Slave Hymns of Blacks in the Poems of Maya Angelou

Abstract

Slavery has been by far, the most horrible event in the history of The United States of America. It has been a shameful and unforgettable practice that had its ramifications in the very fabric of American culture. It deprived the black people of their past, their roots and their rich heritage. As a result of slavery, the blacks were forced to occupy positions as second class citizens and often deprived of their fundamental rights. Slavery began with the setting up of plantations in the American South. Africans were brought under force and torture by white slave traders to work on these plantations.

The loss of basic identity as human beings was unbearable for the black race. Bound in chains and fetters their lives changed for ever. Joel Kovel in his illuminating study of The Origin of Racism says that the white master: “. . . first reduced the human self of his black slave to a body and then the body to a thing; he dehumanised his slave, made him quantifiable and thereby absorbed him into a rising world market of productive exchange” (qtd. in Murugan 28).