As scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. noted, “the Black Church is a cultural laboratory,” where congregation members developed new forms of artistic and literary expression, songwriting, food traditions, and organized for freedom and civil rights. This includes fashion which has always been a source of inspiration and self-expression for church communities.

In September 2024, the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum (SSAAM) in Skillman, New Jersey opened its special exhibition titled The Head that Wears the Crown. The exhibition, a collaboration by Dr. Isabela Morales, SSAAM’s education and exhibit manager, and curator Kyra March, a PhD student at Rutgers University and a public history intern at SSAAM, explores how fashion was a crucial part of the history and the legacy of the Black Church.

For many working-class Black women during the early 20th century “their regular day to day lives did not involve being very fashionable. Many of them were domestics, many of them were doing menial jobs because opportunities were so limited," said Beverly Mills, a SSAAM co-founder. “But on Sunday you were able to be in control of how you wanted to look and how you wanted to present yourself to the world.”

The Head that Wears the Crown

SSAAM has 24 church hats in its collection dating from the 1930’s to the present day, many of which had been donated throughout the years by community members, and none had ever been exhibited before.

“This exhibit was a chance for us and the community to show them the love they deserve,” said Dr. Morales. But the goal was to go beyond merely displaying the hats, and bring them to life through multigenerational portrait photography, audio-visual experiences, and oral histories.

“I remembered a journal from the [Civil War] period commenting on how Black women would wear grand turbans to church services,” March said, as she was conducting research for the exhibit. This inspired her to go beyond understanding church hats as individual items to explore "how Black women expressed their spirituality, freedom, and creativity through headwear more broadly across time,” she continued.

Early on in the exhibition, visitors learn about laws that banned enslaved Black women from styling or adorning their hair as white women were free to do. So-called “plain” hairstyles, or handkerchiefs called tignons were permitted, however, leading some Black women to push legal boundaries by covering their hair in brightly colored or patterned cloth.

As tignons and turbans gave way to hats, a variety of styles, materials, colors, and trends came and went, often becoming family heirlooms. Whether handmade or store-bought, for some, adding a hat to their Sunday best was more than a fashion choice but a celebration of creativity, culture, or resistance to norms around race, class, and gender.

“Many people believe the tradition is dying, which I hope this exhibit remedies,” March said, “Whether it is wearing a white lace doily and gloves on communion Sunday, wearing choir robes, pins, fascinators, etc. each tradition has a history and each person participates or pushes back against that tradition for specific reasons that vary from person to person.”