![]() ![]() A tragic irony of the American experience is that faith has been deployed to suppress as well as to liberate to exclude as well as to include to control as well as to free. It is a commonplace but not uncontroversial argument. To Gates, the Black church is the soil in which Black culture and political action flowered. “Gathering here, they not only prayed, but after the services were over, they could talk to each other about who might have had a baby up the road, who might have died, who was sold.” The church father Tertullian insisted that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Roman Catholic Church. ![]() “In slavery, you couldn’t go down the road and visit anyone,” the scholar Mary Rivers Legree tells Gates. The lifting of souls, though, was not limited to the spirit but also helped shape society. writes in “The Black Church,” his engaging companion volume to a new PBS series, “enslaved Black people found their first glimpse of heaven on earth in the praise house.” “As the machinery of slavery churned on with no end in sight,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. Products of the Great Awakening of the 18th century, the growing churches were built by - and for - enslaved people. In the beginning there were the “praise houses” - rudimentary sanctuaries constructed in places like Silver Bluff, S.C., Savannah, Ga., and Petersburg, Va. THE BLACK CHURCH This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song By Henry Louis Gates Jr. ![]()
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