America was a pseudo-Christian nation that never practiced sincere Christianity. In fact, slaves often questioned where the real Bible was! According to Raboteau’s book, Slave Religion, in quoting Lewis and Milton Clarke, “Slaves believed that there existed somewhere a real Bible from God.” This was because white pseudo-Christians always persisted in using the Bible to make slaves passive and to justify slavery and segregation. Slave owners practiced a counterfeit religious Christianity, which is what America was built on. One should be reminded that we should not be teaching whitewashed versions of history to our children as white supremacists have done for centuries. It is good to think the way Neil Tyson does when he said, “One of the great challenges in the world is knowing enough about a subject to think you’re right but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.” Think about what white supremacists are trying to do to history!
We should be reminded that religious songs carried secreted messages during slavery. One such religious song was “Steal Away to Jesus.” This was used to signal slaves that an attempt to escape was at hand. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was often used to signal that the Underground Railroad was available and escape to the north was possible. Just days after Mexico’s black president, Vicente Guerrero, abolished slavery in 1829 David Walker, a black freedom fighter, made his appeal to rise up against the slave owners. In addressing comments by Thomas Jefferson Walker said, “Mr. Jefferson said, ‘when a master was murdered, all his slaves in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death . . . . had I not rather die, or be put to death, than to be a slave to any tyrant, who takes not only my own, but my wife and children’s lives by the inches?”
Harriet Tubman became the “Moses of her people,” one who would be entrusted by God to lead people to freedom. Tubman became convinced that this was her calling from God, which would later become inspiration for blacks seeking freedom across the United States. John Brown, the hero against slavery heard of Harriet Tubman’s efforts to liberate slaves and wanted her to join him on the attack against slavery at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Harriet Tubman was not a freedom fighter just in words but provided the physical action needed to free slaves. Tubman was an ancestor of the great warriors of West Africa.
In 1852, Frederick Douglass said, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.” We will not let Black History be pushed back even if we have to teach the truth every Sunday after church or on street corners.
