Today, July 1, is the anniversary date of death for two great religious reformers in America, Pauli Murray and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Stowe was the daughter, sister, and wife of prominent American clergy, and her family was deeply involved in the underground railroad. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Stowe began writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin", a book which inspired abolitionist fervor in the North, contempt in the slave-holding South, and was said by Lincoln to have been the spark that started the Civil War.
Pauli Murray was the first black female priest to be ordained in the Episcopal Church, and among its first generation of female priests in the communion. A lawyer, and civil rights activist, Thurgood Marshall called her book "States' Laws on Race and Color" the "bible" of the civil rights movement. Murray was an unsung hero of the civil rights generation, before becoming an iconic figure within the Episcopal Church. In recent years Murray has begun to be more widely recognized in the Church, and the fields of civil rights history and LGBTQ history.
Murray once said, "One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement."
What a fitting statement for both Murray and also for Stowe on this day that commemorates them both.
Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.
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