In 2006, the Diocese of Washington asked the General Convention to include Thurgood Marshall in the Episcopal Church’s book of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. The request was referred to a church commission, but those who support Marshall’s cause can hold a Eucharist in his honor next month, perhaps on May 17, the anniversary of his victory in Brown. v. Board of Education.
Two men, two speeches. The men, both lawyers, both from Illinois, were seeking the presidency, despite what seemed their crippling connection with extremists. Each was young by modern standards for a president. Abraham Lincoln had turned fifty-one just five days before delivering his speech. Barack Obama was forty-six when he gave his. Their political experience was mainly provincial, in the Illinois legislature for both of them, and they had received little exposure at the national level—two years in the House of Representatives for Lincoln, four years in the Senate for Obama.
The Very Rev. Tracey Lind, dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, will take part in a panel discussion about race, religion and politics on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer tonight. The program is broadcast at 6 pm EDT; the panel discussion is expected to air about 6:30 pm.
The Archives of the Episcopal Church announces an electronic publication and online exhibit entitled, The Church Awakens: African Americans and the Struggle for Justice. The multimedia exhibit covers the period of enslavement to the present, with emphasis on the Civil Rights era.
The gift of Native Americans to the civil rights movement is the gift of a tiny minority fighting for its legal rights against overwhelming odds. Long before there were sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, there were Native activists fighting for justice in the Supreme Court. President Andrew Jackson ignored the verdict in one of these cases when he herded my ancestors on a death march.
Martin Luther King was a lot of things to a lot of people, and at this late date his memory has been mythologized and sterilized and romanticized past all recognition. But he knew how to answer Jesus’ question—he knew what it meant to come out of hiding as a Christian. He knew what it meant to be sought. What are you looking for, Martin? I’m looking for justice.
The Klu Klux Klan exemplifies overt racism. Institutions that claim to provide equal opportunity but use tests known to disadvantage a minority practice covert racism. Latent racism is perhaps the most insidious and intransigent form of racism, representing the stereotypes and prejudices to which all of us are exposed as a consequence of being born and raised in a racist society.
The researchers propose this explanation: most of the white folk who were behaving respectfully to the African Americans were having to devote a huge amount of energy to the unconscious process of censoring their actual negative impulses. So much so, that it took the brain an hour or so to recover equilibrium and restore normal service to all its functions.
For many years, I was a serious Anglophile. I loved being an Episcopalian, because we talked like Thomas Cranmer every single week (at least until the 1979 revision of the Prayer Book). I was obsessed with the Masterpiece Theater series on Henry VIII and Elizabeth I….
Race is often the “elephant in the room” about which nobody wants to speak. When I preach about racial justice, whether in a predominantly Caucasian or African-American congregation, invariably at least one person will tell me that I was brave for doing so. Why does the topic of race make people uncomfortable?