Church Ladies: Untold Stories of Harlem Women in the Powell Era

By Martia G. Goodson

More than simply ushers and Sunday School teachers, the women of Harlems Abyssinian Baptist Church were influential leaders in the congregations of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Senior and Junior. Church Ladies: Untold Stories of Harlem Women in the Powell Era explores these womens lives at the church and their roles in a Northern civil rights movement that took them and their pastor, the fiery Powell Junior, from protests for jobs on Harlems 125th Street in the 1930s to demonstrations for justice in the halls of the United States Congress in the 1960s.

Testimony from over a dozen little-recognized women paints a vivid picture of that historic church and the struggles against Jim Crow in New York City and beyond. Their stories also shed light on Congressman Powells social and legislative impact on the American nation during a time of strict racial segregation and unchecked racial violence. It was time when the Church ladies and all of black America whispered and shouted, Give em hell, Adam!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504958851

Martia G. Goodson

Martia G. Goodson, PhD, is an American historian specializing in African American oral history. She authored Chronicles of Faith: the Autobiography of Frederick. D. Patterson and has written numerous articles for academic and professional journals and magazines on black oral history. She is the author of New York’s African Burial Ground, an official guide to the cemetery of fifteen thousand Africans enslaved in colonial Lower Manhattan. After a career teaching at Baruch College-CUNY, Dr. Goodson is completing a second book on the burial ground and a book of stories from formerly enslaved black people in Tennessee and Kentucky. She enjoys interviewing and photography and lives in Bronx, New York.

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© 2015 Martia G. Goodson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/29/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-5887-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-5886-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-5885-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015917811

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

1 To Be An Abyssinian

2 Senior Powell’s Divine Aristocrats

3 From the Church of the Classes to the Church of the Masses

4 Aunt Chubby’s Children

5 Jobs: Crawling, Walking, Running

6 Church Ladies and Mr. Civil Rights versus the Tammany Tiger

A Note on the Denouement

7 Operation TakeDown

8 The Monsters We Defy

9 The Church Ladies’ Statements and Scrapbooks

10 Profiles of the Narrators

To Consider

A Few Words on Sources

Permissions

About The Author

To the memories of Mary Kennedy Reddick, Ruth Dixon Graham and Jamie R. Graham,

to Ruth G. Ray and to Malerie

FOREWORD

Church Ladies is an important book for anyone who wants an understanding of the church, of African Americans and of America in the 20th century. The role of the church and of the church women is not just crucial to the civil rights movement: As this book makes clear, those roles were critical catalysts for American history well beyond the well-known chronicle of the civil rights movement.

It will come as a surprise to many readers that innovations taken for granted in today’s United States came from the church and from church ladies. For example, long before Ms became an accepted term (or magazine title), as this book explains, [t]he term Miz is one of long standing and is widely-used among blacks and is used regardless of whether an adult woman’s marital status is known or not. It had its origin not in the women’s movement of the last century but in slavery over a century earlier.

Of course Church Ladies is also a history of two Abyssinian Church pastors, my father and grandfather, and again, those histories told by the women of Abyssinia will surprise many. To take one small example that tells a larger story, today many find it difficult to believe that my father ran for Congress as a Democrat and a Republican - and on the American Labor ticket. His endorsement of Dwight Eisenhower for election in 1956 over Adlai Stevenson, who had the backing of the Southern segregationists, was the beginning of the Democratic Party’s effort to bring him down, starting with a well-financed primary challenge in 1958. (My mother and I were in Europe the night of the primary, so my father sent us a telegram when the election results were known, reading The people won, three to one. That’s all he had to write.)

But for me, on a personal level, this book is a revelation, with the reminiscences of so many women I knew going back to my earlier memories of the late 1940s. The church was a center of my life, but looking back, there was so much more to the women of Abyssinia than a toddler and then growing boy could know or appreciate. What was clear as far back as I can remember is that the women of Abyssinia were always a critical part of the church, before services, during services, after services, in the civil rights struggle, in politics, in the life of the community and in our lives.

Church Ladies is a reminder of the rituals of Saturday and Sunday, from preparing Saturday night to dressing for church Sunday morning. Both of my parents on Friday night would take the train or fly from wherever they were speaking and performing (and in the pre-jet age, that could be an arduous journey) to be home on Saturday. That was our day, starting with play – both my mother and father joined touch football with neighborhood kids, for my father against the wishes of his doctors worried about his back injury, and for my mother in violation of her million-dollar insurance policy on her hands. And then we had our Saturday night preparations for Sunday morning – and yes, I too wore a stocking cap.

Then there was the name of the church: Abyssinian or Abyssinian Baptist was the formal reference, but inside the church, much more often, it was Abyssinia, pronounced abySEEnya. Reading the passage describing that special name was one of the many times I nodded in agreement, reminded of growing up in the church and the church office.

Church Ladies is also a revelation to me about my family, with new insights into the history of two previous Powell generations. Seen from the perspective of the ladies of Abyssinia, my father and grandfather now emerge as ever more complex and interesting. Much of the book served as both a reminder of history and the adding of crucial background. Reading it was a joy, and sometimes I even laughed out loud.

Then there were the personal surprises: Growing up, I knew my father wore a back brace and had suffered a painful injury. I did not know that the first time in years that his doctors allowed him to perform a baptism was when he baptized me.

So turn the page, savor and enjoy what is in the pages ahead. Church Ladies is at once a delight and essential reading.

Adam Clayton Powell III

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful for the insights provided by the Ladies themselves and for their friendship. I owe a debt of gratitude to Emilyn Brown, Glen Johnson and Kevin McGruder, all of whom encouraged me and critiqued my work and ideas consistently. I want to express my thanks to Barbara Connell and Marilyn Russell for their confidence that I could tell this story. Thanks also to Abyssinian’s Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III who encouraged the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library to collect the reminiscences of these and other Abyssinian women in the Abyssinian Baptist Church Oral History Project. I conducted those interviews in 1992 and portions of several of them are included here. Thanks to Dinean Davis of In Her Image for her imaginative book design. And thanks to Ewurama Ewusi-Mensah of Sea Never Dry Editing and Publishing Services for improving Church Ladies with her editing. Special thanks to Jamie Goodson and Malik Goodson, who often had to hear TMI about the book.

Many others have given encouragement and counsel: Ruth Inniss, Janice Judge, Diana Lachatanere, Sandii McNeill, Rev. Dr. C. Vernon Mason, Minister Rashad R. Moore, the late Ronald Newsome, Yvonne Pannell, Louise Ray, Grant Reid, Dr. Audrey Williams, and the late Rev. Dino Like Boom Woodard among others. They have had to endure many years of my dodging questions about when I was going to finish that book. I hope that they will be pleased now. I would like to pay tribute to the memory of Professor Charles Hamilton, who told me that I should write this book. That was a long time ago, but I remembered and it has been a motivation. Finally and Foremost, I want to acknowledge God, who has brought me from a mighty long way.

PREFACE

Depictions of black Church Ladies are staples of American popular culture. In e-mail jokes and in TV sitcoms, images of boisterous, post-middle-age, sanctimonious brown biddies of the church abound. These women—depicted as nosey, suspicious, and sexually frustrated—are familiar and sometimes amusing figures on the landscape. With their stereotypical fluttering, flubbering, and flustering demeanor, their strident voices, and their extreme Sunday-go-to-meetin’ wardrobes, the Church Ladies are familiar to millions of people. To this public, the Church Lady is a physically imposing figure: tall, either skinny or fat, and wearing a hat and/or an ill-fitting wig. She is usually brown skinned and lacking in composure.

Church Ladies are icons produced in life, on stage, and on screen. The twentieth century brought Lorraine Hansberry’s signifying Mrs. Johnson in A Raisin in the Sun and the animated Hetebrink sisters, Cassietta and Amelia, from TV’s Amen. Aunt Esther, a loudmouthed Bible thumper, crucified Red Foxx’s Fred Sanford weekly on Sanford and Son. Twenty-first century entertainment continues to provide the pulsating laugh track to accompany contemporary Church Lady figures like The Parkers character, Nikki Parker, an occasional church choir director, and her daughter Kim, a squeaky-voiced Church Lady in training. We have heard the belly laughs produced by Tyler Perry’s no-nonsense Church Lady matriarch, Madea; and portrayals of Church Ladies have long been a standard (and apparently a financially imperative) part of the repertoire of black male comedians across generations, from Flip Wilson and Bill Cosby to Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock.

Renditions of Church Ladies have invaded the twenty-first-century world of reality TV, and the mendacious images continue. These supposedly modern church women appear to be no different from the unchurched ladies shown on other reality minstrel shows focusing on black folk.

These popular characterizations—of unsophisticated, intellectually limited, materialistic, shallow, immature, impulsive, foul-tempered women (or, in the parlance, females)—ignore the social complexities of church ladyship; they reduce the spiritual lives of the women of the black church to comic relief. Failure to consider these women in a more expansive way leaves unwritten much of the story of the black community’s development, particularly in New York City’s Harlem.

The Church Ladies depicted in the popular media are, in fact, quite different from the Church Ladies of history. The women of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church were not comic figures, though they found amusement in recounting to me some of their days at the church. They were not nosey females; they were intelligent, probing women unafraid to take initiative and to ask hard questions. They tried to be good Christian soldiers, but they did not think of themselves as faultless. They were not belligerent, but then again, they were not to be played with. They raised their voices collectively and effectively but did not limit themselves to raising their voices in church choirs. They were outspoken about important social issues during an important time in the history of this important church and this important community.

The women of this book are part of a black sisterhood of Christians, one with a long history of faith-based activism. This sisterhood of traditions and practices is traceable to the transatlantic trafficking of Africans. It is rooted in the African women who crossed the Atlantic Ocean, against their wills, and in their descendants. Within their enslavement in the Americas and in the Caribbean, these women perpetuated worship practices and created new forms of expression for traditional African ways of life and ways of being, their religion. Spiritual practices evolved that reflected this survival of Africanisms that was unequivocally shaped by slavery and syncretized in that bitter crucible.

Throughout the Americas, African precedents are found in the religious practices of the descendants of the enslaved. And throughout these traditions, women of African descent became major players—shamans—on the stages of organized religion: the mães dos santos of Brazilian candomblé; the iyalorixás and santeras of Cuban Santeria; and the queens and priestesses of Haitian vodun, among others. North America had its major players as well. In the United States, black women in the black church aspired to be, were trained to be, and successfully became Church Ladies in the tradition of their female elders. From the lone voice singing or humming in the white folks’ kitchen, to those voices lifted up in the plantation brush arbors and camp meetings of yesteryear to the cathedrals of today’s black churches, Church Ladies have been and remain a defining presence. Indeed, without black women, there would be no black church.

Though historically denied formal leadership roles in black churches, denominations, and congregations, on boards and committees, and behind pulpits and microphones, black women have nonetheless been the sine qua non of the black church. The titular heads of the black church have been male, but women have always been both leaders and followers there.

The leadership work of Church Ladies in the United States finds examples in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women who led lives of social activism: Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Jennings, and Susan McKinney Steward, all activist New York Church Ladies. New women stood on those shoulders early in the twentieth century. Church Ladies Mary McLeod Bethune, Ida B. Wells, and Nannie Helen Burroughs rose to national prominence battling the major social ills that faced black people and that especially challenged black women: the need for educational opportunities for black youth (Bethune), the need to end lynching of those youth and their families (Wells), and the need to develop women’s leadership in churches and schools (Burroughs). Later in the twentieth century, when the key issues for black people were civil rights, voting rights, social and recreational services, and help for impoverished mothers, yet another generation of Church Ladies came forth. In Montgomery, Alabama, in Jacksonville, Florida, in Detroit, in Saint Louis, and in Sunflower County, Mississippi, Church Ladies Jo Ann Robinson, Eartha White, Mother Waddles, Annie Malone, and Fannie Lou Hamer emerged. Alongside each of these famed women stood countless other unnamed and unrecognized Church Ladies. They did not seek personal recognition, but they most certainly did want universal recognition of their human and civil rights. They were prepared to fight for those rights and to accept nothing less.

A confluence of events during the 1930s—the Great Migration and the birth of the New Negro—helped to produce another group of Church Ladies, women ready to wade into the unknown waters of the city of New York to seek the good life, or at least a safer one. They depended on their churches and their own good sense for guidance in this new territory. Influenced by earlier national black leaders like Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, Dr. Robert R. Moton, James Weldon Johnson, and Marcus Garvey, as well as Bethune, Wells, and Burroughs, this newer Church Lady was also influenced by newer leaders: Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, and Thurgood Marshall. Yet in twentieth-century Harlem, it was the imposing presence of two Abyssinian pastors—Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and his son, Adam—and the influence of their historic church, which made a critical difference. This was the Powell Era, 1908–72. Harlem and New York were home to other churches, of course, but as far as this new group of Church Ladies was concerned, Abyssinian Baptist Church was, in the words of one, the only church in New York.

This is the story of Church Ladies who affiliated with one church and joined in a collective assault on the white supremacist ideas — ideas that fed Jim Crow in the North and in the South. The Ladies had not come to Abyssinian or to New York looking for struggle. The truth was quite the opposite: they wanted jobs, housing, and decent treatment. But when they found out that they were to be denied those things, they had no choice but to engage. At Abyssinian they found church leadership ready to hear them, to lead them, and to be led by them as they battled for jobs. They wanted an end to price gouging in their neighborhood stores, an end to racial violence in the streets, and an end to second-class citizenship in the voting booth and elsewhere. Affiliation with Abyssinian might, many felt, offer a chance to advance their own, secular interests. They were right.

Adam Clayton Powell Sr. headed the Harlem church when it moved from mid-Manhattan to its new sanctuary uptown in 1922. There he recruited a staff of trained professionals to help manage the many activities and classes in the Sunday school and at Abyssinian’s adjacent Community House. People came to Abyssinian worship services and classes in droves, in numbers that rivaled enrollment figures of some black colleges.

Later, Powell Jr.’s legendary congressional career focused church and community attention on national issues and on the fight for changes to benefit people of color, workers, poor people, urban dwellers, and everyone desiring more educational opportunity, more jobs and job training, more decent housing, health care, and a greater measure of justice. Abyssinian’s Church Ladies who reminisce here were recipients of Powell’s individual and collective attention. He was not a remote figure—some had known him when they were all teenagers; others hung out with him in Harlem, and some worked for him. All saw his political rise and demise. They protested his political funeral and attended his church funeral. They witnessed both the beginning and the end of the Powell Era. But these Church Ladies’ stories have not been heard.

_______________________________

In Church Ladies, these women tell their own stories and, in doing so, give voice to the history of that distinguished church and to the Powell Era in ways that others cannot. This chronicle of these Harlem women is based on in-depth interviews conducted with more than a dozen women who were active in Abyssinian life during the tenures of its well-known pastors, Powell Sr. and Powell Jr. Most of the women were more than eighty years old when they were interviewed in 1992 and 2002. As their rich testimony accumulated, as its significance was illuminated, and as the interviewees began to pass away, a compilation of these Church Ladies’ stories seemed right. Church Ladies: Untold Stories of Harlem Women in the Powell Era is the result.

I had already joined Abyssinian when I conducted the first interviews. I did not know my subjects but was first introduced to them through a letter from the pastor, Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, describing my intention as an oral historian to tape-record their reminiscences of Abyssinian history. After meeting and interviewing them, I began to recognize their faces at church. I chatted with them, worshipped with them, and ate Sunday dinner in the church’s Fellowship Hall with them. In time, I attended the funerals of most of them.

They were a special group, but they were not unique. After the initial interviews, it became clear that there were many more Abyssinian stories to tell than I had already collected, and many more people to collect from. Then, on a Friday evening in the fall of 2002, I was blessed to grab one of the last open seats on a chartered bus for the ninety-minute ride to the site of an Abyssinian women’s weekend spiritual retreat. That’s how I met Bertha Talley, my seatmate. Throughout the bus ride and that weekend, we talked. We had several things in common, and I learned some compelling details about her. Our conversations led to a formal interview with her and with several other older Abyssinians whom I had not met earlier. This oral history is also the result of numerous interviews with those fifteen women. Bertha Talley’s recollections are central among them. Though I decided to concentrate here on the stories of Abyssinian’s women, I have made an exception with the testimony of Peter G. Holden Jr. His memories of Powell Jr. and of the Powell Era offer another perspective on the church and on the congressman. Although the emphasis in Church Ladies is on the collective memories of this era, the reader can learn a little bit more about the narrators individually in Chapter Ten.

The Powell Era saw the dogged persistence of Jim Crow, and the narrators here, along with their families, were victims and resisters. Their testimony helps us to understand the decades from the 1920s to the 1970s in greater depth. In particular, this oral history illuminates the irrepressible power of a black church with a courageous pastor and a congregation that was enlightened and unafraid. The women’s descriptions of their lives are representative of the lives of thousands of Harlem’s women and hundreds of thousands of their counterparts in northern black urban communities across America in those times.

The women’s testimony begins with voices of those women who remember Abyssinian during the 1920s, when the hundred-plus-year-old church moved to Harlem, and the late 1930s, when Senior Powell was nearing the end of his pastorate. Next, their reminiscences draw a contrast between the church of the father and the church of the son. Powell Sr.’s Abyssinian was known as the Church of the Classes; his son ushered in the birth of another church, the Church of the Masses. That new church yielded distinctive personalities and programs that the Church Ladies narrators recalled from their own experiences. The Church Ladies also described and interpreted Adam’s political career. They inspired his ascendancy; they watched it and invested in it. They were present at its end.

Spanning most of the twentieth century, the Church Ladies timeline begins with Powell Sr.’s 1908 arrival at Abyssinian and New York. It extends to the time of Powell Jr.’s death in the early 1970s. The initial focus of the women’s interviews was church life, but other compelling subjects kept emerging: their jobs, their families, their experiences with racism in Harlem and elsewhere in New York, and their community life Up South (as opposed to Down South) with activist Powell Jr. Their testimonies describe the fiery times when Adam’s Harlem jobs protests, the southern civil rights movement, and the black power movement were successive waves crashing against the conscience of New York City and of America. They reminisced about when their pastor served in Congress, when he was a black national firebrand against segregation, racial discrimination, and moral hypocrisy in all quarters, nationally and internationally.

Church Ladies is twentieth-century American history—seen through the eyes of the women of a black church. It is formed from the reminiscences of solid women: dignified, modest, hardworking, poised, imaginative, and intolerant of continued second-class citizenship. These women were the descendants of survivors of the transatlantic slave trade, enslavement, emancipation, Jim Crow, migration, and immigration. Theirs was a centuries-old legacy of repression and resistance, and they brought this legacy to the Abyssinian Church.

Both of the Powells were larger than life. However, my aim here is not to present the Powell giants but the world of the giants’ church and the secular world of the church women and church men whom the Powells served. As history Church Ladies is not an objective treatment of these subjects. I have not tried to present a complete, fair, and balanced account of the church as an institution, of the congregation as Christians, of the pastors as spiritual leaders or role models, or of the narrators as final authorities. The testimony of these working-class women is concerned with their day-to-day lives and the things that impacted those lives. Of course they talked about the things that I asked about, but my questions were directed by their own gyroscopes of memory of those times. In their chosen orbit, they spoke less or not at all about the things that remained dim in their memories or were low on their list of priorities. They loved Adam and talked easily about why that was so. For example, Adam’s activism and his legislative work impacted their lives; his marriages did not. Likewise, the financial and spiritual stability of the church and its ability to meet their needs concerned the Church Ladies; the Powells’ family business and Adam’s social life did not concern them. They hardly mentioned Hattie Dodson, her legal problems, or her time in prison; fruitless investigations of tax improprieties involving Adam; his divorces from Isabel Washington and Hazel Scott; his marriage to Yvette Diago; his response to the challenges of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; or the Abyssinian church when Adam was gone but not quite gone. Nonetheless, what they do talk about is of substance. Their stories are important and available but have been told to only a few who study those times.

The women here were all working people with families and lives that were regularized and complex. They worked at jobs where they punched time clocks. They did not have the time or, seemingly, the disposition to explore further the plethora of media accounts of Adam’s comings and goings. And their ages prevented them from having anything other than a child’s perspective on his father. Additionally, the women had been raised to exercise discretion and etiquette. They knew what a woman ought to be and ought to say. As such, they were not inclined to air their own or the church’s dirty laundry for public inspection or for personal aggrandizement. The Church Ladies’ testimony suggested that they believed that Adam and Abyssinian Baptist Church had suffered enough detractors already without their needing to tip the scales any further. This does not mean, however, that what they say is invalid or inauthentic. They were generally not critical of Adam, and I—interested in what the Church Ladies were interested in—have chosen to maintain that perspective in presenting their stories.

This is the story of the Church Ladies and the people of Harlem who celebrated Powell Sr. and made Adam Clayton Powell Jr. who he was. They loved him for his activism, his oratory, and his unapologetic passion for their interests. That’s why, in the streets and in the church, he could always hear them urging, Give ’em hell, Adam!

_______________________________

As with all complex institutions, Abyssinian in the Powell Era can be hard to understand. A few things explained at the outset will help the reader better understand the story being told here. Below I have included a brief explanation of a widely accepted term of address for black women; a look at the historical significance of how one properly dresses for church; and a brief discussion of choosing a seat in the church pews at Sunday worship services.

Term of Address

The term of address for women spelled Ms. emerged in the United States in the 1970s as an alternative to and combination of the term Missus, usually abbreviated as Mrs. (referring to a married woman) and the term Miss (used for an unmarried woman). Ms was designed to blur the verbal distinction that some chose to make in terms of address for women who were married and those who were not. Long before Ms came into popular usage (and before it became a magazine title or a lifestyle) black people had a single term of address to refer to all adult women, regardless of race: Miz.

The term Miz is one of long standing and is widely used among blacks regardless of whether an adult woman’s marital status is known or not. It is a respectful term referencing a woman’s age and gender, not her marital status. Unlike Ms, the term Miz, as used traditionally in the black community, simplifies terms of address.

Some speakers of Standard English distinguish between the pronunciation of Mrs. and Miss. Black speakers often pronounce both of these words the same: Miz Thus, a woman’s marital status is not revealed by what she is called. Miz is, instead, a creation of a people whose history in the Americas included chattel slavery, the inability to have a legally recognized marriage, the constant disruption of family units, and the designation of all black and biracial children of the enslaved as illegitimate.

For black women held in slavery there was no Mrs. The post slavery era allowed black people to address black women and men publicly with a title consistent with black social realities. Then, black children would appropriately call an adult black man named Jesse Wilson, for instance, Mister Jesse or Mister Wilson. A woman named Aretha Foster would be called Miz ’Retha or Miz Foster.

At Abyssinian Baptist Church in the Powell Era, women were universally called Miz (as they are today). One did not have to busy one’s head with determining a woman’s marital status in order to address her or to refer to her. She was Miz—Miz Craig, Miz Webber, Miz Thomas, Miz Jones. When a married woman’s marital status was known, she was still referred to as Miz. She and her husband were referred to, for example, as "Mr. and Miz Jones. (On the other hand, interestingly, congregants referred to two of Powell Jr.’s wives, Isabel Washington and Hazel Scott, as Isabel and Hazel, rather than as Mrs. Powell or Miz Powell. This is not surprising, however, for women married to the man known usually as Adam, and only sometimes as Rev. Powell, Congressman Powell, or Dr. Powell.")

In Church Ladies all women are referred to as Miz. For the most part, a Church Lady’s marital status was of no particular importance at Abyssinian. Practically the total life of the church—opportunities for leadership and initiative, to use foresight and organizational skills—was within the grasp of these Abyssinian women, whether they were single, married, or divorced. At the church, although they could not be pastor or deacon, they could be anything else they wanted to be, including head of the trustee board in charge of the church’s money. And they used language - in use beyond the confines of the church - to compliment that vision. Black people reframed terms of address for black women—in all of their various marital statuses—and created an answer: Miz.

Dressing for Church

Although most of the action of Church Ladies takes place outside of Sunday worship services, this weekly ritual of worship in church and Sunday school was the glue that held everything else together. Dressing for church was an expression of a central value. In the Powell Era and before, dressing for church was not a competition but a cultural expression, reflecting an attitude toward both church and toward those other occasions when black people could, historically, get together without the presence or interference of the one they called Mighty Whitey. This was one of the upsides of Jim Crow, and the dressing up occasions included Sunday morning church services, Sunday School, evening vespers, weeknight prayer services, weddings, funerals, parties, picnics, teas, cocktail sips, rent parties, dances, barbeques, baby showers, and piano and dance recitals. Dressing up for these events was not a tradition among all people. But dressing up to go to the black church has been a distinctive reality with historically discernable roots.

Four hundred years of practice formed the foundation from which this black church tradition sprang. Throughout slavery, black people did not have many places to go of their own volition except to church, whether it was a brush arbor, an outdoor camp meeting, or secret gatherings in a cabin, where they turned down the pot and prayed aloud. In the post-slavery era, Jim Crow, segregation, and the constant threat of violence kept the social circle for blacks racially circumscribed. Going to church was always at the center of that circle. And dressing for church was preparation to go to that center.

In this tradition, dressing for church was understood as a social act of respect toward God: you cared enough to dress carefully, with reverence. Further, blacks approached dressing for church with two cultural imperatives. First, the African traditional emphasis on knowing and wearing appropriate attire was preserved in the diaspora. Dressing for church in twentieth-century America emerged from black Americans’ African heritage, even as worshippers were not necessarily aware that these African connections persisted. Second, church had always been a family affair in the black community. Parents dressed up for church: dresses for women and suits and ties for men. Women wore stockings, and men wore socks. Everybody wore the best shoes they owned. Sleeveless was out, and skirts (loose fitting, of course) with hemlines below the knees were in.

Preparing one’s clothes for church was a routine and orchestrated event. Black people grew up laying out their church clothes on Saturday night, when they also bathed. In addition to their church clothes, people in the Powell Era knew the traditional Big Three of grooming: Ivory or Palmolive soap, Vaseline, and Jergens lotion. (The Big Four, if you count the Dax or Dixie Peach for the hair.)

Children represented their parents, and church was truly a place for black folk to represent. Thus, black parents decided what their children would wear to church, and they supervised their dressing and grooming. Children did not go to church dressed casually. Boys wore tucked-in shirts, with jackets, vests, or sweaters and creased pants with belts and clip-on ties. Girls wore skirts and blouses or dresses of a hem length appropriate to the girl’s age. All children wore their best shoes; some wore hats. Everybody had a handkerchief or a tissue and a quarter or two to put in the plate.

Hair was another focus. Most often, it was prepared on Saturday afternoon or evening, then covered with a cloth or scarf—a stocking cap, a head rag, or a do-rag—which, when removed on Sunday morning, revealed the shiny, coiffed do. Between the hair pomades and the skin emollients, no place on earth glistened like a black church on Sunday morning in the Powell