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Noshing With Tyler D. Parry – August 18, 2022

Author, Jumping The Broom

The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual

This week on Ira's Everything Bagel Podcast, host Ira Sternberg delves into the fascinating world of Black wedding traditions with Tyler D. Parry, author of the acclaimed book, Jumping The Broom, The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual (published by UNC Press).

This episode, perfect for anyone interested in African American history, cultural studies, or the evolution of wedding rituals, explores the depths of the symbolic act of "Jumping the Broom." Prepare to be surprised by the rich tapestry of narratives, مقاومت (muqawama – resistance) against oppression, and the unifying power this tradition holds.

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Unpacking the Layers of Meaning: Memories vs. History

Professor Parry sheds light on the contrasting narratives surrounding Jumping the Broom. We often hear personal stories passed down through families, creating a cherished memory for couples. However, Parry's research dives into the historical context, uncovering the potential origins and evolution of this ritual.

A Paradigm of Resistance: Claiming Agency Through Ritual

The conversation explores the concept of Jumping the Broom as an act of resistance. During a time when enslaved people had little control over their lives, this ritual might have served as a way to claim agency and create a meaningful ceremony outside the constraints imposed by the dominant culture.

Black Writers Reclaiming the Narrative: Reexamining the Ritual's Significance

Parry discusses the efforts of Black writers and scholars to reclaim the narrative around Jumping the Broom. By delving into historical records and cultural practices, they shed light on the ritual's deeper meaning and its importance within the Black community.

Beyond Black Weddings: A Unifying Tradition Across Cultures

While often associated with Black weddings, Professor Parry reveals the surprising truth – Jumping the Broom, or variations of it, have been practiced by various cultures around the world. This episode explores the unifying feature of this ritual, transcending specific cultural boundaries.

The Community's Endorsement: Sealing the Bond with Witness

The discussion delves into the significance of the community's endorsement after the couple jumps the broom. This act signifies the community's support and blessing for the newly married couple, solidifying the union beyond just a legal contract.

The Humanity of the Ceremony: More Than Just Tradition

Professor Parry emphasizes the inherent humanity of the Jumping the Broom ceremony. It's more than just following a tradition – it's a deeply personal act that signifies a couple's commitment and the community's support for their new life together.

A Renewed Interest: The Rise and Fall of Heritage Weddings

The episode explores the revival of interest in Jumping the Broom during the 1960s and 70s, coinciding with the Civil Rights Movement. This period saw a renewed focus on Black identity and cultural heritage. Parry also discusses the booming heritage wedding industry of the 1990s, which further popularized the tradition.

Beyond a Single Origin: The Surprising Multicultural Roots

Prepare to be surprised! Professor Parry debunks the myth of a single origin point for Jumping the Broom. His research reveals a rich tapestry of influences, highlighting the multicultural nature of this enduring tradition.

Listen and Learn:

If you've ever wondered about the meaning of Jumping the Broom, its historical significance, or its place within the broader landscape of wedding traditions, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in to gain a deeper appreciation for this powerful symbol of love, unity, and resilience.

Want to Learn More?

  • Follow Professor Tyler D. Parry on Twitter
  • Purchase your copy of Jumping The Broom, The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual by Tyler D. Parry (published by UNC Press).

Podcast Conclusion

Ira's Everything Bagel Podcast offers a thought-provoking exploration of Jumping the Broom with Professor Tyler D. Parry. This episode sheds light on the historical, cultural, and social significance of this enduring Black wedding tradition. So, the next time you witness a couple jumping the broom, you'll have a deeper understanding of the rich symbolism and history behind this beautiful act.

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Read The Full Transcript

Tyler D. Parry Full Transcript
Ira Sternberg: Welcome to Ira's Everything Bagel, where I talk with intriguing people about everything: their passions, pursuits, and points of view. When we hear phrases, concepts, even traditions, most of us think that we know the story behind them. But we may not. My guest today wrote a book about one such tradition, and what he discovers and shares with the reader adds to the rich cultural stew that exists in the real world but is not always represented in our siloed media or our groupthink academic centers. Tyler D. Parry is the author of Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, published by the University of North Carolina Press and available on Amazon and all the usual places. Tyler D. Parry is an assistant professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, and you can follow him on Twitter at @ProfTDParry, that's P-A-R-R-Y. Tyler, welcome to the show!
Tyler Parry: Thanks so much, Ira. Excited to be here.
Ira Sternberg: It’s a fascinating subject that you've picked to write a book about—yeah, I just ended in a preposition, but that's okay. What stoked your interest in delving deeper and scholastically into that subject?
Tyler Parry: Yeah, so I'll attempt to keep a rather long story somewhat short. The origin story of the book, I think, goes back over a decade when my wife and I were deciding wedding nuptials. We were engaged—I was preparing to graduate from university and had an interest in history at that point, so I wanted to go to graduate school. But, you know, this is where the personal meets the professional. She wanted to jump the broom as part of celebrating her heritage as an African American woman. But we both only knew kind of really abstract, secondary information about the actual subject. I was interested in slavery in the African diaspora at that point, and, to keep it short, the minister who married us asked me to get him some information about the ritual so that any guests who weren't familiar with it would have context for why we were doing it.
Ultimately, I started looking through university databases and found a wealth of information that I wasn't seeing published in secondary works. It became pretty clear that “jumping the broom” was a tradition that many know about through popular culture and many practice, but not many have engaged with critically, at least in terms of history. So, I ended up writing this multi-page report, and when I handed it to him, he looked at me wide-eyed and clearly wasn't going to read it. I didn’t take offense or anything, but I had all this information, and as I went on to graduate school, I thought, “I need something original, exciting, and engaging to write about.” And this topic just stuck with me. Lo and behold, this is what becomes my first book, over a decade later.
Ira Sternberg: What I liked about your book was your approach. Clearly, during the slave era in the United States, jumping the broom was critical in many lives, but you don’t leave it there. You expand and show that, as the book’s subtitle says, it has multicultural origins. Just in your introduction, you said, “The enslaved couple’s actions when they jumped the broom were rich in unspoken symbolism,” and that struck me as very important because, clearly, in that period of U.S. history, you couldn’t get away with a lot as a slave. So, here you were participating in a wedding ritual, an important event, and you were able to communicate something through the jumping-the-broom ceremony that the slave owners or masters couldn’t understand, interfere with, or even be present for.
Tyler Parry: Yeah, and I think for people who study the histories of enslaved people, or marginalized people in general, you’re often dealing with groups who did not write their own histories. So, you’re piecing together information or evidence that was placed upon them in the historical record, or engaging evidence where people were hesitant to discuss the specifics of the ritual. With jumping the broom, you often find it mentioned in literature that they married “by jumping the broom,” but they wouldn’t elaborate for various reasons. Sometimes they felt embarrassed; they saw it as a vestige of slavery that they wanted to forget. Others felt it was something to keep as part of heritage.
One thing I did was excavate any source that mentioned jumping the broom and try to reconstruct a history looking at the ritual as practiced in the 19th century while also examining why it was revived after slavery ended. So, by the Civil War, most formerly enslaved African Americans stopped jumping, looking to register their marriage in court, or with a justice of the peace or minister. For a hundred years, jumping the broom kind of disappears as a physical act for African Americans. But in the mid-1960s and 1970s, it’s revived. So, the book is not only about the historical narrative but also memory—how people commemorate and memorialize certain things. In this case, it’s about ritual memory, and how it's reinvented and reimagined by different groups at different times.
Ira Sternberg: Do you think the ritual memory started with some shame when slavery ended but then was embraced, as you mentioned, in the 1960s or so? Do you think it was a way of identity by embracing the symbol of being marginalized?
Tyler Parry: I think that’s what the sources suggest. As a historian, you’re careful not to project modern ideas onto the past, but one thing seems clear. Most sources about jumping the broom under slavery come from individuals interviewed in the 1930s, recalling memories from 70 to 80 years prior. In the Great Depression, when Black Americans were struggling, there was a Federal Writers’ Program that commissioned writers to collect oral histories from these communities. In these interviews, some African Americans talked about their experience of being enslaved as children. And there was debate about jumping the broom after slavery—some fondly remembered it, while others believed it wasn’t necessary anymore.
Even though people stopped practicing it physically, there was still memory of it in the form of expressions. In the South, both Black and white people would ask, “When are you going to jump the broom?” meaning, “When are you going to tie the knot?” or “get married.”
In the 1960s, particularly the post-civil rights era and the Black Power movement, younger generations started reclaiming it as part of asserting pride in Blackness. This re-evaluation saw rituals of enslaved people through the paradigm of resistance, challenging stereotypes about marriage and stability. Marrying someone was an act of resistance, even if enslaved people knew they could be separated at any time. So, this idea of resisting stereotypes helped revive interest in jumping the broom as an act of reclaiming heritage.
Ira Sternberg: The book goes beyond that and looks at other countries and times, so it has a broader approach. And when you did the research, the dynamics were different in each setting. Were you able to come to a consensus about the importance of jumping the broom, given it meant one thing for enslaved and formerly enslaved people in the U.S. but something different elsewhere?
Tyler Parry: To directly answer the question, the unifying feature was that jumping the broom was most attractive to marginalized groups who felt ostracized or oppressed by the dominant society.
Ira Sternberg: So, not necessarily enslaved but just ostracized for one reason or another.
Tyler Parry: Exactly. If you look at rural Welsh people in the 18th century, they might not have had churches nearby or rejected English cultural norms. For them, it was an expression of their uniqueness. Similarly, Irish travelers or British Romani—groups that don’t typically marry within a church but want a ritual process—use this as a cultural statement. This trend carried over to rural communities in Louisiana, Appalachian whites, and communities in the frontier West. I was surprised at how widely it spread, and part of my interest was to show that the U.S. is a cultural product of various ethnicities and traditions converging.
In short, I didn’t find a single origin point for jumping the broom, but I did find that it was widely adopted by marginalized communities who valued it as an authentic form of expression. And a unifying feature in all cases was community endorsement of the marriage afterward, which was important in all these groups.
Ira Sternberg: That folklore extended not just to marriage but to sex as well. And it’s not just jumping over a broom; there’s jumping back, and both people may do it. Can you elaborate on that?
Tyler Parry: Yes, that was fascinating. Jumping the broom is more diverse than it appears. British Romani, for instance, had one ritual where the bride and groom walked through a tunnel of people, then the husband jumped first, followed by the wife, and he’d catch her. In Welsh communities, a woman dissatisfied with her union could divorce by jumping backward over the broom within a year. Enslaved people in the U.S. adopted this idea of backward jumping for divorce. So, without knowing a single origin, I found this fascinating evidence of marginalized white and Black populations influencing each other’s traditions.
In the book, I created a graph cataloging all these expressions. Some jumped over facing each other, some multiple times, or with chanting. If only the husband jumped, or if the wife refused to jump, it sometimes meant she wasn’t ready to marry—kind of a runaway bride scenario.
Ira Sternberg: That’s fascinating. Did you find any cases of non-marginalized communities using this?
Tyler Parry: Good question. The only real references are from people who mocked it. Among the so-called elite classes, it was seen as a poor or marginalized ritual. In some English art, they’d portray a Scottish figure jumping the broom to diminish his status, as if to say, “You’re still just a Scottish Celt to us.” And enslaved people occasionally noted how their masters imposed broom-jumping on them as a mockery. Yet, marginalized communities could turn that symbol of mockery into something empowering.
Ira Sternberg: Did this mockery extend into the modern era, from middle or upper-class Blacks toward the ritual?
Tyler Parry: Yes, in short. Particularly in the 1990s, when heritage weddings became popular, jumping the broom became more common at Black weddings. Some Black academics, particularly Afrocentrists who wanted to position African American history within Africa, felt that using the ritual reinforced the idea of African Americans as bound to slavery. So, there was a minority voice against its use, but I think the custom ultimately won out as people sought to investigate their roots and reimagine the ritual for themselves.
Ira Sternberg: What surprised you most in your research?
Tyler Parry: Great question. I think the surprising part was that despite its association with slavery, jumping the broom wasn’t as universally popular as some secondary literature suggested. I found that 28–32% of enslaved people who discussed marriage referenced it. So, it wasn’t a majority, but it was significant enough to explore why it became so meaningful and why it’s remembered. What’s fascinating is why certain traditions, even if they’re not the majority, become so embedded in memory and popular culture.
Ira Sternberg: Before I let you go, based on your research and your wife’s input, would you like your kids to jump the broom when the time comes?
Tyler Parry: Yes, I think it would be meaningful. But ultimately, as with the enslaved people’s agency to make choices, I’d want them to decide for themselves. But I hope they’ll be informed enough to know why it’s important if they choose to do it.
Ira Sternberg: That’s a great way to leave it. My guest has been Tyler D. Parry, author of Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, published by the University of North Carolina Press and available on Amazon and all the usual places. Tyler D. Parry is an assistant professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UNLV. You can follow him on Twitter at @ProfTDParry—that's Prof T-D Parry. Tyler, thanks for being on the show.
Tyler Parry: Thank you so much, Ira. I had a great time.
Ira Sternberg: Same here. And join us every Thursday for a new schmear on Ira’s Everything Bagel.

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