Each Sunday for the Month of February 2026 NHMBC featured four members of the church community to give a video presentation of "A Moment in Black History and Person of the week .
What does it mean
Black History Month means looking back at the impact pioneers and leaders of the Black community have had on our community, organizations and cities. It means celebrating and honoring the legacy these leaders have laid for future generations to follow. It means supporting the advancement of the Black community amidst the racial injustices that continue to happen throughout the U.S. today.
It means educating ourselves further and honoring the fact that we would not be where we are today without the innovative contributions these Black leaders and pioneers have made — and to remind ourselves daily that Black history cannot be contained to a single month but should celebrated year-round.
Click on the video to presentation to see and hear their experiences and what it means to them.
The Black church has played a pivotal role in Black history, serving as a central hub for community support, political activism, education, and spiritual guidance, providing a safe space for African Americans to gather, resist oppression, and fight for social justice, particularly during times of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement; essentially acting as the backbone of the African American community throughout history.
Dr. Gloria Floyd
Dr. Shanteia Beavers
The Black Church was the cultural cauldron that Black people created to combat a
system designed to crush their spirit. Collectively and with enormous effort, they refused to allow that to happen. And the culture they created was sublime, awesome, majestic, lofty, glorious, and at all points subversive of the larger culture of enslavement that sought to destroy their humanity. The miracle of African American survival can be traced directly to the miraculous ways that our ancestors reinvented the religion that their “masters” thought would keep them subservient, Rather, that religion enabled them and their descendants to learn, to grow, to develop, to interpret and reinvent the world in which they were trapped; it enabled them to bide their time — ultimately, time for them to fight for their freedom, and for us to continue the fight for ours. It also gave them the moral authority to turn the mirror of religion back on their masters and to indict the nation for its original sin of allowing their enslavement to build up that “city upon a hill.” In exposing that hypocrisy at the heart of their “Christian” country, they exhorted succeeding generations to close the yawning gap between America’s founding ideals and the reality they had been forced to endure. Who were these people? As the late Rev. Joseph Lowery put it, “I don’t know whether the faith produced them, or if they produced the faith. But they belonged to each other.”
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