Civil rights leader and congressman delivers sermon at Shiloh Baptist, a church founded by former slaves
On the Sunday ahead of Martin Luther King Day and Barack Obama’s inauguration, I went to Shiloh Baptist Church on 9th St in Washington. Today it’s a church of hundreds of people but it was founded by 21 former slaves in 1863.
The church is led by Rev. George Wallace Smith but Congressman John Lewis delivered the sermon. He is the final activist alive that spoke at the Lincoln Memorial in that 1963 march on Washington in which Dr. King told the world about a dream.
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He was there in the biggest of battles for desegregation and has been beaten unconscious, close to death in the struggle to advance civil rights.
It’s a little over 30 minutes long but take the time to listen. In a period full of it, this too is a moment of history. The one man left from 1963 giving a sermon in a church founded by former slaves two days before the first African American president is sworn into office. That’s a crossroads we will only see once and his is a perspective that truly no one else alive can deliver. It’s a perspective of where we are, how far we’ve come (and Lewis, from preaching to chickens in Georgia as a child to the civil rights movement) and how far we have to go.
