Watch Night recalls the hopeful waiting for Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to take effect in 1862, and today’s continued quest for racial justice.
In a lecture series sponsored by Union Presbyterian Seminary and the Center for Social Justice and Reconciliation this week, the Rev. Dr. James Forbes spoke on “COVID-19: A Parable of Plagues before Deliverance.”
On June 19, 1865, Texas notified formerly enslaved people that they were now free citizens. Today, 155 years later, there’s still much racial justice work to be done.
At Caldwell Presbyterian, the walls of our sanctuary talk. The voices are those of enslaved African Americans owned by the Caldwell family on a plantation north of our city of Charlotte, North Carolina. Before emancipation, their forced labor, blood, sweat and tears created the fortune that was later given to this church to build its sanctuary in 1922.
The plaque describing the shared history of two Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) churches is on prominent display for everyone to see as they exit the sanctuary of the 3,000-member First Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina.
