I actually really found the first reading interesting, and not just because I didn’t read any of the others. It was refreshing to see something that so blatantly called out white people and their wrongdoings that was written in this time. I also just really liked how he slyly called for slave insurrection. It’s a mystery to everyone, including myself, as to whether I would have called for slave insurrection, but I just like the ability he has to make you see the subtext without spelling it out to you.

One reading that struck a chord with me, however, is Black Religion in the Post-Reconstruction South. I’m not going to lie, it has occurred to me that some of the ecstatic worship going on in the black might be fake, but it never occurred to me that someone could be seen as uneducated because of the way they worship. While I know that some people are just shouting to shout in my church, I think that some of them generally worship that way, and that’s why I was kind of rubbed the wrong way with his thoughts about ecstatic worship in this passage. I think his thoughts on that type of worship also show a clear division between black worship in the south and north. It makes me wonder why that difference existed, and if it still exists today.