The future Presbyterian minister Francis Grimké was born in 1850. His father was a slaveholder and his mother was enslaved. While Grimké was still young his father died of the yellow fever epidemic and although his father had tried to preventatively take care of his family before he passed, the death catapulted Grimké and his siblings’ childhoods into hardship and mistreatment.

After the Civil War concluded in 1865, an academic mentor helped him relocate to Philadelphia, where Grimké began pursuing ministry. A staunch proponent of Reformed theology, Grimké also spent much of his ministry involved in the battle for civil rights for African Americans.

On this episode of Prayer amid Pandemic, Eric Washington, an associate professor of history and the Director of African & African Diaspora Studies Program at Calvin University, shared how Grimké spoke out about the evils and folly of American racism during the Spanish Flu pandemic.This week’s prayer is from Amanda Jackson, the executive director of the Women’s Commission at the World Evangelical Alliance

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