Let My People Go: A Call to End the Oppression of Women in the Church, Revised and Expanded
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They were not impressed by the master's Christianity, may I say. This is why it's even surprising to me that they adopted Christianity. Exactly, because they saw all of the brutality, they saw all the hypocrisy, and were the brunt of it. But they heard about this Jesus, this man of sorrow who suffered, and they identified.
And then they were told that Jesus is the Son of the High God. Wait, the Son of the High God? We can get to the High God through this guy?
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And his story sounds like our story? He's born in terrible circumstances, he's mistreated. He's finally abused and killed. Maybe He will carry us to the High God. After a short break, more conversation and song with Joe Carter. Subscribe to On Being on Apple Podcasts to listen again any time and discover everything we create. Watch your feed in coming days. They were never made available as an album in his lifetime.
I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Joe embodied the beauty, sorrow, and hidden meanings within the spirituals, songs composed by nameless bards in slavery, and yet a tradition that gave us gospel, blues, jazz, and hip-hop. Were there songs reaching back to the ancestors? Do you think they felt that, also, that old belief that was planted in them of their songs reaching to God? I think in the early days of slavery, yes. Because for a long time there were a lot of ancestors from Africa who were still there on the plantations. So they got that sense. For example, with Mary McLeod Bethune — her grandmother came over from Africa with two sisters, and she remembered the songs and stories and sang those songs to the children.
Now nobody in my family now remembers any of the songs, but we have the stories of her singing the songs to the children and so on. And it was through the songs that the faith was transmitted. The Jews in Egypt. An old master comes out one day. I don't hear nobody singing down there. You guys strike me up one of them good, old spiritual songs. You know how I like them. Give me one of them good, old songs. Now pretend you're going to be — you're all slaves, OK? And master wants us to sing a song, but we don't really want to sing for master, do we?
Master loves our singing, but he doesn't listen to the words we say. He doesn't have a clue. So we can say anything we want. So, let's give the master a good old song. One of the connections also that I learned about that period of time from my grandparents was, my grandfather was a storyteller. And he would regale the family, every time we were together, with slavery stories.
That's what he always talked about. And there was a slave by the name of John who was the star of all of these stories. And you never knew whether the story was true or not, but it was always funny, and it got your attention, and Grandpa was a good storyteller. There was also always a moral at the end of the story. But the one theme that went through all of these stories was that John had outsmarted the master. He was always ahead of the master. So there was this concept — the master doesn't really understand us.
And so, the spirituals were — all of the spirituals, all of the songs were masks. As well as these transcendent, wonderful moments. They were also signals for escape. It's like you get into the stream of that living water. And there's no past, present, and future. It's just right now, and right now everything is all right. You know, there's a story about Elijah and a woman whose son died. She had received this son as a miracle, actually. And the prophet told her that she was going to have this son at a certain time and she did, and the son dies.
Send for that prophet. I want to see the man. Now, you gave me the promise, I have a child, and my child has died. I'm having a tragedy right now. And it doesn't say that I'm doing OK. It doesn't say that everything's OK in my life. So the sense of well-being does not depend on whether things are good or bad or up or down because, if we had to live that way as slaves, we would constantly be buried underneath the ground, because the circumstances were so horrible and so bad we had to find, as I say, that secret door.
We talked about how there was this subversive power of the words of the spirituals, saying things which really contradicted the interests of the masters, for example. But also there were more overt codes and real practical references in some of the spirituals. And give me an example of that, where there was almost a secret language. Someone is going to meet us on the other side of the river.
Well, first, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" was a death song, as most of them were in some way. And it was often sung when a child died. It was a way to evoke one's dignity, to say, even though I'm a slave, God has to send a golden chariot down from the sky. I'm going to have dignity. My child's going to have dignity. A band of angels coming after me, coming for to carry me home. So I think at some point someone realized, "Maybe I don't have to die in order to have a little heaven. And, of course, they thought that if they got to the Mason-Dixon line and crossed, they would have true freedom.
And then, unfortunately, they got across the Mason-Dixon line and still found there was oppression, and found that somehow they had to revert back to the original spiritual meanings of the songs because the political meanings never delivered them. I can do a much more whimsical listen knowing what you just told me about some of the practicalities and codes behind that.
And the story was that a certain season, the angels would come and trouble the water, as they say, which, I don't know, they put their wings in or their toenails or whatever. But whatever happened, once they touched the waters, if you got in the water, and you were sick, you'd be healed. So here's this guy, 38 years he's been going.
I'm a lame man. And every time the angels come to trouble the water, somebody gets in before me. Of course, I do. We are not victims.
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We're powerful individuals, and we are people of faith. And so they sang — let me just do a little bit of that song. What this makes me think of is how the politics of freedom can actually distract from this inner freedom and dignity, which the slaves possessed and which we find so expressed in this music even today. And maybe in the same sense that sometimes religion can distract from spirituality. You get a structure, a form. You get a program, and somehow, after a while, the real thing is as elusive as the Holy Grail.
And you can lose this sense that these slaves who created this music obviously had that — at every moment, they were full of grace. All was well with their souls no matter what was going on around them, no matter what rights they had or what their legal status was. No, it must be said that there were certainly slaves who were trying to escape, slaves who were willing to get involved in revolution and insurrection and so on. But I think the larger community had a spiritual identity that guided them. And we have to be so careful not to be glorifying slavery, right? So what are we talking about here?
What are we getting at? I think what we're talking about human suffering, and how do we survive when the worst happens?
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And I think that African Americans have shown the world, and other peoples have done it, too. Other peoples are doing it all the time, and it's the same process. It doesn't matter who the people are. It doesn't matter whether the song is an actual song of notes and music or whether it's the spirit of a people expressed in some other way, but you'll find — for example, when I sing these songs, I can sing "Motherless Child" in Siberia; they know what it means.
As a matter of fact, you go to Wales right now, you'll find African-American spirituals in Welsh in the Welsh hymnbook, part of their worship. So the songs have become symbolic, I think, of that universal quest for freedom, that yearning for freedom and that part of us that says, "I will not be defeated. Today, experiencing the hidden stories, meanings, and hope of the spiritual. This is one of our earliest and most beloved shows, with the late, singular musician and humanitarian Joe Carter.
The paradox of the spirituals in their context of slavery was that they gave themselves over, in some sense to suffering and to the hardness of life and really to an essential powerlessness. This is where we are; this is where we live. But there was an "and. Am I making any sense? Yeah, that's one of the horrible problems that we have to deal with, with the whole issue of progress, you know? Because in the process, we may lose something. But you know something?
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Because I have been living with these songs, these songs have become the strength of my life. Because I realize even though I am not in slavery, as my grandparents or great-grandparents were, I deal with all of the difficulties of life that nobody escapes. And even somebody who's perfectly free and perfectly rich and perfectly powerful in the world's terms doesn't escape from suffering, right? And the worst kind of bondage is that which takes place in the inside. When we look back to the slavery days, we were bound, but it was the master who was really the slave. And I think some of us understand that now.
But I experience in my own life great strength from telling the stories and looking back, because I see what they went through, and I haven't experienced anything like what my ancestors did. And I complain about everything.
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I wonder if it is at all disturbing to you that this music with its sensibility has, is considered now to be a defining part of American culture as a whole? You could say maybe that it's been co-opted, embraced. Does that bother you? Because that necessarily takes it out of its context, doesn't it? I mean, is it OK for a white person to celebrate this as much as…. I think it's a good question. And my answer is this: When any music or art becomes this transcendent thing that helps people through, it then becomes a property of the universe.
It becomes a property of the world. And to tell the story of the spiritual, it's not an African story. It is an African-American story. It's the blending of the two cultures. And the fact that George Gershwin was influenced greatly by the spirituals, I think it's a wonderful thing that this man could reach out of his neighborhood, go down to South Carolina and listen to the elders sing and come back and say, "This is a treasure.
And today — it's true with any kind of art — there has to be the sensitivity of the person who is observing and participating.
And some people don't get it no matter what you do. And there are other people, you don't have to say anything, and they get it from the get-go. And one of the things I would say about the development of African-American music and culture — the powers that be found it much more attractive to promote the blues and to promote the image of the black man singing the blues with a bottle of wine in his back pocket singing about less-than-noble sentiments, while we had this whole treasure. And the Paul Robesons and the Marian Andersons and others who came and brought this music forth, they didn't make the big commercial successes.
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Well, Robeson, and Anderson did for a while, but they're among the few. In order to make a commercial success, you've got to sing soul, you've got to get away from anything that is spiritual and change the message. I just have a certain personal feeling about it because we still have a problem, because there are still people who don't want to tell the truth about who we are.
And if the truth is really told, then you've got to go back and tell the story of the love and the forgiveness and the power of many of the ancestors. They weren't all loving and forgiving. Some of them were mean-spirited. Some of them did whatever they had to do, I'm sure. But as a national identity, this music became the embodiment of a spirit of goodwill, a spirit of forgiveness, a spirit of "I'm going to survive no matter what.
And by the way, this woman that I told you about, Jessie Anthony, she was the most dignified soul I'd ever met. The last time I saw her, she was, I think, 88 years old. Her parents were born slaves. And she began to sing the spirituals. She sang at the Boston Public Library, she sang at Harvard, demonstrating the music. And she said, "Joe? I said, "You got a suitcase. She beamed at me.
She said, "In that suitcase, I've got my going-home clothes.
Let My People Go and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. The Equality Workbook: Freedom in Christ from the Oppression of Patriarchy by Bob Edwards MSW Paperback $ Start reading Let My People Go on your Kindle in under a minute. Editorial Reviews. Review. I truly enjoyed this book. The history and in depth look at how Let My People Go: A Call to End the Oppression of Women in the Church, Revised and Expanded - Kindle edition by Bob Edwards. Religion & Spirituality Kindle eBooks @ www.farmersmarketmusic.com
Ooh, I've got a beautiful dress in there. Jesus is coming for me any day, don't you know, child? I'll never forget that image. Here was someone who'd gone through all of the changes in culture and society, and now was living in an elder apartment complex in Boston, all of her children in Washington, D. And she was still singing her songs. And she was holding her head up high every place she went.
She was the kind of person who just commanded your respect. And when the young people — whenever we'd go to her house, she would tell us the stories of these songs and everything. And then, she would always end singing one little song. Mentioned in "Out of Osama's Death, a Fake Quotation Is Born" by Megan McArdle, The Atlantic May , and widely distributed on twitter as a quote of King, after the death of Osama bin Laden , the first sentence is one written by Jessica Dovey on her Facebook page, which became improperly combined by others with genuine statements of King, whom she quoted, and which occur in Strength to Love , Ch.
Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way. A Usenet post additional archive , from 15 Jan , with Message-Id: That strongly suggests it is the original source, which was later mis-attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.
The inspiring speeches you might not know ". Wikipedia has an article about: Martin Luther King, Jr. Wikisource has original works written by or about: Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Retrieved from " https: Pages containing cite templates with deprecated parameters Pages with broken file links Civil rights activists Anti-war activists American religious leaders Christian leaders Christian nonviolence Baptist ministers Democratic socialists Christian socialists Gandhians Political leaders Nobel Prize winners births deaths People from Atlanta African Americans American Baptists.
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