them. The few missionaries who tried to convert were often frustrated by the polygamy of Africans and their tendency to fuse Christian and African beliefs into a mixed religion. At first it was mainly the Anglican Church and its Society for the Propagation of the Gospel that worried about the slaves the most. From the late 1730s on, evangelical currents also spread in the British colonies, which were particularly appealing to the slaves with their doctrine of the equality of men before God. Christianity initially found a following mainly among urban slaves.
However, a significant number of African Americans did not achieve First Great Awakening until the 1780s. Around 1800 the proportion of African-American slaves who professed the Christian faith was about 10 percent.
The greatest surge in Christianization in African American history occurred during the Second Middle Passage , which coincided with the evangelical wave of conversions of the Second Great Awakening . During this time hundreds of thousands of slaves from the previous centers of the plantation economy were deported to the Deep South . Many slaves of these so-called migrant generations encountered this deeply disturbing experience by seeking spiritual refuge in Christianity, and especially evangelicalism. The Baptists and Methodists , but also the Anglicans and Presbyterians and in Louisiana and Florida also the Roman Catholic Church experienced a strong influx, although the slaves were highly selective towards the beliefs of these churches and were particularly sensitive to content such as B. felt addressed to the concept of salvation , which they could relate directly to their life situation. Much of the Afro-American spiritual life, which formed a theological amalgam of black and white religiosity, did not develop in the houses of worship of established churches, but in assemblies, the slaves secretly and in the wild in so-called Bush Arbors (for example: "Laubenkirchen" ) held.
Since the 1830s, the Christianization of slaves was also supported by most of the slave owners. Of course, this happened for very different reasons. Some planters had a sincere missionary spirit. Others wanted to silence the Christian and abolitionist critics who accused them of willfully keeping slaves away from the faith. Still others hoped to be able to subject slaves better to their will if they belonged to a Christian denomination that they might control themselves.
During the second Great Awakening, Afro-American slaves not only formed evangelical denominations or joined such denominations , but also occasionally achieved the rank of deacons or lay preachers ( exhorters ). Because of the influence they exerted on other slaves, black preachers in particular suffered extremely little from the slave owners. The planters preferred to see wandering white missionaries who they brought to their plantations for a fee, so that they could teach their slaves about the Bible , visit the sick, and perform funerals and weddings. Some planters had a chapel built for the slaves on the plantation ; only occasionally did they lead their “black family” in prayer as well as their “white family”.
The slaves perceived the slaveholders' interest in their spiritual wellbeing in a very mixed manner. Some saw their master’s newly awakened religious obsession as a threat to their work-free Sunday. Others encountered certain Christian beliefs such as the commandment of obedience , which they found particularly offensive. Still others, who had previously professed Christianity, welcomed the conversion of their slave owner.
From the beginning, the slaves received the beliefs of the Christian religion differently than the whites understood them. The greatest discrepancy was found in the concept of salvation, which was understood purely spiritually by the white believers, while the black believers took it literally and expected that in the end the precarious relationship between black and white would also be corrected. They also quickly interpreted the biblical exodus as an expression of their own history and developed their own theology in which the emancipation of the Israelites predicted their own redemption.
The religious communities that the slave owners had allowed their slaves to set up on the plantation often developed a life of their own, in which the planters could hardly intervene later. These communities became social places where slaves formulated their collective aspirations, mobilized their resources, and gave them a spiritual meaning in order to counter the seemingly limitless power of their owners. The religious communities did not bring the slaves closer to the abolition of slavery, but they were places of an oppositional culture, which the slave owners rightly suspected.
Individual evidence
- ^ EJ Monaghan: Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America , Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005
- ↑ Monaghan, p. 243
- ^ Anthony Albanese: The Plantation School , New York: Vantage Books, 1976
- ^ Eugene Genovese: Roll, Jordan, Roll , New York: Vintage Books, 1976, p. 562
- ↑ Ira Berlin: Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves , Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-674-01061-2 , p. 202
- ↑ Berlin, p. 215
- ↑ Berlin, pp. 205f
- ↑ Berlin, p. 39
- ↑ Berlin, pp. 72-75, 79f
- ↑ Berlin, pp. 11, 100f, 117f
- ↑ Berlin, pp. 193f, 206f
- ↑ Berlin, pp. 206f
- ↑ Berlin, p. 206
- ↑ Berlin, pp. 206f
- ↑ Berlin, p. 207
- ↑ Berlin, p. 209
See also
- Slavery in the United States
- Chronology of Slavery in the United States
- History of the African American
- African American literature
- African American music
- African American English
literature
- J. Williams Harris (Ed.): Society and Culture in the Slave South , Routledge Chapman & Hall, 1992, ISBN 0-415-07055-4
- Sidney W. Mintz, Richard Price: The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective , Beacon Press, 1992, ISBN 0-8070-0917-2
- Lauri Ramey: Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry , Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, ISBN 1-4039-7569-8
education
- R. Roderick Palmer: Colonial Statues and Present Day Obstacles Restricting Negro Education ; in: The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 26, No. 4, 1957, pp. 525-529
- Thomas Webber: Deep Like Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community 1831-1865 , New York: WW Norton & Company, Inc., 1978
- CG Woodson: The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861: A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War , New York: GP Putnam's Sons, 1915