الأرشيف الشهري: ديسمبر 2012

Maria Stewart: Hero of Black Church History

Maria Stewart: Hero of Black Church History
It’s 1831 and in the culture of her day, Maria Stewart has four strikes against her. She is Black; she is female; she is young; and she is widowed—in era where all four designations were horribly disrespected and dishonored.
Yet, Maria Stewart marches into the office of William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the Liberator, an Abolitionist newspaper. She demands that Garrison publish her letter to her fellow Black sisters of the Spirit.
He does!
Read the rest of her story and learn more about who you are in Christ.
Arousing to Exertion
To fully comprehend Stewart’s staggering accomplishments, we have to backtrack to her less than advantageous upbringing.
“I was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1803; was left an orphan at five years of age; was bound out in a clergyman’s family; had the seeds of piety and virtue early sown in my mind, but was deprived of the advantages of education, though my soul thirsted for knowledge. Left them at fifteen years of age; attended Sabbath schools until I was twenty; in 1826 was married to James W. Stewart; was left a widow in 1829; was, as I humbly hope and trust, brought to the knowledge of the truth, as it is in Jesus, in 1830; in 1831 I made a public profession of my faith in Christ.”
Married at 23, widowed at 26, converted at 27; she challenges a nation at 28. In the fall of 1831, she hands Garrison the manuscript of her challenge to African Americans to sue for their rights. Stewart entitled her work Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality: The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build. She told her readers that she:
“Presented them before you in order to arouse you to exertion, and to enforce upon your minds the great necessity of turning your attention to knowledge and improvement.”
Here we have a young, female, African American widow writing in a white male abolitionist tabloid as a spiritual director to motivate her people to learning and action—based upon being created in the image of God.
But God!
Using the biblical truth of the image of God, Maria Stewart guides her readers toward the counter-cultural but scriptural truth that:
“It is not the color of the skin that makes the person, but it is the principles formed within the soul.”
Stewart inspires her audience to see who they are in Christ.
“Many think, because your skins are tinged with a sable hue, that you are an inferior race of beings; but God does not consider you as such. He hath formed and fashioned you in his own glorious image, and hath bestowed upon you reason and strong powers of intellect. He hath made you to have dominion over the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea (Genesis 1:26). He hath crowned you with glory and honor; hath made you but a little lower than the angels (Psalms 8:5).”
In 1831, no one was telling young Black women that they were formed in God’s image. No one was telling young Black women that they had God-given powers of reason and intellect. No one was telling young Black women that they had dominion and honor. No one…but God…and no one but Maria Stewart.
With everything stacked against her and against her sisters of the Spirit, Maria Stewart refuses to listen to the wicked ways of the world. Instead, she courageously chooses to listen to the edifying encouragement of the Word. She teaches us not to believe the world’s lies about us, but to cling to God’s truth about who we are in Christ.
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Maria W. Stewart (1803-1879)

imagesCAIRW3WFMaria W. Stewart (1803-1879) was born Maria Miller, to free parents in Hartford, Connecticut. Unfortunately, she would become an orphan at the age of five. Being without parents, she was forced to become a servant.

During the 10 years she served in the household of a clergyman, she was not able to receive any sort of formal education. Nevertheless, she taught herself by reading the books from the family library. After leaving the clergyman’s house at the age of 15, she supported herself by working as a domestic servant and continued to educate herself at Sabbath schools.

In 1826, she married James W. Stewart at the African Baptist Church. He asked that she not only adopt his surname, but his middle initial as well. James was a veteran of the War of 1812 and provided Stewart with a middle class lifestyle while residing in Boston.

He died in 1829 leaving Stewart widowed and childless. She was left a generous inheritance by her late husband; however, she was defrauded of it by the executors as a result of an extended court battle. Distraught and grieving, Stewart experienced a miraculous religious conversion and dedicated herself to God’s service.

Stewart was also influenced by a prosperous clothing shop owner named David Walker, who was a well known, outspoken member of the General Colored Association. Walker was identified as a leader within the African-American enclave of Boston. In 1829, he wrote and published, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.

Walker had a very profound effect on Stewart’s ideology of freedom, activism, and self-elevation. This epiphany introduced new sentiments surrounding the abolitionist movement and education. Her newly adopted religious fervor coupled with her inspiration to engage in political matters, signified her as audacious.

She was criticized and frowned upon for speaking and writing on such topics then considered taboo. As the abolitionist movement began to gain momentum, William Lloyd Garrison (publisher of the Liberator and acquaintance of Fredrick Douglass) asked African-American women to contribute articles to the newspaper. In 1831, Stewart met with Garrison and he agreed to publish her works.

Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation of Which We Must Build was her first published work. It sold for six cents. A year after her first published work, she began her public lecturing career, delivering her first speech on April 28, 1832 before the African-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston. Although she was considered brazen and was often discouraged to continue lecturing on such inflammatory topics, on September 21, 1832 she lectured to men and women (considered a promiscuous audience) regarding their overwhelming apathy, smothering the fire of freedom within their spirits.

She defied social constraints as she continued to lecture and speak out against the contrary existence of discrimination, sexism, and slavery in a country that upholds itself as the land of the free.
Because of her fearless spirit, Stewart is recorded as being the first woman to speak to a mixed “promiscuous” audience and leave writings on political issues. Promiscuous audiences were audiences comprised of both genders, which many people criticized and rejected because women were discriminated against.

Although she would discontinue her lecturing career to promiscuous audiences, she inspired contemporaries such as suffragist Sojourner Truth and Jarena Lee (the first woman authorized to preach by Richard Allen).In her speeches, labeled as Black feminist rhetoric, she chastised those who were remiss in actively seeking their freedom, striving for equality and uplifting themselves and their community. Disregarding the pervasive discriminatory climate, she encouraged African-Americans to mobilize and become more politically involved.

In Stewart’s third speech, entitled, “African Rights and Liberty” she defends her God given right to speak before any audience. Her final speech was delivered in 1833 as she resigned herself to leaving Boston as a result of the contemptuous feelings harbored by some in regards to her speaking. After relocating to Baltimore in 1852, Stewart began teaching, but soon moved again to Washington, D.C. where she organized a school.

She was eventually able to receive her husband’s pension after a law was passed granting pensions to widows of the War of 1812 veterans. She published her second edition of Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart. Shortly thereafter, she became the head matron of the Freedman’s Hospital and Asylum in Washington.

She died at the age of 76, after her book was published. Indeed, this notable African-American political and human rights activist, essayist, lecturer and educator can be hailed as a woman who spoke unapologetically about the mistreatment of African-Americans and women; yet, she never ceased to encourage those groups not to capitulate by accepting second class citizenship. Stewart profoundly promoted obedience to Biblical scriptures and the attainment of freedom and education.

AMERICAN SLAVE NARRATIVE

imagesCADL8HF1AMERICAN SLAVE NARRATIVE :

The slave narrative is a literary form which emerges from the experience of enslaved Africans in Britain and its colonies. It includes the memories of six thousand former slaves from North America in the 18th and 19th centuries, with about 150 published as separate books or pamphlets. . In addition, there are also written documents of white Americans or Europeans captured and enslaved in North Africa, usually by pirates.

Although Slave narratives were first produced in England in the 18th century, they soon became a mainstay of African American literature. Novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin represented the abolitionist view of evil of slavery; however white southern-writers responded by writing so-called anti-Tom novels in an attempt to represent pro-slavery viewpoint. Furthermore, narratives of slavery recounted the personal experience of African-Americans who had escaped from slavery to arrive at North.

Most studies of black American culture have concentrated on its oral aspects, folk tale, music religion because they have seemed most distinctive. In addition, the slave narrator was much more than passive assimilator of another culture’s literary tradition. It is crucial that throughout the 18th century American slave narratives were free of outside influence; the pressures and strategies came later. The first slave narrative Adam’s Negro Tryall, was published in 1703.

Rather than emphasize the material result of slavery, as most scholars tend to do, the slave writers focuses on its human causes in an attempt to understand why white people chose to victimize them.”Their representation of religious violence identify deep and psychological forces that drive the slave owner to try imposing upon colored people in an absolute power and control rivaling that of the Maker Itself .” ( Ferguson, 298)

All the members of human family are born physically unchained in a world of diverse sexes, cultures and skin colours. But the slave owners sought to steal from dark people the liberty that the original Maker endowed to all humans.

The slave owners, in addition to their tortures, rape black women to satisfy their sexual desires. Although their sex leaves women vulnerable to rape, they usually remain spiritually vulnerable to slaveholders. Because only females can bear children, white oppressors seeking to reinvent Africans and get rich in the process must gain dominion over their bodies. In a letter a slaveholder Thomas Jefferson declared that “ I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.” “ As a slave, black woman was in entirely different relation (from the slave man) to the plantation patriarch. Her reproductive system…gave birth to property…and all slaves inherited their status from their mothers.”(Ferguson, 311)

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Characteristics of Slave Narratives
Marked by religious/humanitarian appeals
Emphasize the narrator’s movement of innocence to greater understanding
Serve as propaganda
Details cruelty of slavery
Contrast slavery with Christian ideals
Portray the narrator as a trickster
A first sentence beginning, “I was born…” A place but not a date of birth
Sketchy account of parentage
Description of a cruel master, mistress, etc.
An account of one extraordinarily strong slave – “pure African”
Description of a “Christian” slaveholder
Description of plantation life
Account of slave auction, of families being destroyed
Description of slave patrols
Escape attempts
Taking of a new last name
Reflections on slavery
Often dictated to a white writer or reviewed by a white editor
“life on the road” (i.e. Bibb) – emphasis on deception over physical resistance

A Brief History

A Brief History
 1441 First African slaves Imported to Portugal
 1517 Plantation slavery begins
 1619 African slaves arrive at the English colony of Jamestown
 1777 Vermont abolishes slavery
 1793 Congress passes the first fugitive slave act
 1807 Congress outlaws the African Slave trade
 1861 The Civil War begins
 1863 Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation
 1865 Civil War ends
 1866 Former confederacy passes “black Code” laws
 1868 The 14th Amendment of the Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing equal protection under the law
 1870 The 15th Amendment of the Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision

African-American literature

imagesCA3MS02XAfrican-American literature

African-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of slave narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. African American literature reached early high points with slave narratives of the nineteenth century. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a time of flowering of literature and the arts. Writers of African-American literature have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize to Toni Morrison. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues and rap.
As African Americans’ place in American society has changed over the centuries, so, has the focus of African-American literature. Before the American Civil War, the literature primarily consisted of memoirs by people who had escaped from slavery; the genre of slave narratives included accounts of life under slavery and the path of justice and redemption to freedom. There was an early distinction between the literature of freed slaves and the literature of free blacks who had been born in the North. Free blacks had to express their oppression in a different narrative form. Free blacks in the North often spoke out against slavery and racial injustices using the spiritual narrative. The spiritual addressed many of the same themes of slave narratives, but has been largely ignored in current scholarly conversation.
In broad terms, African-American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent living in the United States. It is highly varied. African-American literature has generally focused on the role of African Americans within the larger American society and what it means to be an American.. This presence has always been a test case of the nation’s claims to freedom, democracy, equality, the inclusiveness of all.” African-American literature explores the issues of freedom and equality long denied to Blacks in the United States, along with further themes such as African-American culture, racism, religion, slavery, a sense of home, segregation, migration, feminism and more. African-American literature presents the African-American experience from an African-American point of view. In the early Republic, African-American literature represented a way for free blacks to negotiate their new identity in an individualized republic. They often tried to exercise their political and social autonomy in the face of resistance from the white public. Thus, an early theme of African-American literature was, like other American writings, what it meant to be a citizen in post-Revolutionary America.
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Characteristics and themes
African-American literature has both been influenced by the great African diasporic heritage and shaped it in many countries. It has been created within the larger realm of post-colonial literature, although scholars distinguish between the two, saying that “African American literature differs from most post-colonial literature in that it is written by members of a minority community who reside within a nation of vast wealth and economic power.”
African-American oral culture is rich in poetry, including spirituals, gospel music, blues and rap. This oral poetry also appears in the African-American tradition of Christian sermons, which make use of deliberate repetition, cadence and alliteration. African-American literature—especially written poetry, but also prose—has a strong tradition of incorporating all of these forms of oral poetry. These characteristics do not occur in all works by African-American writers.
Some scholars resist using Western literary theory to analyze African-American literature. One trope common to African-American literature is Signification. Gates claims that signifying “is a trope in which are subsumed several other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyperbole an litotes, and metalepsis.” Signification also refers to the way in which African-American “authors read and critique other African American texts in an act of rhetorical self-definition”