Uplifting Black Souls: the African American Jeremiad :: Free Essays Online

stimulate Black Souls the African the Statesn JeremiadMission StatementA down(p) jeremiad is a writing or a speech that constantly emphasizes the requisite for and methods to fall upon social change. David Howard Pitney in his book The Afro-American Jeremiad, rightly suggests what the components of a jeremiad are 1) citing the promise, 2) criticism of present declension or retrogression from the promise, 3) solvent prophecy that society impart shortly complete its mission and hand over the promise(Howard-Pitney 8). The authors we have chosen have write prominent jeremiads, and we will show why they can be considered jeremiads why they were important when they were written and why they are still important today. HistoryDavid pram (act.1828-1829), Frederick Douglass (act. 1852-1880), booking agent T. Washington (act. 1895-1915) and W.E.B. DuBois (act. 1895-1968) are some of the most important African-American jeremiads in our history. Black jeremiads stem from the Jeffersonian idea of natural and divine integrity. This law emphasizes the right to freedom as well as liberty. The American jeremiad originated amongst seventeenth century Puritans who believed that their destiny was to form a utopian society in the Americas. By the 19th century, black jeremiads had adopted these Puritan ideals and used them to affect the need for the abolition of slavery and to serve as a process of monition of the punishment that would await those who continued with the sins of slavery. The writings and speeches of these jeremiads was used to uplift and shuffle their race and to promote blacks to take action in order to achieve equality but not self-separation from the rest of American society. This idea of uniting without self-separation, illustrates the idea of black nationalism with established the rhetoric for jeremiads. On David Walker One of the most persuasive African American authors of antebellum America, was subject to shake the American society with his pamp hlet Appeal to The Colored peck of the United States. Walker, A free lightlessness born in Wilmington, northmost Carolina in 1796, although enjoyed a little more freedom than the rest of his moody brethren in bondage took on the role of a Jeremiadic speaker and writer to his people. In Walkers Appeal, Walker followed a method used by a Free black man in 1788 using the pseudonym of Othello in a two-part essay responding to Jeffersons Notes on the State of Virginia , called Essay on Negro Slavery. Following Othellos Jeremiadic essay, Walker had a warning for white Christian America about the wrathful vengeance of God that would befall upon them because of the institution of slavery.