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Hester Woods

Hester Woods is a member of Hilliard Chapel AME Zion Church, an employee of Brown's Funeral Home, LTD, and president-elect of the Board of Hospice of Western Michigan.

Articles by this author:

  • African American: Free at Last!

    By Hester Woods
    June 1992

    As the organist plays the prelude, friends and relatives enter quietly and take their seats in the pews. The coffin rests in the front of the church. The minister and family wait in the rear.

    The music shifts from the prelude into a quiet processional, signaling the minister to lead the family into the sanctuary. As they make their way down the center aisle, the minister reads three Scripture passages loudly and forcefully, as if banishing the fear and power of death from the room: