I can remember my Mother always wearing a hat in church. This was a Southern Baptist Church.
Maybe around 1960 or a few years later it quit being the custom and I don’t recall her wearing one after that.
This brought up a memory of my Grandmother. She wrote a story in the “Holmes County Advertiser” of her trip to South Carolina to represent an organization.
There was a problem tho. No proper girl then (just after 1900) traveled without a hat. They arrived at the train station in DeFuniak Springs only a few minutes before the train departed. Her Sister went to the Jennings Sisters store, bought the hat and threw it through the trains window to Grandmother just as the train pulled out.
Countless black women would rather attend church naked than hatless. For these women, a church hat, flamboyant as it may be, is no mere fashion accessory; it's a cherished African American custom, one observed with boundless passion by black women of various religious denominations.
A woman's hat speaks long before its wearer utters a word. It's what Deirdre Guion calls "hattitude...there's a little more strut in your carriage when you wear a nice hat. There's something special about you."
If a hat says a lot about a person, it says even more about a people-the customs they observe, the symbols they prize, and the fashions they fancy.