‘The Heavenization of Earth’: African American Visions and Uses of the Afterlife, 1863–1901

Abstract

Belief in the afterlife was of central importance to slave converts, who ascribed doublemeanings to heaven and hell, as places to which the dead would go, and as metaphors for freedom and slavery. After the war, the continued prominence of the afterlife in exslave religion found vocal critics among the black intellectual elite, who saw it as a vestige of the past. Yet many black intellectuals were believers too, and developed their own visions of a progressive and redemptive hereafter. This article argues that, despite class, educational, and religious differences, which translated into contrasting visions of the afterlife among ex-slaves and black intellectuals (material vs. mental, physical vs. abstract), African Americans in all walks of life took a doctrine that could encourage ignoring the inequalities of the present in anticipation of a better life after death, and turned it into a central tenet of an activist faith in an era of hope and disillusionment.