About the Documentary

Easter in Washington, D.C.: The White House holds its annual Easter Egg Roll on its great lawn. But less than a mile away is the city’s Shaw neighborhood—one of the country’s most impoverished communities—where residents celebrate a more spiritual commemoration of the holiday. In the months leading up to Easter, Let the Church Say Amen follows the lives of four Shaw residents who rely on their neighborhood’s storefront church, the World Missions for Christ Church, to sustain them through the challenges of living in the inner city. Within the tightly proscribed boundaries of this church and its small congregation, they call upon faith and community to overcome the unemployment, homelessness and violence that affects their lives, as well as the lives of many other American families living in poverty.

Presented by executive producer and scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Let the Church Say Amen is a riveting and emotional documentary that tracks the daily lives and journeys of four World Missions for Christ parishioners as they work towards fulfilling their hopes for a better life, using their church as a source of strength and spiritual power. A former corner store, the church is a sanctuary where members gather every Sunday to sing, pray, testify and work to change their community. Originally founded in the 1970s by Rev. Dr. JoAnn Perkins with the support of her mother and eleven siblings, the church has not only saved the lives of those in Perkins’ neighborhood, but also those in her family. While living on welfare, Perkins earned a Ph.D. in special education through scholarships at Georgetown University. Meanwhile, her brother Bobby had slipped into a dangerous drug addiction. In the film, Bobby testifies how he was saved from a path of certain destruction by joining the church, which prompted his sister to give up her title and make him pastor.

Let the Church Say Amen also follows the stories of three other parishioners: Darlene Duncan, a mother of eight who wants to get off public assistance by training to become a nurse’s assistant, despite having only a sixth-grade education; David Surles, who lost his job, children and home to substance abuse and now lives and works in a homeless shelter, hoping to reunite his family by saving enough money to buy a house; and singer and evangelist Ceodtis Fulmore, or Brother C, who wants to reach out to young people by producing religious music. The church provides support for its members’ struggles and uses its modest resources to meet the essential needs of the community, hosting clothing and food giveaways, after-school tutoring, a book club, computer training, services for battered women, educational training and more.

World Missions for Christ Church is representative of an urban phenomenon: the storefront church, a long-time fundamental part of African American and Latino city life. Growing out of a need to reach the most disadvantaged citizens at the street level, these small churches sprang up as life rafts of faith in almost every American city during the Great Depression. Though rarely recognized by the media, these churches have become indispensable fixtures in the American landscape, transforming city blocks into religious and social service centers. By looking at the daily lives of the members of the World Missions for Christ Church, Let the Church Say Amen reveals how faith and community become essential for those who want to create lasting change within cities across the U.S., including the nation’s capital.

The Filmmakers

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Gates is one of the most prominent and well-known academics in the United States today. He has drawn the world’s attention to Harvard’s Afro-American Studies program since he took over as its chair, and his reputation has been solidly built on several fronts as well. As a critic and editor, Gates contributed to broadening the discourse on African American literature with books such as Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self and The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. He also wrote the introductions for two books by Thomas Roma, the collaborating photographer for LET THE CHURCH SAY AMEN: Come Sunday and Sanctuary. Gates has been instrumental in changing the literary canon in U.S. education and bringing literary history to light through the numerous critical texts and republished works he has edited, as well as lost manuscripts he has discovered. Beyond this, Gates has narrated a major PBS documentary on Africa and co-edited a Pan-African encyclopedia on CD-ROM.

David Petersen
Petersen’s films about self-sustaining communities have been exhibited at numerous international museums and festivals, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art,
the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of American History and The Library of Congress. His Academy Award-nominated documentary Fine Food, Fine Pastries, Open 6 to 9 received first place prizes in numerous international film festivals and won an Emmy and a CINE Golden Eagle award. His PBS documentary If You Lived Here You Would Be Home Now premiered at The National Gallery of Art and won a CINE Golden Eagle Award and was an Independent Spirit Award Nominee. His film I Run and Feel Rain: Scenes won a 1993 Rosebud Festival Award, and he has produced various programs for PBS. As an editor, his credits include Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, Roger and Me, City at Peace and numerous investigative documentaries for the PBS Frontline series. As a writer, Petersen received commissions from the Broadway performance art group Squonk Opera and the La Jolla Theater Company. His screenplay, I Run and Feel Rain, was optioned by Miramax. He has received artist fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Ragdale Foundation. Petersen currently teaches at New Jersey City University.

Mridu Chandra
Chandra has had her films exhibited at numerous international festivals and museums, including the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum, the Kennedy Center, the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights Film Program and the World Social Forum 2004 in Mumbai, India. In addition to producing LET THE CHURCH SAY AMEN, a 2004 Sundance Official Selection, she co-produced Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, a feature-length documentary portrait of the late civil rights and peace activist. A 2003 Sundance Official Selection, Brother Outsider has won numerous awards. A member of the CPB/WGBH Producers Academy, she has served as producer, associate producer and assistant editor on a variety of PBS productions in New York. Her writing appears in The Brooklyn Rail. She has a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Thomas Roma
Twice the recipient of Guggenheim Fellowships, Roma’s work has appeared in one-person and group exhibitions internationally, including one-person shows with accompanying books at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography. His books include Come Sunday, Found in Brooklyn, Sunset Park and Higher Ground. His work is in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal. Roma is currently the Director of Photography at Columbia University, as well as a founding contributing photographer for DoubleTake magazine.

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