Every people has a sense of the past, the handed-down record of what has gone before, the Ark of the Covenant, as the collective experience of a people. For the American Negro this sense of the past begins in America, not Africa, for it was in America that the American Negro was forged into a people. Under the tutelage of white plantation masters the first slaves discovered a common language that made it possible for them to communicate with each other and thus make a collective expression of their resentment of the peculiar institution known as slavery. The white slave owner was Christian, and despite some efforts to prohibit Negro exposure to the Bible, most slave masters or, more particularly, their wives--saw to it that the slaves heard the gospel. One of the moving scenes of American history is that of slave and slave master gathered together in church on the plantation to hear the gospel of a Christ of brotherhood. Most plantation masters saw to it that the minister kept his sermon confined to such texts as “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters” (Ephesians 6:5). There was a deeper meaning for the slave in the religious life of the plantation. Strangely enough, it was the Old Testament with its rich history of the Jews and their bouts with famines, pestilence, idolatry, and slavery that attracted the imagination of the religious slave. Working in the field by day, having his wife sold away from him down the river to another plantation, seeing his son stripped naked to the waist and given a hundred lashes for being “uppity,” the Negro slave found a cruel parallel between his life and that of those who begged favor to let them return to their homeland and who finally were delivered by God, who visited a series of disasters upon the slave master. Here in the Negro plantation church--called by scholars “The Invisible Institution”--the Negro began to translate the history of the Jews into words of deliverance and hope. It was thus that slaves began to translate the social history of the Jews into Negro spirituals: _Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?_ _Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land, tell Old Pharaoh let my people go...._ _We are climbing Jacob’s ladder, every round goes higher and higher.... Soldiers of the Cross_ _Jordan’s river is chilly and cold, none can cross but the true and bold...._ _Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home...._ _Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world, going home to live with God...._