Sparagmous, or “The Crucified”

Bibliographic Data

ID23448751
AuthorsMatthew V Johnson (corresponding author)
Year2010
Pages41-61
Publication date2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueThe Tragic Vision of African American Religion (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230109117_3
OpenAlexW2503409560
ISBN9780230109117
LanguageEN
References cited11

Drawn into the maelstrom of Western expansion, the Africans were torn from their homeland and swallowed up in the ever-increasing need for cheap labor in the pursuit of profit. With their participation in the process of Western expansion, objectified as chattel, the Africans and their descendants were doomed from the beginning to an ex istence characterized by social and cultural alienation; in a word, marginalization. This status would be codified by law, although it would extend much further into an evolving American culture and the African American soul. In 1705, almost exactly a century after the first colonists had set foot on Jamestown, the House of Burgesses codified and systematized Virginia’s laws of slavery. These laws would be modified and added to over the next century and a half, but the essential legal framework within which the institution of slavery would subsequently operate had been put in place. It had taken the English in Virginia the best part of one hundred years to finalize their construction of a legal status quite unknown in the Common Law of England, to declare unequivocally that Africans were a form of property: that they were, and henceforth would remain, “Strangers” and “outsiders” who would be required to live out their lives according to an entirely different set of laws from those that governed people of European birth and ancestry. 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Alienation · Genealogy · Homeland · Institution · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Soul · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society