The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

3/5 rating. 220 pages.

Book #21 of 2023. Read June 18, 2023.

This book talks all about the Black Church. It is no monolith and is many things in today’s America, but it has had a huge impact on the lives of all Americans.

“The church, she says, ‘gave people a sense of value and of belonging and worthiness. I don’t know how we could have survived as a people without it.’”

Mixing parts from past cultures in Africa and throughout the Americas, Black Christianity has morphed from various sources: from Islam to African religions and other cultural practices picked up along the way and combined to make a Christianity of their own making.

After the Civil War, the Church was a huge leader of lifting up the lives of now-freed Blacks: from education, to social and community building. The Church allowed a people who had next to no control in their lives the ability to begin to build lives of their own making.

I really liked some of the historical formation details about Black Christianity. This first portion of the book was my favorite. I found it a little more dry as it approached the present.

Additional Quotes:

“The Black Church was a cultural cauldron that Black people created to combat a system designed in every way to crush their spirit.”

“It’s easy to hope when there are evidences all around of how good God is. But to have the audacity to hope when that love is not evident,…that is a true test….To take the one string you have left and to have the audacity to hope – make music and praise God on and with whatever it is you’ve got left, even though you can’t see what God is going to do.” – The Reverend Jeremiah Wright

“There is no question that the Black Church is one of the parents of the civil rights movement, and today’s Black Lives Matter movement is one of its heirs.”

“When you’re singing a song, it’s not just a song; it’s your testimony. It’s your story.”

“Virtually overnight, conversion to Roman Catholicism became an unprecedented route to freedom south of the British colonies, enticing Africans to flee their British masters by escaping south across the St. Mary’s River [into Spanish Florida], where they were promised freedom both in this world and the next.”

“Incredibly, of the approximately 388,000 Africans shipped directly to North America, 210,000 of them were brought to the Carolinas and Georgia, and nearly 50 percent of all Africans imported arrived through the port of Charleston.”

“Georgia…began as an antislavery colony.”

“Missionaries were determined to bring new followers into Christianity, even if it meant withholding the freedom of the Gospel from the enslaved population. Antiliteracy laws were passed to ensure that enslaved people could not legally learn to read or write English, and missionaries excised key stories of the Bible so the enslaved wouldn’t be exposed to them. Gerbner explains: ‘Exodus? Take it out. This is about slaves claiming their freedom.’”

“‘The African Methodist Episcopal Church was really not founded on theological differences,’ McKenzie points out. ‘It was founded because of racial differences. People wanted to be able to worship in dignity.’”

“Would there be an African American people today had there not been a strong Black Church? Higginbotham isn’t sure. ‘I don’t know, because the church is all we had. How would you make sense out of the kind of cruelty that was endured? There’s got to be something that gives you hope just to make it, to persevere. And what we had, the message we had, was to keep the faith.’”

“Black preaching, I believe, is more than preaching with a Black face; it is a unique cultural narrative and theological enterprise where African motifs meet diverse Western influences of North America. A beautiful, bold, homiletical voice, poetry, prophetic witness, Southern storytelling, lament, blues, and celebration are born out of this tradition.” – The Reverend Otis Moss III

“This music, [Rutha Mae Harris] says, was critical to the success of the civil rights movement. ‘Personally, I feel that without the songs of the civil rights movement, there wouldn’t have been a movement, because a song kept us from being afraid.’”

“Music played a variety of roles in the movement. ‘Oftentimes I have heard many of the civil rights leaders here in Atlanta say that they sang when they didn’t have a strategy,’ Andrews says.”

“1964’s Freedom Summer of Mississippi…saw thirty-seven churches burned or bombed during a ten-week period”

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