Black Christianity Before the Civil War: Did You Know?

Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember, edited by James Mellon, is a collection of interviews, narratives, writings, and other primary source material from freed slaves. It includes a chapter on slave religion.

Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom, edited by Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, is the Library of Congress's companion volume to the Smithsonian Institution's radio documentary by the same name. The book contains the complete transcripts of interviews with former slaves (some of which you can hear on the radio production—tapes are available).

In 1998, PBS ran an excellent documentary titled Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery. It's truly one of the best (if not the best) video series on the topic we've ever seen, and dedicates a lot of time to the role Christianity played in the slaves' lives as well as to the stories of black Christians in the North (like Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church). The four-part documentary is now available on video. But its companion pieces may be even better. The book, by the same title, weaves together primary source documents, short stories (by renowned author Charles Johnson), and narratives and comes up with one of the most innovative book formats we've seen. It's incredibly riveting, too. And one cannot overly praise the series' companion website, either (more on that below).

Conversations With God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans, edited by James Melvin Washington, obviously has a broader timeframe than we examine here, but its section on slave prayers excellently captures the spirituality at work here.

The best online resource about African Americans before the Civil War—perhaps the best resource on the subject period—is PBS's companion site to its documentary Africans in America. The narrative is informative, but its true strength lies in its "resource bank," which includes one of the best-ever collections of images and primary-source documents. There's also an excellent teacher's guide. I can't count how many times we visited this site while researching this issue.

Slave narratives abound on the Web, and some of the sites are truly excellent:

American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology contains some of the interviews the Works Progress Administration took with of more than 2,300 former slaves, and includes photos of several of the interviewees.

Other interviews with former slaves, taken in the 1920s and '30s, can be heard at Remembering Slavery, the Smithsonian Institution's companion site to its radio documentary.

Another ambitions project is North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920, which plans to include, for the first time in one place, "all the narratives of fugitive and former slaves published in broadsides, pamphlets, or book form in English up to 1920." In fact, its plans are even broader than that, as it also includes biographies of former slaves published during the same period.

Other slave narratives are available at Duke University's Slave Voices exhibit, which includes scans of the original documents. Excerpts from famous and not-so-famous narratives, including a section regarding slave religion, are also available.

The Library of Congress's African-American collections are available for perusal at The African-American Mosaic Exhibition. Unfortunately, its four main areas—Colonization, Abolition, Migrations, and the WPA—seems limiting.

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