An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 3/17/2021
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"[a nonviolent movement] has to make space for the expression of authentic anger, even rage... we might have had even greater power if we had somehow found a way to allow space for the expression of righteous anger."
In planning the lineup for the featured speakers at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King famously said of Prathia Hall that she was "the one platform speaker I would prefer not to follow." Born in 1940 Philadelphia, Hall was raised in a deep and comforting faith (her father was a Baptist minister). Hall graduated from Temple University in and promptly joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming one of its first women leaders. In September 1962 in Dawson, GA, Hall was among the voter registration workers who were threatened --and then wounded-- by enraged white shooters: https://www.crmvet.org/docs/pr/621009_sncc_pr_americus.pdf
That same year in Terrell County, a number of black churches were bombed and/or burned by Ku Klux Klansmen and their enablers/excuse-makers. Hall participated in a number of commemorative services in the aftermath of these arsons --one of them, amidst the still-smoldering ruins of Mount Olive Baptist Church, she delivered an impassioned speech which conspicuously repeated the phrase "I have a dream." Among the attendees at this particular service were James Bevel (see Lesson #58 in this series) and Martin Luther King. King would later credit Hall's stirring words with crystallizing his own choice of words during his famous speech on August 28, 1963.
The brutal events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 (Bloody Sunday) left Hall's faith shaken, and led her to question the civil rights' movement's entire underlying philosophy of nonviolence. After a period of five years she decided to attend Princeton Theological Seminary, and ultimately became an ordained Baptist minister, succeeding her father as pastor of Mount Sharon Baptist Church in Philadelphia. She would often speak of her deep-seated philosophy of "Freedom Faith," which dovetailed with her passion for social justice and a firm conviction that God very much intended for people to be free. In later years Hall was named to the Martin Luther King Chair in Social Ethics at Boston University School of Theology, and was the first woman to join the Baptist Ministers Conference in Philadelphia. In 1997, Ebony magazine named Hall as #1 on a list of "Top 15 Greatest Black Women Preachers."
Study more at: https://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/people/prathia_hall.html
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