Black Spirituals, Physical Sensuality, and Sexuality

A curious aspect of the vast scholarly literature on the spirituals—the sacred songs created and first sung by enslaved Africans in North America in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries—is the relative absence of substantive analyses that center on themes in the songs that relate to sexuality. This dearth of commentary on erotic matters is especially curious given the longstanding perception of the spirituals as reflecting a comprehensive, wide-ranging oral repository of Black life and culture during the experience of North American slavery. For example, the poet James Weldon Johnson, in his now-classic 1926 essay on the spirituals, wrote: In the Spirituals the Negro did express his religious hopes and fears, his faith and his doubts. In them he also expressed his theological and ethical views, and sounded his exhortations and warnings.... But in a large proportion of the songs the Negro passed over the strict limits of religion and covered the whole range of group experiences—the notable omission being sex.... Indeed, the Spirituals taken as a whole contain a record and a revelation of the deeper thoughts and experiences of the Negro in this country for a period beginning three hundred years ago and covering two and a half centuries. (emphasis added)1

Human sexuality · Sociology · Gender Studies · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society

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