'Amazing Grace' was written in 1773 by John Newton, a white, English slave trader. Newton had been moved to craft the song after a near-death experience aboard a slave ship; and in 1778, he spoke out publicly against slavery.
"Amazing Grace," which was performed during George Floyd's memorial service in Minneapolis Thursday, is one of the best known hymns across a variety of Protestant denominations and also has a complicated racial history.
Written in 1773 by John Newton, a white, English slave trader, the song was originally known as"Faith's Review and Expectation." Newton had been moved to craft the song after a near-death experience aboard a slave ship which sailed into a storm. Newton became a Christian and in 1778 spoke out publicly against slavery.
In 2015, President Barack Obama, a man with no previous history of public singing, sang the hymn at a memorial service for the nine African Americans killed by a white supremacist shooter inside one of the nation's oldest black churches, Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The moment seemed to resonate with a wide variety of Americans.
In 2015, President Barack Obama, a man with no previous history of public singing, sang the hymn as a memorial service for the nine African Americans killed by a white supremacist shooter inside one of the nation's oldest black churches, Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. After the song brought mourners to their feet, Obama went on to deliver a eulogy for the church's slain pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. As he delivered it, Obama said the killer assumed he"would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation's original sin.""But God works in mysterious ways," Obama said."God had different ideas.
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