One custom from Africa that was historically retained in African American families was

I was in elementary school when the Emmy award-winning miniseries, Roots, aired in 1977. Viewed by an estimated 85 percent of American households, Roots is considered one of the most impactful shows of all time. The series chronicled the life of Kunta Kinte through his capture from Africa and enslavement in the 18th and 19th century American South.

In Roots's third episode comes a rare moment of tenderness. Kunta Kinte and Belle, both enslaved, cement their wedding vows by jumping the broom. An elderly woman parades around the couple with a specially prepared broom, adorned with red and gold ribbons. Gripping the broomstick tightly, she shifts the broom up and down as she marches around the couple, soliciting prayers for preservation of their marriage. She then places the broom on the earthen floor in front of the couple and asks if they are confident about their decision to marry. After both respond affirmatively, she invites the bride and groom to “jump over the broom into the land of matrimony.”

I never forgot this scene, and I wasn’t alone: It left an indelible impression on Black America. The broomstick wedding, for many viewers, conveyed how African descendants shared the profound joy of romantic love in the midst of incessant violation and trauma. In the years since Roots premiered, I’ve been invited to a number of weddings in which Black couples jumped the broom, considering it a dignifying African tradition preserved by ancestors.

But the tradition’s true origin story complicates its legacy. While jumping the broom indeed predates African enslavement in America, it’s actually been traced to indigenous wedding rituals in Europe. As a professor of religion and African American studies at Emory University, I’ve spent my career researching the custom’s transatlantic journey and how it changed over generations. As an undergraduate, I frequently came across references that associated broomstick weddings with Black Americans' African heritage. While studying abroad in Nigeria, I researched the association—but wherever I looked, I found no links between broomstick weddings and Africa.

My suspicion of the custom’s European origins grew when I taught at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN in the late '90s. During a class lecture, my students and I discussed an assigned reading that addressed the tradition. I confessed that I actually believed the custom originated in Europe.

Immediately, a Jewish student of Polish heritage said her family had a long history of jumping the broom. The family's broom had been passed along from one couple to another across generations. A blue ribbon was tied around the broom with each couple’s names inscribed. Felicitously, the broom was in her mother’s possession at the time, and I was able to examine the sacred heirloom—carefully hand-crafted and preserved for over six generations.

Seal Press Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African American Marriage by Dianne M. Stewart

Seal Press Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African American Marriage by Dianne M. Stewart

Now 40% Off

In recent years, I found scholarly evidence confirming my long-held hypothesis of the broomstick wedding’s origins. Like Roots shows, some enslaved couples, when permitted to marry, did jump the broom with pledges of everlasting love. However, a 2020 study of 378 testimonies about enslaved weddings revealed that only 28 percent made references to broomstick rituals, while 34 percent described no ceremony at all, and 38 percent mentioned other ceremonial rites entirely.

Likely, the tradition of jumping the broom traveled from Britain to the colonies. Pre-Christian Roma and Celtic communities in the British Isles were known for jumping the broom to seal their wedding vows. Rural Anglo-Saxons embraced the practice as well. The Welsh, in particular, sustained the ritual, at least until the 1840s, and carried the tradition to the American South, where many of them settled, especially during the 19th century.

Once in the United States, white slave owners seemingly imposed the foreign custom upon couples who desired a symbolic ritual, according to Bosses and Broomsticks: Ritual and Authority in Antebellum Slave Weddings. Some slaveholders, in fact, unceremoniously introduced what they viewed as an old pagan custom to their enslaved laborers with more than a hint of paternalism and derision.

While it is celebrated today, the broomstick may have served to remind enslaved couples that their marriages were perpetually vulnerable to dissolution at the whims of their owners. Enslaved persons had no marital rights and those who married could be severed from their spouses at a whim’s notice since their owners had every right to gift, loan, collateralize, hire out, or sell them without explanation or warning. More than thirty percent of enslaved persons’ first marriages were dissolved, for example, due to the operations of the domestic slave trade after the Revolutionary War. Some enslaved couples even adapted their wedding vows to accommodate their precarious condition, vowing to remain married until "death or distance" would part them.

However, other recollections of slave weddings suggest their communities often did exhibit control and agency over their varied wedding ceremonies, including those involving the broomstick ritual. Given the historical association of broomstick weddings with marginalized groups and lower classes in Europe and the United States, it’s not surprising to learn that in order to suit their needs, some enslaved people willingly adopted the practice from the poor whites who surrounded them.

The social and physical landscape of labor among enslaved communities might have played a role in such decisions because, as one enslaved man summed up, per the 2021 book Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher's Climb to Freedom, field hands were willing to jump the broom, but when house servants married, they wanted a white preacher. Enslaved domestic laborers had greater proximity culturally and even genetically to white slaveholders than their counterparts who worked in the fields. They had more access to the customs and resources of white slaveholders than field laborers, and would have been aware of the social stigma matrimonial broomsticks elicited among white Christians in slaveholding circles who regarded it as an invalid pagan custom. Therefore, it is not surprising that some enslaved persons laboring in owners’ households expressed disdain for the practice or preference for a “real,” or “true” church wedding. However, for a significant percentage of captive African descendants, jumping the broom was, perhaps, the next best thing to an official wedding.

For some Black Americans today, these revelations may be of little significance because they jump the broom principally as a gesture of solidarity with their ancestors. For others, the mere fact that the ritual’s origins are traced to Europe could be unsettling.

Which raises the question: What if we understand Roots’s portrayal of the broomstick wedding not as the standard wedding ritual, but as one of many practiced by African captives?

A couple jumping the broom in New York in 2011.

The stark truth is that we still don’t know enough about enslaved couples’ matrimonial rites, but we do have access to information about African engagement and wedding ceremonies that can inspire other ways to tie the knot.

One wedding ritual I encountered during my studies in Africa stands out. In most variations of the tradition—which is deeply rooted in Niger-Congo West, Central, and South African cultural heritages—the bride receives a cup of palm wine from her father, uncle or another elder relative. She then approaches a group of men, (her husband is seated among them), and gives him a sip of palm wine to suggest that this is the man she chose to marry.

Among the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria, (which was one of the most exhausted upper West African sites of early slave deportations to the Americas and the Caribbean), this wine carrying ceremony (or igba nkwu nwanji) is the last in a series of rites that publicly authenticates the marriage. “Only after she has found the groom…offered the cup to him and he [has] sipped the wine, [is] the couple…married traditionally,” Michael Widjaja writes in his guide to Igbo culture. As more and more contemporary American couples are eliminating patriarchal vows and procedures from their wedding ceremonies, the closing igba nkwu nwanji rite of the bride identifying her chosen life partner can be interpreted as a ritual that affirms women’s agency in marriage.

"We have access today to information about African engagement and wedding ceremonies that can inspire new reflections."

In another West African custom, widely practiced among the Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin, the couple taste four foods together before exchanging vows. Representing sweetness (honey), bitterness (vinegar), sourness (lime), and heat (cayenne pepper), the flavors nod to the breadth of married life, beyond the euphoria of the wedding day. As the bride and groom taste the elements, the wedding host will interpret their symbolic meanings and invite the couple to reflect upon the gravity of the marriage commitment.

Learning about the origins of jumping the broom reminded me that Black Americans today have choices our enslaved ancestors did not. We can deepen our connections to our roots through marriage rites that they likely wished they could have incorporated into their own ceremonies. Now, as we consecrate our vows, we can introduce a new generation to the symbols of love that never should have been erased.

This content is imported from poll. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

This content is imported from OpenWeb. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.