Unit 2 Summary

The exploration of unit 2 included the social, cultural, and physical experiences that impacted the enslaved Africans in the birth and development of the spiritual, which resulted in the creation of a vast repertory of material that survives to this day. This repertory, which includes many different types of spiritual classifications, gave the community a true, valid, and useful song. It kept the community invigorated, enabled the group to face its problems, commented on the slave situation, stirred each member to personal solutions and to a sense of belonging amid a confusing and terrifying world, and provided a code language for emergency use.

Secular songs also flourished in the creation of work, dock, sea chanty, prison, railroad, and trickster songs. These songs, a byproduct of the enslaved African working on plantations in the South, were designed to lighten and make work more efficient and easier to manage, while the trickster songs provided an outlet for the expression of socially unacceptable themes.