Charleston Earthquake Survivors' Fervent Appeals to Heaven

During the series of catastrophic earthquake shocks in Charleston, South Carolina, on the night of August 31, 1886, the population, including both white and black citizens, was reduced to a state of desperate prayer and lamentation. Amidst falling buildings and the roaring of the earth, people of all classes and races gathered in open spaces like Marion Square, crying out to God for mercy and singing hymns in a collective manifestation of faith and reliance upon divine intervention during a time of extreme peril.

Fuller account of this event (as retold in The Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star, Vol. 48, No. 39 (27 September 1886), p. 623):

The scene in Charleston on the night of the 31st of August, when the earthquake occurred, was one of the most terrible that can be imagined. The earth rocked and swayed, and the houses were shaken as if they had been toys. The people rushed into the streets in their night clothes, and the air was filled with the cries of the terrified. Colored people everywhere were loud and unceasing in their declamations of alarm, in the singing of hymns and fervent appeals for God's mercy, in which a God knows, many a proud heart who heard them arising in night and in the hour of his wondrous might, devoutly and humbly and sincerely joined. Danger brings all of us to the dust of the people. There were no distinctions of place or power, pride or caste, in the assemblages that were gathered together in Charleston on Tuesday night. The rich and the poor, the white and the black, were all on the same level, and all were equally helpless in the presence of the great power that was shaking the earth beneath their feet.