The Archives of the Episcopal Church announces an electronic publication and online exhibit entitled, The Church Awakens: African Americans and the Struggle for Justice. The multimedia exhibit, covers the period of enslavement to the present, with emphasis on the Civil Rights era.

Figures such as Absalom Jones, George Bragg, Pauli Murray, Jonathan Daniels, and Charles Lawrence are featured along with Church organizations such as the American Church Institute, the Conference of Church Workers, and the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity. Audio recordings include interviews with figures as diverse as Langston Hughes and Jackie Robinson.

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The Very Rev. Tracey Lind, dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, will take part in a panel discussion about race, religion and politics on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer tonight. The program is broadcast at 6 pm EDT; the panel discussion is expected to air about 6:30 pm.

The panel discussion, titled “Race, Religion and Politics,” is expected to discuss how issues of race and religion are intersecting with the 2008 presidential race.

Lind was also quoted in a March 23 New York Times story titled “Obama’s Talk Fuels Easter Sermons.”

For more information on Trinity Cathedral and its programs, please call 216-771-3630 or visit www.trinitycleveland.org.

Gary Wills has a very interesting comparison of two speeches on race by two men from Illinois running for President, Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln:

Two men, two speeches. The men, both lawyers, both from Illinois, were seeking the presidency, despite what seemed their crippling connection with extremists. Each was young by modern standards for a president. Abraham Lincoln had turned fifty-one just five days before delivering his speech. Barack Obama was forty-six when he gave his. Their political experience was mainly provincial, in the Illinois legislature for both of them, and they had received little exposure at the national level—two years in the House of Representatives for Lincoln, four years in the Senate for Obama. Yet each was seeking his party's nomination against a New York senator of longer standing and greater prior reputation—Lincoln against Senator William Seward, Obama against Senator Hillary Clinton. They were both known for having opposed an initially popular war—Lincoln against President Polk's Mexican War, raised on the basis of a fictitious provocation; Obama against President Bush's Iraq War, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and had made an alliance with Osama bin Laden.

Neither man fit the conventions of a statesman in his era. Lincoln, thin, gangling, and unkempt, was considered a backwoods rube, born in the frontier conditions of Kentucky, estranged from his father, limited to a catch-as-catch-can education. He was better known as a prairie raconteur than as a legal theorist or prose stylist. Obama, of mixed race and foreign upbringing, had barely known his father, and looked suspiciously "different."

The most damaging charge against each was an alleged connection with unpatriotic and potentially violent radicals. Lincoln's Republican Party was accused of supporting abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who burned the Constitution, or John Brown, who took arms against United States troops, or those who rejected the Supreme Court because of its Dred Scott decision. Obama was suspected of Muslim associations and of following the teachings of an inflammatory preacher who damned the United States. How to face such charges? Each decided to address them openly in a prominent national venue, well before their parties' nominating conventions—Lincoln at the Cooper Union in New York, Obama at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Read the rest here.

In 2006, the Diocese of Washington asked the General Convention to include Thurgood Marshall in the book of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. The request was referred to a church commission, and will be reconsidered at the 2009 Convention

But those who support Marshall's cause can hold a Eucharist in his honor next month, perhaps on May 17, the date that the diocese proposes establishing as his feast. (and the anniversary of his victory in the landmark school desergregation case, Brown. v. Board of Education.

For background on the diocese's effort read these two stories from the Washington Window.

The resolution recommending Marshall's inclusion that was passed by the Convention of the Diocese of Washington, and a biography put together by St. Augustine's, Marshall home parish in Washington, D. C. are also available.

To find the propers of the day, and suggestions for hymns, click on read more.

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Stephan Salilsbury of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes:

Old Black Alice, who died in 1802 at the wondrous age of 116, remembered well lighting the pipe of William Penn, when the proprietor and slave owner needed a puff.

She remembered attending nascent Christ Church at a time when the nave ceiling was so low she could touch it with the tips of her weathered, slender fingers.

She remembered it all: working the boats of Dunk's Ferry to help white passengers across the river during the day. And working secretly at night to help fellow slaves disappear across the water to freedom.

When Alice died, she was mourned and eulogized as the keeper of the city's memory, a long-lived resident whose life was intertwined with the lives and deaths of the city, a teller of history who saw much and forgot little and passed it all down to eager and younger listeners.

Now Christ Church, where Alice was a parishioner for decade after decade (never attaining freedom herself, despite helping many achieve theirs), has decided to make her life and stories the centerpiece of a new effort to dramatize the city's early experience with slavery.

Read it all.

Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday. The AP's story is here. An essay on the signficance of Loving v. Virginia to the current conflict in the Anglican Communion is here.

See, also:

Update: Rick Perlstein of the American Prospect points out that last year Loving came outin favor of same-sex marriage.