While browsing on the issues surrounding Dr. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, I stumbled on a very interesting chapter about "jeremiads". This is quite a new subject for me and so instead of working it into a regular diary, I shall simply provide a couple of quotes. The interested reader can delve into the subject at leisure. The source is listed at the end of this post. Learning about jeremiads has provided me with much needed context to the Wright saga, quite a humbling experience, I must say. So here goes!

Excerpts from "Civil Religion and the Anglo- and African American Jeremiads":

Far stronger were the fierce condemnations of slavery hurled at white Americans by black abolitionist jeremiahs such as David Walker. Walker was born legally free to a slave father and free mother in North Carolina in 1785. At the age of thirty, he left the South vowing to avenge the wrongs against his people and moved to Boston where he became a militant abolitionist journalist. He was among the most socially advantaged African Americans and, while his fiery rhetoric expressed alienation from the land of his birth, his skilful use of jeremiadic rhetoric reflected his active participation in the highest ideals of American society. In his famous 1829 pamphlet, The Appeal, Walker bitterly charged "this Republican land" with gross hypocrisy and called down God's wrath on America: "Oh Americans! Americans! I warn you in the name of the Lord ... to repent and reform, or you are ruined!" Despite the Appeal's rhetorical threats of violent black revenge, it ended with the optimistic prediction that God meant yet to melt the hearts of white Americans and save them from their folly. [...]

Unlike separatist forms of black nationalism such as those voiced by Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, the dominant black jeremiad tradition conceives of blacks as a chosen people within a chosen people. The African American jeremiad tradition, then, characteristically addresses two American chosen peoples - black and white - whose millennial destinies, while distinct, are also inextricably entwined. [...]

The ebb and flow of optimism about American promise and progress is a pervasive motif [...] affording much inner drama behind these figures' public words. Douglass, Du Bois, and King in particular vacillated with regard to America's perfectibility. Their rhetoric reveals that the intractability of white racism could plunge them into profound crises of faith and that they struggled, often at the cost of great personal turmoil, to sustain a vision of America's democratic promise.
 
More from The African American Jeremiad - Appeals for Justice in America, by David Howard-Pitney.