Stream It or Skip It: ‘The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song’ on PBS, Where Henry Louis Gates Examines More Than 3 Centuries of Religion in the Black Community

The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song is a four-hour docuseries (aired over two nights by PBS) about the history of religion among African-Americans and how the Black church has had to adapt in modern times. Henry Louis Gates Jr., whom most people know from his PBS series Finding Your Roots, is the host and one of the executive producers of the series. He travels to different historic churches all over the South (and a few in the North), talking to pastors and historians about the significance of the Black church in American history, and how instrumental it was during the final years of slavery in the U.S., and also helped bring community to the newly-freed enslaved people who were facing the ratcheting up of segregation after the Civil War.

THE BLACK CHURCH: THIS IS OUR STORY, THIS IS OUR SONG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of a slave-era praise house and a small wooden church.

The Gist: The first hour mostly examines what religions Africans who were brought over on middle passage slave ships carried with them, and how they worshiped. It was a combination of a number of religions, including aspects of Christianity and Islam. Then Gates, through interviews with the aforementioned pastors and historians — and celebrities who grew up in the church like Jennifer Hudson, Oprah Winfrey and John Legend (one of the docuseries’ EPs) — traces the origins of the Black-run Southern Baptist congregations that developed when slave owners took their enslaved people to services.

From there, the American Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, founded by Richard Allen, Absalom Jones and other freemen who advocated for the abolition of slavery, was founded in the late 1700s. The role of women in both churches is also discussed; Vashti Murphy McKenzie, who became the AME’s first female bishop in 2000, is one of the experts interviewed.

The second hour discusses the political leanings of the various Black church sects, especially as the Civil War raged on. He moves through the church’s role in politics, especially as Black men got the right to vote, along with how they tried to combat the Jim Crow laws that fueled segregation just as the enslaved population was struggling to establish themselves as free people. For example, church officials negotiated the land part of the “40 acres and a mule” settlement with General Sherman after his march across Georgia, before President Andrew Johnson took it away.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In a lot of ways, the first two hours of The Black Church could be a companion piece to CNN’s recent docuseries Lincoln: Divided We Stand.

Our Take: Gates and his fellow executive producer, Dyllan McGee, have created a compelling four-hour docuseries about a part of American history that is isn’t well known outside the Black community, but is exceedingly crucial to furthering people’s understanding of the Black experience in this country, and why the experience of today has such deep ties to enslaved lives lived 250 and more years ago.

Gates, as he has done in so many of his PBS series and specials, brings his subject matter down to the personal level. Gates knows the spirituals and the hymns, and he sings them with aplomb at different times during the series. He is awed but not intimidated when he goes into historic churches, and he and the experts that are interviewed make sense of the rise of Black churches within the context of the tough history Blacks in this country have had, from the first Africans coming over on the middle passage to 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests.

We’re looking forward to the next two hours, which go over the civil rights movement and the historic presence of Martin Luther King and bring the narrative up to the moment, where the Black church struggles to find their place in today’s BLM protest movement, as well as modernizing their message when it comes to issues like gay rights.

Parting Shot: At the end of the first hour, Gates talks about the beginning of the Civil War, and, referring to how the enslaved people identified with the story of Exodus, says that “Black Christians believed that the fall of Pharaoh, and their exodus from Egypt, was finally at hand.”

Sleeper Star: No one’s a sleeper because everyone Gates and the filmmakers talked to is integral to telling the story of the Black church’s influence on American history.

Most Pilot-y Line: None.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song is a well-paced, well-researched look into how impactful religion in the Black community has been, stretching back to the earliest days of our country’s history.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song On PBS.org