An Ante-Bellum Sermon

By the time Dunbar wrote “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction period had been over for decades. In fact, Dunbar himself never lived during the ante-bellum or pre-war period, as he was born in 1872, seven years after the war’s conclusion. The racial injustice Dunbar responded to for much of his career was actually not slavery but the fallout and backlash freed Black people faced in post-bellum America. Dunbar’s poetry about the ante-bellum plantation period was often disguising the dissatisfaction he felt about the lack of progress for Black people in his own post-bellum period.

Dunbar was writing in a time of severe racially motivated violence and discrimination. Although slaves in the South had been emancipated, they had no land or property of their own, and poverty often drove them to work for the very same masters from whom they had been freed. They received extremely low wages and became bound to their former masters by debt. Black prisoners found themselves forced into the same kind of work they did as slaves, and the unlawful lynching of Black men in the South became increasingly prevalent, particularly with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, one of Dunbar’s most famous poems, “The Haunted Oak,” vividly portrayed the horrors of mob mentality and condemned the violence done to Black men by these lynching mobs.