Athens will celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Charles Eric Lincoln, who recently was inducted, posthumously, into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. Athens Limestone Community Association invites the public to learn more about the author and scholar during Spilling the Tea: An Expo of Charles Eric Lincoln on Saturday, May 17, at 2 p.m.

Spilling the Tea will offer music, refreshments and a look at Lincoln’s growing-up years in Athens and his career as an author, professor and world-renowned theologian.

Attendees are invited to join into the spirit of the 1930s and 1940s by dressing in the style of the time. There is no admission charge, but donations will be accepted. All proceeds will benefit projects at the Pincham-Lincoln Center, on the site where Lincoln grew up and attended Trinity School, and where the event will occur.

Born in Athens in 1924, Lincoln grew up in a segregated society, experiencing the racial prejudice which would shape the direction of his career. From kindergarten through his graduation in 1941 as valedictorian, he attended Trinity, a school founded by the American Missionary Association in 1865 for the education of newly freed slaves and their progeny. He lived with his grandparents, hauling manure in a wheelbarrow to earn his tuition of $3 per month and picking cotton to help his grandparents put food on the table.

Heading north after graduation, he learned that racial prejudice was not confined to the south. Attempting to sign up for military service after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was refused on the basis of his skin color. Two years later. He was drafted.

Lincoln earned a bachelor’s degree from LeMoyne College, a master’s from Fisk University, a divinity degree from the University of Chicago and master’s and doctorate from Boston University. He became an ordained Methodist minister.

In the 1960s he held administrative and academic positions at Clark College, now Clark Atlanta University; in the early 1970s, he was Professor of Religion and Sociology at Fisk University; and from 1976, he was at Duke University, retiring in 1993 as Professor of Religion and Culture.

Lincoln authored, co-authored or edited 22 books, most of them on the African-American church. They include “My Face is Black,” “Black Muslims in America” and “Coming Through the Fire.” He was co-author of “The Black Church in the African American Experience.” He authored one novel, “The Avenue, Clayton City,” a book of poetry, “This Road Since Freedom” and several church hymns.

Lincoln died in 2000 at the age of 75. He is considered to this day the foremost authority on the sociology of African-American religion and race.

Lincoln’s induction into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame occurred in April during a gala at the University of Alabama’s Bryant Center. Alabama Writers Hall of Fame was instituted in 2014 by a partnership between the Alabama Center for the Book and Alabama Writer’s Forum. Since then, it has inducted new members every two years. Lincoln joins the ranks of such renowned authors as Rick Bragg, Mary Ward Brown, Ralph Ellison, Zelda Fitzgerald, Fannie Flagg, Winston Groom, Zora Neale Hurston, Helen Keller, Harper Lee and Kathryn Tucker Windham.

Speakers prominent in the fields of religion and sociology are featured each year during Clark Atlanta University’s C. Eric Lincoln Lectureship Series, instituted in 1982 by a group of students honoring the positive impact Lincoln had during his tenure at the school. Because the lecture could not be presented in person during the COVID epidemic, Athens-Limestone Community Association was honored to be asked to present a film about Lincoln. The resulting film, Coming Through the Fire: Surviving Race and Place in America, told the story of Lincoln’s early life in Athens.