The road to many of Mississippi's Black churches is easy to miss. 

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Some sit beyond stretches of farmland where cotton once dictated the rhythm of life and death. Others emerge unexpectedly from neighborhoods shaped by migration, disinvestment, and resilience. A few stand along highways where thousands pass every day without knowing the histories contained within their walls. Their steeples rise above fields, pine forests, railroad tracks, and small towns. Their cemeteries hold generations of families whose names rarely appear in official archives, but whose labor, faith, and sacrifice helped shape the state itself. 

 

Over the past year, I have traveled across Mississippi photographing Black churches. The journey carried me through the Delta, into the hills of North Mississippi, across central Mississippi, and eastward toward Meridian and Columbus. What began as a photographic project gradually became something else. The churches revealed themselves not merely as religious institutions but as historical records, repositories of memory, and living witnesses to Black life in the American South. 

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The buildings tell stories. 

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Some stories are visible. A weathered cornerstone marking a congregation's founding. Photographs of former pastors hanging in fellowship halls. Stained glass windows memorializing church mothers, deacons, and community leaders. Names etched into cemetery markers beneath cedar and oak trees. 

 

Other stories are less easily located. They survive through repetition. Through testimony. Through songs sung for generations. Through anniversaries, homecomings, revivals, and funerals. They persist because someone continues to remember. 

 

Mississippi has long occupied a complicated place within the American imagination. The state is frequently invoked through narratives of racial violence, political struggle, and poverty. Those histories matter. Yet they often overshadow another history equally central to understanding the region: the history of Black institution building. Across the state, Black communities created schools, businesses, newspapers, mutual aid societies, and churches that sustained life under conditions that frequently sought to deny Black people autonomy, dignity, and citizenship. 

 

Among these institutions, the Black church occupies a singular position. 

 

It has served as sanctuary and headquarters, classroom and refuge, gathering place and political forum. Long before many Black Mississippians could exercise meaningful political power, churches provided spaces where leadership could be cultivated, information shared, and collective futures imagined. During Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and into the present, the church functioned as one of the few institutions fully governed by Black communities themselves. 

 

Yet to speak only of politics would be to miss something essential. 

 

The churches I encountered were also deeply spiritual places. Their significance cannot be understood solely through activism or historical importance. They are spaces where the visible and invisible converge. Places where ancestors remain present in memory and rituals. Places where grief and joy often occupy the same pew. 

 

Raised in a Haitian household, I learned early that history is rarely confined to books. It lives in stories, gestures, songs, and traditions passed between generations. Spirituality was not separate from everyday life but woven into it. The boundary between memory and presence often felt porous. That understanding shaped the way I approached these churches. 

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Repeatedly, I found myself drawn to the spaces surrounding the sanctuaries as much as the sanctuaries themselves. 

 

The churchyards. 

 

The cemeteries. 

 

The fellowship halls. 

 

The vacant lots where former buildings once stood.