After the assassinations of leaders Black like Martin Luther King Jr., many Black churches found themselves at a crossroads - struggling to remain relevant as secularization increased, while having to take on urgent social and cultural issues within their congregations and broader Black communities. The series continues with Part Two, documenting the Black church’s expansion of its reach to address social issues including inequality, and ministering to those in need, from the Great Migration - the movement of millions of African Americans out of the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest and West that began around 1916 - to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s. Key figures whose stories are told in the series include founder Richard Allen and preacher Jarena Lee of the African Methodist Episcopal Church abolitionist Frederick Douglass influential religious figure Henry McNeal Turner and pioneers Virginia Broughton and Nannie Helen Burroughs of the National Baptist Convention.

Gates speaks with noted scholars, public figures, and religious leaders about faith and the struggle for rights in the midst of growing racial violence that would continue well into the 20th century. In Part One, host Gates explores the roots of African American religion, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and the extraordinary ways enslaved Africans preserved and adapted their faith practices under the brutal realities of human bondage. ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ Gave Mrs. “We wanted to make a series about the sheer transcendent power of belief, and never has that message been more important than now.” “The Black church is the oldest, the most continuous and most important institution created in the history of Black people in this country, and I’m honored that we have made this series, and will be sharing it with audiences at a time when these stories of grace and resilience, struggle and redemption, hope and healing would be so desperately needed, given all that we’ve lost and all that we’ve endured in the last year,” Gates said on Friday during the TCA’s Winter Press Tour virtual PBS panel. The upcoming PBS documentary reveals how Black people have worshipped and, through their spiritual journeys, improvised ways to bring their faith traditions from the African continent to the New World while interpreting them into a form of Christianity that was truly their own, in a nation whose original sin was the enslavement of their ancestors across the Middle Passage. It traces the centuries old story of the Black church in America, all the way down to its foundational role as the site of African American survival, freedom, solidarity and speaking truth to power. “ The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song” is a soul-stirring two-part, four-hour documentary series from executive producer, host and writer Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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