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David Spencer's We Shall Not Be Moved

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The Special Collections Department of Mullins Library at The University of Arkansas houses hidden treasures in regards to American music. Items throughout the department include primary sources such as diaries, pictures, musical scores, books, and notes. I have been interested in African-American spiritual music and after looking through many collections, I decided to research this topic. I found many interesting books written about African-American spirituals which contained authentic musical examples. These books include “The Negro Forget Me Not Songster,” “American Ballads and Folk Songs,” and “Religious Folk Songs of the Negro” written in 1844, 1927, and 1934 respectively. These objects relate to American music because they contain original musical examples and scores of African-American music compiled by their various authors.
Originally, I intended to research the music of William Grant Still and Florence Price while …show more content…

David Spencer writes a brilliant book titled “We Shall Not Be Moved” which includes a chapter about the use of black spirituals in the United States south. Spencer explains how “Africans sang of their experiences as slaves and infused them with messages of Christian redemption in the thousands of songs they created for themselves, known collectively as spirituals.” Spencer continues by explaining how the topics of spirituals included the horrors of racial exploitation and messages of liberation associated with their masters’ Protestant Christian views. M. Shawn Copeland argues that “on plantations, religion was the sphere in which the enslaved Africans were able to exercise some measure of autonomy and freedom.” He claims that slaves would risk punishment for freedom in religion as they regularly held independent and unsupervised worship services. In these services, slaves formed poems and later music, allowing them the slightest bit of

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Instead he began to propagate the belief that sharing religion with the slaves would “lay them under stronger obligations to perform the greatest diligence and fidelity”. Though a number of protestant religions moved throughout at the time the Baptist church eventually took ahold of the south to become the most practiced religion. Frey discusses briefly the African culture that made some influence on the lifestyle of the African slaves. Most of the African cultural practices were bogged down or destroyed by the slave owners and American society.

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This week’s assignment is to answer questions, in essay format, from chapters 3 and 4 of the assigned textbook, “The Black Church in the African American Experience,” by C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, provided the answers. Below are responses to the five questions. 1. What is the name of the first African American founded institution of higher learning in the United States? When was it founded?

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Douglass’s words that captured such “veracity” is his saying that “slaveholder’s profession of Christianity is a palpable imposture” (xiv). The strong declaration, which gained many witnesses, proves his first-hand experience with slavery and therefore, justifies his credibility, regarding his religious persecution. Through this, he proves that Christianity, as they call it, is an illicit form of religion bent toward justifying white slaveowners’ actions while praying for “heavenly union” (Douglass 106). In the following occurrences, Douglass provides insight into the religious masking that Christian slaveholders use to cover-up the unjust treatment of their slaves, shining light onto the misinterpreted cult they have formed to justify their crimes and the effect religion has upon the white dominant culture

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Christianity was, to the slaves of America, (something with a double meaning). In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Frederick Douglass, the author, argues about how Christianity can mean one thing to a free white man and something completely different to a black slave. The slave owners follow the ‘Christianity of the Land’ while the slaves follow the ‘Christianity of Christ.’ Frederick begins to build his credibility to a, white, northern, audience by including documents from trustworthy writers and by getting into personal experiences through his writing. Throughout the narrative, he is articulate in how he writes, and it shows the reader that he is well educated.

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Allen Dwight Callahan’s The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible connects biblical stories and images to the politics, music and, religion, the book shows how important the Bible is to black culture. African Americans first came to know the Bible because of slavery and at that time the religious groups would read it to them instead of teaching them by letting them encounter it for themselves. Later the Bibles stories became the source of spirituals and songs, and after the Civil War motivation for learning to read. Allen Callahan traces the Bible culture that developed during and following enslavement. He identifies the most important biblical images for African Americans, Exile, Exodus, Ethiopia, and Emmanuel and discusses their recurrence and the relationship they have with African Americans and African American culture.

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Mr. Thomas Auld, however, was not the worst religious slaveholder, in fact Douglass shares stories of Reverend Hopkins and Reverend Weeden only to prove the crudeness of Christian slaveholders. Douglass then goes on to tell of how some fellow slaves and himself began to familiarize themselves with Christianity, and how it angered their slaveholders, who, “would much rather see them

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Slavery: Effective on Slaves and Slaveholders In Frederick Douglass’s autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Douglass recounts his life in slavery to reveal to his readers the horrors of the American slave system. To effectively inform his readers of the corrupt system, he publicizes the slaveholders’ hypocritical practice of Christianity. Although he himself is a Christian, Douglass’s narrative is a scathing commentary on the ironic role of Christian religion in the Southern slaveholding culture. Throughout his book, the author expresses and exemplifies his perspective on religion by illustrating the falseness and hypocrisy of the Southern people. To start off, Frederick Douglass suggests that the Southern people’s religion is false and insincere.

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Douglass is relentless when attacking the church, he states, “The American Church is Guilty” (Douglass 1039). This has a slightly taste of irony, because here Douglass, a colored man, is calling out the most “sacred” body of people. It almost as if he was the master and they were the slave now. Next, the main theme expressed by

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Question # 6 The Abolitionist Movement In the 1800’s the abolitionist movement was put in place by political oppositions to achieve immediate emancipation of all African American slaves in the ending of racial segregation and discrimination. The Abolitionist movement in the United States of America from the 1830s until 1870 was an effort to end slavery in a nation that valued personal freedom of slaves and believed all men are created equal. There were limitations of the early abolitionist movement in noting that certain political oppositions and white abolitionists did not think that African Americans or people of color should have equal rights because of their ethnic backgrounds, gender and knowledge.

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Here, Douglass exposes the Christian attempt to wash their hands of any guilt or wrong doing. Overall, Douglass exposes the truth behind this hypocrisy; when these slaveholders use God as a

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Evangelical preachers, in keeping with their social doctrine that targeted the disadvantaged in society, attempted to convert slaves and Native Americans. Prior to the Awakening no one had made a serious effort at their conversion for fear that Christianity was “a step towards freedom” (357). Slaves attended evangelical sermons en masse, wary of the Anglican ministers who supported their masters. Evangelical Christianity offered moments of release and equality from the perpetual suffering of a slave’s life. This did not mean, however, that the evangelists actively opposed slavery.

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If thou doesn’t love thy neighbor as thyself, thou was unchristian like. Fervent sermons transferred meaningful ideas of equality to everyday citizens. Reverend Miller presented this sermon at the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Methodist denomination was one of the most outspoken anti-slavery sects. The Methodist gained the most membership during the Second Great Awakening, in fact one in five Americans belonged to the Methodist Church (Keillor 1).

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Not to mention, jazz music had been struggle against society. The 1960s and 1970s’s black power movement influenced on jazz musicians and Hancock was not an exception. That’s why sociological factors influenced on Hancock’s styles, sounds and messages in songs or albums. In Musical Borrowing, Dialogism, and American Culture, 1960-1975 (2006), Berry suggests that “Watermelon Man” (1973) from Hancock’s album Head Hunters (1973) shows evidence of mixing African-American culture with traditional African music (Berry,2006, p.168-169).

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Religion and its relationship to slavery is a contradictive subject, whether it was forced upon slaves or was a form of hope and freedom is still commonly debated about to this day. However, these individuals were devoted Christians in the abolitionist movement who all

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Music is not only used to capture peoples hearing but it is used to power peoples minds through the power of an individuals voice. Music served a critical role in the African American’s lives, as it was used to uplift their spirits as well as providing them with hope and strength to fight for civil rights and overcome segregation between white superiority and the unfair treatment of the inferior black. Music was defined as the voice of the people that lived through the oppression of the civil rights movement. During the civil rights movement, there were many different types of music genres sung, dependent on the culture, this included spiritual music; gospel and even folk music, which was performed by musicians, singers and even people of any musical talents. Through this, it brought about the uniting of people to join together and sing songs that helped them go through the oppression of the civil rights movement.

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