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Giving Thanks for a Committed Life
A Prayer by Martin Luther King
O God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee for
this golden privilege to worship thee, the only true God of the
universe. We come to thee today grateful that thou hast kept us
through the long night of the past and ushered us into the
challenge of the present and the bright hope of the future. We
are mindful, O God, that man cannot save himself, for man is not
the measure of things and humanity is not God.
Bound by our chains of sin and finiteness, we know we need a
savior. We thank thee, O God, for the spiritual nature of man.
We are in nature but we live above nature. Help us never to let
anyone or any condition pull us so low as to cause us to hate.
Give us the strength to love our enemies and do good to those
who despitefully use us and persecute us.
We thank thee for thy Church, founded upon the Word, that
challenges us to do more than sing and pray, but go out and work
as though the very answer to our prayers depended on us and not
upon thee. Then, finally, help us to realize that man was
created to shine like the stars and live on through all
eternity.
Keep us, we pray, in perfect peace, help us to walk together,
pray together, sing together, and live together until that day
when all of God's children—Black, White, Red, and Yellow—will rejoice in one common band of humanity in the kingdom of
our Lord and of our God, we pray. Amen.
Source: Harold A. Carter's 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
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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