Esau McCaulley is described on his homepage as “Author” and “Public Theologian.” The title of one of the books written by the associate professor of the New Testament at Wheaton College provides a good sense of both of those roles: Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope.
In an essay that appeared on December 23 in The New York Times, McCaulley tells how as research for an essay he’d write about the spirituals that are sung in Black churches at Christmastime, he looked into “Sweet Little Jesus Boy.” He says that the spiritual “was, in my childhood imagination, a connection to the faith of my ancestors, a song composed in the hush harbors where enslaved people gathered clandestinely to celebrate the birth of our savior.”
But when he looked into the background of the song, “I was startled to discover that ‘Sweet Little Jesus Boy’ was written not by an African American during slavery but by a white man named Robert MacGimsey in 1934.”
More: “Rather than working on a plantation, MacGimsey grew up on one.”
McCaulley was to discover that MacGimsey, who was to buy a plantation and, “like his father before him, he hired Black people to pick cotton,” did undertake an effort to record spirituals that his workers sang, “spirituals he probably feared would be lost to history.”
McCaulley: “I am glad we have the recordings of these spirituals that we might not otherwise, but I cannot help but be bothered by another account of a white man benefitting from the musical genius of the Black community.”
But there is another point to McCaulley’s essay that goes beyond another instance of cultural appropriation.
