"Representative Thinkers" by: Ashley Alele

            Last week's lecture was entitled Practices of Freedom & Justice: Representative Thinkers. The Speaker was Dr. Pollard III who is currently the Dean of Divinity. He started off saying that Relion is his forte. He describes Religion as the phenomenon that describes the encounter of human beings with the sacred and divine.

            Most of his speech was about slavery. Dr. Pollard told us that during enslavement, freedom meant how to get away. Then it meant equal oppurtunity, now it means justice. I liked that statement because it is true that us as African Americans are always striving for better and as time goes by we are slowly acheiving it. He played a song for us called Ship Ahoy by the Ojays. It came out in 1973 and was the only popular song that talked about the Slave Trade. We then discussed what it meant to be an African American in the United States.

            He told us about Howard Thurman who was the first Dean of Rankin Chapel. In 1963 at the age of 64 he went on his first trip to Africa. He wrote a very influencial prayer/meditation about how he felt about what he saw when approaching the motherland by boat.

             Dr. Pollard ended his speech by discussing three important people from our past that took their religious path to empower our community.
-Jerena Lee: the first African American to write a spiritaul autobiography
-Sojourner Truth: She became a Methodist, traveling and preaching about abolition.
-Howard Thurman: In 1944 helped found the first racially integreted, multicultural church in America.