A Series on Black Personhood and Freedom

I didn’t understand the faith or the worship practices of my church. Why would solidly middle and working class black folks—who, during the week, were principals, teachers, executives, and middle management in corporations—come into church bedecked in suits, ties, dresses, and hats and then work themselves into a spiritual and emotional frenzy? I tried to explain away our faith with history, sociology, and theology. I tried to push away my Pentecostal roots. I tried to push away the African spirituality of my childhood that believed in surrendering our lives, our very bodies, through tears, dance, through uplifted arms to God.

This form of religion was folly.

I dismissed it as so heavenly minded that it was no earthly good.

I dismissed it as unsophisticated, not well thought, and lacking spiritual rigor.

You could hear it as you parked your car. That holy fire emanating from the sound of the church. From the outside, the stately brick church with its stained glass windows of the Protestant reformers exuded dignity, poise, and a solid bourgeois, middle-class religion. But what you heard—as one rushed from the parking lot of this once white Lutheran church—was the sound of black freedom. We rushed to get into Progressive Church of God in Christ. The pews were packed from the ground to the balcony, bursting at the seams to hear the sound of the Hammond B-3 organ roaring its melodies, feet stomping upon the hardwood floors, tambourines rattling sounds of liberation, washboards zagging praises to God.

“Let the power of the Holy Ghost fall on me, Let the power of the Holy Ghost fall on me. Let it fall, let it fall, let it fall on me.”

It was as if the very building would break, the stained glass windows explode. The more we sang, the more the church would get worked into a sanctified frenzy. The saints (as we called ourselves) would start running, dancing, shouting. The church would be transformed: the ordinary, the mundane transformed into something beyond time or space.

This was old time religion… and frankly, I was embarrassed by it.

As a high schooler, I rebelled against the black Pentecostal tradition I was raised in. I didn’t understand why we didn’t sing hymns on a pipe organ and from a hymnal or with a praise band like my white high school classmates. In school, I learned about John Calvin, John Wesley, Charles G. Finney, and Billy Graham. I was educated into white evangelicalism and was frankly taught to be ashamed of my black religious heritage.

I struggled to understand why we drove from the suburbs into the heart of downtown Rochester, NY. Why couldn’t we assimilate like some of my other black classmates and go to the popular “multi-ethnic churches” led by white pastors?

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I failed to understand that the faith of my church, the faith of my parents and grandparents, was a religion of black freedom.

I failed to realize that in the sounds of the Hammond organ, in the sacred roar of handclapping and feet stomping, in the whirl of tambourines playing, my community was participating in acts of resistance.

That on Sunday morning, the black doctor who faced racism during her whole week was free to express the pain in her heart through the tears dripping down her face.

I missed that the black corporate executive, when he stood up and yelled hallelujah and threw his arms into the air, was releasing the frustrations of the microaggressions he faced on a daily basis.

This holy frenzy, the sacred sounds of black Pentecostalism, gave the congregants of my home church the only space during their week to be free. To be black and free, to speak to God about the joys and sorrows of life. This religion wasn’t otherworldly. Instead, it brought the divine into the mundane. It made God present to the burdens of blackness. It gave one the freedom to live as one ought to, without the need for permission from the world around us.

Peter J. Paris in The Social Teaching of the Black Churches writes:

It was out of the crucible of racial oppression, then, that the black Christian tradition emerged as a nonracist appropriation of the Christian faith. As such it represented the capacity of the human spirit to transcend the conditions of racism in both thought and practice.¹

The spirituality of black Pentecostalism was not foolish or unsophisticated. It was organized resistance.

If I had listened to the sounds of the drums beating through that church, I would have heard the call to justice. I would have heard the ways that the church paid for the college tuition of struggling students. I would have heard the appeals to support Historically Black Colleges, would have witnessed the way they supported the needs of Black Classical Musicians who were studying at the local conservatory, and would have seen their involvement in local politics.

I had failed to listen. Until, one Sunday morning, that refrain “Let the power of the Holy Ghost fall on me” struck my heart, my feet started moving, my arms started waving. I surrendered my body to the divine, and I joined my ancestors in a faith called freedom.

Image Credit: Russell Lee, “Members of the Pentecostal church praising the Lord. Chicago, Illinois,” negative, April 1941, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. Call #LC-USF34- 038774-D. Digital Reproduction #LC-DIG-fsa-8c00864.

Oh I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free

1. Peter J. Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 11.