DELIVERANCE

BIBLICAL ANALOGY AND THE BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT "Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel? Then why not every man?" is a powerful spiritual analogy of encouragement from our enslaved forbears' rich cultural repertoire. Analogy is a figure of speech that compares one thing with another thing so that the meaning of one is applied to the facts of other things. Slaves' uses of analogy were very sophisticated utilizing music, art, quilting, stories, cooking, clothing; in short, they used analogy to code covert messages from prying eyes and ears of masters, their minions, tattle-tales, spies, overseers, so as to communicate with each other . Some messages became so adept that they ceased to be analogy and sublimated into homology, which is super-analogy, so relatively similar. Thus returning to the song above, the Lord delivering "Daniel" from the lion's den became homologous to Harriet Tubman, "Moses," with a $40,000 reward on her head, whether dead or alive, that she successfully evaded for over two decades, rescuing hundreds, despite being handicapped with fainting spells, living into her 80s. "Jonah" was the slave Robert Smalls who piloted the Confederate freighter, the "Planter" , its all-slave crew, and their families out of heavily-fortified Charleston, South Carolina, harbor in the sable darkness of morning in 1862, into the Union fleet that was blockading it, under a white flag. Robert Smalls became a United States Congressman from there. The "Hebrew children" were the millions of former slaves, termed "Contraband of war," who fled the plantations en mass whenever the Union troops drew near; they provided iron strength to the North, as they sapped the South of same. The Bible fueled the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s with additional analogy, homology. Bible's efficacy yet empowers our people in the fight for freedom in years since 1968, as we battle on!