At sessions focused on social justice, PNBC leaders and guest speakers urged greater response and a unified front to address impacts of the new federal budget.
The grants aim to support historical spaces of ‘Black American joy, resilience, innovation, and activism’ in their preservation efforts, according to a news release.
The First Baptist Church of Williamsburg officially established itself in 1776, although parishioners met before then in fields and under trees in defiance of laws that prevented African Americans from congregating.
‘It is featured in over 40 different Christian hymnals and sung in churches all across America, not just during Black History Month or Juneteenth,’ said musician Theodore Thorpe III.
As survivors gathered Tuesday, they invited another congregation that knows the pain of murderous hatred to join them: members of the Tree of Life synagogue.
‘You have done a marvelous job of grasping the underlying truth and philosophy of the movement,’ the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to the creator of a comic book about civil rights.
‘We are honest about the conditions that we're facing, but we are not hopeless about what we're facing,' said Bishop W. Darin Moore of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
The fire severely damaged Clayborn Temple, which served as the headquarters for the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike that brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city.