This excerpt from Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll sheds some light on this complicated question:
In Wilkinson County, Mississippi, an old slave gravedigger, accompanied by a young helper, asked a white stranger a question:
“Massa, may I ask you something?”
“Ask what you please.”
“Can you ‘splain how it happened in the fust place, that the white folks got the start of the black folks, so as to make dem slaves and do all de work?’
The younger helper, fearing the white man’s wrath, broke in: ‘Uncle Pete, it’s no use talking. It’s fo’ordained. The Bible tells you that the Lord fo-ordained the Nigger to work, and the white man to boss.”
“Dat’s so. Dat’s so. But if dat’s so, then God’s no fair man!”
Later on in the book, Genovese explores how the slaves came to view Christ in a way that ultimately subverted slavery, something we would do well to remember this MLK Day:
The slaves had a special and central place for Jesus, but a place that whites had difficulty recognizing. Julius Lester has given us, with a few short strokes, a convincing reading. The slaves, he writes, “fashioned their own kind of Christianity, which they turned to for strength in the constant times of need. In the Old Testament story of the enslavement of the Hebrews by the Egyptians, they found their own story. In the figure of Jesus Christ, they found someone who had suffered as they suffered, someone who understood, someone who offered them rest from their suffering.”
Moses had become Jesus, and Jesus, Moses; and with their union the two aspects of the slaves’ religious question – collective deliverance as a people and redemption from their personal sufferings – had become one through the mediation of that imaginative power so beautifully manifested in the spirituals.
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