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Thanking God for His Gifts
I thank thee, Lord, for sparing me to see
this morning, the blood running warm in my veins, the activity
of my limbs and the use of my tongue. I thank thee for raiment
and for food, and above all, I thank thee for the gift of thy
darling son Jesus, who came all the way from heaven down to this
low ground of sorrow, who died upon the cross, that
"whosoever believeth upon him should not perish but have
everlasting life."
Our Lord, our Heavenly Master, we ask thee to
teach us. Guide us in the way we know not. Give us more faith
and a better understanding and a closer walk to thy bleeding
side.
I have faith to believe you are the same God
that was in the days that are past and gone. thou heard Elijah
prayed in the cleft of the mountain. Thou heard Paul and Silas
in jail. Thou heard the three Hebrew children in the fiery
furnace. I have a faith to believe that you have once heard me
pray, when I was laying and lugging around about the gates of
hell, no eye to pity me, no arm to save me. Thou reached down
your long arm of protection, snatched my soul from the midst of
eternal burning. Thou place me in the rock and placed a new song
in my mouth. Thou told me to go, and you would go with me; open
my mouth, and you would speak for me.
For that cause we call upon you at this hour.
And while we call upon thee, we ask you please don't go back on
Glory, neither turn a deaf ear to our call. But turn down the
kindness of a listening ear, catch or moans and groans, and take
them home to the High Heavens. We plead bold one thing more, if tis they glorious will, I pray thee.
O Lord, our Heavenly Master, we ask thee
please to search our hearts. Tie the reins of our minds. If thou
see anything laying and lugging around our hearts, not your
right hand planted and neither pleasing to thy sight, we ask
thee to remove it by the brightness of your coming, cast it in
the sea of forgiveness, where it will never rise up against us
in this world, neither condemn us at the bar of judgment, if it
is thy glorious will, I pray thee.
O God, our Heavenly Father, we ask thee to
please make us a better servant in the future than we have been
in the past, and may our last days be our best days.
We thank thee, our Heavenly Father, for what
you have done for us in days that past and gone, and what you
are doing at this present moment. I know you have been good to
me, because you have brought me a mighty long ways. Through many
dangers, toils, and snares I have already come. Twas grace that
brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me on.
O Lord, our Heavenly Father, will you please
have mercy; please remember the sick and the afflicted, the poor
and those in hospitals, bodies racked in pain, scorched with
parching fever; have mercy on them if tis thy glorious will, I
pray thee.
O Lord, my Heavenly Master, remember this
weak and unprofitable servant made the attempt to bow before
thee. Go behind me as a protecting angel, and by my side as a
safeguard. And when we have did all assigned to our hands to do,
this old world can afford us a home no longer, may we look back
and see a well-spent life and just before a joyful hour, that we
may be able to sing praise to the Father, Son, One God, world
without end. My soul say amen, amen, amen.
Source: Harold A. Carter's The Prayer Tradition of Black
People (1985) * *
* * * Harold A. Carter grew up in the 1940s,
in Selma, Alabama. He was the third of five children (two
boys and three girls) in the home of Reverend Nathan Mitchell
Carter, Sr. and Lillie Belle Carter. His father--Nathan
Carter--was a Baptist pastor and preacher, and also professor at
Selma University, a Baptist School founded in 1878 by Baptists
of Alabama. His father taught Bible and theology.
In the late 1950s, Harold Carter first earned a Bachelor of
Divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary (Chester, PA).
At some point between the mid 1950s and 1968, Harold Carter was
for a full year a pastoral assistant to Martin Luther King. In
1987 (?), Carter earned a Ph.D. in Theology at St. Mary's
Seminary and a Doctor of Ministry in the same month from Colgate
Rochester Divinity School. He was (1959-1964) a pastor at Court
Street Baptist (Lynchburg, VA) and has been pastor since 1964 of
New Shiloh Baptist (Baltimore, MD).
Dr. Carter led New Shiloh into a church and
Family Life Center, Sunday, May 27, 1990. Over the years of his
ministry, he has led citywide crusades in evangelistic ministry
across America and in many countries abroad. Dr. Carter's first
book "The Prayer Tradition of Black People" continues
to be a standard work in the Black Spiritual Anthology. A more
recent work, "Building Disciples in the Local Church,"
is being used by churches near and far, to build revival fires
in the local church. His Book, "America, Where Are You
Going?" has also proven to be a powerful call for America
to examine where she is going in light of the Christian faith,
so often compromised and even ignored in our present day world. Harold Carter thinks of himself as a minister,
"Determined to Live With Christ." Dr. Carter is
married to Dr. Weptanomah W. Carter, noted speaker, author and
founder of several ministries in New Shiloh Baptist Church.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 27 December 2011
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