In studying any phase of the character and development of the social and cultural life of the Negro in the United States, one must recognize from the beginning that because of the manner in which the Negroes were captured in Africa and enslaved, they were particularly stripped of their social heritage.

Although the area in west Africa from which the majority of the slaves were drawn exhibits a high degree of cultural homogeneity, the capture of many of the slaves in intertribal wars and their selection for the slave markets tended to reduce to a minimum the possibility of the retention and the transmission of African culture.

The slaves captured in the intertribal wars were generally males and those selected for the slave markets on the African cost were the young and the most vigorous. This was all in accordance with the demands of the slave markets in the new world. One can get some notion of this selective process from the fact that it was not until 1840 that the number of females equaled the number of males in the slave population of the United States. Young males, it will be readily agreed, are poor bearers of the cultural heritage of a people.

But the manner in which the slaves were held for the slave ships that transported them to the new world also had an important influence upon the transmission of the African social heritage to the new environment. They were held in baracoons, a euphemistic term for concentration camps at the time, where the slaves without any regard for sex or family and tribal affiliations were kept until the slaver came along to buy a cargo for the markets of the new world.

This period of dehumanization was followed by the "middle passage," The voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to the slave markets of the west Indies and finally the indigo, tobacco, and cotton plantations of what was to become later the United States. During the "middle passage," the Negroes were packed for sex or age differences, not to mention such matters as clan and tribal differences. In fact, no regard was shown for such elementary social, or shall I say human, considerations as family ties.

In the new world the process by which the Negro was stripped of his social heritage and thereby, in a sense, dehumanitized was completed. There was first the size of the plantation, which had significant influence upon the extent and nature of the contacts between the slaves and the whites.

On the large sugar and cotton plantations in the southern states there was, as in Brazil and the West Indies, little contact between the whites and the Negro slaves. Under such conditioned there was an opportunity for the slaves to undertake to reestablish their old ways. As a matter of fact, however, the majority of slaves in the United States were on small farms and small plantations in some of the upland cotton regions of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas the median number of slaves per holding did not reach twenty; while in regions of general agriculture based mainly upon slave labor in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee and the median number of slave holdings was even smaller.

Then slaves freshly imported from Africa were usually "broken in" to the plantation regime. According to the descriptions given by a traveler in Louisiana, the slaves were only "gradually accustomed to work. They are made to bathe often, to take long walks from time to time, and especially to dance; they are distributed in small numbers among old slaves in order to dispose them better to acquire their habits."

Apparently from all reports, these new slaves with their African ways were subjected to the disdain, if not hostility, of Negroes who had become accommodated to the plantation regime and had acquired the ways of their new environment.

Of what did accommodation to their new environment consist? It was necessary to acquire some knowledge of the language of whites for communication. Any attempt on the part of the slaves to preserve or use their native language was discouraged or prohibited. They were to set to task in order to acquire the necessary skills for the production of cotton or sugar cane.

On the small farms very often the slaves worked in the fields with their white owners. On the larger plantations they were under the strict discipline of strict overseers, who not only supervised their work but also in the interest of secruity maintained a strict surveillance over all their activities. It was a general rule that there could be no assembly of five or more slaves without the presences of a white man. This applied especially to their gathering for religious purposes. Later, we shall see how the slaves were soon introduced into the religious life of their white masters. All of this tended to bring about as completely as possible a loss of the Negro's African cultural heritage.

E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America. 1963

© January 2006 By Afromerica