The Black Church Quotes

“...enslaved people "were conjuring out of nothing that manhood that has been stripped away from them for four hundred years, they used the spirituals as a catalyst.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“Stories of Ayuba's Muslim religious practices - running away to find private spaces in which to say his daily prayers - led to his imprisonment. During his captivity, Ayuba wrote a letter in Arabic to his father in Africa, explaining the desperation of his situation and pleading for help. The letter made its way into the hands of James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, which began as an antislavery colony.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“Black churches viewed education and litercay as paramount to the success of the African American community...."the vast majorities of HBCUs were founded to be seminaries and divinity schools...schools in church basements evolved into HBCUs: Morehouse College arose from the basement of Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta Georgia; Selman College, from the basement of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta; and Tuskegee Institute, out of a room near the local AME Zion church.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“her theology, which Broughton summarized in the 1904 book Women's Work, as Gleaned from the Women of the Bible, offered "biblical precedents for gender equality”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“...the great blues musician W.C. Handy said, "I think these spirituals did more for our emancipation than all the guns of the Civil War.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“White planters used the Bible to justify slavery; Black people, held in bondage, used the spirituals to express their own beliefs in God, justice, and freedom. Frederick Douglass called the songs "a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“Active in the antislavery effort, helping enslaved persons, including Frederick Douglass, find safety in the North, the AME Zion Church also counted Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman as members. These abolitionists were believers who framed their powerful arguments for freedom and equality in the language of scripture and an uncorrupted Christianity.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“Estimates of the percentage of enslaved Africans who were Muslim arriving in North America vary widely...between 8 and 20 percent is a reasonable estimate...”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“..we find some of the deepest traces of Islam and other traditional African religions in places like Sapelo Island, home of the Gullah Geechee people. Islam's strong roots persisted here in ways that creolized Black Christianity.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“W. E. B. Du Bois’s triptych of “the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song