Entry · catalog no. 4247
church fan
/ /ˈtʃɜrtʃ fæn/ /CHURCH fan
noun · Black churches, concentrated in the South and in Migration congregations · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
A hand-held fan of coated board stock stapled to a flat wooden handle, carried in Black churches: religious or race-uplift imagery on the front, an advertisement for a local Black business on the back.
“It got hot in there before the second hymn and every church fan in the building came out.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American churches, heaviest in the South and in the Northern congregations built by the Great Migration. The advertising hand fan dates to the late nineteenth century; the church fan as most people picture it is a twentieth-century object, at its height before air conditioning reached sanctuaries in the 1950s and after, and still printed today. The advertisers were not only funeral homes, though that is the version that gets remembered — Black-owned insurance companies and florists bought the reverse too. The Tennessee State Museum holds a fan advertising the funeral services of Mrs. Phillip Jordan, a Black woman undertaker working in the Jim Crow South, and another for Universal Life Insurance, founded by Dr. Joseph E. Walker in 1923. Curators read these fans as material culture of Black death, Black business and self-representation: for many congregants the images on the front were the first dignified pictures of Black people they had ever seen in print, arriving before Ebony and Jet.
1900s
Black funeral homes and insurance companies begin advertising on hand fans
1923
Universal Life Insurance founded; its fans circulate in Black churches
2023
Tennessee State Museum publishes its church fan holdings as Black material culture
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Black churches, concentrated in the South and in Migration congregations · 1900s
Spoken by
Black congregations, ushers, church mothers and funeral homes
$CHURCHThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring126 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
40/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1900
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Tranae Chatman, Curator's Corner: Preserving African American History and Material Culture — Church Fans, Tennessee State Museum
2023
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+ Cite a sourceSmithsonian National Museum of American History, Archives Center Advertising Hand Fan Collection, NMAH.AC.0809
late 1800s–2000s
See also