Description
The August Quarterly Festival, also called Big Quarterly, is an annual celebration to commemorate the founding of the Union Church of Africans, the first African American Church, independently incorporated 1813, in the United States. Simply put, it is a celebration of African American Religious freedom in the United States. The August Quarterly, which began in 1814, became a kind of Independence Day for Black people on the Delmarva Peninsula.
In fact, in the early years of the festival “abolitionists and Underground Railroad conductors of the stature of Thomas Garrett and Harriet Tubman were often in the Wilmington area to assist slaves who chose to escape”. The Big Quarterly, over the years, has remained a time of reunion, religious revival and celebration of freedom for the people in and around Wilmington, Delaware.
