Beyond Eden: The Collected Sermons and Essays of Prathia Hall

By Courtney Pace

A major figure in African American social justice movements and Black theological praxis and theory, Rev. Dr. Prathia Laura Ann Hall (1940–2002) had not been the subject of a book-length critical study until Courtney Pace’s Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2019. Now with the publication of Beyond Eden: The Collected Sermons and Essays of Prathia Hall, Pace provides a volume of seminal importance to the fields of womanist theology and ethics, Black church history, and African American history.

Beyond Eden explores Hall’s preaching and research, curating a collection of her work to expand scholarship on her influence on American religion and Black churches. Hall pioneered womanist preaching, embodying the necessary interconnections among theology, social science, history, and practical ministry. She was a master organizer, not only leading her congregation but facilitating collaborations among national, regional, and local organizations to serve Black churches and Black communities. The sermons and essays in this volume showcase Hall’s womanist preaching brilliance, the seamless connection between church and the academy in her work, and her understanding of the gospel as Freedom Faith.

A trailblazer in the womanist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, Hall merged Christian ethics with Black feminist thought during decades of civil rights activism and preaching. Although she had very few publications due to the demands of her multifaceted vocation, health limitations, and familial responsibilities, her extensive work has been transcribed from handwritten notes and audio recordings by editor Courtney Pace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780820361789

Book preview

BEYOND

EDEN

BEYOND

EDEN

THE COLLECTED SERMONS AND ESSAYS OF

Prathia Hall

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Courtney Pace

THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

ATHENS

© 2022 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

Set in 9.5/13.5 Bunyan Pro Regular by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed digitally

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hall, Prathia LauraAnn, author. | Pace, Courtney, 1984– editor.

Title: Beyond Eden : the collected sermons and essays of Prathia Hall / edited with an introdution by Courtney Pace.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021040666 | ISBN 9780820361772 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820361789 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Hall, Prathia LauraAnn—Sermons. | Black theology—Miscellanea. | African Americans—Religion—Miscellanea. | Womanist theology—Miscellanea. | Feminist theology—Miscellanea. | LCGFT: Sermons. | Essays.

Classification: LCC BT82.7 .H35 2022 | DDC 230.089/96073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040666

DEDICATED TO

Rev. LaGretta Bjorn

(OF BLESSED MEMORY)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction:

From Freedom Faith to Beyond Eden

PART 1. SERMONS

Beyond Eden

Divine Assignment

Letter to the Church in Tough Times

The Church under Construction

Captivity’s Capture

Captivity Is a Lie

An Outrageous Assertion

Between the Wilderness and the Cliff

Broken by the Blessed

Children: A Suffering Sister, a Frantic Father, and a Dying Daughter

When the Hurts Do Not Heal

When Jesus Tells Her Story

Burden Bent

Crippled by a Spirit

Women in Ministry

Freedom Faith

We Seek Jesus

Journey with Jesus

Meeting at Galilee

The Hope of Glory: Christian Women Accounting for Their Hope

Treasure beyond Measure

Rekindle the Spirit

Grieving for the City

Music from the Rubble

A Nightmare in Broad Daylight

Peace to a Troubled World

Chosen or Choosing

The World in Whose Hands?

Working on the Building

The Pastor’s Prayer

A Message from Pastor Wynn

Cultural Counterfeit: A Wedding Homily for Edith Kimbrough

Excerpt from an Untitled Sermon on Domestic Violence

Stanford Baccalaureate Address: Earth’s People Crying for the Embrace of Peace and Justice

Vassar Baccalaureate Address

PART 2. ESSAYS AND OTHER WRITINGS

Exodus Interpretation in the African American Context

Evaluating, Reviving, and Revisioning the Meaning of the African American Church

Convergence and Crisis: The Impact of Racism and Sexism on the African American Community

The Ministry of Missions among African American Baptist Women

The African American Church at the Crossroad: Facing the Moral Challenge of Gender

Woman’s Space, Woman’s Place: Structural Ambiguity and Moral Dilemma in the Woman’s Convention of the NBC USA, Inc.

A Call to the 1995 Black Church Leadership Conference (October 18–20, 1995)

Dialogue on Black Theology

The Challenge of True Kinship

Heritage, the Primary Asset of the Black Church and the African American Community: Implications and Imperatives for the Twenty-First Century

Index

Acknowledgments

Thank you to University of Georgia Press for supporting this project. I want to express particular gratitude to Walter Biggins, now with the University of Pennsylvania Press, for believing in this endeavor and for his encouragement in its initial stages. Thank you to my UGA editor, James Patrick Allen, and to my reviewers, for your guidance and support. Thank you to Jon Davies and Irina du Quenoy for assistance with final edits and preparing the book for publication.

This volume would not be possible without Rev. LaGretta Bjorn (of blessed memory) and Akil Bjorn. Thank you for caring for Rev. Dr. Hall’s papers until they could be properly archived and digitized. Thank you for welcoming me into your home, and your family, and for encouraging my research and publication. And to Christina and Emma Grace Bjorn, thank you for being you!

Thank you to Equity for Women in the Church—an ecumenical movement to facilitate equal representation of clergywomen as pastors of multicultural churches in order to transform church and society—for your unwavering advocacy against sexism and racism in theological education, ministry placement, and ministry practice. I am proud to serve as Equity’s Prathia Hall Scholar in Residence of Social Justice History. Thank you to Jann Aldredge-Clanton and Sheila Sholes-Ross for leading Equity and for your mentorship of me and so many others. Thank you to my fellow board members for all that you do, seen and unseen, to support race and gender justice in the church and the world.

Thank you to Nevertheless She Preached for creating space to empower all people to dismantle patriarchal structures by elevating voices of faith leaders on the margins, especially womxn and sexual minorities of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Thank you to its cofounders, Natalie Webb and Kyndall Rothaus, and to my fellow board members for your faithfulness to the vision and for your openness to the Spirit.

Thank you to Valerie Bridgeman, founder of WomanPreach!, Inc., a training space to empower and nurture preachers from spaces inhospitable to their vocation and their voice, welcoming of all genders. WomanPreach! awards the prestigious Prathia Hall Social Justice Preaching Award, and half of my royalties for this volume will be donated to the organization to support its mission to empower and support women preachers and recognize those continuing Hall’s legacy.

I am blessed with wonderful friends, and I wouldn’t be me without them: Virzola Law, Jewel London, Christopher and Rhonda Davis, Wil Gafney, Tamura Lomax, Earle Fisher, Sinda Vanderpool, Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Betsy Flowers, Vanessa Lovelace, Eboni Marshall Turman, Jaime Clark-Soles, Gary Simpson, Vahisha Hasan, Candice Benbow, Karoline Lewis, Eliza Tweedy, Susan Shaw, Eileen Campbell-Reed, Broderick Greer, Gina Stewart, Ashley Coffield, Tami Sawyer, Floridia Jackson, Allyson Dylan Robinson, George Mason, Sarah and David Weatherspoon, Martha Simmons, Frank Thomas, Andre Johnson, Andrew Zirschky, LeighAnn and David Breckenridge, LaiLing Ngan, and Hulitt and Sheila Gloer. And to Ruth Ann Foster, Ken Norcross, and my Papa Stanley (all of blessed memory), I hope I am making you proud. Thank you to my theater friends Becky Fox, Rachel Donohue, and Amanda Fisher, for being fabulous. Thank you to my colleagues at FedEx Employees Credit Association, empowering financial justice for our members through the credit union movement. Thank you to my First Baptist Memphis church family, and to my pastor, Kathryn Kimmel. Special thanks to my doktorvater Doug Weaver, for ongoing encouragement and support through the zigzags of professional academic life. And sending up gratitude like glitter confetti for my best friend, Elizabeth Grasham, who drops truth and love in the most life-giving ways.

To my figure skating family—Peter and Darlene Cain, Liz Cain, Ashley Cain-Gribble, Timothy LeDuc, Amber Glenn, and Zachary Spillers—and to my trainer, Kate Richards, thank you for helping me find my bearings when they’re lost and for keeping me strong.

Thank you to my family for your faith in me and this project. To my husband, Michael, and our children, Stanley and Seren, thank you. For everything. For just being you. I love you.

Reader, I want to invite you to pause and think about who first read Bible stories with you, taught you to pray, welcomed your full spectrum of emotions and questions, encouraged you to pursue your dreams, reassured you when you felt broken, and cheered you as you got back up. Please tell her Thank you for me.

BEYOND

EDEN

Introduction

FROM FREEDOM FAITH TO BEYOND EDEN

Beyond Eden invites readers to behold Prathia Hall’s prophetic womanist imagination. Whereas my previous book, Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall, offers a thematic biography of Hall, Beyond Eden curates a collection of her pioneering womanist preaching and scholarship, embodying the interconnections between theology, social science, history, and practical ministry.¹ She was a master organizer, leading her congregation and facilitating collaboration between national, regional, and local organizations to serve Black churches and communities.

This introduction presents a brief summary of Hall’s life and an exploration of her womanist formation. It also includes notes on the collection that describe the editorial process and methods used to honor Hall’s wishes for publication of her sermons and research.

Early Life

Rev. Dr. Prathia LauraAnn Hall (1940–2002) was a civil rights activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a community organizer, and a scholar, as well as a significant and influential Baptist minister.

Raised in North Philadelphia, Hall assisted her father, Rev. Berkeley Hall, in his church ministry, and came of age shaped by his awareness of race and class stratification. He was her primary spiritual and intellectual mentor, and though he feared for her safety, he raised her to be an activist. A self-proclaimed race man, Rev. Hall purposefully introduced Prathia to such Black thinkers as Howard Thurman, Langston Hughes, Constance Baker Motley, and Adam Clayton Powell. In her youth, Hall also gained significant experience with public speaking through church programs, debate competitions, extracurricular activities, and community involvement.

Her first memory of segregation involved an experience she had at age five, while traveling to the South to visit her grandmother. The train conductor forced her and her sister from their seats, shoving them into a segregated car. Hall recognized the dehumanizing impact of his brutality, and the incident solidified her commitment to antiracism as a way of life. During high school and college, she joined Fellowship House, a Philadelphia organization dedicated to social justice, where she studied nonviolent activism and its philosophical roots, participated in demonstrations along the North Shore, and learned about the work of organizations like SNCC.

SNCC was just forming around this time (1960), with the goals of organizing voter registration drives and taking part in nonviolent direct action. Whereas Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) typically led short-term campaigns, SNCC students focused on long-term voter registration drives in counties with majority Black populations. SNCC recognized that voting tenured congressional representatives out of office could quickly change the dynamic of Congress and its committees. The organization’s project in southwest Georgia (SWGA) launched on November 17, 1961, and modeled the sought-after Beloved Community in its interracial nature and commitment to community collaboration.

Hall wanted to attend Tuskegee University, but as her father feared her going South, she matriculated at Temple instead. After her father’s unexpected death from a car accident, however, the development of the 1960s Greensboro sit-ins compounded her resolve to join SNCC after graduation and contribute to the fight for civil rights in the South.²

Hall in the Civil Rights Movement

In 1962 Hall informed her mother, Ruby, of her plans to join SNCC as a field secretary. Her work would involve canvassing door-to-door for Black voter registration, often requiring multiple visits to earn trust amid a difficult physical, social, and economic context. Many potential voters would not be persuaded, and some would not answer the door for fear of white retaliation. Since whites controlled most Black people’s employment, housing, and utility infrastructure, anything that suggested activism against white supremacy was a grave risk. Hall recognized the two-way educational exchange of SNCC’s approach:

We spent long hours on those porches. It took a long time. You didn’t just walk up to somebody and convince them to register to vote and take their life in their hands. And so you talk to a person sometimes two weeks before you had permission, the time was right even to broach the subject. But during that time, we had the information about political empowerment, voter registration, literacy. . . . They had the wisdom of the ages. And that’s what we received. And this was especially true in my experience in southwest Georgia.³

When Hall arrived in Albany, Georgia, in the late summer of 1962, she and SWGA project leader Charles Sherrod connected immediately. When Sherrod was out of town—by 1963, somewhat often—Hall took the helm. She spoke at mass meetings and for SWGA project fund-raising. Faith Holsaert, an activist from a nominally Jewish family, was blown away by Hall’s preaching and, even after attending events that also featured Martin Luther King Jr., was bowled over by Prathia—I had not imagined a young woman my age could possess such oratorical power.⁴

Hall trained new SNCC volunteers in how to survive in the South. Raised in the North by southern parents, educated in predominantly white schools, and familiar with Black Baptist traditions, she was well qualified to help white northern volunteers understand southern culture, including its notions of etiquette and propriety, so that they could effectively and safely connect with the local people. She also taught them how to relate compassionately to the community and each other, understand multidimensional, systemic oppression, and build relationships across existing divides. Hall explained:

Northern people who were never told that they couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t do anything, to the bathroom they wanted to or the drinking fountain or the restaurant, were not used to any restrictions. . . . We were in a brutally dangerous world where especially the fact that we were racially mixed was dynamite. And I did not find those kinds of restrictions irritating.⁵

As a trainer, Hall prepared SNCC workers for the physical and psychological realities of the South. All SNCC volunteers had to write their own wills as part of the onboarding paperwork when joining the organization. Combining practical tactics and contextualized fear, she helped SNCC’ers name the trauma they would face and understand that those they were setting out to help lived amid such fear unceasingly. As such, volunteers needed to honor Black residents’ reasonableness of wanting freedom while yet being too scared to act. She prepared volunteers for how to survive jail and police brutality:

Music was a lifeline, a source, a well from which we could draw . . . courage and strength in the face of eminent [sic] danger. With these forces of death with their guns loaded and sometimes drawn, surrounding you and taking down your name or license plate number, to be able then to sing and the relationship between the songs of the movement and the songs of the church is of one fabric, that’s a continuous thread. . . . In the movement rallies there would be some slight variation from the old prayer meetings that . . . has a different phrasing of the melody, those pregnant pauses, those are underlying, underscoring, it’s almost like you’re gulping for breath in the face of fear.⁶

In Hall’s first month in SWGA, police raided a July mass meeting at Mount Olive Baptist Church in Sasser, the second raid of its kind in two weeks. After recording license plate numbers, thirteen officers barged into the sanctuary to intimidate those gathered. After singing We Shall Overcome, Hall and others walked into a swarm of local police officers who were standing outside, taunting individuals with threats of terror.⁷

On August 30, Hall was among those in a car stopped by gunfire by Sasser deputy marshal D. E. Short. Short cursed at the driver for contesting the stop. Hall answered him by looking him in the eye—which was something that was forbidden, for Black people to look white people in the eye—and said to him, we’re talking to people about registration and you have no right to stop us. She described his reaction: He became just enraged. Changed colors, began literally foaming at the mouth, . . . cursed me in, with names I had, some I had never heard before or since. She later elaborated that after Short repeatedly shouted Shut up! he was trembling with rage and calling me a long-haired [yellow] bitch, he pulled a gun and began firing at the ground around our feet.⁸ Hall went numb:

If I had moved one muscle, I would have given him the excuse he wanted to raise the gun point blank and fire. . . . I believe my numbness was a gift from God that saved my life. . . . In that particular incident, I wasn’t operating out of fear, I wasn’t operating. I was just there. By the grace of God. I was glad to stand in that vermin-infested hole because I was alive. But I came very close to not being alive.⁹

On September 5, Hall and other SNCC workers gathered to welcome new recruit Jack Chatfield. They were making plans for their work as they stopped for gas on the way home, when their conversation was noticed by others present at the gas station, with horrific consequences. Chatfield was having a snack in the kitchen that night while the others slept, when he heard the sound of a quiet car motor, followed by gunfire. Sherrod darkened the house lights, then joined the others on the floor, where they were trained to lay during attacks. Hall and Chris Allen suffered minor bullet graze injuries, but Chatfield was shot twice in the arm. After nearly forty-five minutes on the floor, Sherrod crawled to the phone. Understandably suspicious of the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Sherrod called New York Times reporter Claude Sitton at midnight. Sherrod, then Hall, gave their accounts, while another team searched for a doctor who would treat Chatfield.¹⁰

Because of concerns about white retaliation, SNCC had difficulty finding churches willing to host mass meetings. In the summer of 1962, four Black churches in Terrell and Lee Counties, all associated with the movement in some way, were burned by white supremacists. Two wooden churches that stood five miles apart, Mount Olive Baptist Church (in Sasser) and Mount Mary Baptist Church (in Chickasawatchee), were burned within an hour of each other on the night of September 9. Hearing news of Mount Olive, Hall recounted, We dressed quickly and made our way to the church. There were no firefighters. The church had already burned to the ground.¹¹ Police declared the burnings not connected to civil rights activity.¹² Hall reflected:

As we stood there, more people gathered, members and friends of the church. We held hands together and sang and prayed. As we stood there watching the remains of Mt. Olive, Mr. Southwell of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrived. I extended my hand and said, I’m Prathia Hall. He looked at me and said, Don’t you know better than to stick your hand out there like that to speak to me? I said, Don’t human beings speak to each other that way? He walked away saying, Well it ain’t the way I live.¹³

SNCC held a prayer vigil in September 1962 by the ruins of Mount Olive Baptist Church. Martin Luther King Jr. attended as an invited speaker. Sitton reported, As the sun sets across the cotton fields, some fifty Negroes and two whites met at Mount Olive for a ‘prayer vigil.’ Joining hands, they sang softly, ‘We Shall Overcome.’ A wisp of smoke rose from the ashes of the church . . . The whites in the automobiles that shuttled slowly past looked on and said nothing. Hall led the group in prayer: ‘Lord, help us keep our heads up,’ Miss Hall said, her voice breaking. ‘Help us, Lord, as Mount Olive, Shady Grove, and Mount Mary Churches rise again out of the ashes. Lord, we’re going to be free. We want to be free so our children won’t have to grow up with their heads bowed.¹⁴ Throughout the prayer, Hall repeated the phrase I have a dream, emphasizing her vision for racial equality and justice. Such was the power of Hall’s preaching that Sitton, who did not customarily quote prayers in his reportage, did so here, while opting not to note King’s remarks at the same vigil.

Hall knew King from Fellowship House in Philadelphia and worked closely with him, particularly collaborating on speaking engagements and coordinating civil rights organizing work in Atlanta, which Hall led by the end of 1963. During a shared car ride from the Mount Olive vigil, King requested and received Hall’s permission to use her phrase I have a dream in his own speaking and began doing so as early as November of 1962. King described Hall as the one platform speaker I prefer not to follow.¹⁵

In January 1963, U.S. Attorney Floyd M. Buford sued Deputy Short for six counts of civil rights violations against Hall from late August 1962. Short pled not guilty and alleged that he had stopped their vehicle for out-of-state plates and incorrect parking, asked them to leave because Black citizens complained about SNCC workers threatening Black people who would not register, and offered to escort them out of town to protect them. During the subsequent January 1963 federal grand jury trial in Americus, Justice Department lawyers purposefully adopted racist identifiers for Black people, prohibited SNCC workers from interracial gathering during proceedings, and forbade Prathia Hall from wearing her hat in court because her dignified dress might offend Sasser farmers.¹⁶ Hall and others testified against Short for firing at them and fabricating charges. Directly contradicting his earlier testimony, Short claimed he had escorted them out of town to protect them from upset white people, and his lawyer made sexual allegations about SNCC and particularly about Hall. As she was unable to bring herself to repeat what Short called her, the judge permitted her to summarize. She did so, and reiterated her claim that he assaulted them to prevent their voter registration campaign. After twenty minutes of deliberation, a twelve-man, all-white jury acquitted Short of all charges on January 25, 1963.

Hall grieved the verdict as a defeat, particularly as she was in the North fund-raising for SNCC, but on returning to SWGA in February 1963, she understood that the people in the counties looked on it as a measure of hope because Short’s trial was the first time a white in this area had even been questioned and brought to trial for an injustice to a Negro. Though Hall did not win her case, she was the first person to sue police for brutality against Black lives in Georgia.¹⁷

SNCC’s work in SWGA gained momentum, with more workers joining the cause. The placement of white, northern student Faith Holsaert into Terrell County was particularly controversial, so she never officially lived there. Police officers regularly followed activists to the edge of town, brights beaming. In May SWGA shifted focus to Albany, and Hall was arrested within a week for brochure distribution. By June, police had arrested twenty-two of SNCC’s twenty-six members and one hundred forty demonstrators within a three-day period. Hall and the others not yet arrested hid until prompted to disguise themselves and flee to another location, hiding in a series of churches while two armed Black men stood watch by the door. Because SNCC’s strategy required large demonstrations, Police Chief Laurie Pritchett used large-scale arrests and high bail fines to deflate SNCC’s resources and undermine its strategy.¹⁸

By late 1962, SNCC planned a new campaign in Selma, Alabama, which commenced in early 1963 under the leadership of Bernard Lafayette. When he joined King’s SCLC later that year, SNCC executive secretary Jim Forman named Hall leader of the Selma project. Following the conviction of five civil rights workers for demonstrating the previous month, SNCC launched a massive voter registration campaign on October 7. Nearly three hundred individuals appeared for registration, while local sheriff Jim Clark harassed those in line and refused them food or water. Fourteen civil rights workers, including Hall, were arrested during the October 7 Freedom Day events. Hall was scheduled for trial November 14 for picketing and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but the trial was delayed until December after the Justice Department attorney refused to appear. On February 17, all fourteen were convicted for violating city ordinances—unlawful assembly and provocation—and fined $300 each.¹⁹

Impressed with Hall’s leadership in SWGA and Selma, SNCC appointed her to organize its collaboration with other groups in Atlanta. During a December 21 and 22, 1963, visit from Kenyan minister of home affairs Oginga Odinga, Hall and other SNCC’ers shared conversation and song. The Peachtree Toddle House denied them entry later that night, in Odinga’s plain sight. Another attempt to gain entrance to the restaurant, December 23, inspired a staged sit-in, during which seventeen were arrested. The following morning, on Christmas Eve, Hall, Gregory, and Yancey were arrested. All three held stock in Dobbs House Inc., which owned the Toddle House chain, and made national headlines—Stockholders Accused of Trespassing, New Civil Rights Tactic—Buying Stock, and New Type of Woman in Civil Rights Work—for being arrested on their own property; they were held at $100 bail in solitary confinement at Big Rock jail in Atlanta.²⁰

Released on January 2, 1964, Hall led SNCC’s intensified civil rights campaign in Atlanta. On January 11, following an Atlanta Summit Leadership Conference meeting, Hall was arrested during a sit-in at the Heart of Atlanta Motel along with John Lewis, Wyatt Tee Walker, Martin Luther King Jr., and others. Upon release, Hall returned to Albany for demonstrations at the town’s Toddle House. By mid-January, she helped negotiate for the integration of more than fifteen Dobbs House and Toddle House restaurants in Georgia and locations in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee.²¹

In early 1964 Georgia state and federal courts battled each other regarding jurisdiction over civil rights cases in Georgia. Hall’s case related to the Toddle House sit-in was initially assigned to Fulton County Superior Court judge Durwood T. Pye, notorious for abusing his power to enforce white supremacy. In an effort to limit further demonstrations, Pye required all arrested in the January 11 Heart of Atlanta Motel demonstration to attend each other’s trials. Hall’s case was second on the docket. After the first trial, the U.S. District Court petitioned to move the remaining cases to federal court. Pye refused to release Hall and needlessly delayed her hearing. Hall’s lawyers contested the move, claiming unconstitutional behavior. The U.S. District Court sued for custody of Hall; in an extended showdown, federal courts eventually freed her from Pye’s custody and released her on bond on March 24, 1964. The case progressed through various stages of appeal between Fulton County and the State of Georgia, not being fully dismissed until April 2, 1968.²²

Finding Freedom Faith

Hall viewed her voter registration and community education as a mutual educational exchange. SNCC workers knew how to vote, and the local people had learned the system and how to stay alive in the system morally, mentally, and spiritually—how to live in an oppressively crushing system without being crushed. She met people who had supported their families on less-than-subsistence wages earned by back-breaking labor and had weathered discrimination, threats, and violence with strength and nobility. She found the resilience of the community inspiring:

The primary lesson I received from those Black sages was that of faith for living in life-threatening circumstances. It was a faith first made manifest by our slave fore-parents who defied the teachings of the slavocracy. . . . Those profoundly spiritual women and men developed their own moral critique of the slaveholders’ oppressive brand of religion and expressed the slaves’ absolute conviction that slavery was contrary to the will of God and that God definitely intended them to be free. These sons and daughters of those enslaved ancestors continued to hold on to that freedom-faith. The freedom-faith fired and fueled the fight.²³

Freedom Faith, the idea that God meant all people to be free and equips those who work for liberation, grounded Hall’s theology. Following a philosophy first learned from her father, Hall believed that freedom and faith were woven together in the fabric of life, and that service to people was service to Christ.²⁴ She contextualized her understanding of Freedom Faith during her civil rights activism with SNCC, understanding its deeper call to trust God fully with one’s life for the sake of justice.

Hall directly connected efforts toward liberation with God’s will for humanity, implying God’s favor and provision for those who resisted oppression: This sense that I’m not a nigger, I’m not gal, I’m not boy. I am God’s child. And as God’s child, that means that I am everything that I’m supposed to be. In this same spirit, she praised the courage and resilience of generations of Black people who survived the brutality of enslavement and Jim Crow because of their faith in God. This same Freedom Faith would continue to sustain them as they opposed Jim Crow: It may cost my job, it may cost my life, but I want to be free, and I want my children to be free. So I’m going down to the courthouse, and I’m going to sign my name. And I’m going to trust God to take me there, and I’m going to trust God to bring me back. That’s courage. That’s faith. That’s freedom faith.²⁵

Hall’s language here clearly draws from Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited (1959), which she read with her father. Thurman related a story he had heard from his grandmother about an enslaved minister officiating secret religious meetings for the enslaved: You-you are not niggers. You-you are not slaves. You are God’s children. Thurman explained that having an identity as a child of God gave hearers of this message a profound sense of personal worth, which could absorb the fear reaction. Validating personal dignity offered that person the confirmation of his roots, and even death becomes a little thing.²⁶

From 1963–1965, arguably the most violent years of the modern civil rights movement, Hall accepted higher levels of leadership within SNCC, and the accompanying increased danger. As she led the organization’s work in Selma and Atlanta, she repeatedly faced arrest, police harassment, and the threat of death. Arrests did not frighten Hall but rather provided opportunities to proclaim Freedom Faith: In jail we drove the jailers crazy by singing. They wanted us out of these jails more than we wanted out—there was no stopping us. We’re already in jail, what are they going to do? Many times there were beatings, but they happened anyway.²⁷ Hall’s extended incarcerations during the movement enriched the hues of her theology of suffering for freedom: You can never appreciate the peace, the solace, the quiet appalling silence. You read about it in the Bible. But you can’t appreciate it unless you’ve been in jail. Been in jail for a just cause. There is such a purging of the soul that you feel as though you have been relieved of all of your sins. The burdens of the world have been taken off of you.²⁸

Hall’s Freedom Faith made her courageous in the midst of fear, capable of facing death for the sake of life: There’s the courage that’s lived when one lays down one’s life for a cause, and there is that other courage that is lived when one lives one’s life for a cause. Hall viewed such courage as profoundly religious as saying a prayer or doing any kind of religious discipline. Hand-in-hand with the Black sages of SWGA, Prathia Hall walked face-to-face with the forces of death in the struggle for life.²⁹

Hall’s Freedom Faith would find its ultimate expression in her Christocentric, womanist vision of liberation from all forms of oppression. She spoke strongly against layered structures of domination, even those Black religious circles might not want to address—sexism, racism, classism, ageism, heterosexism, denominationalism, etc.—and called upon hearers to work with those who affirmed the full equality of all others.

Ministry and Scholarship

Immediately following the SCLC’s march in Selma, commonly described as Bloody Sunday, Hall was among a select group of SCLC leaders flown to the city to help with the aftermath. Fearing overwhelming white retaliation against any Black response to the police brutality marchers faced on the bridge, SCLC representatives told the wounded gathered at Brown Chapel AME (African Methodist Episcopal Church) that if they couldn’t forgive those who had attacked them, they wouldn’t see Jesus when they died. To Hall, this was spiritual extortion in a moment when people needed space for righteous anger and grief. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, over the next year, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, SNCC expelled its white members. Dismayed both by SCLC’s heavy hand in suppressing Black communities’ grief from white supremacist brutality and SNCC’s move toward Black Power and away from the Beloved Community, Hall left the movement in 1966. After returning to Philadelphia, she continued activism in partnership with Fellowship House and other local organizations. She married her long-time boyfriend, Ralph Wynn, in 1966 and went on to have two children, DuBois and Simone.³⁰

Many decisions awaited Hall. She had sensed a call to ministry as a young person but had joined the Civil Rights Movement in part to escape it. During her SNCC years, she wrestled between attending law school or seminary. She feared the difficulties of life as a female Baptist pastor, but even noble alternative pursuits like civil rights law could not shake her sense of call to ministry.³¹ In 1976 she endured a period of intellectual and spiritual restlessness, prompting her to return to school, this time with certainty of her call to ministry. She lamented the years of reluctance to accept her call but reached the point where she must either preach or die. Her only source of doubt had always been her gender: Had I been born male, I would never have questioned that.³²

Beginning in 1979, Hall commuted to Princeton Theological Seminary for the master of divinity program and to Philadelphia each Sunday as the new pastor of Mount Sharon Baptist Church, founded by her father. She recognized at the beginning of her pastorate that the church was a small, bruised congregation, suffering from the wounds of recent conflict and separation and manifesting a crisis of identity in its tenacious hold upon a romanticized image of the past and confusion regarding how it should move forward.³³ Her primary task as pastor was guiding Mount Sharon toward utilization of the strengths of the past as foundation and resource for meeting the challenges of the present.³⁴ Individually and collectively, the church bore the brunt of the neighborhood’s poverty and deprivation, and Hall understood her call as ministering to people who hurt the most and receive the least.³⁵ Rather than relying on clinical pastoral skills, Hall believed the most important balm for her congregation was a liberation-modeled ministry, rooted in the historical tradition of the Black church.³⁶

Hall may have personally considered gender and class as central to an understanding of Freedom Faith, but her earliest academic research into the subject presented race as her primary intellectual lens. Her father’s tutelage in Black identity and her experiences in the Civil Rights Movement no doubt deepened her understanding of racial disparity and her resolve to address racism through scholarship.

For example, Hall wrote a paper for a graduate Old Testament course, examining Exodus 2:23–25, engaging biblical scholarship, liberation theology, and Black heritage. She argued that the Exodus account was not about the people’s suffering, but rather the divine response to the groaning.³⁷ In spite of white attempts to distort the text and its meaning, hush harbors hosted enslaved Africans as they questioned the texts and found themselves in the story of the Israelites: Only the story of Jesus as Redeemer and Lord of lords takes a place more central than the Old Testament redemption stories in black theology.³⁸ The exodus narrative made the God of Moses credible and established the bedrock of Black Christianity: The living God was/is the God of the oppressed, the Liberator God which made glad the hearts of the sons and daughters of Africa bound in American slavery.³⁹

Following Exodus, Israel found itself in the wilderness, which Hall described as the time since 1954: "Black Americans now find themselves—like Israel—in Exodus 15:22. They have crossed the Red Sea. They look to and move toward the promised land. But they are indeed in the wilderness."⁴⁰ Wilderness wandering raised questions of fidelity, visions of the promised land, and human responsibility amid God’s timing. Hall turned to William Jones’s humanocentric theism, in which embracing God as liberator requires disbelief in any form of God’s complicity with oppression. Her analysis concluded that black people claim God as liberator . . . on the basis of faith and the overwhelming belief . . . that God will vindicate that faith.⁴¹ Her paper ended with an open question—how will the pilgrimage be made?—particularly wondering how Black people would continue to interpret the exodus narrative in light of their present experiences.

Though this piece engages Black heritage, hermeneutics, and contemporary life, Hall does not link questions of gender or class. The paper’s bibliography lists Sarah Bradford’s book on Harriet Tubman, but the remaining twenty-one sources are all by men. This does not mean she personally was not wondering about writings by (Black or otherwise) women intellectuals at the time, but they do not appear as obviously influential on her early scholarly work as they do by the time she entered doctoral studies. It is very likely that Hall opted not to cite Black women because the predominantly white, male academy would devalue her work and the legitimacy of Black women’s work as scholarly.

Hall completed her M.Div. in May 1982, during which time she won three awards for scholastic and preaching excellence. She immediately began a master of theology program to study Black faith and liberation. By fall 1983, Hall began doctoral studies in religion and society at Princeton Theological Seminary, overlapping these with the completion of her Th.M. in 1984. In 1982 Hall became the first female member ever inducted into the Baptist Minister Conference of Philadelphia and Vicinity.⁴²

In the first year of her PhD program, she suffered medical complications, her mother became critically ill, and a close family member died suddenly, events that generated administrative suspicion of her ability to complete the program. During this time, Hall was embattled in a troublesome divorce, while raising two children and commuting to Philadelphia. Her husband, Ralph, did not support her theological education or call to ministry, which awakened her to recognizing his systemic abuse of her and their children. Ralph ignored proceedings, financial obligations, and documentation, extending the length and cost of the divorce. In 1986 she suffered significant injuries after a car accident that further impeded her ability to focus on schoolwork, complicating her relationship with some of the faculty. Albeit slowly, Hall persisted, even securing a teaching position while finishing her dissertation.⁴³

In 1989 Hall joined the faculty of United Theological Seminary (UTS) in Dayton, Ohio, remaining until 1998. While there, she became (in 1993) the first woman ever to preach from UTS’s chapel and also served as associate dean of spiritual and community life, associate dean of the Doctor of Ministry program, dean of African American studies, and director of the Harriet L. Miller Women’s Center. Additionally, she furthered the development of a curricular program to prepare students for ministry in African American faith communities and effective, informed ministry across racial and cultural lines in the whole Church.⁴⁴ Through chapel, she facilitated deeper spiritual engagement within the community, typically officiating services if she was not preaching in them and connecting the UTS community with meaningful liturgy and other spiritual formation practices across denominational and international boundaries.⁴⁵

As a single mother and full-time graduate student facing significant legal and medical bills, Hall depended on preaching invitations and student loans for supplemental income. Even once she had secured a full-time income at UTS, she juggled the expenses of her son’s Morehouse tuition and care for her mother and other relatives. Her daughter, Simone, had significant health concerns, exacerbated by pregnancy with Hall’s grandson, Michael McMillian, in 1989.⁴⁶ Simone died on March 6, 1992, at age twenty-five. Hall composed a beautiful tribute to her daughter, lovingly remembering Simone’s unique personality, virtuosity for the arts, and independent spirit. In the reflection, Hall also processed the difficulty of accepting Simone’s choice to parent given her health challenges, yet celebrating her maternal bond with Michael and promising to raise him as she intended.⁴⁷ Nearly ten years later, Hall reflected on Simone’s death: It is an awesome question to learn to live in a space without the physical presence of the child of your own body and one who had been in your life for twenty-five years, but I am learning by living the question. . . . Faith makes it barely bearable.⁴⁸

This exceptionally difficult loss delayed the submission of Hall’s dissertation proposal by almost a calendar year, which troubled her even as she managed UTS responsibilities and itinerant preaching. Princeton Theological Seminary and UTS pressured Hall to focus, and UTS even required her to gain their approval for any speaking invitations. She secured a Forum for Theological Education grant, while UTS underwrote half of an eight-month study leave, which would normally have been unpaid.⁴⁹

Throughout these dissertation writing years, personal tragedies added to the challenges she faced professionally. A February 1994 auto accident exacerbated previous back injuries, and her diabetes caused vision impairments and hospitalization. She grappled with such severe back pain that she was at times immobilized. In 1996, Hall lost her brother Berkeley, who had struggled with substance abuse and addiction.⁵⁰

Despite her hard work, this accumulation of difficult personal circumstances spiraled into accusations that Hall was neglecting her professional responsibilities, to the point that her applications for advancement at UTS met with opposition bordering on harassment. In May 1994, Hall received a memo from Provost Maxine Beach that the seminary was eliminating her position and handing those responsibilities to committees. In a half-hearted attempt at compensation, UTS offered her a one-year contract to work in the Doctoral Studies office, which she accepted with frustration and grief that she was not part of conversations shaping the decision. Eventually, however, as her situation stabilized, Hall transitioned from this temporary position to the role of associate dean of the DMin program, including a temporary appointment as dean of African American ministries during the sabbatical of the then-dean Daryl Ward. UTS allowed her to assume the position without a completed terminal degree, stipulating that she finish it by 1996. By April of that year, Hall had submitted the first three dissertation chapters, turning in the final chapter seven months later in November.⁵¹

Her dissertation, The Religious Consciousness of African American Baptist Women, analyzed the constructive work, moral leadership, and mission ministry of the Woman’s Convention Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention USA (WC), from 1916–1961. In this work, functionally a sequel to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent (1994),⁵² Hall examined the dilemma whereby the WC had independent space and yet remained subordinate to the male leadership of NBCUSA. Namely, she wrote, It was a predicament of often competing and conflicting loyalties to Christ, Church, denominational leadership, family, race, women, and self in which loyalty to others could result in disloyalty to self.⁵³ As a concrete example, Hall focused on Nannie Helen Burroughs’s presidency of the WC and the battle for control of Burrough’s National Training School for Women and Girls, utilizing a womanist social-ethical methodology, or consciousness of the multidimensional oppressions which impact Black women’s social reality, with special attention to the primary forces of racism, sexism, and classism. Acknowledging what Kimberlé Crenshaw would later term intersectionality, Hall’s womanist methodology highlighted that each dimension is complex, systemic, dynamic, and cumulative, creating a multiplier effect of racism times sexism times classism in Black women’s experience.⁵⁴ She successfully defended her dissertation in spring 1997.⁵⁵

During the 1996–1997 academic year, UTS reworked Hall’s position into a tenure-track faculty position: professor of Christian ethics and dean of African American studies. Chosen as a finalist in a national search for the position, Hall campaigned for the appointment with the strong support of Daryl Ward. Close to thirty Black church leaders submitted letters of support for Hall’s application to UTS; letter writers included Samuel Dewitt Proctor, Henry and Ella Mitchell, Jacquelyn Grant, Pamela June Anderson, Daryl Ward, and Otis Moss, Jr.; they emphasized Hall’s careful bridging of church and academy and her significance as a Black woman preacher and scholar. Despite this outpouring of support, UTS declared a failed search. Hall retained her interim title of dean of African American ministries until June 30, 1997, but her faculty title was that of lecturer rather than professor. She retained the title for one year, during a UTS-granted study leave to finish her dissertation.

During this time, Hall also pursued alternative employment opportunities for the future, and was selected to serve as visiting scholar in the Womanist Scholars Program run by the Department of American Baptist Women at the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC). In 2000 she earned the Martin Luther King Jr. Chair of Ethics at the Boston University School of Theology, a dream appointment for her in many ways. She moved to a luxury apartment within walking distance of Boston University, where she had sufficient resources to generously support civil rights and social justice organizations, as well as to fly her son DuBois and grandson Michael to Boston to visit her.⁵⁶

Womanist Awakening

The level of intellectual inquiry in Hall’s seminary papers was exceptional, far exceeding the capability for original thought of some doctoral students, or even some tenured professors. By the beginning of her doctoral degree, Hall’s work addressed racism and sexism collectively and publicly, as inseparable forms of oppression. Her intersectional understanding of layered oppression developed during her graduate study, though both her childhood experiences working with her father and her civil rights and community activism contributed to this comprehension as well. The colliding experiences of divorce, acceptance of her call to ministry, and theological education lifted the veil from every aspect of her life and work. Her preaching, research, and leadership thereafter proclaimed womanist liberation from all forms of oppression, engaging multidimensional systemic oppression, exposing the interconnectedness between racism, sexism, and classism and the resulting impact on Black women and thereby on Black families and communities, and calling Black churches to remember their heritage as the mediators of survival and liberation for their people.

Womanism by that name emerged through the work of writers and scholars like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker, who broke new ground by speaking out about Black women’s experiences and historical agency.⁵⁷ In the midst of feminist insistence that sexism was the greater evil and Black men’s insistence on prioritizing the perfidy of racism, women were being asked to split [them]selves in two in some cruel game of tug-of-war, as if they had no authority, agency, or freedom to name our whole selves.⁵⁸ Black women’s writings elevated wisdom from lived experience, moral agency, and commitment to opposing any forms of oppression, whether by race, gender, or any other classification. Rejecting white supremacist marginality, Black women celebrated their mother wit, sheer will, . . . passionate determination, and sacred heritage, by which "mamas, grandmothers, aunties, church mothers, and other mothers confirmed, critiqued, and challenged their girl children to insure [sic] that they not only survived, but thrived in a world often configured to destroy their creativity, intelligence, and womanhood."⁵⁹

The most significant catalyst of womanist methodology was Alice Walker’s poetic definition of womanism at the beginning of In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983).⁶⁰ Karen Baker-Fletcher described her reaction to Walker’s definition thus: I felt like I could breathe again as I read her definition of womanist. I felt the roots that are the veins of my body being watered with the Spirit of life as her words touched my heart.⁶¹ Kelly Brown Douglas found in Walker’s definition the uplifting of Black women, and verifi[cation of] the power of the black female voice to speak with authority about the complicated and wonderfully adventurous reality of being embodied black and woman . . . [and] quickly moved from being words on a page to symbolizing a movement of black women claiming our voices, claiming our spaces to tell our own diverse stories of living.⁶²

In Katie’s Cannon (1997), first-generation womanist scholar Katie Cannon explained why Walker’s definition resonated so deeply with Black women religious scholars:

Our objective is to use Walker’s four-part definition as a critical, methodological framework for challenging inherited traditions for their collusion with androcentric patriarchy as well as a catalyst in overcoming oppressive situations through revolutionary acts of rebellion. [Our] overall goal in this project is to recast the very terms and terrain of religious scholarship . . . debunking, unmasking, disentangling the ideologies, theologies, and systems of value operative in a particular society . . . by analyzing the established power relationships that determine cultural, political, and economic presuppositions and by evaluating the legitimating myths that sanction the enforcement of such values.⁶³

Stacey Floyd-Thomas similarly engaged Walker’s definition to nuance academic womanism: Whereas Walker has defined what it means to be womanist, womanist scholars of religion, in turn, have defined what it means to practice womanism . . . [or] how womanist scholars ever since [Walker’s definition] have used her definition as a vantage point for apprehending the scholarly context, criteria, and claims of black women’s intellectual development in the academy.⁶⁴

The 1980s, then, were a decade of Black women finding their voices, individually and collectively, certainly evident among womanist religion scholars. By 1985, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes convened the first Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society unit at the American Academy of Religion / Society of Biblical Literature meeting. Nikki Giovanni described that first gathering as landing in a land-mark-less situation, dropping anchor at a place and in a space where we see very little of anything that is familiar and yet we continue to make a conscious decision to be human and humane in death-dealing situations.⁶⁵ The institutional academy and its guild organizations perpetuated idolization of white male expertise, "devalue[d] womanist modes of experience-near cognition, . . . [and went] to great length to demand that [Black women’s] intellectual concerns and canons of discourse be ignored in