Entry · catalog no. 1151
jumping the broom
/ /ˈdʒʌmpɪŋ ðə ˈbruːm/ /JUMP-ing thuh BROOM
phrase · Plantation South — Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana; now Black weddings nationwide · 1850s
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1.
The wedding rite in which a couple, having just been pronounced married, joins hands and jumps together over a broom placed on the floor or held low by attendants. Among enslaved Black people in the American South, where the law refused to recognize their marriages, the leap was the ceremony itself: it made the union real in front of witnesses when no license, minister, or courthouse would. In present-day Black weddings the jump usually follows the legal vows rather than replacing them, and is understood as a deliberate act of remembrance — the couple stepping over the same threshold their ancestors crossed. Families often keep the decorated broom afterward as an heirloom.
“Right after the pastor pronounced them, they grabbed hands, counted to three, and jumped the broom while the whole reception hollered.”
2.
As a verb phrase, to get married at all. This sense runs older and wider than the ritual: in nineteenth-century English and American speech, jumping the broomstick meant a couple living as husband and wife without a legal tie, and the phrase carried a sneer from people who considered such unions illegitimate. In Black speech today the sting is gone. The phrase simply means to wed, and is usually spoken with affection, or with teasing aimed at somebody who has been putting it off.
“Boy, you been with that woman nine years — when y all gon jump the broom?”
Origin & Attribution
Carried by enslaved Black people across the plantation South — Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana — by at least the 1840s and 1850s, and recalled decades later in Federal Writers Project interviews with the formerly enslaved. Two competing origin stories are both overstated. The popular claim, spread by wedding planners and lifestyle press after the 1990s, that the rite came from Ghana or West Africa has no documentary support. The opposing claim, argued by Maulana Karenga among others, that enslavers simply imposed it, ignores what the record shows: enslaved people took a broomstick custom already circulating among poor and marginalized communities in the British Isles, Appalachia, Romani camps and Cajun Louisiana, and remade it. Historian Tyler D. Parry documents that reworking — jumping backward, jumping in sequence, using the leap to divorce as well as to marry. The rite was largely abandoned after emancipation, when Black couples could register legal marriages and wanted nothing that smelled of bondage. It returned through Alex Haley Roots (1976 novel, 1977 miniseries) and then Harriette Cole 1993 wedding planner, which put the broom into the mainstream Black wedding. The custom is Black American not because it began in Africa but because Black Americans made it mean something no one else did.
1855
North Carolina University Magazine describes an enslaved couple, Bob and Nancy, disagreeing over whether to marry by the books or by jumping the broom-stick
1936
Federal Writers Project interviewers begin recording the accounts that will yield well over a hundred references to broomstick weddings
1977
The Roots miniseries shows Kunta Kinte and Bell jumping the broom, triggering the modern revival
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Plantation South — Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana; now Black weddings nationwide · 1850s
Spoken by
Black couples and their families; Black clergy, wedding planners and reception hosts; descendants of the enslaved
$JUMPINThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring171 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
72/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1855
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
Tyler D. Parry, Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)
book · printed
■
Tyler D. Parry, "Broomstick weddings and the history of the Atlantic world," Aeon, 14 December 2020
essay · published
■
Tracy L. Barnett, "To Jump the Broomstick," The Civil War Monitor, Spring 2023
magazine · reported
■
North Carolina University Magazine, Vol. 3, 1855, pp. 69–70 (cited with page in Barnett, Civil War Monitor, 2023)
periodical · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceHarriette Cole, Jumping the Broom: The African-American Wedding Planner (Henry Holt, 1993)
book · printed
See also