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Charleston and the Resilience of Wednesday Night Church

A year later, the mid-week prayer meeting is more important than ever.
Charleston and the Resilience of Wednesday Night Church
Image: Seth Hahne

Where else could we go? That was the hard truth of our Wednesday nights. This was the 1950s and my family was black, so we didn’t have much choice of where to go for a mid-week break.

We went to church. Life stopped for Wednesday night “prayer meeting,” as we called it then—and God knows, if black folks needed anything in the 1950s when the sun went down, we needed prayer.

Each Wednesday, Daddy came home about four from his weekday government job as an auditor, walking through the front door of our Denver bungalow and exhaling probably for the first time in a long day. Mama, not needing to ask him how work went, would have already cooked our family dinner. My big sister and I did our daily job of washing up the dishes afterwards, always without complaint.

Then, with Daddy, we all waited on the front porch for our evening ride. Some good church brother—maybe Brother Bell or Brother Cunningham or Brother Wheeler, or one of the other Negro men in our church who ...

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