African Americans did not doubt that their lives were filled with trouble: how could one be black in America during the lynching era and not know about the existential agony that trouble created for black people? Trouble followed them everywhere, like a shadow they could not shake. But the “Glory Hallelujah” in the last line speaks of hope that trouble would not sink them down into permanent despair—what Kierkegaard described as “not willing to be oneself” or even “a self; or lowest of all in despair at willing to be another than himself.”[41] When people do not want to be themselves, but
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