The Black Church

The Church has always been the cornerstone of Black communities.  The Church is a place where people have gathered to celebrate, grieve and support one another.  The Church is where our stories are rooted and where we will find our history. In his 2021 book, The Black Church, This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song, Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr describes the Black Church as its own cultural system, requiring its own set of cultural proficiencies (Gates, 2021). While Black worship was tightly controlled and monitored during the antebellum period, newly emancipated enslaved persons were more or less left alone to worship as they pleased after the war’s end. The church provided a refuge from the daily indignities of discrimination, and provided an environment where Black people could practice and develop distinct disciplines of music, dance, reading, writing, rhetoric, and oratory (Gates, 2021). Iowa’s historic Black Churches and congregations hold true to the traditions outlined by Gates. The Des Moines Register newspaper archives from the 1870s through the 1950s are full of examples of the many ways the Black Church created and nurtured a rich cultural environment for the city’s Black residents. During any given week, congregations hosted visiting lecturers, concerts, plays, as well as a variety of social organizations and working groups dedicated to education, health, housing, and voting.