Coming up on "American Black Journal," defining the Black church.

We're gonna delve into the historical beginnings of the Black church and the roles that racism and spirituality have played in it development.

Plus, we'll have a special report from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History tracing the history of religion in African-American culture.

Stay right there.

"American Black Journal" is coming up next.

Announcer 1: From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Announcer 2: Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

Announcer 1: The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of "American Black Journal," in covering African-American history, culture and politics.

The DTE Foundation and "American Black Journal," partners in presenting African-American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

Announcer 2: Also brought to you by AAA, Nissan Foundation, Ally, Inpact at Home, UAW, Solidarity Forever, and viewers like you, thank you.

(upbeat music) Welcome to "American Black Journal".

I'm Stephen Henderson.

And as always, I'm really glad that you've joined us.

We're continuing our year-long series, taking a look at the Black church here in Detroit.

It is produced in partnership with the Ecumenical Theological Seminary and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History.

Today, we're focusing on the identity of the Black church from an academic and historical perspective.

We're gonna look at the impact early racist attitudes had on Africans and how spirituality helped them survive oppression.

But first up, a brief lesson on the major role of religion in African-American culture and the beginnings of the Black church here in Detroit.

Here's producer Marcus Green's report from the Charles H. Wright Museum.

Hi, I'm Doug McCray, and I'm one of the educators here at the Charles Wright Museum of African-American History.

We have gone through a large part of the exhibit that is called, "And Still, We Rise."

It takes us from ancient Africa all the way up to modern day America.

And this particular area, it's a fantastic area, information about several different churches.

Without a doubt, any African-American community, you will definitely find some places where people can go and have religious worship.

And faith has been the very thing that has made it possible for our ancestors to survive, capture, the trip across the ocean, enslavement, and for us to be standing here today, "A Matter of Faith."

As we move a little bit father, there's different information that you can see about specific churches that were always available there in the city of Detroit.

So many, many people had a choice of which church they wanted to go into and worship to, and other people had a choice of what churches they wanted to go to, but the good thing about it is that the church was always there.

This particular panel that we see here is one I always like to talk about, The Shrine of the Black Madonna.

It definitely continues talking about religion and Christianity, but the Shrine of Black Madonna addresses Christianity in a way that's much, much more revolutionary.

Another panel that I'm sure many, many Detroiters will be glad to see, the New Bethel Baptist Church.

This was a church that was pastored by Reverend C.L.

Franklin, who was the father of Aretha Franklin.

Reverend Franklin also was important for the civil rights struggle, because he also did lots of things to make it possible for people to have places where they could go and make plans, to arrange boycotts, to arrange marches, things like that.

If not for the church, we would not have been able to do those things, and make the changes that we needed with the blessing of God.

We have here, what, four or five, nine different photos, but all of these are from different churches, and they all show, if you look at any of these faces closely, you can see on their faces the devotion and the commitment to their particular church.

A lot of people, it surprises me to learn, but a lot of people are surprised to learn that the Nation of Islam was founded in the city of Detroit.

The Nation of Islam is talking about separation, totally and completely, so that we can have our own country, our own place to do the things for us because as long as we wait for others to do it for us, it's not gonna happen.

If it does happen, it's gonna happen in a very, very small way.

Because we have this type of people and another type of people in the same community, it's important that we have a place where those people can go to.

We have made the complete circle, but this is one that is dear to many, many people's hearts.

The Plymouth Congregational Church, it's very, very important to our community because it did a lot to make it possible for African-Americans to have opportunities, that had been denied to them, and it also, this particular church also made it possible for different things to happen as far as urban renewal, things to be built up in and around the communities.

I remember hearing a long time ago, in the time of slavery, the people who owned the plantation would always say that you can tell when they are happy when you hear them singing.

But for some reason, they did not understand that we are singing about escape, we're singing about being free.

The foundation for the Black Church is found in racism, in values and culture and spirituality.

I discuss the history of the Black church with Reverend Dr. Kenneth Harris, who is president of of the Ecumenical Theological Seminary and his daughter, Reverend Kenita Harris of Detroit Bible Tabernacle.

Here's our conversation.

I wanna start with just the kind of broad concept here, the link between spirituality, racism, and the development of the Black church.

It's a pretty complex subject, but you guys have spent a lot of time thinking and reading and writing about it.

So, Dr. Harris, I will start with you, Dr. Ken Harris, about, just talk a little about those links and where they find their roots.

The roots of spirituality in the Black church come out of the African religious and spirituality that came from Africa on the slave ships.

The slaves who came here were not savages in the jungle.

They came from cultures that were centuries older than your European civilizations.

And so, the folk that came here from Africa were, I mean, you know, in the Old Testament, the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon and the Ethiopians swear that they had a child who took Judaism back to Ethiopia, which is evidenced by Ethiopian Jews now.

That's the Judaic spirituality.

And then the Ethiopian eunuch who was saved in the book of Acts by Philip, who went back to Queen Candace with the gospel, that Christian link is there.

And so the slaves that were brought over were very, very rich in a history of scholarship, as well as religion and spirituality that spanned a wide spectrum, okay.

The American slave owners worked furiously to destroy those links.

They did everything they could to disconnect Africans from their heritage.

By the grace of God, they were not successful.

They split up families, they split up tribes and all of that, and then, the very vicious attack against African language, African culture, African family values.

Then, in the American context, were merged at some point with the Christianity in the colonies.

But the roots of it, Stephen, go way back prior to that in antiquity, in the 6th to 10th century.

The Babylonian Talmud, which contains interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures by rabbis characterized Africans as, I wouldn't say subhuman, but others.

And those Biblical interpretations included interpretations of passages like the curse of Cain, who killed Abel, his brother, that he offered a sacrifice that wasn't acceptable, the smoke came up, hit him in the face and he turned black.

And so, that immorality, hint, tinge, with black skin, was planted at that time, and also, the curse of Ham, where Canaan, one of the four sons of Ham, saw Noah in his nakedness, and then he was cursed by his father, Noah, and that curse turned his skin black.

But somehow, over the centuries, not only was Canaan turned black, but all the sons of Ham were cursed likewise, according to European and American theologians.

European racists picked up on that, and they took it to another level, especially when they began to import slaves from Africa for sale.

They had to reframe the history to cancel out, to eradicate the rich history of Africa, to looking at people as animals.

You know, they portrayed Africans with tails.

They called Africa the Dark Continent.

Physiological characterization, elongated sex organs, large hips, powerful legs, big lips, wide nose, all of that was encoded as Black, and as a result of the curse of the immorality of people of African descent.

And so, immorality then was encoded by racists as black skin versus Caucasian skin, which was purity and righteousness and morality.

The white Christ that was imported along with the slaves.

That foolishness encouraged them to do all of this nonsense against the African slaves.

They took all of that, Stephen, and they sacralized all of those myths, all those lies.

In other words, they said, this is the truth.

This is the God's truth, and this is what has happened to Africa and American theologians were just brutal against the absence of anything of any value coming out of Africa.

And so, that formed the context in which the Black church would come.

Yeah.

So when you cast forward 400 and some years, from that moment, from that sort of pivot in our journey, talk about now, where we see the vestiges of that, the things that form the Black church today, that have their roots there.

Kenita Harris, I'd love to have you talk about that.

I think where this really shows up in the Black church today is in terms of thinking about the Black church as a response to the moral imperative, that to the moral imperative in terms of injustice done, not only to Black people, and of course, the existence of the Black church is indeed that whether we acknowledge it or not, truly, the Black church, at its core, I think, has had a presence in terms of the response to injustice injustice done to Black folk, but as well as injustice done to different groups within society who've been oppressed.

And so we sort of, again, in today, see those nuances that sort of continue into the present life, or the modern day life of the Black church.

And so, in that we can see that in terms of not only in forms of responding to injustice, but injustice, such as, you know, racism, and the Black church always being a space of affirmation, of Black people in terms of their humanity, in terms of their religious experience and their spirituality and the ability to be able to freely express that.

And now, we see even a diversity.

There's never been necessarily a monolithic in terms of what it means to be Black and to be spiritual or to be Black and to have a religious experience.

There's never been a monolith, even when we think about, in terms of historically, how denominations within the Christian tradition that have been created initially by Black folk, there's still sort of a diversity there.

And what tied all of those traditions was, of course, belief in Jesus, but also, the belief in God entering into the context and the experience of Black people.

For me, myself, being a Millennial, one of the things that I think I see is sort of a return to the fact that we're really, actually, very racial and ethnically and culturally diverse within the African-American community.

That, again, stems back to us not being necessarily a monolith.

And so, what that then entails, I think, is even this sort of sense of being able to recover sort of the experiences, the culture and religious and spiritual expressions and even ideologies that we see within African culture and African spirituality and religion and returning to those, in a sense, to be able to understand even in terms of our own affirmation of ourselves as being created in the image of God and being able to freely express, and live that out.

Again, as Dr. Harris said, those roots were never snuffed out of our spirituality.

They were still rooted deep within us.

And we see those expressions throughout different aspects of a Black religious experience and spirituality, whether we look at the music.

You know, Black, sacred music, from spiritual hymns, to folk music, to gospel music, even in those sorts of religious expressions, we still hear the rhythms, if you will, of our ancestors in terms of African spirituality.

I'm a historian, so I wanna go back just a bit and pick up that there are threads that run through the development of the Black church in America, and two words that come to the surface that Kenita and I have been talking about is the word prophetic and the word subversive.

Hmm.

Yeah.

That those two words shape the African-American response in the crucible of oppression, the Black church that James Melvin Washington called the Black communal womb.

In that incubator, the struggle over these hundreds of years in America to this day, the idea of prophetic and prophetic come to play.

Now, when I say prophetic, I mean, it's rooted in the Old Testament scriptures.

Even though Europeans try to brainwash Blacks to believe their way in terms of the interpreting scripture, Blacks didn't buy it.

You know, they were sitting quietly on the plantation listen to these stupid sermons, but they weren't believing it, okay?

And so they would go into their quarters and go into the hushed harbors and they would strategize.

How do we, first of all, we don't believe that stuff.

And so, let's continue to figure out ways to undermine how we're being treated.

And so, they were subversive in a righteous way.

They were righteous warriors and plantation owners throughout the South couldn't sleep at night because they didn't know when the slaves were gonna rise up, because these were not folk who just got off a boat, but these were African warriors.

They were African royalty, they were kings, they were statesmen who would not tolerate the conditions of slavery without a fight.

And if you look at the books that were written by Black scholars a generation ago, the titles tell you something Kelly Brown Douglas, "The Black Christ," in answer to this white Christ thing.

Cain Hope Felder, "The God of the Oppressed."

James Melvin Washington "Conversations with God: "Two Centuries of African-American Prayers."

And then, he also wrote the book, a great book, "Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Quest for Social Power," Gayraud Wilmore, "Black Religion and Black Radicalism: "An Interpretation of the Religious History "of Black America."

I mean, scholars have done a job.

(Stephen laughing) Reframing, in a proper sense, the origins of struggle and subversiveness and the prophetic authenticity of the work that they've done to confront racism and injustice in America.

It's not a moral vacuum.

It is rich in value, rich in tradition, rich in righteous indignation, and so, that is the crucible that helps us to identify who we are as the Black church.

Yeah.

Kenita Harris, I would love for you to pick up on that idea of prophecy.

What is the role that the Black church will be asked to play?

Think of all of the things that we are dealing with right now.

Yeah.

African-Americans, really trying to, I think, redefine our place and our role in American society, the church is bedrock in that movement and in that conversation.

So prophesy a little bit about where- Well, I think, again, I think reaching back into the prophetic tradition and this whole idea of subversiveness, and this role that the Black church has played in terms of in movements.

Whether it's been acknowledged or not by those of the day, the Black church experience, the presence of the Black church has always, again, had this role of holding up the moral imperative, of calling out injustice, and then calling out injustice in terms of a return to a moral sort of rightness.

As Reverend Robert talks about, a moral sort of revival, if you will, within America, and having that sort of role, prophetic role, if you will, in relationship to political realities.

I think that's really the challenge of what we're facing, as the Black church today.

And I mean, in terms of living within an age of movement, right, we've seen sort of the uprising of movements, from Black Lives Matter to the hashtag movements, to #MeToo, but then, even this sense of injustice that comes from, even with issues around immigration, issues pertaining to environmental justice, even sort of the lifting up of environmental racism.

I mean, there is a plethora of issues that we are addressing and facing.

But I think one of the things that, again, that even as a Millennial, and looking back in terms of this, again, prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power, and lifting up the moral imperative, I think one of the things that we continue to see is that particular call, and that particular role.

The Black church today, I think, has to, I think rediscover, in a sense, what its place is.

Its place in life, if you will, in terms of how and how are we called in a very diverse and inclusive way, to still speak to the issues that pertain to the Black community, to the Black experience, but as well as sort of think about our relationship to not only just our oppression, but the oppression of all.

(upbeat music) That is gonna do it for us this week.

We look forward to bringing you more important conversations each month about the Black church in Detroit.

You can find out more about our guests at americanblackjournal.org, and as always, you can keep up with us on Facebook and on Twitter.

We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) Announcer 1: From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Announcer 2: Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

Announcer 1: The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of "American Black Journal," in covering African-American history, culture and politics.

The DTE Foundation and "American Black Journal," partners in presenting African-American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

Announcer 2: Also brought to you by AAA, Nissan Foundation, Ally, Inpact at Home, UAW, Solidarity Forever, and viewers like you, thank you.

(gentle music)