Prathia Laura Ann Hall Wynn (January 1, 1940 – August 12, 2002) was an American leader and activist in the Civil Rights Movement, a womanist theologian, and ethicist.
[3] In high school, she became involved with Fellowship House, an ecumenical social justice organization, where she studied the philosophy of nonviolence and direct action.
After graduating from Temple with a degree in political science, Hall joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); she worked with Charles Sherrod in Southwest Georgia.
[9] On September 6, 1962, night riders fired into the home where Hall and other activists were staying, wounding her, Jack Chatfield, and Christopher Allen.
In September 1962, Hall agreed to participate in a service commemorating Mount Olive Baptist in Terrell County, which had been burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan.
[11] Hall was called to Selma, Alabama in the winter of 1963 after SNCC field secretary Bernard Lafayette was beaten and jailed there in relation to demonstrations for voter registration.
The violence became too much for Hall after the events of Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965, when marchers intending to go to the state capital were beaten on a bridge just outside the city.
Hall joined the faculty at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, eventually becoming dean of African American studies, and director of the school's Harriet Miller Women's Center.
She later joined the faculty at the Boston University School of Theology, holding the Martin Luther King Chair in Social Ethics.
I remember sitting one day in the little area outside Forman's, transcribing a mass meeting speech given by Prathia Hall, a SNCC field secretary then posted to Selma, Alabama.
As she described the violence in Selma, the awful beauty of her words—and the intensity of her moral outrage—took me by such force that I remember typing on to that long, green mimeo stencil with tears just streaming down my face.