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Prathia Hall was a prominent civil rights activist and preacher who reportedly influenced Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech. Hall is one of the first women ordained in the American Baptist Association.

Born January 1, 1940 in Philadelphia, Pa. Hall’s father, Rev. Berkeley Hall, was the pastor of Mt. Sharon Baptist Church. Rev. Hall preached a form of social justice ministry to his flock, which stuck with his young daughter and carried her through high school and college.

Taking her cues from her father’s ministry, Hall joined SNCC before becoming a student at Temple University. Under her father’s guidance, Hall became a member of the Fellowship House, which took students from Philadelphia and taught them the values of organizing and social activism.

After graduating from Temple in 1962, Hall was sent to Georgia to work with Charles Sherrod’s Albany Project. She began working in the infamous Terrell County region, where along with voter registration drives, Freedom Rides and other SNCC-related demonstrations, Hall put herself in the path of racist whites looking to upend the momentum of the young activists.

It was around this time the Ku Klux Klan burned down a popular Black church, which prompted SNCC leaders to hold a mass solidarity meeting. Hall led this meeting in 1962, which was reportedly attended by King and Rev. James Bevel. Bevel claimed, as many others have, that Hall repeated the phrase “I have a dream” during her passionate prayer for peace and justice.

In later interviews, Hall said she doesn’t recall if King was in attendance at the meeting but did confirm that she may have uttered the phrase. Hall split with the group in 1966, as SNCC moved away from nonviolence.

Hall continued her theological studies, earning a Master of Divinity, Master of Theology and Ph.D. from the Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1978, years after her father’s death, she began serving as the pastor of Mt. Sharon while continuing her studies at Princeton Theological. Hall was the Martin Luther King Chair in Social Ethics at the Boston University School of Theology and the first woman accepted into the Baptist Minsters Conference in Philadelphia.

After a long battle with cancer, Hall died at the age of 62 in Boston.

(Photo: Public Domain)

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