“Prayer and praise meetings, love feasts and communion services, sermons and class revivals, shoutings and singings of hallelujahs in the most fervid camp-meeting style go on uninterruptedly.”
This 1932 quote from the Black writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson describes the August Quarterly Festival, a religious and cultural gathering for Black Episcopalian churchgoers hailing from and around Wilmington, Delaware.
This year, the August Quarterly takes place from August 23 to 30 at various locations in Wilmington, including the Delaware Historical Society, Peter Spencer Plaza, and Harriet Tubman Riverfront Park. Sorrowfully, the Mother African Union Church, the usual site of services during the August Quarterly, experienced a devastating fire in May 2026. This church was the second iteration of the Mother African Union Church, as it had been moved to its current location on North Franklin Street in 1969 due to Wilmington’s efforts at urban renewal…