The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song Paperback Book
For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, segregated West Virginia
town, the church was his family and his community’s true center of gravity.
Within those walls, voices were lifted in song to call forth the best in each other
and to comfort each other when times were at their worst. In this book, his tender
and magisterial reckoning with the meaning of the Black church in American history,
Gates takes us from his own experience onto a journey across more than four hundred
years and spanning the entire country. At road’s end, we emerge with a new understanding
of the centrality of the Black church to the American story–as a cultural and
political force, as the center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as an
unparalleled incubator of talent, and as a crucible for working through the community’s
most important issues, down to today.
In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora
tragically few safe spaces, the Black church has always been more than a sanctuary;
it’s been a place to nourish the deepest human needs and dreams of the African-American
community. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days
of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meeting houses
were subject to surveillance, and often destruction. So it continued, long after slavery’s
formal eradication; church burnings and church bombings by the Ku Klux Klan and others
have always been a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the struggle for equality
for the African-American community. The past often isn’t even past–Dylann
Roof committed his slaughter in Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church 193 years after
the church was first burned down by whites following a thwarted slave rebellion.
But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its
story lies at the vital center of the civil rights movement, and produced many of
its leaders, from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. on, but at the same time there
have always been churches and sects that eschewed a more activist stance, even eschewed
worldly political engagement altogether. That tension can be felt all the way to the
Black Lives Matter movement and the work of today. Still and all, as a source of strength
and a force for change, the Black church is at the center of the action at every stage
of the American story, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.
