“The power of song in the struggle for Black survival—that is
what the spirituals and the blues are about.”
James
H. Cone revolutionized American theology with the publication in 1969
and 1970 of his first groundbreaking works on Black Liberation
Theology—a fusion of themes from the Gospel and the Black Power
movement. Some critics challenged him for drawing more on European
sources rather than African American history and culture. His
response in 1972 was The Spirituals and the Blues, a major
examination of the soul-songs that emerged from slavery and Jim Crow
oppression.
In
the Spirituals, as Cone showed, enslaved Black people expressed their
deep appropriation of the Gospel message of freedom, and their trust
in God’s identification with the oppressed. In the Blues, a
“secular spiritual” born in the era of segregation and lynching,
Black people expressed their dignity, love, and “the gut capacity
to survive,” amidst all the forces that pressed them down.
In
her introduction to this anniversary edition, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes
writes: “Cone’s work established that theology must attend to the
questions and the witness of enslaved Africans and their descendants;
they have a voice, through their music, in the serious questions of
theology. And fifty years after its first publication in 1972, Cone’s
work retains its enduring witness.”
