Preachers 20th century
Edward Everett Hale was an American clergyman, preacher and writer, abolitionist and pacifist.
Hale demonstrated outstanding literary ability from an early age. He went to Harvard College and became a minister and preacher. Grandnephew of Revolutionary hero Nathan Hale and nephew of orator Edward Everett, Hale worked for his father's newspaper, the Boston Daily Advertiser. And for 70 years he never stopped writing newspaper articles, historical essays, short stories, pamphlets, and sermons for the North American Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and the Christian Examiner. From 1870 to 1875 he published and edited the Unitarian magazine Old and New.
Hale wrote several novels, of which the most popular were East and West (1892) and In His Name (1873). Hale's most famous novel, A Man Without a Country, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1863, was written to evoke patriotism during the Civil War. It is a political fable about a man who renounces his American citizenship and greatly regrets it.
Many of Hale's 150 books and pamphlets were tracts in support of the ideas of Negro education, worker's housing, and world peace. The moralistic novel Ten Times One is Ten (1871) was the impetus for the organization of several youth groups.
In 1847, Hale was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society and remained a member for the rest of his life. A 10-volume collection of Edward Hale's writings was published between 1898 and 1900. In 1903 he was appointed chaplain of the United States Senate and joined the Literary Society of Washington. The following year he was elected a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Martin Luther King Jr, born Michael King, is an American preacher, leader of the Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and Nobel Laureate.
His father was the famous Baptist missionary and leader of the Civil Rights Movement Martin Luther King Sr. (1899-1984). He studied medicine and law at Morehouse College, then earned a bachelor's degree in theology at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, followed by a doctorate in theology at Boston University. And beginning in 1955, King Jr. became active in the community with protests over segregated seating on public buses.
On September 20, 1958, the first assassination attempt was made on Martin. Isola Ware Curry, a mentally unstable Harlem woman, stabbed King with a metal letter opener at a department store where he was signing copies of Stride Toward Freedom as part of a tour to promote the book.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a driving force behind such watershed events as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington, which resulted in the historic Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965). He was a prominent African American leader of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his activism for civil rights and social justice. King also actively opposed the Vietnam War, calling for an end to the bombing, negotiations, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated by gunfire on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. James Earl Ray, a petty criminal who had escaped from a maximum-security prison a year earlier, was blamed for the murder. Years after his death, Martin Luther King Jr. became the most famous African-American leader of his era. Today, he has a reputation as a visionary leader who was deeply committed to achieving social justice through nonviolent means. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed into law a U.S. federal day in King's honor; it is observed nationwide on the third Monday in January.
Sister Gertrude Morgan was a self-taught African-American artist, musician, poet and preacher. Sister Morgan achieved critical acclaim during her lifetime for her folk art paintings. Her work has been included in many groundbreaking exhibitions of visionary and folk art from the 1970s onwards.
Similar to other self-taught artists, Sister Morgan used simple forms to depict the human figure. Her works are characterized by their lack of the use of formal techniques such as perspective and definition of light and shadow, giving them a flat, two dimensional quality. She painted and drew using acrylics, tempera, ballpoint pen, watercolors, crayon, colored and lead pencils and felt tip markers. Using inexpensive materials she had at hand, Sister Morgan painted on paper, toilet rolls, plastic pitchers, paper megaphones, scrap wood, lampshades, paper fans and styrofoam trays. The fact that she was self-taught, coupled with her choice of materials as well as her style and subject matter have led her to be characterized as a naive, folk, visionary, vernacular and outsider artist.