Africana Studies Commons^™

Theology In African American Spirituals And White Protestant Hymnody: A Comparative Study, Justin Oei

Undergraduate Research Awards

"The spiritual is one of the most significant windows into the religious experiences of Black Americans. This paper will analyze the theological content of the spiritual, and 19th/20thcentury Black religious practice more broadly, alongside that of contemporary white Protestant hymnody. Fundamentally, the African American Christian experience is based around the promise of liberation from oppression by the Messiah; it seeks justice for the downtrodden and a Kingdom of God based on equity.

I posit that, through a comparative analysis of selected Black spirituals and contemporaneous white hymnody, the spiritual’s theological content will be more focused on liberation as expressed through …

On Joe And The Burial Place(S) Of The Enslaved At William & Mary, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"It is possible that in the 17th or 18th century W&M opened a burial ground on its 330 acre campus and that it buried there those it enslaved over some 172 years. We have no documentation of that, although we have several references to the College’s providing coffins.1 Since those record no further expenses such as transport to the grave or digging the grave, I presume there would have been no such expenses--other of our enslaved would undertake such tasks as part of their job..."

Writing At The Williamsburg Bray School?, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"I’ve become interested recently in whether writing was taught to the pupils in the Williamsburg Bray School. I had assumed all along that it was, and that the discovery of 40 some slate pencils at the Bray School Dig was confirmation of that.

I’d not been alone in my assumption about the teaching of writing, for the great majority of those interested in the Bray School have affirmed that the curriculum included writing..."

Introduction To "The Americans Are Coming! Dreams Of African American Liberation In Segregationist South Africa", Robert T. Vinson

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and “American Negroes”—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators.

Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African government as “honorary whites” exempt from segregation, also saw their activities in South Africa as a …