ABSTRACT
In the past twenty years, as part of the ‘second reconstruction’ generated by the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, an almost totally new view of slave life and black culture in North America has been formulated. While as late as 1964 sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, himself a black, could reasonably maintain that ‘the Negroes were practically stripped of their social heritage’ in the slave period, it is now very widely accepted, and richly documented, that blacks adapted myriad aspects of African cultures, together with white ways, into what is now viewed as an Afro-American culture. 1 Recognising the impact of the English language, the Christian religion and white power, the new scholarship has nevertheless become convinced that there was a quasi-African matrix into which white cultural patterns were incorporated and that an Afro-American culture developed with an otherness and a separateness from white culture. 2 Lawrence W.Levine, for example, maintains that those aspects he terms the ‘sacred world of the black slaves’ created a protected space, ‘a world apart which they shared with each other and which remained their own domain, free of control of those who ruled the earth’. 3
