In the mid-1990s, a novel wedding tradition became popular among African Americans: ‘jumping the broom’. As the couple is pronounced legally wed, they turn to the crowd, clasp hands and jump over a broomstick placed on the floor. One couple explained the ritual’s attraction. ‘It’s traditional,’ they said, ‘and we need to bring it back to our culture. Every Black person should do it.’ For them, as for many, culture and tradition were intimately linked to group identity, and jumping the broom symbolised racial and ethnic unity among those descended from enslaved people in the United States. Indeed, couples who did not jump the broom prior to its widespread revival often expressed regret that they were unaware of the custom when planning their wedding.
Rooted in American slavery, the ritual was often dismissed by the formerly enslaved shortly after the American Civil War. Many Black couples renounced it in the post-bellum period, seeing it as a vestige of slavery. Knowledge of the tradition waned until 1977, when it was reintroduced through the Roots television miniseries, which featured a broomstick wedding performed by an enslaved couple: the protagonist Kunta Kinte and his wife Bell. Then, in 1993, Harriette Cole’s book Jumping the Broom: The African-American Wedding Planner was published, which spurred mass embrace. Cole argued that the broomstick wedding was used by enslaved couples to reclaim dignity within a system that denied them legally recognised marriage. She speculated on attachments to African cultural beliefs about brooms, providing an origin story that highlighted the ingenuity of enslaved people who retained elements of their African heritage.
Then there was the pushback. Not everyone was thrilled about reviving a ‘slave-era’ ritual. Afrocentric leaders such as Maulana Karenga criticised Black couples who used it, arguing that it didn’t originate in Africa, but was actually introduced by slave owners. Jumping the broom, he asserted, reduced a couple’s commitment to one another because they performed the act ‘over an instrument of labour’. Did enslaved people take the ritual from slaveowners, as Karenga suggests? Or is it a celebratory innovation developed by enslaved Africans under extraordinary circumstances? As with the history of many rituals, how it came to be is far more complicated than it might seem.