Category: Speaking to the Soul

The plantation songs known as “spirituals” are the spontaneous outbursts of intense religious fervor, and had their origin chiefly in camp meetings, revivals and other religious exercises. They were never “composed,” but sprang into life, ready made, from the white heat of religious fervor during some protracted meeting in camp or church, as the simple, ecstatic utterance of wholly untutored minds, and are practically the only music in America which meets the scientific definition of Folk Song.

The application of this truth to the interests and destiny of the colored race of America is manifest. We are living in this country, a part of its population, and yet, in divers respects, we are as foreign to its inhabitants as though we were living in the Sandwich Islands. It is this our natural separation from the real life of the nation, which constitutes us “a nation within a nation”:

Even the lime could not cover the smell of death as Constance stepped off the train platform on August 20, 1878. The wind carried the odor for three miles outside of the city. Sister Constance and Sister Thecla returned from a vacation on the Hudson as soon as they heard the news of the fever; the sisters were the only ones traveling into Memphis. As they made their way through the town, signs of plague were everywhere.

I have been and am still inspired by the natural sciences; and yet I do not think that I shall make them my principal field of study. By virtue of reason and freedom, life has always interested me most, and it has always been my desire to clarify and solve the riddle of life. The forty years in the desert before I could reach the promised land of the sciences seem too costly to me, and the more so as I believe that nature may also be observed from another side, which does not require insight into the secrets of science.

The most effective work of the Society among Negroes of the Northern colonies was accomplished in New York. In that colony, the instruction of the Negro and Indian slaves to prepare them for conversion, baptism, and communion was a primary charge oft repeated to every missionary and schoolmaster of the Society.

It hangs in the window of one of the little cash-and-carry stores that now line a street where fashionable New Yorkers used to drive out in their carriages to shop at Tiffany’s and Constable’s. It is a “supper dress” of silk crepe in “the new red,” with medieval sleeves and graceful skirt. A cardboard tag on the shoulder reads: “Special $4.95.” Bargain basements and little ready-to-wear shops are filled with similar “specials.”

I heard his holy voice speaking to all without distinction. “He who does not leave father and mother and brothers and all that he possesses and take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” I learned from Scripture and from experience itself that the cross comes at the end for no other reason than that we must endure trials and tribulations and finally voluntary death itself. In times past, when heresies

In the first place, let me say that I, as a loyal citizen, am whole-heartedly for this country of ours in which all my hopes and ideals and interests are bound up. I believe most sincerely that German brutality and aggression must be stopped, and I am willing, if need to be, to give my life and what I possess, to bring that about. I want to see the extension of real democracy in the world, and am ready to help that cause to the utmost; and finally, I want to see a sound and lasting peace brought to the world as a close to the terrible convulsion in which the nations are involved.

In 1833, many Americans still supported slavery. Many others hated both slavery and abolitionists. They thought slavery was evil but feared that giving immediate freedom to millions of poor, uneducated black slaves might hurt the U.S. economy, flood the country with beggars and criminals, and cause a serious break between the North and the South. So few white Americans supported the abolitionist cause that in 1831 only twenty-five of Garrison’s five hundred subscribers to the Liberator were white.

Whether on the battle front, or in desolate displacement camps, believers experience the numinous, healing, recreating presence of God. God is unreservedly the God of salvation revealed in the One who has passed through death and now abides among his people. The diversity of this Church is both its strength and its weakness, its hidden wealth, and its fragmentation.