Morning Prayers: Black History Week 2026
Each February, the Church hosts a special week of Morning Prayers to lift and honor the stories, struggles, voices, and theologies of African Americans across campus.
The Rev. Aric Fleming MDiv '19
Assistant Director, Office of Doctoral Programs at Harvard Business School, former Memorial Church seminarian.
"The next time you and God meet to discuss the future you intend to inhabit, make sure that you bring the imagination that scares you because that's probably the thing God wants most for you."
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Ahmad Greene-Hayes
Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies, Harvard Divinity School.
"The righteous turn to the wisdom of sacred texts of ancestors long passed on, of kitchen tables surrounded by culture keepers in the gathering spaces of the faithful. They are like trees planted by streams of water or, as the freedom writers sing in the 1960s, drawing upon the insights of this Psalm, "I'm on my way to heaven, I shall not be moved. On my way to heaven, I shall not be moved. Just like a tree that's planted by the water, I shall not be moved."
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Tracey Elaine Hucks
Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies, Harvard Divinity School; Suzanne Young Murray Professor (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study)
"I choose to live each day with both the unknown and the certainty that I am their brave shining light. I am their son ray.
I am their warrior torch, walking across the ancestral bridge that they built for me to be a harvester with a mission to share and to carry into this world the legacy of their unknown history, the determination of their unwavering faith, and the endurance of their light."
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Tracy K. Smith
Boylston Professor of Rhetoric & Oratory; Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
"We have arrived at a point in our collective story, you and I, where adamant, loud voices reach us from every source with opinions and guesses, with demands and deflections. But I like the vulnerable, raw listening David is willing to do in this poem through his guilt and his doubt to the stillness where perhaps all is. David's dancing and spinning reminds me of another tradition, that of the Sufi mystic, the dervish whose whirling is a form of devotion by which the seeking self can be freed of its ego-driven layers of concern, can admit this is not about me, this is about something bigger. I am implicated in something bigger. Let us listen with courage to what that bigger something is saying."
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Austin Bogues, MRPL '23
Harvard Divinity School; Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
"Sleep and rest for the weary are a key component of not only physical health, but we're taught in scripture that it's essential for our spiritual health, too. The passage from Isaiah is special to me. My grandmother read it to me when I was a small boy and woke up from a nightmare. She took me into her arms and read the verse from the Bible she kept on her lampstand. And, as you might imagine, in the embrace of a grandmother's love, I was able to settle down and sleep."
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