• Says historian Colin Palmer, blacks created culture not because they were slaves but because they were human.african american man image by Mat Hayward from Fotolia.com
  
  For the tens of millions of Africans brought to the United States in chains, plantation life was the only vestige of civilization that remained. From these crumbs, first-generation Africans of countless nations and their progeny created a single, lasting culture that would go on to impact not only African-American life in the United States, but greater American culture at large. African-American culture developed on the plantations both in master-approved gatherings and secret, illegal activities.
  
  

Religion

• Plantation culture had a tremendous impact on religion as practiced not only by slaves, but by African-Americans in the United States at large. Though most slaves brought religion from Islam to paganism with them into their American bondage, they were forbidden from practicing these religions on the plantations. Christian preachers, however, were permitted to speak to the slaves. These preachers spread the doctrine that all people, including slaves, were equal in the eyes of god---a dogma that imbued the slaves with hope. It was during this time that African religious practices such as signing, dancing, clapping, and spirit-possession were integrated into American Christianity.
  
  

Music

• Plantation slaves in America played two primary forms of music. One was percussive, incorporating handclaps, field shouts, tambourines, hand-made drums and the banjo---an instrument invented by slaves. The other was choral music. The choral aspects of slave musicals, also known somewhat crassly as negro spirituals, was a highly organized, arranged and conducted art form that would go on to influence another highly organized, arranged and conducted African American genre: jazz. The melancholic, percussive, narrative-based field music would have a great influence on another popular form of southern African-American music: the blues.
  
  

Trade

• Plantation life greatly influenced the social development, or lack thereof, of African-Americans in the wake of the Civil War. As trained and proficient farm hands, many African Americans freed by the Civil War looked to find their own parcels of land and farm them for a living. The share cropping system was in theory developed to facilitate this, yet it was unfairly tilted in the favor of white farmers; African American laborers became indentured servants, living lives of desperate poverty in insurmountable debt to white farmers. However, due to their enslavement, African Americans had little else in the way of marketable job skills; they could find work nowhere else. Thus, the system of agrarian racial subjugation perpetuated itself.