This week on PBS stations throughout the nation, including our own ATL PBA, an extraordinary and compelling documentary from Dr. Henry Louis Gates debuts. The four-part series is called “The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song.”
The series tells a 400-year-old story of the Black church in America, tracing and connecting its African roots to modern day experiences of African-Americans. In addition to worship, the series shows the many roles of the church, which the Rev. Al Sharpton describes as the “epicenter of Black life.” The culture of a Black church includes music, praise dances, gospel songs, hymns, and fashion.
A bonus feature to “The Black Church” has been created by Public Broadcasting Atlanta multiplatform producers Brianna Carr and Jaime Green. The feature, “Tell Me The Story” is specific to Atlanta and it explores the Black church experience in our city. They both joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes to talk about this project.
“It means so much to us to know that we get to share this beautiful world of worship, of faith, with our colleagues and viewers. To just invite them into this world and get a glimpse of what it’s like in the Black church, it’s very exciting,” said Carr. Green added, “We were inspired by Henry Louis Gates’ piece, but we got to dig much deeper into that conversation locally. Specifically seeing different leadership roles and seeing different people that would not always be put into the limelight of leading these amazing congregations in this lovely city. And then also a little of the history. We have so many historical churches here and we only scratch the surface. There are hundreds and hundreds of churches here and we couldn’t tell every story, but we wanted to make sure we really touched on the voice of Atlanta.”
The #AtlantaSundaysBest gallery will be featured on WABE.org/TellMeTheStory. You can see the “Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song” Feb. 17 on PBA at 9PM and 11PM.
