The Black church has also nurtured the vital feeling of “somebody-ness.” Gates quotes the late businessman and civil rights activist Vernon Jordan, who described the experience of attending church on Sunday, wearing your best clothes, after a workweek of being called “boy”: “You not only were somebody, you felt like you were somebody.” Gates has written a book that fills a gaping hole and is equally eye-opening for novices and experts in the field. The reader gains a deep understanding of why Black churches have so often been the target of bombings, arson, and other violence. The book covers both the church’s personal, spiritual role, as a source of comfort, consolation, and dignity during slavery and its painful, lingering aftermath, and its institutional role, as the central pillar of organization and support in the struggle for social justice and political power from the time of the Underground Railroad to the present. It is an immense subject reaching back five centuries to the arrival of African slaves in the Americas. He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.After writing over two dozen books exploring aspects of the Black experience in the United States, Gates now takes on the subject that is arguably at the center of all of them: the role of the Black church. In 2011, his portrait, by Yuqi Wang, was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. African Americans created a form of Christianity with a liberating God and its center, a redemptive force for a nation whose original sin was slavery. in English Literature from Clare College at Cambridge in 1979, where he is also an Honorary Fellow.Ī former chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and The Studio Museum of Harlem. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, segregated West Virginia town, the church was his. in History, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. The companion book to the upcoming PBS series.

A native of Piedmont, West Virginia, Gates earned his B.A. THE BLACK CHURCH: THIS IS OUR STORY, THIS IS OUR SONG is a production of McGee Media, Inkwell Films and WETA Washington, DC. Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998 he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. from his alma mater, the University of Cambridge. Holman: What struck me was that we did not come here.

He is a recipient of a number of honorary degrees, most recently a Litt.D. What struck you most about the Black church history you helped present with Henry Louis Gates Jr. He has also produced and hosted more than 20 documentary films, most recently Making Black America on PBS.įinding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, is heading into its ninth season.

Henry louis gates jr the black church