Freedom Faith

The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall

Courtney Pace

• Verlag: University of Georgia Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780820355054
• Thema: Ciencias sociales
• Thema: Estudios afroamericanos

Freedom Faith is the first full-length critical study of Rev. Dr. Prathia Laura Ann Hall (1940-2002), an undersung leader in both the civil rights movement and African American theology. Freedom faith was the central concept of Hall's theology: the belief that God created humans to be free and assists and equips those who work for freedom. Hall rooted her work simultaneously in social justice, Christian practice, and womanist thought.

Courtney Pace examines Hall's life and philosophy, particularly through the lens of her civil rights activism, her teaching career, and her ministry as a womanist preacher. Moving along the trajectory of Hall's life and civic service, Freedom Faith focuses on her intellectual and theological development and her radiating influence on such figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, and the early generations of womanist scholars. Hall was one of the first women ordained in the American Baptist Churches, USA, was the pastor of Mt. Sharon Baptist Church in Philadelphia, and in later life joined the faculty at the Boston University School of Theology as the Martin Luther King Chair in Social Ethics. In activism and ministry, Hall was a pioneer, fusing womanist thought with Christian ethics and visions of social justice.

CHAPTER 1

“I SEE AFRICA RISING”

“Daughter, do good”

Prathia LauraAnn Hall was born in Philadelphia on June 29, 1940, to Rev. Berkeley L. and Ruby Hall. The Hall family was originally from Virginia, but Berkeley and Ruby moved north to Philadelphia as a young couple to protect their future children from Jim Crow segregation. Their first child, a son, did not survive infancy. Prathia was the second child, followed by Berkeley Jr. and Teresa. Her parents also raised Ruby’s sister’s daughter, Betty, whom Prathia called “sister.”¹

Berkeley’s family of origin was from Florence, South Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia. They moved frequently, looking “for the best work.” Prathia’s paternal grandfather died when her father was thirteen years old, positioning her father as the breadwinner and parent figure for his siblings. He quit school to work full-time but still made time for occasional classes. By his eighteenth year, he moved the family to Philadelphia. There a train accident severed his leg through the bone. Doctors wanted to amputate his leg, but he refused. Recalling that family story later in life, Prathia admired his fortitude at such a young age: “He left this world with a limp, but he had two legs.” She often wondered what he might have accomplished without the constrictive racial barriers of his day. Through his “incredible strength,” he raised and supported his siblings, his sister’s three children, and his own children.²

Ruby Johnson Hall’s family lived on a small farm in northeastern Nelson County, outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. One of six children, Ruby was highly intelligent and enjoyed literature and poetry. The Johnson family attended St. James Baptist Church in Roseland, Virginia, where Ruby and her children would make their professions of faith.³ Ruby’s parents wanted to give her every opportunity for a better life, so they sent her to school in the county seat, where she boarded with her teacher in order to finish the eighth grade. Her parents then sent her to Baltimore to attend Frederick Douglass High School, an admirable accomplishment for the time. Throughout, Ruby worked odd jobs to supplement her parents’ contributions toward the cost of her education.⁴ Ruby attended the Coppin Normal School, later renamed Coppin State Teachers College, also in Baltimore. There she joined the Bethlehem Baptist Church, which called Rev. Berkeley L. Hall its pastor in 1926.

After marrying, Rev. Hall and Ruby moved to Philadelphia. Rev. Hall founded Mount Sharon Baptist Church in 1938 as a mission church of the National Baptist Convention, pastoring there until his death in 1960.⁵ The church originally met in the Hall residence; the living and dining rooms were arranged as a small chapel, and the Halls lived on the second and third floors. He was known as a “phenomenal preacher,” but he declined offers to pastor larger churches because he was committed to social ministry through Mount Sharon and to raising his family in the North Philadelphia neighborhood.⁶ The church also offered a ministry of education to children considered unteachable by the local public schools because of disability or behavioral issues.⁷

Looking back as an adult, Prathia saw her father’s specialized ministry in North Philadelphia as ahead of its time, “focused primarily upon the needs of children and youth,” meeting the “bread and butter” needs of families in their community, where the poverty otherwise led to numerous “petty economic crimes.”⁸ The entire Hall family participated in the church’s ministry, assisting with its food pantry, clothes closet, visitation, and discipleship programs. Every week, after Hall’s parents visited wholesale grocers or producers to gather food, the children divided the food into boxes they then distributed to needy families.

The Hall family opened their three-story Victorian row house on West Girard Avenue to extended family and friends needing a place to stay. Prathia remembered their home being “large and always full” and akin to a “New Testament household” because they held “everything in common.”⁹ The composition of the household embodied her parents’ willingness to care for others: “They were the parents of four children: Betty, Prathia, Teresa, and Berkeley, Jr, and surrogate parents of numerous other children who needed to share the love, guidance and protection of their home.”¹⁰ Remaining at home to manage the household, Ruby was both strict with her children and held high expectations of them.¹¹

In 1945, when Prathia was five years old, she, and her younger sisters Teresa and Betty, took a train from Philadelphia to Virginia to visit their grandparents. This was Hall’s first time traveling by train unaccompanied by her parents. The girls were dressed in their finest clothes and filled with excitement as they found seats, unaware of Jim Crow: “The conductor just literally snatched us up by the collar, you know, and what are you doing here? You can’t sit here.” Without giving the girls time to respond, he shoved them from car to car forward in the train. He pushed them into the car immediately behind the engine, filled with smoke. Hall later recounted her disillusionment in that moment: “The whole trip we sat there looking out the window, hurt far less by the pushing and the shoving, than in the psyche. The train ride had lost all its excitement. There was a message in the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks. The message was: you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough.”¹²

Prathia learned a great deal about church leadership from her mother. Ruby taught children’s Sunday School at Mount Sharon Baptist and led the children in poetry recitation and dramas performed for the congregation. Hall’s mother was instrumental in providing opportunities for Hall to speak before the congregation of Mount Sharon Baptist Church, directing programs for the children to perform. Mrs. Hall “had taught children to read who the school system had said couldn’t be taught, and taught them to speak and to perform plays and do poetry.” Hall remembered, even when she was “too small to be seen,” being lifted onto a chair or tabletop to recite her lines in children’s productions at church. “We’d always forget it and mess it up, and they would just applaud and say, ‘You’re wonderful. You can do anything you want to do.’” Hall’s parents both stressed the importance of learning “to speak well and to handle the language well.”¹³ Prathia remembered gaining her love for poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from her mother.¹⁴ Reflecting on Ruby, Hall observed that “since her early childhood, two personal characteristics have earned for her the respect of family and friends—her keen intelligence and her devotion to her Lord.” Presttonia “Prestie” Brown, a childhood friend of Prathia’s, remembered Mother Hall as “extremely bright” and good at managing money, especially in helping the church stretch its budget to meet its ministry goals. Ruby could also be controlling and quick to ask people when she wanted something from them.¹⁵

Prathia’s primary spiritual and intellectual mentor, however, was her father. Rev. Hall impressed on his elder daughter that she was destined for great things, for which she would need a strong work ethic. Prathia recognized that he “never let the fact that I was a woman be an excuse for not being the very best I could be, whatever it was I would be doing.” She cherished memories of him taking her to see excellent preachers: Paul Robeson, Mordecai Johnson, and Nannie Helen Burroughs.¹⁶ When Prathia would later listen to herself preach, she heard her father, more than any other preaching mentor. As a tangible reminder of his influence on her, she carried his handkerchief in her Bible the rest of her life.

He told her of a vision he had the year she was born, of God taking him to “a high mountain” and saying to him, “This is the year that marks the rising up of the colored peoples of the world. I see Africa rising, Asia rising, India rising.” This story instilled in young Prathia that she was “nurtured for the Freedom Movement.”¹⁷

In many ways, Rev. Hall did raise Prathia for the freedom movement. He shared with her his passion for issues of faith and justice, particularly as concerns race. He frequently talked about “the struggles of black people, history of Africa, African Americans, Asia.” He was passionate about solidarity between the oppressed, “colored peoples of the world.” Mount Sharon frequently held Black History celebrations, in which the entire church participated.

Prathia remembered that her childhood friends would share how much they loved her father because, when children were visiting their home, Rev. Hall would regale them with his stories of black history.¹⁸ Brown described Rev. Hall as a tall, “no-nonsense” kind of man, with a professorial manner. Though he was very loving, as a child, Brown still felt that she should sit respectfully, with her hands folded in her lap, when she was with him.¹⁹ When Rev. Hall would begin to “wax eloquent” in a teaching moment, Prathia’s siblings would “flee for the hills,” but Prathia would “draw closer” to hear his teaching. She laughed as she reflected: “Part of the reason he poured all those things into me was not gender—it was access. I was the one who was there.” While her siblings received “the mandatory,” she “went for more.”²⁰

Brown remembered Prathia as “always an excellent speaker,” even as a young girl, skilled in elocution and speech writing. As the girls played at each other’s houses, Prathia encouraged Brown to improve her own skills. Prathia frequently read for church services, and as a preteen she was a regular participant in Mason, Eastern Star, and Elk Club debates, which Hall won in 1955.²¹ As far back as Brown remembers, Prathia was a woman of conviction, determined to work hard for what she considered important: “If she believed in something, she didn’t move off of it.”²²

Prathia attended predominantly white public schools in Center City Philadelphia, including the Philadelphia High School for Girls, one of the top secondary schools in the city. Her outspokenness against the omission of black history in her junior high and high school curriculum led several of her teachers to dock her grades.²³ She felt the support of her community with her as she pursued her education: “I’ll never forget the woman who used to watch me walk to school with my books as she waited for the bus to go to her job as a domestic. When I would come past her on my way to school, her own shoulders would straighten up and every now and then she would press a crumpled dollar in my hand and say, ‘Daughter do good. I’m prayin’ for you.’”²⁴

As a junior in high school, Prathia started to tell her guidance counselor that she wanted to attend law school to “become a civil rights attorney like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley.”²⁵ The counselor interrupted her, insisting she abandon this plan, because asking her family to finance law school was selfish. Knowing nothing about Hall’s family when giving this advice, the counselor assumed that all black people were poor, destined for continued poverty. Prathia never forgot this conversation, nor did she let it derail her goals.²⁶

At the same time, Prathia was determined not to become a preacher.²⁷ She felt as if “a war [was] being waged in [her] consciousness against the compelling call to the ordained ministry.”²⁸ Prathia realized the difficulty she would face as a female minister, “a terrifying prospect,” since she “knew almost no ordained ministers who were women who were taken seriously by the church”—except Mary Watson Stewart, an itinerant African Methodist Episcopal (AME) preacher whom she had observed.²⁹ In many ways, she searched for alternative ways to follow her call “by fighting racism at home and in the South.”³⁰

In no uncertain terms, even as an adolescent, Prathia knew she was expected to “have an identity” and not “be a domestic.” She and her sisters were raised to be self-sufficient and independent. Her father rejected excuses of race or gender for any level of underperformance. Not only did he invest his wisdom into her, but she saw him regularly help other women become independent.³¹ Though she had traits of both of her parents, she was in many ways her father’s daughter.³²

“You’ll have a hard time convincing her that she should be in class”

During high school, Hall joined Fellowship House (FH), an interfaith, interracial organization established in 1931 and led by Marjorie Penney. Raised in a middle-class home in Philadelphia and a graduate of what was then known as the Pennsylvania Museum School of Art, Penney understood the potential for young people to combat segregation through “a handful of young church folk, Negro and white, convinced that peace in the world must” come from local people taking action in their communities. In 1929, these “church kids” met at the Quaker school Pendle Hill to address church segregation. After much struggle to find a willing church host, Penney’s congregation, the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia, first allowed them to meet, and thereafter “the church was always packed.”³³ By 1931, FH held interracial worship services across Philadelphia.

In 1942 FH established its headquarters in a home at 1431 Brown Street, in “a conflict neighborhood.” FH relished the opportunity to test its ideas in that atmosphere. The house, colloquially known as Bums’ Castle, had previously functioned as a firehouse, coffin factory, and hideout for fugitives. The windows were painted black, the floors were so “thick with scum” that they were cleaned with an acetylene torch, and the building itself “was big and cheap.” Having outgrown the Brown Street house, FH moved to 1521 West Girard Avenue, less than a block from the Hall family home, in 1957. FH eventually expanded into eleven multistate locations. In 1964, Little Fellowship House opened at Columbia Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street in Philadelphia under the direction of...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “I See Africa Rising”
• Chapter 2. “Living in the Face of Death”
• Chapter 3. “In Jail for a Just Cause”
• Chapter 4. “Equality Now”
• Chapter 5. “Black, Preacher, Baptist, Woman”
• Chapter 6. “I’m 5′6″, but I Should Have Been Taller”
• Chapter 7. “The Living God Is Not a Bigot”
• Chapter 8. “The Baptist Church Is Going to Have to Deal with Me”
• Chapter 9. “One of the Founding Mothers of the New America”
• Appendix. Who Had the Dream? Prathia Hall and the “I Have A Dream” Speech
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index