A Live Conversation with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on June 2

Please join us on June 2 at 7 p.m. ET for a live conversation between historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the Rev. Phillip Jackson as they discuss Gates’s new book, The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song. 

The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song is a tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America. Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s social and political landscape.

We invite teachers, students, and history lovers to join us for this event.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or co-authored twenty-two books and created eighteen documentary films, including Finding Your Roots. His six-part PBS documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program-Long Form as well as a Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and NAACP Image Award. He is also a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute.

The Rev. Phillip A. Jackson has been priest-in-charge of Trinity Church Wall Street since January 2020, after coming to Trinity as vicar in 2015. As priest-in-charge, the Rev. Jackson performs all duties of the Rector, including acting as the spiritual leader of the parish and managing operations, parish programs, the clergy, staff, and all resources and facilities of the church. He is a member of the President’s Council of the Gilder Lehrman Institute.