CHAPTER 9 | SPIRITUALS AND THEIR COLLECTORS: FROM CONTRABAND TO CONCERT HALL 227
Home might be eternal, as in “Deep River” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; or
it might be in the world, as in “Got a Home in That Rock” or even “Steal Away,”
where it refers to freedom; or it might be either one, as in “Sometimes I Feel Like
a Motherless Child.”
A spiritual about the sufferings of Jesus invites listeners to imagine his tor-
ment. “He Never Said a Mumblin’ Word” reviews the events of the Passion, includ-
ing Christ’s judgment before Pontius Pilate, the crown of thorns, the whipping,
the nails, and two stanzas’ worth of fl owing blood. It is not hard to picture onlook-
ers cringing at all this brutality while the victim silently accepts his fate:O they took my blessed Lawd,
Blessed Lawd, blessed Lawd,
O they took my blessed Lawd,
An’ he never said a mumblin’ word,
Not a word, not a word, not a word.Spanning emotions from abject woe to joyful hope, the black spiritual stands
as a remarkable legacy from one of American history’s most degraded chapters.
Writing on the spiritual in 1878, James Monroe Trotter, the fi rst historian of black
American music, refl ected: “The history of the colored race in this country”
proves that “no system of cruelty, however great or long infl icted, can destroy
that sympathy with musical sounds that is born within the soul.”THE “NEW NEGRO,” HARRY T. BURLEIGH,
AND THE CONCERT SPIRITUALThe founding of black colleges opened new educational opportunities for African
Americans in the later nineteenth century. Higher education for blacks
began before the Civil War, with the founding of Ashmun Institute (later Lincoln
University) in 1854 and Wilberforce University in 1856. It fl ourished in the years
immediately after the war with the creation of Fisk, Hampton, and Howard
universities and Morehouse College, all founded before 1870, and by the end of
the century included such notable institutions as Tuskegee Institute and Spelman
College, both founded in 1881. To these must be added the small number of tradi-
tionally white institutions, such as Oberlin College, that admitted black students
long before the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century brought an
end to legal segregation in higher education.
By the turn of the century, black and nonsegregated colleges had produced
a generation of artists, writers, and intellectuals, born in the waning days of
slavery or shortly after its abolition, whose achievements are remarkable by any
standard of measurement. Writers and activists such as Booker T. Washington
and W. E. B. DuBois spoke out eloquently on behalf of African Americans, and
though they sometimes disagreed sharply about how to effect changes, they
agreed that injustices against blacks demanded action. The new public image of
the outspoken, educated, middle-class African American came to be called the
“New Negro” and was a harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and
1930s (see chapter 13). The ethic of working publicly to improve the conditions of
African Americans pervaded all aspects of black culture around the turn of the
century, music included.black collegesblack activism172028_09_205-230_r3_ko.indd 227 23/01/13 11:29 AM