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African – Americans ...too long others have spoken for us (John Russwurm, 1827) I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it…slaves know as little as their age as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most asters…to keep thus the slaves ignorant. (Frederick Douglass 1845) It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and identity has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you…I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history and neither did I. I was a savage about whom the least said, the better…You belonged where white people put you. (James Baldwin, 1965) The truth about a black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly: the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions. (Baldwin) ..black lay veiled in a shroud of silence, invisible, not because they had no face, but rather because they had no voice. Voice after all, presupposes face…Without a voice, the African is absent, or defaced, from history. (Houston Baker, 1987) Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life, and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of ‘talking back’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of moving from object to subject, that is the liberated voice. (bell hooks, 1991) Black secular song, along with other forms of oral tradition, allowed them to express themselves communally and individually, to derive pleasure, to perpetuate traditions, to keep values from eroding, and to begin to create new expressive moods...which continued a rich internal life. (Lawrence Levine, 1977) Ralph Ellison suggests that music has the capacity to carry ‘ a whole unrecorded history’ [Songs] they told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension…they breathed the complaint of souls boiling with the bitterest anguish…the songs of slaves represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by tears. (Douglass) Cornel West commented in an interview that ‘music and preaching’ are central to African-American communication and that ‘rap is unique because it combines the black preacher and the black music tradition’ White folks don’t understand about blues. They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better. You sing ‘cause that’s a way of understanding life. …This be an empty world without the blues. I take that emptiness and try to fill it up with something. (August Wilson, 1985) Tricia Rose about rap: “polyvocal conversations; rap becomes an elaborate story ‘to articulate the shifting terms of black marginality in contemporary American culture’ Rap provides resistance to ‘dominant public transcripts’ Rappers…are miners, they are the cultivators of communal artifacts, refining and developing the framework of alternative identities that draw on Afrodiasporic approaches to sound organization, rhythm, pleasure, style and community. Rap is a technologically sophisticated project in African-America recuperation and revision…yet another way to unnerve and simultaneously revitalize American culture. (Tricia Rose). The Negro is a sort of seventh son born with a veil and gifted with a second sight in this American world – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, tow unreconciliable strivings, tow warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. ( W E B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk ,1903) I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; not am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids and I might even to said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. … Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other’s people’s minds. (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952)