The African American Struggle for Identity

African Americans struggle with identity because of 400 plus years of slavery, Jim Crow, the dark specter of ghettoes, and the New Jim Crow, i.e., prison.  In a 1967 speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to this as the struggle for somebodiness and located that identity in Jesus.  This struggle for identity is exacerbated by the fact that African Americans have moved away from the institution, i.e., the Black Church, and Black Pentecostalism, i.e., the motor behaviors that slaves brought with them from Africa, practiced in the Invisible Church in the brush arbors and practiced in the first Black Churches.


Bishop Johnson argues that African-American identity, i.e., somebodiness, flows from the motor behaviors that Africans brought with them from Africa, behaviors like the ring dance, call and response, Negro Spirituals, etc.