Capturing the Collections: “The Book of American Negro Spirituals” 

In June 2025, The Book of American Negro Spirituals was passed to the Digital Imaging Lab for digitization. An unassuming brown hardcover book, The Book of American Negro Spirituals contains 62 songs, from the well-recognized folksong “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to “Nobody Knows De Trouble I See,” and more.  

Figure 1: The front cover of The Book of American Negro Spirituals, by James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson. Image © Museum of the Bible, 2026. All rights reserved.

Figure 2: The book interior page. Image © Museum of the Bible, 2026. All rights reserved.

In 1925 and 1926, brothers James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson banded together to cultivate two volumes of spirituals: The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925) and The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (1926). Each spiritual bears a dedication to a friend or hero, including African American educator, author, and orator Booker T. Washington, and poet, historian, and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois. 

African American spirituals proliferated during much of the late 18th century until the abolishment of slavery in the 1860s. In the 1920s, a resurgence of interest in spirituals arose, with a spectrum of opinions on the significance of spirituals.  

Thinkers such as James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Paul Robeson, and Benjamin Mays generally viewed spirituals as communal religious expressions shaped by Christianity and served as a cultural testimony to enslaved people’s beliefs and experiences. In contrast, John Lovell Jr. and Miles Mark Fisher argued that spirituals encoded resistance and aspirations for earthly freedom, while E. Franklin Frazier rejected this interpretation, emphasizing themes of liberation through death instead, which was a recurring theme. Other scholars separately suggested spirituals were pure expressions of the soul and were the only permitted emotional outlet at the time. Despite differing interpretations, scholars broadly agree that spirituals reworked biblical narratives—from Moses to Elijah to Jesus—to meet the "spiritual and material needs"[1] of enslaved people, and one can be certain that spirituals "like other ‘black sources’ provided a partial testimony to the slave experience."[1]*

*Dr. John White, senior lecturer in American History at the University of Hull, documents these thoughts in his article, Veiled Testimony: Negro Spirituals and the Slave Experience (1983).

The Book of American Negro Spirituals is one among many in Museum of the Bible’s Collections that brings to light the history and impact the Bible has in Black history. Once digitization is complete, the images will be made available for researchers, scholars, and the public to access and study. 

We invite you to further engage with items related to Black history in the collections. Read how the museum helped the Vernon A.M.E Church of Tulsa, Oklahoma, restore an important historical register or view some of our collections that show the Bible’s role in Black history. 

Capturing the Collections is a series of articles from our specialists and interns working in the Digital Imaging Lab featuring a look at some of the objects they are digitally preserving. 

[1] White, John. “Veiled Testimony: Negro Spirituals and the Slave Experience.” Journal of American Studies 17, no. 2 (1983): 251–63. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27554312.