Awake!, “What Is the Bible’s View? — Are Blacks Cursed by God?”
“MANY religious leaders have answered “Yes.” … But, first of all, please note that nothing is said in this Bible account about anyone’s being cursed with blackness of skin. And note, too, that it is Canaan, not his father Ham, who was cursed. … What great harm has resulted from the misapplication by churchmen of this Biblical curse! The slavery of African blacks, and their mistreatment since the days of slavery, can in no way be justified by the Bible. The truth is, blacks are not, and never were, cursed by God!”
A two-page article in the same issue of Awake! that is given over to race. It quotes the Jamieson, Fausset and Brown commentary applying the curse of Canaan to “the slavery of the Africans”, traces the misreading to the fourth-century writer Ambrosiaster, to a 1873 prayer indulgence of Pope Pius IX and to defenders of American slavery, prints a black reader’s account of trying to scrub the colour off her skin, and says the black race descends from Ham’s sons Cush and probably Put. It attributes the teaching throughout to “religious leaders”, “church commentators” and “churchmen”. It does not mention that The Golden Age of 24 July 1929 printed the same answer, or that Zion’s Watch Tower of 15 July 1902 had called that view “as probable as any other”.
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Provenance and verification note for Awake!, What Is the Bible’s View? — Are Blacks Cursed by God?
Confidence note. Opened on the Watchtower Online Library on 19 September 2026 and read in full from the document’s own HTML. The page markers read 28 and 29, the printed citation line reads “g77 10/8 pp. 28-29” and the series label above the title reads “What Is the Bible’s View?” The article carries no by-line. Its place in the issue was fixed from the citation lines of the neighbouring documents in the same issue.
Corroborated by. src-race-ga-1929-0724-origin-of-negro, src-race-zwt-1902-0715-ham-canaan, src-race-w-1956-1015-god-segregationist
Notes. The organisation’s own magazine devotes an article to refuting the teaching that black people are under Noah’s curse, and names churchmen and slaveholders as the source of it. The same teaching had appeared in its own Golden Age in 1929.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-race-g-1977-1008-blacks-cursed