The focus here is on the most important institution in the history of the African-American community – the black church: how it began in the era of slavery, how its unique identity evolved over time and the central role which it played in fighting the long battle for civil equality. “The black church was the cultural cauldron that black people created to combat a system designed in every way to crush their spirit,” Gates writes. “The miracle of African-American survival can be traced directly to the miraculous ways that our ancestors – across a range of denominations and through the widest variety of worship – reinvented the religion that their ‘masters’ thought would keep them subservient.