In the gut-wrenching days of the Civil Rights Movement, it was the prayer rallies that confronted the growling police dogs, fire hoses, and other tools of racial intolerance.
Today, a time when President Donald J. Trump is stoking the flames of racial intolerance on the eve of the midterm elections, many ministers are hoping to use the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation (CBCF)’s annual Day of Healing Prayer Breakfast to rally veterans of the era in a new way.
“I believe in the power of prayer, but prayer has never been an excuse for inaction. At its best, prayer prepares us for the work; it strengthens us for the struggle. That is one reason the Day of Healing Prayer Breakfast continues to mean so much to me,” said the Rev. Delman Coates, senior pastor of Mt. Ennon Baptist Church in Clinton, Maryland. “We come together to pray, but we don’t stop at prayer. [It’s] a time to recommit ourselves to the work, to the ongoing struggle for social justice.”
Held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, the breakfast culminates CBCF’s Annual Legislative Conference, centering a weeklong pursuit to advance America in a moment of spiritual resolve and resistance.
Featuring clergy, policymakers, and a bevy of believers, the longtime tradition grounds the nation in the roots of revolution — a generational tale that faith should not be confined to the four walls of the church.
“[The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.] certainly did not believe that,” Coates reminded. “Our faith sent us into the streets. It sent us to the ballot box. It sent us to jail cells. It compelled us to confront injustice, speak truth to power, and challenge this nation to live up to its highest ideals.”
America was attempting to turn a new page in racial reform when the Rev. Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner and her husband, Tom Skinner, founded the Annual Prayer Breakfast, now Day of Healing, in 1981.
From catastrophes like 1965’s Bloody Sunday to the national outrage sparked by King’s assassination in 1968, faith leadership and sacrifice have historically met at the crossroads of civic action, making an annual convening rooted in those same principles imperative even four decades later.
“Our fight has never ended, but our struggle is more directed at our well-being,” Williams-Skinner recently told The Informer. “We still have lynchings and acts of violence and questionable deaths, but things are [even] more questionable. There has never not been a time for prayer and fasting and speaking out and voting.”
In other words, drawing from generational leadership demands far more than remembrance but the will to confront today’s injustices, particularly in the spirit of living traditions like the Day of Healing Prayer Breakfast.
“In that room and in that space, you will have many people who have been laboring, who have been fighting, who are doing so much to try to protect democracy, protect our vote, and protect our rights,” the Rev. Tony Lee, pastor of Community of Hope A.M.E. Church in Maryland, told The Informer. “The Day of Healing is important because [it shows] we can do more than one thing at a time. We need to be fighting, and…we need to be organizing, mobilizing, and strategizing.”
Taking a Nod from CBC’s Own Leaders in Faith
Driven by ALC55’s theme: “Rooted, Ready, and Rising,” this year’s Day of Healing brings the gospel sounds of John P. Kee & New Life, plus keynote speaker, the Rev. Dr. George L. Parks Jr., to Northeast D.C., all the while invoking the action needed well beyond September.
“We have a list of grievances, but no plan,” Coates said. “When I think about many of the proposals and ideas that I see from policymakers, thought-leaders, influencers, faith and civil rights leaders who are on platforms, promoting what we need today, from my vantage point, it amounts to S.H.-.T — Symbols, Holidays, Images and Tokens.”
The Rev. Thomas Bowen, general secretary of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, nodded to testimonies of resistance in the Civil Rights Movement.
Advocacy at the hands of faith activists, and later members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), saw leaders like former Georgia Rep. Andrew Young –– founding executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) –– help draft pivotal legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
From there, Young went on to become the state’s first Black congressional representative since the Reconstruction era and the first African-American U.N. ambassador with his appointment by former President Jimmy Carter in 1977.
“There is a nonviolent tradition in the Black community that says that no matter what happens to us, we don’t hate anybody, and we work to overcome it,” Young told The Washington Informer’s Austin Cooper in February 2022.
Meanwhile, in the 5th Congressional District, the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) fought injustice until he died of pancreatic cancer in 2020. Highly regarded as “the conscience of Congress,” Lewis galvanized people to challenge the system in all walks of life — from leading over 600 protesters across Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to calling for the inquiries that led to Trump’s first impeachment trials 54 years later in 2019.
“When we look at the ‘traditional civil rights movement,’ there wasn’t a national event like a prayer breakfast that they looked forward to, but there were other meetings at local churches and…mass meetings, and things like that took place that helped energize,” Bowen told The Informer following the 2025 Day of Healing, “and the prayer breakfast for the CBC is one.”
Like Rep. Young, the District’s own former delegate, the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, served as a top aide to King and helped lay the groundwork for the 1963 March on Washington, which celebrated its 63rd anniversary to the tune of a [ ]-attended revival on Aug. 28 at Lincoln Memorial.
Meanwhile, other early attendees and previous speakers of the annual prayer breakfast include: the Rev. Grainger Browning, pastor of Maryland’s Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church; nationally renowned Bishops T.D. Jakes and Vashti McKenzie; and modern freedom fighters like the Rev. Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and president of Repairers of the Breach –– which is currently leading a nationwide march to the polls through Election Day on Nov. 3.
“We pray. We recommit ourselves. And then we go back to work,” Coates said, reiterating the Day of Healing ethos, “for the poor, voting rights, human dignity, and building a nation in which everybody has a place.”
For the senior pastor, driving human dignity through principles of faith is especially pertinent in a moment masked by the growing influence of Christian nationalism.
“We need a faithful Church…a prophetic Church. We need a Church willing to speak, particularly when silence would be easier,” Coates continued. “For the poor, voting rights, human dignity, and building a nation in which everybody has a place.”
Christian nationalism and white evangelicalism saw a pointed rise in tandem with Trump’s second presidency, which heavily stakes on making America “great again” and “rededicating” the country to God –– the same country that has now undergone policy violence, unconstitutional war, and what Barber called “a national moral crisis,” to The Informer in April.
Why Christian nationalism is a pressing issue for faith leaders of all belief systems: it aims to marry faith to political power in exclusionary ways, Coates explains, while conflating the concept of “belonging” in America to appearances, religious beliefs and political affiliations.
As such, Coates says it’s time to employ tools of resistance beyond protest.
“We do not have an agenda for the Black community and American people that enables us to keep a roof over our heads, [to send] our kids to decent-funded schools, to get a college education without going into debt,” he told The Informer, “to have a healthcare [system where] people don’t have to die or go bankrupt because they get sick. What we need today is substance over symbolism.”
As issues from health care and cultural erasure to the prevention of voter discrimination in congressional maps line the ballot this November, ALC55 carries a call that some liken to an ancestral assignment.
Where the annual prayer breakfast comes in: demonstrating how to turn coalition into movement without losing sight of the power in spiritual refuel.
“In the midst of [it all], we cannot lose the fact that we all are humans in the fight,” Lee told The Informer. “And in our humanity, we can all use a day of healing.”
