TV Talk: PBS traces history of ‘The Black Church’ with John Legend, Yolanda Adams, Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

PBS’s “The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song” (9-11 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, WQED-TV), hosted by writer Henry Louis Gates Jr. (“Finding Our Roots”), explores the role of the church in religious terms and as a cultural and political center in the lives of Black Americans throughout American history.

“The church was the epicenter,” said producer-director Stacey Holman earlier this month during the PBS portion of the Television Critics Association winter 2021 virtual press tour. “It was the first place of agency for enslaved and free Blacks. It was a place where we could gather freely, we could commune freely, we could just surrender and we could worship God. It is in our roots, it is in our blood, regardless of where we stand with it now. But it is really instrumental in just making us and sustaining us.”

In the two-part, four-hour series Gates surveys the history of worship among Black Americans through interviews with scholars and famous faces, including gospel music legend Yolanda Adams and singer-songwriter John Legend.

“Jesus’ message was so much about helping the poor, helping the least of these people who have been downtrodden,” said Legend, who is also an executive producer on “The Black Church.” “As members of the lowest caste in American society, we have taken that on as a way of encouraging resilience and seeing a bigger purpose in our struggle and in our suffering. And I think that’s why the message of the church has been so resonant with Black people.”

In “The Black Church” Gates visits the church he grew up in in his hometown of Piedmont, W.Va., — “halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.,” he noted – and considers the role of religion in sustaining hope.

“Often religion is dismissed as being otherworldly,” Gates said. “But Black people clung to the church so they could believe in the future of their descendants here on earth, that by and by there would be a better day, by and by your grandchild would be free, your great grandchild would be free. They couldn’t imagine in 1850 the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War or the 13th Amendment. But through that blanket of cultural warmth and belief in spirituality, we drew sustenance from each other.”