Discussed in this essay:
The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Penguin Press. 304 pages. $30. / PBS. Four hours.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. belongs to the postwar generation that grew up during, and then helped to shape, a shift in black consciousness from a sense of alienation to one of affirmation. When Gates was a student in the late Sixties, HBCUs had long taught Negro history, but the writers of what is sometimes referred to as the first generation of Black Studies brought to campus a new recognition of Africa’s importance to black America, rooted in black nationalist politics. And while movement politics may have fallen off in the Seventies, it left in black people and historians an awareness of their power to control the interpretation of black history. Alex Haley’s popular novel