Out of it came our Black businesses, our Black educational institutions.”īack to Gates, who says, “It’s been a sanctuary where Black people could interpret The Bible in their own images and praise God in their own voices, creating some of the most sublime music the world has ever heard. Al Sharpton says, “The Black church was more than a spiritual home. “I don’t know how we could have survived as a people without it.” “The church gave people a sense of value and belonging and of worthiness,” Oprah Winfrey says. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravityan intimate place where voices rose up in song. “The lessons I learned here, the power of faith, the importance of community, have remained with me and sustained me in the same way the Black church has sustained the African American people from the days of slavery to this day.”Īnd then come some of the talking heads, and I mean that in a good way in the case of this series. “My mother’s family has worshipped here for generations,” he says as he mounts the steps and enters the church. Gates has embedded the narrative of this work by characterizing The church as the oldest, the most continuous and most important institution ever created by the African American people.
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