William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison publish Slave Songs of the United States, the first major collection of African American spirituals and folk poetry from Sea Islands plantations. These 136 songs preserve call-and-response patterns, biblical allegory, coded escape instructions, and West African rhythmic structures, representing enslaved people's oral literature.

This collection provided poetic raw material for the Harlem Renaissance poets (Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown), who adapted spirituals' folk idioms, repetition, and biblical cadences into jazz poetry and blues verse. The spirituals' fusion of African oral tradition and evangelical Christianity created a distinct American folk poetics that influenced everything from Robert Hayden to contemporary spoken word.