May 14 - 20, 2021

On June 19, 2020, I made a commitment to educate myself on the lingering effects of racism, discrimination, and bias in America. Every day through June 18, 2021, I will read an article or book chapter, listen to a podcast, watch a movie or documentary, view a webinar, or do something substantive to educate myself in these areas. As part of that commitment, I will post to this blog each Friday with a list of what I've done over the past week as well as any pertinent thoughts or reflections.

Today's post covers the week of May 14-20, 2021.

 

The Black Church 

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, hosts this two-part, four-hour series for PBS on the history of the Black church in America. The series features several prominent scholars on African American history and the Black experience, including Rice's own Anthony Pinn.

 

Episode 1 begins with a review of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the religions that followed those slaves from Africa, including traditional African religions, Catholicism, and Islam. Morgan Godwin, an Anglican minister of the time, stated that because Africans could read and write and laugh, they were human and should be baptized, but because they were of a different race they should not be freed.

But enslaved Africans heard about Moses leading his people to the promised land in Exodus, the message of persecution from Jesus, and they saw themselves. So South Carolina passed the Negro Act of 1740, which limited slaves ability to assemble and make music. Slaves began to build small praises houses, which didn't violate the laws of assembly because of their size, but which also formed the basis for the physical Black churches to come.

As the Civil War approached, more than 200,000 Black men joined the Union army, while Black women staffed the war relief effort. On January 12, 1865, General Sherman of the Union Army meets with 20 Black Baptist and Methodist ministers about how he could help them after the war was over. Sherman issued Special Field Order #15, which divided more than 400,000 acres of Confederate land into 40 acre parcels for freed slaves. President Andrew Johnson later rescinded the order, leaving millions of freed men and women to fend for themselves.

Since learning to read and write was illegal for slaves under the Confederacy, the Black churches took on the role of educating both children and adults using the Bible. In fact, many Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were founded as divinity schools in church basements following Reconstruction. Black Southerners had been stripped of voting rights and lived in segregation, but the church remained a place of independence.

Episode 2 starts at the beginning of the 20th century. Many at the time saw the church as a powerful force against the sin of racism and violence. Yet migrants out of the former confederate states also found cultural differences between the North and South did not allow for their style of church. Southern worship was far more informal and looked down upon by Northerners.

So storefront churches began popping up to fill the void, as did religious Race Records - phonograph recordings of Southern spirituals and preaching. This time period also marked the beginning of the popularization of Gospel music - taking the songs and rhythms of Sunday to a mainstream audience on Saturday.

In the North, Nation of Islam leaders Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X told followers that, as Black people, God made you beautiful. Don't conform to what white people are asking - they are the problem, not you. In the South, the Black church became the center of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Some Black churches were afraid to participate in the Civil Rights movement for fear of retaliation. When Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in 1968, those in the movement were left to ponder what to do next.

With a void in leadership, secular organizations stepped forward with a new message of Black empowerment. The Black Panthers, for example, spread a message of moving away from the restrictions of the church. They believed in Black self-determination, empowerment, and self-defense. The church itself began to change as well. Pastors James Cone and Jeremiah Wright preached a Black theology that stressed a God intimately connected to the struggle of Black people. Yvette Flunder, a Bishop in the Church of Christ, pushed for Black churches to be more welcoming to the LGBTQ community in an effort to survive the rise in secular organizations.

In the 1980s and 1990s, rap and hip hop musicians talked about things going on in people's lives that the church didn't recognize or understand. And the church's swift condemnation of hip hop didn't help the situation. Musicians who were raised in the church broke away, feeling the church failed to respond to a more contemporary message.

Today's Black Lives Matter movement is also largely secular. As the Reverend William Barber, head of the Poor People's Campaign, tries to bring young people back to the church, he says this: "We need a moral critique, not a liberal and conservative critique. People know there's something wrong with a religion that nothing to say about the oppressive realities of life."

The episode ends with Gates back at his home church in West Virginia, telling a story about what the Black Church has meant to him. "Life has a way of reminding you that you need something bigger than you to get through a season. The Black church was the place where our people somehow made a way out of no way, and it's the place after a long and tiresome journey to which we can always return and call home."