going to play all over God's heaven."

Other worldliness is not peculiar to the religion of the slave. It is
a trait which the slave encountered in the religion of his master. But
in the Negro's conception of religion it received a peculiar emphasis.
In fact, these ecstatic visions of the next world, which the Negro
slave songs portrayed with a directness and simplicity that is at once
quaint and pathetic, are the most significant features of the Negro's
songs of slavery.

It is interesting to note in this connection that nowhere in these
songs do we discover the slightest references to Africa. They reflect
no memories of a far off happier land. Before the Negro gained his
emancipation Africa had, so far as he was concerned, almost ceased to
exist. Furthermore, the whole tone and emphasis of these songs and of
all other religious expressions of the American Negro are in marked
contrast with the tone and emphasis of African religious ideas. The
African knew of the existence of another world, but he was not
interested in it. The world, as the African understood it, was full of
malignant spirits, diseases and forces with which he was in constant
mortal struggle. His religious practices were intended to gain for him
immunity in this world, rather than assurance of the next. But the
Negro in America was in a different situation. He was not living in
his own world. He was a slave and that, aside from the physical
inconvenience, implied a vast deal of _inhibition_. He was, moreover,
a constant spectator of life in which he could not participate;
excited to actions and enterprises that were forbidden to him because
he was a slave. The restlessness which this situation provoked found
expression, not in insurrection and rebellion--although, of course,
there were Negro insurrections--but in his religion and in his dreams
of another and freer world. I assume, therefore, that the reason the
Negro so readily and eagerly took over from the white man his heaven
and apocalyptic visions was because these materials met the demands of
his peculiar racial temperament and furnished relief to the emotional
strains that were provoked in him by the conditions of slavery.

So far as slavery was responsible for the peculiar individuality of
the Negro's religion we should expect that the racial ideals and
racial religion would take on another and a different character under
the influence of freedom. This, indeed, is what seems to me is taking