Joseph E. Lowery, a veteran civil rights leader who helped Martin Luther King Jr. found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, died on March 28. He was 98.
A charismatic and fiery preacher, Lowery led the SCLC for two decades—restoring the organization’s financial stability and pressuring businesses not to trade with South Africa’s apartheid-era regime—before retiring in 1997.
Disbelief is often the response Carole Boston Weatherford gets from children about her books featuring notable African Americans.
“Kids just can’t believe that our nation allowed those kinds of injustices to visit upon so many people,” said Weatherford, a poet who has written children’s books on Fannie Lou Hamer, Harriet Tubman, Lena Horne, and others.
Hispanics now account for 40 percent of all US Catholics, and a solid majority of school-age Catholics. Yet Hispanic Americans are strikingly underrepresented in Catholic schools and in the priesthood—accounting for less than 19 percent of Catholic school enrollment and only about 3 percent of US-based priests.
Extensive efforts are under way to narrow the demographic gaps. They have been highlighted in a nearly completed four-year study by US Catholic bishops seeking to strengthen the church’s engagement with Hispanics.
The Washington National Cathedral donated thousands of medical masks to two hospitals in the nation’s capital after discovering a trove of the much-needed protective equipment just feet from where Helen Keller and other prominent Americans lie in the cathedral’s underground crypts.
Bought in 2006 as a precaution during an outbreak of the H5N1 flu, the 5,000 plus N95 respiratory masks had been forgotten until early this month, when the cathedral’s chief stonemason, Joseph Alonso, remembered coming across them in an unfinished area of the crypt level.
If any locals still braving the streets walked past Boston’s John F. Kennedy Federal Building at the end of March, they may have found themselves staring at a huge black-and-white image of Anne Frank’s face.
“Anne Frank died of an infectious disease in a crowded detention center,” read the caption. The image was projected on a wall near the building, which houses the state’s federal immigration court, on March 22 by activists with the Jewish immigration group Never Again Action. “Governor Baker, release everyone in ICE detention before it’s too late.”
When it came time to pass the peace at Pathway Baptist Church, senior pastor Mike Donald didn’t hesitate.
“Everybody, wave to the right,” Donald said.
In response, the hundreds of people at the Calvert Drive In Theatre in Calvert City, Kentucky, turned to their right and waved to the people sitting in the cars next to them.
In 1918, the city of Philadelphia threw a parade that killed thousands of people. Ignoring warnings of influenza among soldiers preparing for World War I, the march to support the war effort drew 200,000 people who crammed together to watch the procession. Three days later, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hospitals was filled with sick and dying patients, infected by the Spanish flu.