The Black Church (McGee Media, Inkwell Films, WETA, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I stumbled out of bed after a long night during which we watched the entire PBS-TV series The Black Church, which started at 9 p.m. and was supposed to last for four hours but actually ran 5 ½ hours because of all the abominable pledge breaks that cluttered it up – I actually joked to Charles during the last one, “Who do they think is going to join KPBS at 2 in the morning?” Last night KPBS decided to show all four one-hour episodes of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s historical series The Black Church – this is their fourth mini-series on African-American history hosted and co-produced by Gates, along with an overall series on African-American history, a series on “Black America Since MLK,” and another one on Reconstruction and its aftermath (in which African-Americans were able to own land, build businesses, earn incomes and, most frightening of all to white Southerners’ sensibilities, vote and hold political power – until all that was systematically dismantled in the two decades from 1877 to 1896 and Black Americans reduced to the permanent situation of servitude and poverty white Americans, especially white Southerners, thought was their “due”). The official running time of this show was four hours, but thanks to the damnable amount of rather pitiful begging American public television continually has to do to stay afloat (since it doesn’t have a dedicated revenue stream from license fees paid by radio and TV set owners the way the British Broadcasting Corporation does) it got stretched to 5 ½ hours by the interminable “pledge breaks” inserted into it. So Charles and I stayed up until 2:30 a.m. and this morning I joked that we had done the reverse of the traditional “Saturday night and Sunday morning” – instead of stumbling out of bed with hangovers from a night of partying and making it as best we could to church on Sunday, we were stumbling out of bed and trying to pull ourselves together after a long night of church, or at least a long night of watching an extended TV show about church.

The promos for this show promised that even if you thought you knew about the history of the Black church, you’d learn something new – and the biggest new things I learned about the Black church, and African-American religious experience in general, came in the first few minutes of the show. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. mentioned that there were already Christians in Black Africa before the slaves were brought here – and, indeed, in 1491, one year before Christopher Columbus sailed on his ill-fated voyage, the king of Congo converted to Roman Catholicism and apparently, like the Emperor Constantine in Rome a millennium earlier, ordered his whole country to do so as well. And Christianity wasn’t the only Abrahamic religion to have a foothold on the African continent: a number of indigenous African countries had already adopted Islam. This shouldn’t have been a surprise to me since decades ago I read a book about the great African empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhay (the first two are names of modern African countries but the historic empires extended far beyond the modern borders, much the way the Roman Empire ruled a far greater swath of territory than modern-day Italy), and this book mentioned – among other things – that in the 13th century the world’s largest library was located at the University of Timbuktu. But, since none of the indigenous sub-Saharan African languages were written down, almost all the books at the University of Timbuktu were in Arabic, which functioned as the lingua franca of scholarship in Africa much the way Latin did in Europe. One of the most extraordinary historical documents unearthed by Gates and the researchers of this show was a diary kept by a slave in South Carolina (the show claims that 25 percent of all the slaves imported into the U.S. came through the port of Charleston, which became a sort of Slavery Central, and for that reason the coastal islands off Charleston was the locale in which Black Americans preserved more of their African cultural traditions than anywhere else) which was written in Arabic and was a full account of his experiences as a new slave.

This raises a lot of questions, including not only how this diary survived over the centuries but how the slave got away with writing it in the first place, since usually (as Gates points out in the narration) there were severe legal penalties for any slave caught reading or writing, or anyone else – Black or white – who tried to teach them to do so. The bizarre and never-ending attempts of American white supremacy to rationalize itself to itself – which led the framers of the U.S. Constitution, some of the most supremely logical people who ever lived, to rationalize the quandary at the heart of slavery, namely whether a slave is a person or property, by deciding slaves were three-fifths people and two-fifths property – were aware that there was a fundamental inconsistency (to put it mildly) to declare yourself the owner of someone who is just as capable of intellectual thought and creative expression as you are. Gates mentioned the so-called “ring shout,” which was one of the earliest religious rituals the slaves carried over from African culture and is actually a quite elaborate system of polyrhythmic handclapping done as the worshipers sit in a circle. I remember the story of how DuBose Heyward, whose novel Porgy, set in the Gullah country of South Carolina, became the basis of George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, took Gershwin to South Carolina and had him attend a “ring shout.” Within five minutes Gershwin, with his superb ear for all things musical, had caught the complicated rhythms and was clapping along – something Heyward thought no other white American at the time could have done.

One of the most important stories of how the Black church evolved during slavery is how whites had profound disagreements of their own over whether they should attempt to convert the slaves to Christianity – and, if so, just what sort of Christianity they should teach them. Some whites thought there was no reason to teach the slaves Christianity since all that was expected out of them was labor, and the whole rationalization of slavery was that these were inferior beings who weren’t as capable as white people and therefore deserved to be in a permanent condition of servitude. Others thought that a properly edited version of Christianity, stressing the rather creepy parts of the Bible that explicitly condone slavery and emphasize the duty of slaves to be obedient to their masters, would help the whole elaborate edifice of slavery keep going. But the Bible is also full of time bombs – the central myths of both Judaism (Moses confronting the Egyptian empire and leading his people on the Exodus to Palestine) and Christianity (Jesus being tortured and dying on the Cross at the hands of the representatives of an evil empire, only to be resurrected by divine intervention) are tales of an oppressed people rising up against their oppressors and getting God to help them. Gates included an amusing graphic in his series in which whole chapters of the Bible literally disappeared on screen to symbolize the parts the slaveowners didn’t want to expose their slaves to – including the whole book of Exodus other than chapters 19 and 20. Meanwhile, enough slaves began learning enough about the Bible – including the forbidden stories of the Exodus and Christ’s tortures on the cross – even if they couldn’t read it themselves, they could memorize it and tell each other its stories.

By the early 19th century there were enough free African-Americans, especially in the North (Gates touches on the well-known story of the invention of the cotton gin, ironically by a New Englander, which kick-started the Southern slave economy by giving it a newly lucrative product, cotton; before that most of the agricultural slaves had worked on tobacco plantations, but the combination of a practical way to separate cotton bolls from their seeds and the simultaneous rise of a major textile industry in Great Britain that needed cotton as a raw material kept slavery alive in the South as it slowly but surely died out in the North), to have built up substantial Black churches – and Gates stresses that these were virtually the only enterprises in the U.S. actually owned, operated and financed by African-Americans. (W. E. B. DuBois wrote in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk that even very poor Black communities would pool whatever funds they had and build a large, roomy church, often made of brick instead of wood because brick implied permanence and also brick buildings were harder than wooden ones to burn down.) I think Gates is a bit unfair to Abraham Lincoln – ever since Howard Zinn it’s become virtually an article of faith on the American Left to question Lincoln’s bona fides and claim that he really wasn’t a principled opponent of slavery. Gates mentions Lincoln’s brief flirtation with the American Colonization Society – an organization founded by Kentucky Senator Henry Clay and his political supporters who had the idea of shipping American Blacks en masse to Africa, where they founded the nation of Liberia (with the ironic result that in today’s Liberia the descendants of U.S. slaves who were relocated there have formed an elite that oppresses the native populations of the area) – and hints that it lasted well into the Civil War. What the progressive historians who question Lincoln’s commitment to racial equality and justice ignore is all the contrary evidence, including Lincoln’s 1857 speech in which he said, “The Negro is a man” (a very radical sentiment for the time and one even quite a few abolitionists didn’t share) and the fact that when he wrote editor Horace Greeley in August 1862 that “my primary ambition in the current conflict is to preserve the Union, and not to preserve or destroy slavery,” he had the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in his desk drawer at the White House and he was only waiting for the Union armies to win enough of a victory on the battlefield to give it both military and political credibility. (This happened with Union General George McClellan’s victory at Antietam Creek, Maryland, on September 17, 1862.)

The Emancipation Proclamation was presented as a war measure and applied only to slaves held in the Confederate states, but aside from encouraging slaves to leave their plantations and join the Union army, it promised that the slaves in those states would be “now, henceforth and forever free.” Lincoln didn’t have to use the word “forever” – he used it because he wanted to, because he hoped that the Union victory in the Civil War would mean the end of slavery in the U.S. and that was what he wanted to achieve. As Gates tells the story, African-American Christians heard the Emancipation Proclamation and saw it as deliverance, and also trusted in the promise of Union general William Tecumseh Sherman that there would be a long strip of coastal land in the South from Charleston to the Georgia-Florida border which would be divided up between the slaves of the South, with each one getting what became the proverbial “40 acres and a mule.” Alas, in April 1865 Lincoln was assassinated and replaced as President by his running mate, Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Senator who had opposed secession but was just as racist as the rest of the white Southern political class (though Johnson also had come up from the lower classes – he hadn’t even been able to read or write until he married a schoolteacher and she taught him). Johnson set aside Sherman’s order and set about restoring the great Southern plantations to their white former owners – though, reflecting his status anxiety, he made them file petitions with him personally and beg to have their properties and their political rights restored. The next part of the story is the one Gates already told in his series on Reconstruction: the Congressional Reconstruction Acts, passed by a two-thirds Republican Congressional majority over Johnson’s vetoes, called for federal military occupation of the former Confederate states. Under the force of federal arms – and especially after Johnson was replaced in the White House by Ulysses S. Grant, the general credited with winning the Civil War for the North and a principled anti-racist – African-Americans began building businesses and running for political office.

Many of the successful candidates were former ministers – after all, the Black church was the largest reservoir of educated and intellectually accomplished people in the Black American community – and during the Grant Presidency the laws against voter suppression and the political violence wreaked on African-Americans by the Ku Klux Klan and other racist sickos were aggressively enforced. All that changed in 1877, when a corrupt deal between the Republican Party and the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to become President in exchange for a promise to end the federal occupation of the South – and without federal troops to enforce the civil rights of Blacks, the white so-called “Redeemers” of the South took power, destroyed thriving Black businesses and affluent communities, and mounted a campaign of terror to discourage Blacks from voting and reduce them once again to near-slave status as farmworkers or domestics, their principal occupations under slavery. Gates charts how this led to the so-called “Great Migration” of African-Americans from the South to the North in the early 20th century, attracted by the North’s growing economy (especially the availability of industrial jobs) and the relative freedom from racial prejudice – though there was enough racist violence from white Northerners as well that Black Southerners’ hopes for an anti-racist Nirvana in the North were quickly dashed. One part of the story Gates mentions is that the Northern Blacks had developed a quite different style of worship in their churches than their Southern brethren and sistren – and Black Southerners used to a quite different style of worship, one in which the congregation would be moved by something the minister said to start singing, hollering or whooping in response, were put off by the Northern Black churches, which held quiet, orderly services similar to those in white churches. This is a kind of yin-and-yang balancing act that runs through the entire history of African-American culture, especially its music: do we venerate and celebrate the folk origins of Black music or do we convert it into something more formal, more “classical,” to put our most respectable selves forward and show the whites that we’re just as good as they are?

Gates mentions the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a choral group organized by the historically Black Fisk University and sent out on tours, not only through the U.S. but internationally, both to raise badly needed money for the university and to show off their well-rehearsed, well-disciplined version of Black culture. Gates does a brief segment on Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the extraordinary Black performer who is not only one of the key figures in the evolution of Black church music from spirituals and “sorrow songs” into gospel but also one of the key figures in the creation of rock ’n’ roll. If anything, Gates actually underestimates just how much of America’s (and the world’s) popular music from the start of the 20th century to today has its roots in the Black church. All the key elements that shaped blues, jazz, soul and rock started in the Black church: the call-and-response patterns, the riffs, the blue tonality, the strong rhythms, the “worrying” (extensive ornamentation) of a song – there’s an interesting sample of it on The Black Church with Shirley Caesar, gospel veteran, singing the first line of “Amazing Grace” and stretching the one line out to almost a full minute with her ornamentation – and the powerful rhythms. Tharpe’s importance is not only as a singer but a guitar player as well; after making folk-gospel records on acoustic guitar (including the song “This Train,” later covered by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary and Bruce Springsteen), she picked up an electric guitar, signed on with Lucky Millinder’s big band and made records, some of them specifically gospel, some sexually racy secular blues and some (like her breakthrough hit, “Shout, Sister, Shout!”, which fused gospel and pop 13 years before Ray Charles got credit for that innovation) which mixed the two, which sound like she beamed in from 20, 30 or 50 years later.

Gates also mentions an odd variety of gospel record which sold plenty of copies in the late 1920’s: attempts to reproduce a capsule version of an entire Black church service, cut down to fit the 3-minute 20-second time limit of a 10-inch 78 rpm record. The most famous practitioner of this sort of record was Rev. J. M. Gates, whose career as a recording artist survived the Great Depression and was heard on a variety of labels, always pretty much to the same formula: a cut-down sermon that shades over from speaking into rhythmic declamation (essentially the origin of rap, though rap also has its roots in the Black insult game “The Dozens,” in which two or more Black men would get together on a street corner and each would think up nastier and more outrageous insults to hurl at the others) into full-throated singing. Harvey Louis Gates, Jr. (presumably no relation) cites a Gates record from 1930 called “Manish Women” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRd5vHP0U1Y), which pretty predictably is a full-throated defense of traditional gender roles and an attack on the titular “manish women” for not knowing their place. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was using this record not only to exemplify the mini-service genre but also to exemplify the pitfalls of the Black church and its willingness to be outfront about racism while simultaneously reproducing some of society’s other prejudices, notably sexism and homophobia. He details some of the powerful Black women who had to fight their church hierarchies for the right to preach – many of them were refused ordination but said so-what and evangelized anyway – and he also notes that quite a few Black clergy were as unenlightened about Queer issues as their white brethren, especially when the AIDS crisis hit and there were seemingly as many Black as white ministers proclaiming it as God’s judgment against Gay men.

Gates discusses the crucial role of the Black church in organizing the African-American civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and if anything he overrates the personal role of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of his interviewees says he doesn’t think the civil rights movement would have been as successful without King, which I rather doubt (especially since I’m still a good enough Marxist to be uncomfortable about “great man” theories of history). King himself – in his history of the Montgomery bus boycott, Stride Towards Freedom – said he came to the leadership of that action more by accident than anything else, and I suspect if he hadn’t emerged someone else would have. Gates also portrays the ongoing nature of the debate within the Black community over whether the victory against racism can be won strictly by nonviolent means or whether revolution will be necessary – he cites a meeting in the 1840’s at which Frederick Douglass and another Black leader (whose name escapes me – in fact Gates dropped so many names of important individuals in his story almost no one has heard of I felt like I should have been taking notes!) argued over whether slavery could be abolished without violence (which Douglass said it could and his opponent said it couldn’t), which sounded weirdly premonitory of the debates Martin Luther King’s and Malcolm X’s followers had in the 1960’s. Gates actually presents King and Malcolm as more in line with each other than history usually gives them credit for, including both being aware of the importance of winning Black people the vote and persuading them to use it. He even tries to situate the Nation of Islam within the Black church tradition, even though it explicitly rejected Christianity as the religion of the oppressors and embraced … well, something that called itself “Islam” but, as Malcolm X learned to his shock one day when he lunched with a member of the U.N. delegation from one of the Arab countries, had little to do with traditional Islam. (According to Malcolm’s own account in his autobiography, he outlined the theology of the Nation of Islam to the Arab delegate, and the Arab kept shaking his head and at the end told Malcolm, “That has nothing to do with the Islam I believe in.”)

Gates also does an interesting segment on Rev. Ike and his so-called “prosperity gospel,” including shots of Rev. Ike’s bling-festooned pulpit which looks like he had the same interior designer as Donald Trump. And as the story rolls on he details the ongoing violence against African-Americans, much of it from white police officers, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which – unlike previous African-American civil rights movements – has had precious little to do, organizationally or influentially, with the Black church. There are some interesting and somewhat aimless reflections as to whether the Black church has a “future” in an age that seems increasingly secular, in which even many people who believe in some sort of God and some sort of life after this one call themselves “spiritual” rather than “religious” and don’t affiliate with any particular faith tradition, denomination or creed. And, like a lot of other Black cultural commentators, he tries to defend rap (or “hip-hop,” to use the term for it by people who like it) by pointing to its socially conscious origins with groups like Public Enemy and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, without acknowledging (except briefly through a clip from an N.W.A. video) the cesspool of sexism, homophobia and racism against non-Black people of color rap has descended to – though he also shows a chilling scene of Black ministers collecting and destroying rap CD’s in a misguided attempt to suppress the form. It’s all too reminiscent of Hitler’s book-burnings and, closer to home, the response of fundamentalist white Christian ministers to John Lennon’s “We’re more popular than Jesus now” by organizing people to burn Beatles records and memorabilia. (I would dearly love to see rap disappear, but only in a socially and Constitutionally acceptable way: I would like to see people stop listening to it and stop buying it.)

The show’s ending seemed oddly inconclusive, and I suspect if Gates had made it a year or two later he would have included a segment on how the white establishment, especially in the South, is busy industriously reproducing their success in suppressing the Black vote after Reconstruction through a series of laws aimed at keeping Blacks, other people of color, and young and poor people in general from voting through a Byzantine system of regulations. The past few years have seen increasing efforts by white-dominated Republican state governments throughout the country to limit the vote and make sure that people who would be unlikely to vote Republican won’t be able to vote at all – and one of the big things they’re trying to do is prevent the African-American churches from mobilizing Black voters. We are at the beginning of what appears to be an epic confrontation between America’s carefully eked out democratic institutions and the anti-democratic features of the original U.S. Constitution – including the nearly absolute power it gave state legislatures to determine who could and who could not vote, including determining legislative districts as well as providing there should be elections at all. There is actually no constitutional guarantee that U.S. citizens can vote for the President, or even for a state’s electors to vote for President; there is nothing to stop a state from revoking that power from the people and assigning it to their legislature, and a number of the Republican voter-suppression bills are aimed at doing exactly that if the voters come up with a result the Republican legislators don’t like. These bills are so savage in their intent and so sweeping in their actual provisions that even someone as moderate as President Joe Biden has called them a threat to American democracy – and one suspects the main political, social and community-leadership challenge facing the Black church in the next 10, 20 or 30 years is to mobilize Black political power to turn out the Black vote in spite of these restrictions and to awaken the conscience of the country the way they were able to do in the 1860’s and again in the 1960’s.