African American folk healing encompasses black identities, cultures, and spiritualities. Drawing from its rich heritage and focusing twentieth century developments particularly, African American Folk Healing is a contemporary reading of this multilevel phenomenon. The book investigates a range of historical contexts that converge into contemporary expressions. I approach folk healing as an important facet of black cultures that has altered in the past hundred years in ways that parallel other social changes in African American communities. Multiple questions about black people living in America and the seemingly stubborn retentions of folk healing influence the development of this book.

From its past practices, black folk healing continues in various forms. How and why have historical instances of these practices carried over into the present? How and why have other researchers approached black folk healing? How has urban living impacted African Americans’ understandings of folk healing? Folk healing has value and weight in black communities. Do changes in practices indicate different relationships of black communities to mainstream societies of United States? How have remnants of folk healing changed in light of greater access to information from the formalized medical profession?

The range of cultural development or retention is indicated in these excerpts from two black women, interviewed nearly seventy years apart. One woman is from rural Georgia with less formal education; the other woman is a successful writer beginning to work in an alternative medicine form known as healing touch.

The doctor . . . treated her for ‘bout two weeks but she didn’t get no better. A friend told us to try a root worker. … The root worker come that Wednesday mornin’ and looked at her, but he never touched her. He told us she had been hurt, but he could have her on her feet in ‘bout a week or ten days. He didn’t give her no medicine, and he never come back ‘til she was up and walkin’ ‘round. She got up in ‘bout seven days, and started talkin’ earlier than that. (Unnamed informant, recorded by Louise Oliphant, Federal Writers’ Project, Augusta, Georgia, 1936-40. #100149, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington, D.C.)

Anybody who does this healing work can come through a medical standpoint or a religious standpoint. I tend to feel that it is more of a religious standpoint for me—not a religious but a spiritual thing. Because how does this work? Because I may touch you . . . and I might not even touch you. How is it that you are feeling better? . . . It’s the energy, because you are not doing it. It’s the energy that you are allowing to move through you and out, into that person’s energy. (Ann, interview by author March 2003)