'The Black Church' by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t an anomaly but a culmination. The “Black Church,” shorthand for a plethora of denominations and congregations, had always played a leading role in African American survival and provided some of its leading voices in the long march to the future.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., perhaps America’s most recognized Black public intellectual, wrote The Black Church to answer those who dismiss African American Christianity as a tool of the oppressor rather than a source of power. Black preachers used the King James Bible to encourage slave rebellions and the more secular W.E.B. DuBois recognized the power of those churches community and mythology.
Gates doesn’t overlook the negatives, the “bad actors and practitioners of bad faith” who preached sexism, anti-Semitism and the false gospel of prosperity. But during slavery and the century following abolition, Black churches provided a “space brimming with subversive features.” Little wonder Black churches have always been targeted by white supremacists—even in 2020.
Along with explicitly political messages, Black churches were the cradle of a distinctly African American culture, the places where oratory, music and dance were nurtured and developed before overspilling their boundaries to impact popular culture. Gates’s book expands on the story told in his PBS documentary series “The Black Church,” seen on Milwaukee PBS Channel 10 at 8 p.m., February 16 and 23.
