Excerpt from Paper: "Souls Boiling Over: Spiritual Slave Songs and Douglass, Stowe and Faulkner"
African-American slave songs, also known as Negro Spirituals, have greatly influenced American music. From Gospel songs to Jazz and The Blues, song writers have been inspired by the spirituals' deep pathos, anguish and quiet hope.
While many slaves sang spirituals to express their discontent with their existing situations, their music also served a purpose; slaves in chain gangs often sang in unison to coordinate their work. Some spirituals, such as Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, were used by the Underground Railroad as codes for slaves to escape. It wasn't until the 1870s that these songs were made popular by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a group of young ex-slaves who toured the nation and world to raise money for Fisk University, a school established to help educate former slaves.
In this presentation, I have tried to compile some of the best known spirituals and combine them with images and texts we have been studying this semester. I like to think of each slide as telling its own story through music, images and literature. As you go through the slides, you will notice that, thematically, they move in the directions of oppression, escape and ultimately freedom.
I hope you enjoy the music which uniquely captures the many aspects of the Peculiar Institution.
While many slaves sang spirituals to express their discontent with their existing situations, their music also served a purpose; slaves in chain gangs often sang in unison to coordinate their work. Some spirituals, such as Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, were used by the Underground Railroad as codes for slaves to escape. It wasn't until the 1870s that these songs were made popular by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a group of young ex-slaves who toured the nation and world to raise money for Fisk University, a school established to help educate former slaves.
In this presentation, I have tried to compile some of the best known spirituals and combine them with images and texts we have been studying this semester. I like to think of each slide as telling its own story through music, images and literature. As you go through the slides, you will notice that, thematically, they move in the directions of oppression, escape and ultimately freedom.
I hope you enjoy the music which uniquely captures the many aspects of the Peculiar Institution.
Excerpt from a Paper for a Course Titled Paradigms of Knowing
Perhaps what is worth knowing can best be summed up by the words of Mother Teresa: "We are all capable of good and evil. We are not born bad: everybody has something good inside. Some hide it, some neglect it, but it is there. God created us to love and to be loved, so it is our test from God to choose one path or the other" (Cardey, 1995, p.51).
Knowledge is not just about facts that are "useful". Knowledge that is valuable affirms the goodness of every human being. It helps us to find the "good inside"--inside ourselves and in others. In a day and age which defines the value of a person by the size of their bank account, in a day and age in which people live in fear of violence and terror, in a day and age of racisim and bigotry, such knowledge addresses a great need and hunger in our society. As Mother Theresa states, "The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty--it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God" (Vardey, 1995, p.79). These words closely refect the ideas of the great philosophers of Plato and Socrates: "Education, therefore, is in the service of the soul and the devine, and not, as for the Sophists, of the secular and human alone (Tarnas, 1993, p.43). By services the soul, by feeding its hunger, education and knowlege can serve "to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world" (Kennedy, 1968, p.1).
Knowledge is not just about facts that are "useful". Knowledge that is valuable affirms the goodness of every human being. It helps us to find the "good inside"--inside ourselves and in others. In a day and age which defines the value of a person by the size of their bank account, in a day and age in which people live in fear of violence and terror, in a day and age of racisim and bigotry, such knowledge addresses a great need and hunger in our society. As Mother Theresa states, "The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty--it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God" (Vardey, 1995, p.79). These words closely refect the ideas of the great philosophers of Plato and Socrates: "Education, therefore, is in the service of the soul and the devine, and not, as for the Sophists, of the secular and human alone (Tarnas, 1993, p.43). By services the soul, by feeding its hunger, education and knowlege can serve "to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world" (Kennedy, 1968, p.1).