Speechless: The Reclaiming of Negro Spirituals Through Artistic and Therapeutic Research 

Kache’ Attyana Mumford is a poet, writer, therapist, and actor from Jacksonville, Florida. She is a 2025-2026 recipient of Rose Library’s African American history and culture short-term fellowship. 

“O Black Slave Singer, gone, forgot, unfamed. You alone in the long, long line of those who’ve sung untaught, unknown, unnamed have stretched out upward, seeking the divine.” 
— The Book of American Negro Spirituals by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, p.12 

My first introduction to Negro spirituals was at church. I was born Black, female, and Southern — which meant church was a constant. My single mother, raising two children by the age of twenty, relied on the church not only for worship but also as a safe, affordable form of community and childcare. By the age of eight, I was spending most of my time at our local Baptist church, participating in nearly every extracurricular activity offered. 

That summer, our choir teacher introduced a class on Negro spirituals. Bethel Baptist Institutional Church — the oldest Baptist congregation in Jacksonville, Florida, founded in 1838 — became both our classroom and a living archive. The original church was burnt down and rebuilt in 1904. The structure from 1904 still stood, preserved within the larger church. I can still remember sitting on the dark chestnut pews, running my hands across the rough wood, breathing in the scent of the old sanctuary. Our teacher asked us to memorize the space: the weight of the bench, the small altar, the history pressed into the walls. Then we read spirituals aloud, pausing afterward to imagine the enslaved and free Black congregants who once gathered there. 

I recognize those songs as the first poems I ever read. Their words held grief, joy, resilience, and faith in ways that deeply resonated with me. As a writer, I’ve come to understand how language can craft the symphony of a human life — how narrative can make visible what is often unseen. As a creative arts therapist, I also see how words and songs can create safe distance for those carrying trauma. Projecting feelings onto a poem or spiritual allows people to express truths they may not yet be ready to claim as their own. 

The project Speechless: Reclaiming Negro Spirituals grew from conversationsin an affinity group with Black undergraduate psychology students at NYU in 2024. Many felt isolated by racism in their classes and discouraged when their concerns were redirected to an affinity group rather than addressed institutionally. I recognized their pain — it mirrored my own struggles in graduate school. During one session, I played a Negro spiritual, and the room fell into tears. The music gave breath to feelings they could not voice. Many of the students felt silenced, and their voices were stripped and empty to even their own ears, but  the soul in the song led students to tears and through this they were able to share how their experiences connected to the words in the music. Their response created a poetic inquiry research idea: How does the reintroduction of Negro spirituals with Black American youth inform their narrative? Is there a connection between the Black American experience from 1865 to 2024? What happens when you give Black American youth the power to mold their own history through lyrical text? In art-based research, in poetic inquiry, researchers use poetry to explore and communicate social scientific issues. Poetry is both flexible and robust as a research tool. 

To pursue these questions, I turned to the Rose Library. My knowledge of spirituals was limited, and I wanted to immerse myself in the full breadth of this tradition. The collections held more than I ever imagined: hundreds of songs with layered meanings, emotions, and symbols. 

As James Weldon Johnson observed, “Although spirituals in a general classification fall under the heading of religious songs, all of them are by no means religious in a narrow or special sense” (Johnson & Johnson, 1926, p. 12). In these songs, I found not only expressions of faith, doubt, and hope but also intimate portraits of love, grief, and everyday life. 

Negro spirituals are like opening the pages of a human being’s private journal. They are filled with thoughts, emotions, and layers of meaning, each line carrying the weight of survival and the tenderness of memory. Yes, they sing of the pain of slavery, but within them, too, are songs of love—voices calling out to a beloved, asking her to meet beneath the stars, to jump with him into forever. I always knew enslaved people could not legally marry, that they jumped the broom to symbolize their union, but I never expected to hear that intimacy sung in a spiritual. I never expected to find songs mourning a wife or husband sold away, the singer clutching love through memory, holding on with every starlight and sunrise. 

Even the familiar song A Motherless Child startled me with its depth. 

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child— 
Sometimes I feel like I’m al-mos gone. 

The words carry an invisible death—the grief of a mother who has lost her child yet is forced to keep living, each day hollowing her out, making her feel less and less until she is almost gone. But even in the most painful songs, there is always hope. 

Sing-in wid a gun in ma hand, Lord, 
I’m sing-in wid a gun in ma han’, 
Still the purtiest sing-in. 

Or the song that declares endurance: 

I’ve started and I’m going all the way, 
I heard of a city with no sorrows, 
No one cares and I’ve started to. 
I have a dear mother ov-er in that city 
and I promised to make it some day. 
No matter the trials, 
To meet her some day. 
The road may be lonely but no matter the denials, 
I’ve started and I’m going all the way with my Jesus. 

And then All God’s Children Got Wings — a song that carried a secret message of liberation, whispering to the enslaved that they too had the right to heaven, no matter what their masters preached. 

My understanding of Negro spirituals had been so limited by the way society frames them. What I’ve come to realize is that their truest lesson is the human capacity for survival and renewal. Even in the worst conditions, human beings remain fully human—they love, they suffer, they hope, and they live against all odds. That is what we do. We love, we hope, we survive. 

I am excited to bring this work back to Black undergraduate youth, challenging them to uncover beauty in moments of isolation and to explore how these poetic messages add to the tradition of healing. I am also drawn to the broader possibilities: the healing impact these spirituals might hold when carried into different cultures and across the world. By expanding awareness of the souls who created these songs—their faith, their resilience, their coded messages—how might they speak to a world that so often feels divided and alienating? What might they still teach us, and how might poetry and song together become vessels for healing? 

Be still and listen: 
Sometimes I feel so lonely, 
Sometimes I feel so blue. 
Sometimes my heart’s near break-in, 
Oh Lord, what shall I do? 
Now I woke up dis morn-in, 
I hate to face duh day. 
Be still and listen, 
Till duh still small voice comes through—be still.