Following the Civil War, the performance of spirituals for concert stage burgeoned, with the establishment of choruses, including a choir at Fisk University in 1867. The Fisk Jubilee Singers became the most renowned university choral group in the country; yet Fisk was in the company of several other eminent university choirs including those at Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes. Esteemed arranger, composer, director, and conductor William Levi Dawson would lead the Tuskegee Choir to fame in the 1930s and 1940s. Spirituals held a particularly prominent place in the black cultural and political renaissance of the late 1920s, and in the political ideologies of James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke. For Locke, the leading intellectual of the New Negro movement, the renaissance of the spirituals represented African Americans' newfound rejection of tyranny and disavowal of shame. Johnson and Locke viewed the spirituals and their composers as emblems of progress, of a new philosophy of public representation that radically departed from stereotype and satire. By their composers, the spirituals were often regarded as the form that most eloquently blended folk tradition with classical composition. H.T. Burleigh, perhaps the preeminent spiritual composer, concluded that spirituals were the only American songs that could be defined as folk.

The sheet music in this section includes arrangements by several of the most prominent composers of the genre: H.T. Burleigh, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Levi Dawson, and Margaret Bonds.