The Evolution of Resistance: From Negro Spirituals to Hip-Hop

By:Rashad Blunt

Southern Roots

Living in the South for all of my life up until college taught me a lot about the way things used to be in America. This experience growing up was a major factor in choosing the angle that I would like to discuss: religion and resistance in the African diaspora.

Reflecting on the African diaspora as a whole, music has always been a method of unification, especially for the African American community. Growing up in the South, I had family members who were members of Baptist Christian churches, and the unity that I felt at church led me to explore music and what it means through the lens of the diaspora.

As my knowledge and understanding grew, so did my interest in different types of music. I was captivated by how passionate church worship was every Sunday. The Baptist churches that I attended used these incredible songs whose roots reached back to slavery, which I later learned were called Negro spirituals.

I had so many questions about these beautiful songs that I look to answer throughout this story. For example, how were Negro spirituals possible among African slaves who couldn’t read or write in the language they were being forced to communicate in?

The adaptation skills of these enslaved people were unparalleled, given the numerous obstacles they had to face with the development of slavery in America. Part of that adaptation was the creation of Negro spirituals—sacred folk songs developed by enslaved African Americans, particularly in the American South. These spirituals combined Christian themes with African musical traditions, oral storytelling, call-and-response, rhythm, memory, and the lived experiences of enslavement.

The songs could express faith, grief, hope, community, and resistance at the same time.

In this article, I will connect my own experiences to research and explore the effect that Negro spirituals have had on religion and resistance throughout the African diaspora and, eventually, the evolution of Black music in America.

Uniquely, my experiences in New Jersey at Rutgers University allowed me to see two different sides of America's racial history at a young age. Discrimination and prejudice have been things the Black community has had to endure throughout America, but growing up, I noticed differences in the way race was discussed and experienced in the North and South.

The racist traditions and structures historically embedded in Southern life were impossible for me to ignore. The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and policies that placed Black Americans at a disadvantage continued to shape the world around me. I came to understand this more deeply by researching some of the issues that have shadowed Black people as a whole in the South.

In Cultures of Violence: Racial Violence and the Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South, Ivan Evans draws parallels between racial domination in South Africa and the American South.

Evans explains that the pattern of racial violence in the South was shaped in part by the efforts of landowners and commercial farmers to regain control over a society transformed by emancipation. He also points to the power Southern elites maintained over institutions of state government after slavery.

The author's analysis highlights something important: abolishing slavery did not automatically eliminate the systems of power built around it. Political, economic, and social structures could continue to preserve racial inequality long after slavery itself was legally abolished.

And yet, dominance never stopped African Americans from resisting prejudice.

That resistance took many forms. One of them was music.

Negro spirituals gave enslaved people a religious expression that was distinctly their own. The functionality of these songs is part of why they have stood the test of time and are still performed today.

Spirituals emerged within a society attempting to impose Eurocentric religion and culture upon enslaved Africans. Yet rather than simply absorbing what was forced upon them, enslaved people transformed Christianity and Christian music through African traditions, rhythms, communal practices, and their own understanding of suffering and liberation.

Beautiful melodies would be sung as if they were the calm before the storm because the words to these songs were often crying out for a savior.

In terms of African American culture, Negro spirituals became one of the earliest collective musical voices created by Black people in America.

That voice would continue evolving long after slavery ended.

The Importance of Negro Spirituals to Religion and Resistance

The history of African people in colonial America is complicated. Africans were present in the Americas before the English colonies developed into the United States, and the status of the Africans brought to Virginia in 1619 has sometimes been debated by historians. What is clear is that these people had been forcibly captured and transported across the Atlantic, and during the seventeenth century the English colonies increasingly codified a racial system of hereditary chattel slavery.

That system eventually grew into one of the most profitable and brutal institutions in American history.

Across the entire transatlantic slave trade, historians estimate that approximately 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forced aboard slave ships. Around 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage and disembarked in the Americas.

The slavers did not see families, fathers, mothers, leaders, communities, and nations. Human beings were turned into commodities.

Millions of innocent people were ripped away from their families and everything they knew.

Captured Africans were forced toward ports and slave-trading fortifications along the African coast, including places such as Cape Coast Castle and Gorée Island. From there, many endured the Middle Passage under horrific conditions aboard slave ships.

People were deliberately separated from families, languages, communities, and cultures. Yet this attempt to destroy identity did not completely succeed.

Communication within enslaved Black communities became essential to survival.

People from different African nations and language groups had to create new ways to communicate with one another. Music became one of those ways.

All of these events affected the way Black people were forced to communicate in America, and I believe those events still echo in the way we communicate today.

Negro spirituals became one answer for enslaved people trying to survive and resist in the past.

But what is the answer for Black people today?

When the two words religion and resistance become interconnected, I immediately think of Negro spirituals.

In America, these songs became part of enslaved people's collective identity. They sang while they worked. They sang when they worshiped. They sang when they were afraid.

Work songs could help people maintain rhythm and pace during forced labor. Spirituals could allow people to express emotions that the institution of slavery attempted to suppress.

These people had so much taken from them that sometimes singing was one of the few things nobody could completely take away.

Negro spirituals also allowed enslaved Africans and their descendants to preserve elements of African musical traditions even as multiple cultures were woven together in America.

There are long-standing accounts and traditions describing spirituals being used to communicate information about escape and resistance. Harriet Tubman herself was closely associated with religious songs, and music undeniably played a role in communication within enslaved communities.

At the same time, historians continue to debate some of the more specific modern claims about elaborate “codes” hidden inside particular spirituals. Because so much of enslaved people's history was intentionally denied documentation, we should leave room for both oral tradition and historical caution.

What we know without question is that spirituals could communicate things much deeper than their surface lyrics.

They could carry pain.

They could carry hope.

They could carry faith.

And they could carry a desire for freedom.

Much from this period of Black American history was never recorded from the point of view of enslaved people themselves. Many were legally prevented from learning to read and write. Oral tradition therefore became incredibly important in preserving memory.

Songs became part of that historical record.

These spirituals were expressions that much of white America could hear without necessarily understanding the full emotional world behind them.

That alone is powerful.

Furthermore, spirituals became a way to preserve culture that slave owners had attempted to eliminate.

For many African Americans like myself, growing up, I believed that I had no culture because of the effects of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Millions of people were disconnected from their birthplaces and families. Names were changed. Languages disappeared across generations. Histories were intentionally erased or left undocumented.

But eventually, I realized something.

Being Black in America is a culture in itself.

And that culture did not appear out of nowhere.

It was created.

It was adapted.

It survived.

Today, hip-hop sits at the center of global popular culture, but the culture of Black people in America has always revolved around creating something out of conditions that were never designed for us to thrive.

When hip-hop started, it quickly became a platform for Black and Latino communities to talk about the problems going on around them.

Today, hip-hop is one of the most influential cultural forces in America and throughout the world.

None of this music exists in isolation.

African people carried traditions, rhythms, spirituality, storytelling, movement, and musical memory across the Atlantic. Those traditions changed dramatically over hundreds of years, but they never completely disappeared.

Many people fail to see the connection, but Negro spirituals helped create one of the foundations of Black American music.

These traditions influenced not just hip-hop but also gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, soul, rock and roll, and countless other forms of American music.

The evolution was not always a simple straight line from one genre to the next. Music develops through many influences at once.

Still, the continuity is undeniable.

Black culture is a product of survival, adaptation, faith, creativity, and resistance.

Negro spirituals are one of the earliest places where we can hear all of those forces coming together.

Religion and Resistance in America

Confused and extremely far from their homelands, enslaved Africans fought to preserve traditions they had maintained in Africa.

Those traditions included many different religions.

Some enslaved Africans practiced indigenous African religions. Some came from regions where Christianity had existed for centuries. Others were Muslims.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture notes that we do not know exactly how many African Muslims were transported to the Americas, but surviving documents clearly establish that Muslims were among the enslaved African population.

Once in America, enslaved Africans encountered a version of Christianity often controlled by the very people enslaving them.

But Black people transformed that religion.

Biblical stories about Moses, Exodus, deliverance, judgment, heaven, and liberation could take on entirely different meanings when heard by a person living in bondage.

Harriet Tubman's story demonstrates how powerful that combination of spirituality and resistance could become.

Tubman was deeply religious and became one of the Underground Railroad's most important conductors. Current historical research indicates that she personally led roughly 70 family members and friends to freedom during approximately 13 return trips to Maryland, while also providing instructions that helped many others escape.

That number is smaller than the legendary claim that she personally rescued 300 people, but to me, it makes her story no less extraordinary.

Imagine escaping slavery and then voluntarily returning again and again to lead other people out.

Her faith was inseparable from that mission.

Songs also appear throughout accounts of Tubman's life. Stories surrounding spirituals and coded communication have become part of the larger cultural memory of the Underground Railroad. While historians debate exactly how systematically particular songs were used as codes, the larger role of music, oral communication, faith, and community networks in resistance is undeniable.

Tubman was an icon doing what she believed was God's work.

People like Harriet Tubman are examples of how spirituality could become action.

Religion has always had an effect on society, and during slavery it became something complicated: a tool slaveholders could use for control and, simultaneously, something enslaved people could transform into a source of liberation.

Personally, spirituality has always been something I have practiced in order to feel at one with my ancestors.

There are so many different methods for a person to practice their spirituality.

For enslaved Africans, material connections to their old lives were often stripped away. Yet memory, song, rhythm, faith, and community could survive.

Even in the face of cultural destruction, enslaved people never completely lost their connection to their heritage.

Songs could allow people to speak about suffering in ways that reached beyond the literal meaning of the lyrics.

Singing for a brighter day, these enslaved people created Negro spirituals that would last generations.

The narrative forced upon a Black person during slavery in America was that you were less than a person.

Chattel slavery made that dehumanization hereditary. Laws developed so that children born to enslaved women inherited enslaved status.

Negro spirituals were a way of giving African American people strength—songs they could carry with them even during the most difficult moments.

Slaveholders frequently attempted to control enslaved people's religious lives, and Christianity was sometimes deliberately taught in ways that emphasized obedience.

But enslaved Black Christians created interpretations of Christianity centered on liberation.

Their African heritage remained present throughout that transformation.

These African people were forced onto ships, many snatched from their families, sold, and packed into vessels as though they were equipment.

It is truly hard for me to believe that the slavers believed in the same God that I grew up learning about.

That contradiction—the people preaching Christianity while simultaneously enslaving human beings—became one of the deepest hypocrisies of American history.

The ability to praise and worship while creating an interpretation of Christianity that belonged to them was pivotal to cultural preservation and survival throughout the African diaspora.

All of the hymns and spirituals that enslaved people orchestrated represented adaptations to a new place that came with unimaginable burdens.

W.E.B. Du Bois would later describe the forced transportation of millions of Africans across the Atlantic as one of the great dramas of human history, describing those who endured it as descending into “Hell.”

That transformation was something none of these people could have imagined.

They were stripped of almost everything material, but memory and faith could travel where possessions could not.

This is what is so amazing about the way enslaved people developed Negro spirituals as a form of cultural preservation.

People from different parts of Africa gradually created new communities and new ways of communicating.

Negro spirituals became one of the things these people could have in common.

In the midst of what Du Bois described as hell, Black people created a collective voice.

Personally, I use these testimonies to get through everyday struggles, knowing that my pain and problems are nowhere near the intensity of what my ancestors were forced to endure.

Spirituals make me feel blessed to be able to experience all the things that I do.

Hearing Negro spirituals in the music I listened to at church made me feel at one with my ancestors.

Church was always a spiritual experience for me, but once I realized the history behind the songs, I began hearing them differently.

I felt extreme empathy for my fallen ancestors crying out.

This is when spirituality started to become more familiar to me.

Negro spirituals are reminders of the pain African people have endured in this country, but they are also reminders that those people survived.

These songs remain within African American culture, and spirituals continue to be something people look to for strength.

After slavery and the Civil War, the sacred musical traditions developed by Black Americans continued evolving.

Eventually, those traditions would help catalyze the rise of gospel music.

The Impact of Negro Spirituals on Gospel Music

The purpose of the church is to preach the Gospel, but the Black church became much more than a place to hear a sermon.

It became community.

It became refuge.

It became a place to organize.

And, of course, it became a place for music.

Gospel music is not simply song. It includes a performance aesthetic deeply connected to African American musical traditions, including rhythm, improvisation, emotional expression, call-and-response, and communal participation.

Smithsonian Folkways describes African American gospel as a twentieth-century sacred music that evolved from nineteenth-century African American traditions including spirituals and hymns.

The creation and growth of gospel music also coincided with one of the largest demographic transformations in Black American history: the Great Migration.

Robert M. Marovich explores this history in A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music.

In the early and middle parts of the twentieth century, millions of African Americans moved from the rural South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities.

Chicago became one of the most important destinations.

Black migrants were leaving one world and entering another.

The church provided something familiar.

Marovich explains how gospel songs and gospel communities offered migrants catharsis and affirmation while helping them feel less like strangers in a strange land.

This illustrates the deep dependency and connection African Americans maintained with the Black church.

It was one of the places where Black people could create community on their own terms.

They could use gospel music to fuel ambition, survive struggle, and find spiritual relief.

Several important pioneers helped shape what became modern gospel.

Methodist minister Charles Albert Tindley was one of the foundational Black hymn writers whose compositions bridged older hymn traditions and the emerging gospel sound.

Songs associated with Tindley include “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?” and “I'll Overcome Someday.”

Even the titles tell you something about what religious music could mean for Black people at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Another essential pioneer was Lucie E. Campbell-Williams.

Campbell-Williams was an educator, composer, activist, and important leader in the National Baptist Convention. She served as music director for its Sunday School and Baptist Training Union Congress and helped introduce audiences to musicians who would later become legendary.

Her work placed her directly in the development of twentieth-century Black sacred music.

These pioneers were creating something that offered salvation and community for their people.

Gospel did not simply copy Negro spirituals.

It evolved from a larger tradition of Black sacred music in which spirituals were foundational.

Sociologist Robert Lee Sutherland, quoted by Marovich, described religion in Chicago's Black churches as something that could provide salvation while giving individuals higher goals and helping make their lives more endurable.

That description gets at something central to Black sacred music.

It is not only about what happens after death.

It is also about surviving right now.

Gospel music became a way to free yourself from your troubles, even if only for the duration of a song.

And it still serves that purpose today.

This functionality is deeply connected to the role Negro spirituals played generations earlier.

The music changed.

The need remained.

Using Music to Spread a Message

When Negro spirituals developed within enslaved communities in America, they served many purposes.

They allowed people to worship, mourn, testify, remember, endure, and communicate.

In some historical accounts and oral traditions, songs were also connected to escape and resistance.

Eric Bernard Grant explores the political meaning attached to spirituals in “Message in Our Music”: Spirituals and the Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, 1871 to 1945.

Grant argues that generations of Black Americans repeatedly turned to spirituals as part of their struggle for human and civil rights.

That is important because spirituals did not stop meaning something when slavery ended.

They changed meaning with each generation.

A song created under slavery could later be performed on a concert stage, in a church, at a political gathering, or during another struggle for freedom.

Music could carry history forward.

Megan Sullivan explores a similar idea in “African-American Music as Rebellion: From Slavesong to Hip-Hop.”

She describes African American music as continually evolving in response to attempts to erase or dominate Black culture.

Black Americans created distinctive music rooted in the experiences they faced in America while retaining and transforming elements of African culture.

That music eventually penetrated virtually every corner of American popular culture.

The reason why I wanted to highlight this is because she talks about the American experience.

African people did not know when they were forced into America that they were helping build a country from the ground up.

They were denied the American experience that others were promised because they were being deprived of their freedom.

Living in slavery is not a life at all.

This is why there was so much emotion and passion inside these spirituals.

The lives of enslaved people were so controlled that music became one of the places where an internal world could survive.

The parallels between slavery and some issues affecting Black America today can still be alarming.

Mass incarceration, racial disparities within the criminal justice system, and the continued struggle over what freedom means have kept conversations about Black liberation alive.

The circumstances are not identical to chattel slavery, and the distinction matters.

But the spirituals remind us that the struggle over equality did not simply disappear when slavery was abolished.

Enslaved Africans were singing to be remembered.

To be heard.

To hold onto themselves.

And perhaps to imagine a world they might never personally see.

The pain that Sullivan discusses when describing the racist fabric of American culture can be felt when listening to spirituals.

That same tradition of turning pain into testimony continues within hip-hop.

Sullivan writes about music becoming a way for African Americans to remain connected to African heritage while protesting the conditions they faced throughout American history.

Connecting back to my childhood, I realize now that those spirituals were faint hand-me-downs from my ancestors.

Music has always served this function for Black people throughout the history of America.

In the past, sometimes meaning had to remain covert.

Today, hip-hop allows artists to make many of those messages overt and unconcealed.

But not all music is meant for everyone to completely understand either.

Many artists use slang, references, cadence, local language, and cultural codes that tell you exactly where they come from.

People outside that community may hear the music.

But that does not necessarily mean they understand everything being said.

When I think about that, the distance between spirituals and hip-hop suddenly does not feel quite so large.

Evolution of Black Music

At the birth of the American entertainment industry, Black people were often deliberately depicted as dumb, primitive, or insignificant.

Minstrel shows and blackface turned racist stereotypes into mainstream entertainment.

At the same time, Black people were creating musical traditions that would eventually transform American culture.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the blues emerged from Black communities in the South.

The blues did not come from one single source. It developed through a mixture of African American work songs, field hollers, spirituals, folk traditions, and other musical influences.

That distinction is important because Black music does not evolve like a straight family tree.

It is more like a river.

Different streams combine, separate, and reconnect.

Spirituals influenced gospel.

Spirituals and work songs contributed to traditions that helped shape the blues.

The blues influenced jazz, R&B, rock and roll, soul, and countless other musical forms.

Those genres then continued influencing each other.

Eventually, hip-hop would enter that conversation.

Black music has continually empowered and uplifted people who can relate to it and share the same everyday problems.

In “Trying to Make Old Negro Spirituals Resonate With the Hip-Hop Generation,” journalist Stephanie Simon explores the challenge of keeping spirituals relevant to younger Black listeners.

The article raises an important point: spirituals can still inspire Black communities because they come from people who had almost no reason to believe their circumstances would change and yet continued reaching toward freedom.

That message remains powerful.

As African American people, staying connected to culture can help us remain strong and unified.

Music can be part of the glue that keeps a community moving.

It is vital that we as a society recognize the influence slavery has had on this country because acknowledging that history should push all of us to make a dedicated effort to do better and continue doing better.

Given America's racial history, it is also not surprising that many Black artists failed to receive proper recognition or compensation for their work.

Throughout the history of American popular music, Black musical innovations were repeatedly adopted, repackaged, and commercialized for larger white audiences.

Sometimes the Black creators who pioneered the sound received little of the financial benefit.

Denise Sullivan explores another side of music and resistance in Keep On Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip-Hop.

One important historical moment involved James Meredith's March Against Fear in 1966.

Meredith began a march from Memphis, Tennessee, toward Jackson, Mississippi, to challenge the fear surrounding Black voter registration.

On June 6, 1966, a white gunman shot Meredith.

He survived.

Civil rights leaders continued the march, and Meredith later rejoined it before its conclusion.

The shooting became part of a larger turning point in the Civil Rights Movement and the emerging Black Power movement.

Musicians responded to the moment as well.

J.B. Lenoir's “Shot on James Meredith” transformed the attack into music, directly questioning how America's political leadership would respond.

That is the tradition I keep returning to.

Many enslaved people could not read or write to share their experiences through books or letters.

Songs became a voice.

By the Civil Rights era, Black artists had access to recording studios, radio, concert stages, and eventually television.

The technology changed.

The function of the music remained familiar.

Speak about what is happening to us.

Document what we are seeing.

Tell people how it feels.

Once I became aware of the songs sung by my ancestors, I could begin hearing their influence in the music I listened to.

Negro spirituals became part of a musical language Black America continued developing for generations.

Fast-forward to today's culture, where social media has transformed how music spreads but hip-hop remains one of its central forces.

Rising above obstacles is deeply connected to the Black experience in America, and both Negro spirituals and hip-hop exemplify that experience in different eras.

We are not historically that far removed from slavery.

The songs remind us what Black people had to endure in this country just to have their humanity recognized.

But they also show us how far we have come.

And they encourage us to keep going.

Slavery created the conditions in which Negro spirituals emerged. Spirituals became one foundation within the larger evolution of African American music.

From there came new sounds, new movements, and new ways of telling our story.

Rise of Hip-Hop & Black Pride in America

Both Negro spirituals and hip-hop have been used to unify Black communities, even though they were created in completely different eras and circumstances.

There have been hip-hop songs that became closely associated with movements.

Kendrick Lamar's “Alright,” for example, became an unofficial anthem heard during Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

The phrase “we gon' be alright” could be shouted collectively in the streets almost like a modern call-and-response.

That is what immediately makes me think about spirituals.

On the other side of the spectrum, Negro spirituals can still be heard in churches today.

The influence of Black sacred music can be found throughout R&B, soul, hip-hop, and countless other genres.

Artists do not have to literally sample a spiritual for that influence to exist.

Sometimes the connection is in the cadence.

Sometimes it is in repetition.

Sometimes it is testimony.

Sometimes it is call-and-response.

Sometimes it is talking about pain while still declaring that you will survive it.

Southern hip-hop groups like Outkast helped create a musical world that was unapologetically rooted in Black Southern identity.

Albums like ATLiens and Aquemini combined futuristic ideas, Southern culture, spirituality, social commentary, storytelling, and sounds inherited from generations of Black music.

Outkast would inspire countless artists who came after them to embrace where they came from rather than imitate what the music industry expected hip-hop to sound like.

That, to me, is part of the same larger tradition.

Take what you inherited.

Transform it.

Make it yours.

Negro spirituals remind us of what was done to Black people in America, but they also remind us of what Black people created despite what was done to them.

Hip-hop serves a similar purpose.

Both forms can provide motivation for Black people to unite and overcome.

The circumstances are different.

The language is different.

The instruments are different.

But the impulse feels familiar.

There is something brilliant about creating a form of communication in public that can carry meanings understood most deeply by the community that created it.

That happened in the spiritual.

And I believe it still happens in hip-hop.

Music and the way Black Americans have used it to resist oppression while creating something original stems from generations of people who refused to surrender their humanity.

Negro spirituals became part of a template for telling stories that people could feel even if they had never personally lived through the experience being described.

For far too long, these spirituals have not received enough credit in mainstream conversations about the history of American music.

There is an African proverb that is often translated to say that until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.

That idea stays with me.

For centuries, Black people were the subjects of histories written by somebody else.

Music gave us another way to tell our own story.

This is why I am so proud to put this piece together.

Because even during one of the darkest periods in the African diaspora, there was brilliance.

There was creativity.

There was faith.

There was resistance.

And there was music.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the brilliance and perseverance of the African diaspora created forms of communication and expression that would later influence American culture and eventually the world.

Negro spirituals have stood the test of time because of how powerful their messages truly were.

But what affects me most is not simply the music.

It is the decision to keep creating.

Imagine having almost everything taken from you and still finding a reason to sing.

Imagine living in a society legally designed to erase your humanity and still creating something beautiful enough that generations of people would continue singing it long after you were gone.

That is resistance.

When I hear those songs today, I do not just hear religion.

I hear history.

I hear suffering.

I hear communication.

I hear culture.

I hear Black people refusing to disappear.

And when I listen to hip-hop, underneath everything that has changed, I can still hear part of that same instinct.

Tell our story.

Speak about what hurts.

Celebrate who we are.

Call out what is wrong.

Keep going.

I am forever grateful for the persistence of those souls who chose to fight and continued to have hope no matter what they were faced with.

Their music reminds me that resistance is not only fighting against something.

Sometimes resistance is simply refusing to lose yourself.

We can always get through this together.

Just as we always have.

References & Further Reading

Evans, Ivan. Cultures of Violence: Racial Violence and the Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South. Manchester University Press, 2009.

Grant, Eric Bernard. “Message in Our Music”: Spirituals and the Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, 1871 to 1945. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2005.

Library of Congress. “African American Spirituals: Resources in the American Folklife Center.” Library of Congress Research Guides.

Library of Congress. “Spirituals.” The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America.

Marovich, Robert M. A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music. University of Illinois Press, 2015.

National Endowment for the Humanities. “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.” Based on the SlaveVoyageshistorical database.

National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution. “African Muslims in Early America.”

National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution. “Celebrating Black Music Month.”

National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution. “James Meredith.”

National Park Service. “Harriet Tubman.” U.S. Department of the Interior.

National Park Service. “The Superpower of Singing: Music and the Struggle Against Slavery.” U.S. Department of the Interior.

Simon, Stephanie. “Trying to Make Old Negro Spirituals Resonate With the Hip-Hop Generation.” The Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2008.

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. “African American Gospel Music.” Smithsonian Institution.

Sullivan, Denise. Keep On Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip-Hop. Lawrence Hill Books, 2011.

Sullivan, Megan. “African-American Music as Rebellion: From Slavesong to Hip-Hop.” Discoveries, no. 3, 2001.

Tennessee Encyclopedia. “Lucie Eddie Campbell-Williams.” Tennessee Historical Society.

SlaveVoyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. A collaborative digital historical database documenting the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans.