For best-selling author Henry Louis Gates Jr., the next couple of months is set to yield something he is accustomed to: widespread anticipation of another of his literary works. This time it’s for “The Black Church: “This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song.”
No title cover has even been released for “The Black Church,” which debuts Feb. 16, 2021. We do know that book is a companion to a 2021 PBS series.
On one of his social media platforms, Gates, who is renowned as one of the most important voices on the African-American experience, has posted this:
“I am thrilled to share the title of my next documentary — The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song. The two-part series will examine the deep history of the Black church and culture of African American faith communities. Coming to PBS in 2021. #BlackChurchPBS #PressTourPBS.”
Eager readers can pre-order the companion book at https://bit.ly/3gyhlym.
Notables such as historian Cornell West have gotten a sneak peek at what is to come.
Writes West, “Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has once again delved deep into the doings and sufferings of Black people in the USA! This time he gives us a rich story and riveting song of the profound forms of spirituality and musicality that sustained Black sanity and dignity.”
According to West, although Gates “rightly highlights the centrality of the ambiguous legacy of the Black Church, he also explores the crucial realities of Islam and other non-Christian religious practices. And the last powerful and playful chapter on his personal dance with an elusive Holy Ghost lays bare his own signifying genius grounded in a genuine love of Black people and culture!”
A reminder, you can pre-order.
A release about the upcoming work notes that a young Gates grew up in a small, segregated West Virginia town, where the church was his family and his community’s true center of gravity.
“Within those walls, voices were lifted up in song to call forth the best in each other, and to comfort each other when times were at their worst. In this book, his tender and magisterial reckoning with the meaning of the Black church in American history, Gates takes us from his own experience onto a journey across more than four hundred years and spanning the entire country.”
The road’s end, the release asserts, leads to “a new understanding of the centrality of the Black church to the American story – as a cultural and political force, as the center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as an unparalleled incubator of talent, and as a crucible for working through the community’s most important issues, down to today.”
“Begin Again” author Eddie S. Glaude Jr. also has seen what Gates is bringing next.
“Absolutely brilliant – a book that should spark a very rich conversation within the field and echo far beyond it. Its reckoning with the Holy Ghost in the context of Gates’s own childhood is extraordinary,” he writes.
“More than a wonderful synthesis of a deep literature about Black Christendom, it is a necessary reminder of where the Black community has found its strength to persevere, and to fight, and where it must find it still. Not least, Gates shows us that sacred music has never just been music; it is a taproot and a through-line across all of American history. A necessary and moving work.”
Dr. Marla Frederick, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Religion and Culture, Emory University, Candler School of Theology, puts it succinctly: “If you want to understand the long arc of black struggle, hope and resilience, read Gates’ ‘The Black Church.’ It is a concise and compelling history of the significance of black churches in American society.”
AT A GLANCE
“The Black Church: “This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song”
By Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Hardcover | $30.00
Published by Penguin Press
Feb 16, 2021
304 Pages
ISBN 9781984880338
Pre-order: https://bit.ly/3gyhlym
