The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song (2021)

The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song is an intimate and moving series from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. It tracesthe 400-year-old story of the Black church in America, the changing nature of worship spaces, and the men and women shepherding them from the pulpit, the choir loft, and church pews. Gates explores all the way down to its bedrock role as the site of African American survival and endurance, grace and resilience, thriving and testifying, freedom and independence, organizing and solidarity, and speaking truth to power.

For many, it's their house of worship. For some, it is an engine for social justice. For others, it's a place of transcendent cultural gifts exported to the world, from the soulful voices of preachers and congregants to the sublime sounds of gospel music. For the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., attendingattending church in America was also "the most segregated hour" of the week. 

The documentary reveals how Black people have worshipped and, through their spiritual journeys, improvised ways to bring their faith traditions from Africa to the New World while translating them into a form of Christianity that was not only truly their own but a redemptive force for a nation whose original sin was found in their ancestors' enslavement across the Middle Passage.