By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life.
This passage describes the historical condition of enslaved Black people in the mid-18th century and their psychological readiness for a new worldview.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
But the true Negro folk-song still lives in the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the Negro people.
Mother and child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but there is little of wooing and wedding; the rocks and the mountains are well known, but home is unknown.
Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment.
They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.