by Rev. Dorothy S. Boulware
On Southern plantations before the Civil War, it was a secret meeting place, where enslaved people worshipped, learned to read, and sometimes plotted their escapes. During the civil rights movement, it hosted strategy sessions for boycotts and protests.
Now, the community is calling on the Black church, its cornerstone, again — this time, to preserve and teach Black history at a time when MAGA conservatives are all but erasing it from public school curriculum.
Sometimes blending Scripture with contemporary music and the arts, faith leaders are providing lessons on Black history to eager students. Some are using a curriculum developed in Florida, while others incorporate dance, theater, and visual art to tell the stories of enslaved Africans and their descendants that their children won’t get in class.
“Our nation is not concerned with preserving an accurate telling of our story. That’s why the church has to be the sacred keeper of our story,” said Rev. Charlie Dates, senior pastor of both Salem Baptist Church and Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago. “We’ve got to be the people to tell the truth, since many public schools have cut back on Black History lessons — and some are even forbidden.”
Black churches teaching Black history is nothing new. Sunday School and, before that, training unions of varied denominations often weaved outstanding feats of people of African descent into the faith lessons they taught every week,
Many are using a Black studies toolkit developed by Faith in Florida, a coalition of over 800 congregations across 41 counties in Florida. The coalition came together after Gov. Ron Desantis, a Republican — backed by the GOP-controlled state legislature — stripped an advanced-placement Black history course from the public school curriculum in 2023.
Our nation is not concerned with preserving an accurate telling of our story. That’s why the church has to be the sacred keeper of our story.
Rev. Charlie Dates, esteemed Chicago minister
At the same time, several local school districts in Florida and elsewhere have watered down or eliminated honest lessons on slavery, and pushed Black-themed books off library shelves.
Angered and frustrated by the moves, Black communities took matters into their own hands, partnering with the church to hold Black history classes for school-age children. They quickly became popular.
”Now our Black history classes are larger than our Sunday school classes and Bible classes because it has struck an interest,” Rev. Rhonda Thomas, executive director of Faith in Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times. Children, she said, now understand that the holiday honoring the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “is not just about a parade.”
Dates, the Chicago minister, says it’s a familiar mission for faith leaders.
“The Black church is the ship God sent to rescue Black people,” Dates told his congregation in the first 2024 Black History Month sermon.
“It was the Black church that stood to welcome our relatives from the South during the Great Migration,” he said. “It was Bishop Arthur M. Brazier who fought for the children of Woodlawn to attend classes like other students rather than in temporary buildings.”
Dates also gave a shout-out to Rev. Dr. James T. Meeks, a former Illinois state representative who is also the founding pastor of Salem. He also noted that members of Salem’s security team guarded then-Senator Barack Obama in Chicago the night he was elected president in 2008.
Rev. Andrea M. Foster, Coastal Atlantic provincial leader of Global United Fellowship, struck a similar chord about the church’s responsibility “because that’s where our history was birthed and connected.”
“We need to go back to the whole philosophy of teaching our children their history,” she says. “That’s how HBCUs got started. We need to have a department in our ministries that not only teaches Black history, but should be merged with the traditional Christian Education department. I think it would even draw children to Sunday school.”
They need to know, she added, that Harriet Tubman didn’t travel the Underground Railroad without praying.
Source: Seattle Medium
