Is anyone else watching "A Glory From the God" on CBS? Helped purchase the freedom of 10K slaves !

[Breeze54]

Program Details

A Glory From the God

Type: Special
Date: February 23, 2008
Time: 7:00 pm

Description: Profile of Boston preacher and pediatrician Gloria White-Hammond
and her support of families in Sudan.

Cast:
Director(s):
Producer(s):
Writer(s):
Original Airdate: February 17, 2008
Genres: Documentary
Future Airings
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This is making me just tear up! Quite moving...

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The Healer

Gloria White-Hammond


http://www.tufts.edu/home/feature/?p=white-hammond

She's painfully shy. She's soft-spoken and demure. But in her roles as a pediatrician,
minister and anti-slavery activist, Gloria White-Hammond doesn't know how to quit.



In 1983, on a long drive with her husband from Boston to Philadelphia, Gloria White-Hammond who had always been an upbeat, hopeful person, seriously considered suicide.

She and her husband, Ray, also a physician, had been married for 10 years. Together, they had survived the grueling routine of overlapping residencies - he as a Harvard-trained surgeon, she as a Tufts pediatrician. Ray and Gloria should have been happy. But they were not. They were desperately alone, gritting their teeth through every day. "By then, I wanted out of marriage or out of life," White-Hammond says, glancing toward the floor of her office at Boston’s South End Community Health Center.

Lucky for the world, she decided to say yes to life. Over the past 21 years, this quiet woman with the dangly earrings and luminous cocoa-brown skin has made herself into a ferocious tiger for change in the lives of countless afflicted and forgotten people, from black female teens adrift on the streets of Boston to throngs of Sudanese enslaved beneath a burning African sun. White-Hammond is both a physician and a minister, and her practice extends from heaven to hell and back.

After some soul-searching, Gloria and Ray decided to broadcast the lessons of their own recovery. They launched a pre-marital and marital counseling service through the auspices of the church that Ray-a pastor as well as surgeon-had founded, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, located in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. There they personally advised scores of couples in distress.

Gloria and Ray went further by taking their struggles public. Veteran Boston newscaster Liz Walker happened to catch them in an appearance on an evening national magazine show during this time and came away intrigued. "My own marriage was going down the tubes, so I was interested in that topic," says Walker, who has since become close friends with White-Hammond.

It was through Walker that White-Hammond first learned of the modern-day practice of slavery in Sudan. "If you wanted to rank the murderousness of things in the world, this would be right up there at number one or two," says Charles Jacobs, an ex-journalist who directs the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group. Once aware of the slavery issue, White-Hammond decided she had to do something about it. Since 2001, while working part-time as a pediatrician and part-time as a minister, she has traveled to Sudan six times (most recently, this past summer, in early July) to help purchase the freedom of some 10,000 slaves.

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