“Dem Days Wuz Hell”: African Americans and the Politics of Hell from Slavery to Great Depression

Slaves and former slaves routinely used the language of evil, hell, the devil, and sin to tell the stories of their enslavement. Whether in Frederick Douglass’s many autobiographies or in the recollections of elderly former slaves during the 1920s and 1930s, there was a consistent and persistent description of slavery as “hell without fires” and some slaveholders as “devils incarnate.” My essay examines how African Americans from the antebellum period to the Great Depression created a robust “politics of sin” that incorporated ideas, geography, spirituality, smell, taste, and touch to attack slavery, white supremacy, and Jim Crow segregation.

By focusing on how African Americans deployed the “politics of sin,” my essay suggests that when historians, such as Mark Noll and Molly Oschatz, discuss the antebellum biblical debates over slavery, they too often privilege an approach to religion that focuses on ideas. As slaves and former slaves discussed the actions and bodies of slaveholders, imagined a geography of hell that located it in the Deep South, denounced the structures of slave sales, and made sense of physical violence through references to sight, sound, smell, and touch, they approached the religious problem of slavery with a much broader and comprehensive approach to religion.