In this intimate four-hour series from executive producer, host, and writer Henry Louis Gates, Jr., we trace how this came to be in the 400 year-old story of the black church in America, 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, solidarity and speaking truth to power. It 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.

Throughout each hour, we will be transported by the songs that speak to one’s soul, by preaching styles that have moved congregations and a nation, and by beliefs and actions that drew African Americans from the violent margins of society to the front lines of change.

The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song will explore the changing nature of worship spaces and the men and women who shepherded them from the pulpit, the choir loft, and church pews. Here, the churches Gates visits are both a world within a world, where Black Americans could be themselves, and the epicenter of the freedom struggle that revolutionized the United States across slavery and abolition, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, the Great Migration and civil rights movement.