The couple would wear traditional dress, with the bride usually wearing a traditional fabric gifted to her by her new parents-in-law, sometimes sewn into a modern Afrocentric design.
He joined one of the city's most prominent black churches, Trinity United, and abandoned his youthful agnosticism in favour of Christianity (Trinity's Afrocentric bent, with its African visitors and women dressed in African robes, may have particularly appealed to the son of an African).