The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues.