Emancipation and Spirituality
Spirituality: Cornerstone of African American Education — Chapter 4
During slavery, blacks developed creative ways to maintain their sense of family. As often as possible they established family units and welcomed new arrivals to these units and referred to them as kin. They taught their children how to survive under slavery and developed a culture based upon family and spirituality. The importance of the family is punctuated by their post slavery efforts to relocate with their families. After emancipation, thousands of former bondmen set our to reconnect with their lost loved ones. With the assistance of the Freedmen’s Bureau, advertisements in local newspapers and word of mouth, these free people of color traveled many miles to reestablish their family units.
In his report, The effects of slavery and emancipation on African-American families and family history research, T.L. Tolman says that the majority of blacks lived in two parent households in 1870. In that the slavery system did not actively advance the idea of the importance of family, these individual quests to reconnect had to have its source of influence outside of the conditions of personal servitude. I would argue that the importance of family connections were an inherent aspect of the African’s spiritual makeup. When denied of it, an individual felt a void in their well-being. When freedom came, they sought to fill that void by reestablishing family ties.
This practice of identifying with family seemed to have lost some of its importance in today’s non-spiritual conditions. Current research shows that African Americans are more likely to have children without marriage ties than whites. In their research Bumpass & McLanahan suggest that premarital births are three times more likely among disadvantaged African American girls than among whites. “Disadvantaged” for them refers to the family and socioeconomic status of a girl’s parents. America’s former slaves were without a doubt disadvantaged, yet they maintained the desire to procreate within the spiritual structure of a family. With this rich history of the importance of family both in the motherland and during the cruelly of slavery, we find a sharper contrast in today’s statistics. According to the Washington Examiner, 77% of African American births are to unmarried moms. To me this signals the need for the reinsertion of spiritual values in the raising of our children.
Throughout the period of slavery, laws forbade legal marriage contracts. Therefore in the legal sense one could argue that “family”, understood as a legal contract between a man and woman, did not exist. Notwithstanding, marriage as a spiritual bonding and acceptance of social responsibilities did most certainly exist. In some cases the man lived and worked on a different plantation. In others the two partners were separated by sale and relocation. Consequently after emancipation, as mentioned previously, large numbers of former slaves did establish family units.
Perhaps some of the most compelling evidence of the presence of spirituality among African-Americans can be seen in the PBS Series “This Far By Faith”. Aired in six one-hour segments, this documentary brings into sharp relief the presence of faith in the lives of enslaved African people. Although of different denominations, Christians, Muslims and traditional religions, these people drew strength from a common belief in the superiority of an Almighty over the tyranny of their slave masters. This series articulates the spiritual influence on the culture of Africans in America from their arrival through emancipation, segregation, the Civil Rights movement and into the twenty-first century. Faith was the cornerstone of their survival.
In a segregated society, African Americans established their own businesses, educational and social institutions. A Quaker philanthropist named Richard Humphreys in 1837 established the first Historically Black College in Philadelphia. His Institute for Colored Youth trained teachers from among free people of color and later became Cheyney State University. By 1902 this school was joined by 85 others that were established to educate the sons and daughters of the former slaves. Taught primarily by African American teachers, education in these schools further instilled in its students the importance of working cooperatively to establish independent businesses, education and social culture in order to survive in a segregated American society. Community responsibility was not an alien idea to these people. It was part of their collective consciousness inherited from their African ancestors. Today HBCUs are declining at an alarming rate. The sense of connectedness, mutual concern and support based on a common spiritual underpinning seems to be declining among African Americans.
