Question 1

What does “church hat” mean?

Accepted Answer

The wide, high, deliberately unmissable hat a Black woman wears to Sunday service — called a crown by the women who wear them, and worn as one.

Question 2

Where does “church hat” come from?

Accepted Answer

The practice belongs to Black churchwomen — Southern congregations from Alabama and Georgia to the Carolinas and Mississippi, and the Northern and Western churches those congregations seeded during the Great Migration — and it long predates the compound noun used to name it. Two historical pressures produced it. The first is scriptural: the instruction in 1 Corinthians 11 that women cover their heads in worship, read literally and at length in Black Protestant churches. The second is economic and racial. Under Jim Crow, an enormous share of Black women worked as domestics and servants in uniforms chosen by employers, and Sunday was the day the uniform came off. What replaced it was chosen without reference to any white household's taste, and it was chosen to be seen. Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry's Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats (Doubleday, 2000), with a foreword by Maya Angelou, is the book that gathered this into the record — Cunningham's portraits and Marberry's oral histories of women describing what their hats mean and cost and where they came from. Regina Taylor adapted those oral histories into a musical play, Crowns, which premiered at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton on 15 October 2002 and opened off-Broadway at Second Stage on 13 November 2002; NPR covered the book on 14 December 2002. The misreading to correct is the reduction of the tradition to fashion or to display. The women in Crowns describe it consistently in the other direction: as an inheritance, an act of respect toward God, and a refusal to be small in the one room where smallness was never required of them.