Hall, Prathia LauraAnn
1940-2002 · Contribution: 1962-2002
Credited as the originator of the phrase “I have a dream,” spoken during a 1962 prayer vigil that Martin Luther King Jr. attended and later asked her permission to echo in his own preaching, while serving as one of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's first female field secretaries and later becoming a pioneering Baptist minister and womanist theologian
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Impact on the world
A Temple University graduate who joined SNCC in 1962 and became one of its first women field leaders in the dangerous voter-registration battlegrounds of southwest Georgia, Hall survived a 1962 shooting when night riders fired into the house where she and fellow activists were staying; three days later, at a prayer vigil for two Black churches burned by the Ku Klux Klan, she spontaneously repeated the phrase “I have a dream” in her invocation, so moving Martin Luther King Jr., who was in attendance, that he later sought her permission to use the words himself — permission she granted without asking for credit, a full year before his 1963 March on Washington address made the phrase immortal. King reportedly called Hall “the one platform speaker I would prefer not to follow,” and she went on to lead SNCC's Selma voter-registration project and help coordinate the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer before a theological crisis following the violence of Bloody Sunday redirected her toward ordained ministry. In 1977 she became one of the first African American women ordained by the American Baptist Churches, later earning a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and holding the Martin Luther King Chair in Social Ethics at Boston University School of Theology, where she helped pioneer womanist theological scholarship; Ebony magazine named her the nation's top Black woman preacher in 1997.
Life & background
Born January 1, 1940, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Baptist minister Berkeley Hall and Ruby Hall, Prathia Hall graduated from Temple University in 1962 before joining SNCC's civil rights organizing in Georgia and Alabama through 1966. She was ordained in 1977, earned a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1997, pastored her father's Mt. Sharon Baptist Church in Philadelphia beginning in 1978, and taught at Boston University School of Theology until her death from cancer on August 12, 2002, at age 62.
Sources
- BlackPast.org; Essence; Alliance of Baptists
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