Black Fire Reader

A Documentary Resource on African American Pentecostalism

Alexander

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621896562
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This compendium of primary resources reflects the important but often overshadowed contribution of African American believers to the dynamic growth of the modern Pentecostal movement--the fastest-growing segment of global Christianity. The doctrinal statements, sermons, songs, testimonies, news articles, as well as scholarly treatises included here allow black leaders, scholars, and laypeople to speak in their own voices and use their own language to tell us their stories and articulate the issues that have been important to them throughout the one-hundred-year history of this movement. Among the constant themes that continue to emerge is their appreciation of an empowering encounter with the Holy Spirit as the resource for engaging the dehumanizing racial reality of contemporary America.

chapter one

Pentecostal Retentions from African Spirituality and Slave Religion

Every Time I Feel the Spirit(Negro Spiritual)

Chorus:

Every time I feel the spirit

Movin’ in my heart I will pray

Every time I feel the spirit

Movin’ in my heart I will pray

Up on the mountains my Lord spoke

Out of His mouth came fire and smoke

Looked all around me, it looked so fine

I asked the Lord could it be mine

The Jordan river is chilly and cold.

It chills the body but not the soul.

There aint but one train upon this track.

It runs to heaven and then right back.

Oh, I have sorrow and I have woe

I have heartaches here below

But while God leads me I’ll never fear

For I know that He is near

William F. Allen(1830–1889)

William Allen, an American classical scholar, wrote prolifically for journals, magazines, and school texts. The Harvard College graduate traveled and studied in Europe and considered a career as a Unitarian minister before deciding to pursue a literary career. In 1856, he became assistant principal at the English and Classical School in West Newton, Massachusetts. During the Civil War, he and his wife ran a school for newly emancipated slaves on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, and in 1864–1865 he worked as a sanitary agent among black war refugees in Arkansas. After the war, he taught at Antioch College before moving to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Allen’s Slave Songs of the United States, published in 1867, was the first published work on American slave songs.

The Ring Shout1

There is a ceremony which the white clergymen are inclined to discountenance, and even of the colored elders some of the more discreet try sometimes to put on a face of discouragement; and, although if pressed for Biblical warrant for the “shout,” they generally seem to think, “he in de Book,” or, “he dere-da in Matchew,” still it is not considered blasphemous or improper if “de chillen” and “dem young gal” carry it on in the evening for amusement’s sake, and with no well-defined intention of “praise.” But the true “shout” takes place on Sundays, or on “praise” nights through the week, and either in the praise-house or in some cabin in which a regular religious meeting has been held. Very likely more than half the population of a plantation is gathered together. Let it be the evening, and a light wood fire burns red before the door of the house and on the hearth. For some time one can hear, though at a good distance, the vociferous exhortation or prayer of the presiding elder or of the brother who has a gift that way and is not “on the back seat”—a phrase the interpretation of which is “under the censure of the church authorities for bad behavior”—and at regular intervals one hears the elder “deaconing” a hymn book hymn, which is sung two lines at a time and whose wailing cadences, borne on the night air, are indescribably melancholy.

But the benches are pushed back to the wall when the formal meeting is over, and old and young, men and women, sprucely dressed young men, grotesquely half-clad field hands—the women generally with gay handkerchiefs twisted about their heads and with short skirts—boys with tattered shirts and men’s trousers, young girls bare-footed, all stand up in the middle of the floor, and when the “sperichil” is struck up begin first walking and by and by shuffling around, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion which agitates the entire shouter and soon brings out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song itself is also sung by the dancers. But more frequently a band, composed of some of the best singers and of tired shouters, stand at the side of the room to “base” the others, singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on the knees. Song and dance are alike extremely energetic, and often, when the shout lasts into the middle of the night, the monotonous thud, thud of the feet prevents sleep within half a mile of the praise-house.

Zora Neale Hurston(1891?–1960)

Novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was the daughter of a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter. Her mother, a schoolteacher, died when Zora was thirteen, and during her teenage years, Hurston worked at odds jobs, including as a domestic servant, before moving to Washington, DC, to study under Alain Locke at Howard University. She migrated to New York City around 1925 to involve herself in the Harlem Renaissance, and while there studied at Barnard College under famed anthropologist Franz Boas.

Hurston published her best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937 and went on to produce numerous articles and short stories as well as several full-length manuscripts of both fiction and ethnography. Yet, in later life, Hurston suffered several setbacks that virtually destroyed her personally and professionally. By the end of her life, within a year of suffering a fatal stroke, she had become a penniless recluse. Though she was buried in the unmarked grave usually reserved for those of no acclaim, her work was later rediscovered, and she received renewed prominence.

From The Sanctified Church2

The rise of various groups of saints in America in the last twenty years is not the appearance of a new religion as has been reported. It is in fact the older forms of Negro religious expression asserting itself against a new.

Frequently they are confused with white protest Protestantism known as Holy Rollers. There are Negro Holy Rollers, but they are very sparse compared to other forms of sanctification. The branches of the sanctified church are: (a) Church of God in Christ, (b) Saints of God in Christ.

The sanctified church is a protest against the highbrow tendencies in Negro Protestant congregations as the Negroes gain more education and wealth. It is understandable that they take on the religious attitudes of the white man which are as a rule so staid and restrained that it seems unbearably dull to the more primitive Negro who associates the rhythm of sound and motion with religion. In fact, the Negro has not been Christianized as much as generally believed. The great masses are still standing by their pagan altars and calling old gods by new names. As evidence of this, note the drum-like rhythm of all Negro spirituals. All Negro-made church music is dance-possible. The mode and mood of the concert artists who do Negro spirituals is absolutely foreign to the Negro churches. It is a conservatory concept that has nothing to do with the actual renditions in the congregations who make the songs. They are twisted in concert from their barbaric rhythms into Gregorian chants and apocryphal appendages to Bach and Brahms. But go into the church and see the priest before the altar chanting his barbaric thunder-poem before the altar with the audience behaving like a Greek chorus in that they “pick him up” on every telling point and emphasize it. That is called “bearing him up” and it is not done just any old way. The chant that breaks out from time to time must grow out of what has been said and done. “Whatever point he come out on, honey you just bear him up on it.” Mama Jane told the writer. So the service is really drama with music. And since music without motion is unnatural among Negroes there is always something that approaches dancing—in fact IS dancing—in such a ceremony. So the congregation is restored to its primitive altars under the new name of Christ. Then there is an expression known as “shouting” which is nothing more than an African possession by the gods. The gods possess the body of the worshipper and he or she is supposed to know nothing of their actions until the god decamps. This is still prevalent in most Negro Protestant churches and is universal in the Sanctified churches. They protest against the more highbrow churches’ efforts to stop it. It must be noted that the sermon is not the set thing that it is in the other highbrow churches. It is loose and formless and is in reality merely a framework on which to hang more songs. Every opportunity to introduce new rhythm is eagerly seized upon. The whole movement of the Sanctified church is a rebirth of song-making. It has brought in a new era of spiritual-making.

These songs by their very beauty cross over from the little store-fronts and the like occupied by the “Saints” to the larger and more fashionable congregations and from there to the great world. These more conscious churchgoers, despising these humble tune-makers as they do always resist these songs as long as possible; but finally succumb to their charm, So that it is ridiculous to say that the spirituals are the Negro “sorrow songs.” For just as many are being made in this post-slavery period as ever were made in slavery as far as anyone can find out. At any rate the people who are now making spirituals are the same as those who made them in the past and not the self-conscious propagandist that our latter-day pity men would have us believe. They sang sorrowful phrases then as they do now because they sounded well and not because of the thought-content.

Examples of new spirituals that have become widely known:

He is a Lion of the House of David

Stand By Me

His Little Light I Got

I Want Two Wings

I’m Going Home On The Morning Train

I’m Your Child

There are some crude anthems made also among these singers.

O Lord, O Lord, let the words of my mouth, O Lord Let the words of my mouth, meditations of my heart Be accepted in thy sight. O Lord. (From the Psalm. “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be accepted in thy sight, O Lord.”)

Beloved, beloved, Now are we the sons of God

And it doth not yet appear what we shall be

But...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Pentecostal Retentions from African Spirituality and Slave Religion
• Chapter 2: The Legacy of the Nineteenth-Century Black Holiness Movement
• Chapter 3: The Azusa Street Revival
• Chapter 4: African American Trinitarian Denominations
• Chapter 5: African American Oneness Pentecostalism
• Chapter 6: Black Pentecostals in Majority-White Denominations
• Chapter 7: Women in African American Pentecostalism
• Chapter 8: Neo-Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements
• Chapter 9: Theological Challenges of African American Pentecostalism into the Twenty-First Century
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Credits