Its very durability forces deeper consideration. Rap was an extension of the American oral tradition. Putting needle to the groove opened a door to a very particular time and place: Imagery, slang and situation. In its early iteration, rap indeed was a form of first-person reportage, a “story of the streets” passed from lips to ears on stoops, in backyards, on mix-tapes, over radio waves. It’s about the little one with the little nappy hair whose mama is on drugs and whose daddy is in jail.” It’s about little girls and boys in our churches. It’s about generations who are coming after us. As Weems tells her flock in her 2004 sermon “Not … Yet”: “Right now, this race is not about me and you. Jakes and Renita Weems weave a narrative of struggle, resistance and resilience. Franklin Peter Gomes Jesse Jackson Louis Farrakhan T.D. It is a sonorous continuum of voices, prophetic and poetic: John Chavis, the country’s first ordained African American Presbyterian preacher Douglass Martin Luther King Jr.
Here are more than 100 sermons, from both Christian and Muslim traditions, that speak to the pressing issues - slavery, segregation, the war on drugs - of their day. What “Preaching With Sacred Fire” underscores is that though seldom was wider light cast upon it, this oral tradition has flourished for centuries from the pulpit: Men and women who have educated, uplifted and unified their flocks. Grabbing the mike, so to speak, and reclaiming their own narrative and the vast platform from which to tell it didn’t happen until the mid-20th century.
Histories, family narratives, parables were passed through generations but were quietly held. Two new books, “Preaching With Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present” and “The Anthology of Rap,” look at two very different forms of African American oral tradition but take similar paths to their conclusions about the history and import of the black narrative tradition, the sacred and the profound.įor decades, large-scale stories told from an African American point of view were few and far between. ThomasĬould one build some sort of sturdy footbridge between, say, Frederick Douglass and Kanye West? An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the PresentĮdited by Martha Simmons and Frank A.
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