Elyria native will present sermon on Juneteenth at Washington National Cathedral

Elyria native the Rev. Thomas L. Bowen, General Secretary of the Progressive National Baptist Convention Inc., will be the guest preacher at the Washington National Cathedral to commemorate Juneteenth. Bowen will speak at a special Holy Eucharist to mark the day in 1865 when news reached enslaved Black Americans in Galveston, Texas, that they were free - more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was enacted. Bowen, who served as senior adviser in the White House Office of Public Engagement in the Biden Administration, also is the Earl L. Harrison Minister of Social Justice at Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. The significance of the time - and the place - is not lost on Bowen. "I'm grateful for the invitation. It's a place where you speak the truth to the country in times like these, as they try to make sense of it all," he said. "It's where Dr. (Martin Luther) King gave one of his last sermons. This is the site where Bishop Budde spoke truth, to plead with the president." At a prayer service following Donald Trump's inauguration in 2025, the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde asked him to have mercy on marginalized groups, "in the name of God." The Juneteenth service announcement came after a week of ominous headlines as multiple states lined up to re-map themselves after the U.S. Supreme Court undid the Voting Rights Act's racial gerrymandering protections. Bowen said as he writes his sermon, the idea of what we do with the freedom we have weighs on his mind. "I'm wont to say, 'if you've ever wondered what you would have been doing in the '60s, look at what you're doing now. That's what you would have been doing then.'" he said. "The celebration of the significance of these days doesn't come without a recommitment to the work. It's not enough to gain certain rights; we have to fight harder than ever to re-gain them. The overturning of Roe (v. Wade) wasn't a one-time president's project. It was an ongoing endeavor of people since 1973. The Voting Rights Act has been a 61-year fight," he said. "We have to fight hard to keep these things." The idea of Juneteenth more than 161 years ago is not so removed from present times, he believes. "Juneteenth was the denial of information to people that they were free," Bowen said. "How we deal with information now can't be overstated. That sword is two edged - often by race and party; that is how they get divided, for all intents and purposes. So what are we going to do with what has occurred?" In our history, he finds hope, he said. "What gives me hope is the history of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in difficult times," he said. "Every generation has faced moments that tested the nation's conscience, and in every generation, somebody stood up. Somebody marched, somebody organized, somebody prayed, somebody spoke out, somebody kept believing when it would have been easier to give up. That history reminds me that darkness never gets the final word." The livestream will air on the Washington National Cathedral's YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/wncathedral at 11:15 a.m. June 14. Contact Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.