The August Quarterly, originally known as the Big Quarterly, is the oldest continuously celebrated African American festival in the nation. First celebrated in 1814 and observed every year since, it commemorates the founding of the Union Church of African Members, the first African American church to be independently incorporated in the United States. In its early years, it became a kind of independence day for blacks of the Delmarva Peninsula, when slaves were permitted to gather once a year, on condition that they return at the end of the weekend, to worship in their own way free from discrimination. Relatives and friends separated by slavery were reunited for worship, fine clothes, stories, and the sharing of African American music, dance, humor, and food. Eventually delegates from over 600 churches representing more than 25,000 members in the United States and Canada assembled annually in Wilmington during the last weekend in August, and this quarterly meeting open to all church members became known as the Big Quarterly. Before the Civil War, the gathering also provided a public forum for slaves and free men and women to discuss colonization and other issues of slavery, and for a few it offered chances to escape, as runaways were aided along the Underground Railroad in Delaware by conductors and abolitionists including Thomas Garrett, Harriet Tubman, John Hunn, and Samuel D. Burris. After slavery ended, the August Quarterly continued and still draws people from around the nation. Its origins lay in Reverend Peter Spencer's break with the white Asbury Methodist Church of Wilmington: born a slave, having purchased his freedom, he led forty followers out of that church in 1805, and in 1813, with William Anderson, founded the Union Church of African Members. Following Spencer's death in 1842, the festival continued to include a wreath-laying ceremony in his honor.

Photo: Devry Becker Jones (CC0)