Honoring the Ancestors

Because the Negro spiritual is the earliest extant body of African-American folk religious narration, Donald H. Matthews believes that it holds the key to understanding African-American religion. In Honoring the Ancestors he explores the works of such seminal black scholars as W. E. B. DuBois, Melville Herskovits, and Zora Neale Hurston, tracing the early development of the African-centered approach to the interpretation of African-American religion.