This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

“IT’S ROYAL WEDDING TIME!!!” blared the celebrity website TMZ. Later, the deed done, the headline switched. “THEY GOT HITCHED AND IT WAS AWESOME!!!” it shouted.

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry marry as millions watch Read more

And so it was across three US time zones, as millions excitedly watched a royal wedding imbued with markedly American values, from the words of the civil rights movement and the ideals of love to a gospel choir belting out the Ben E King classic Stand By Me and the spiritual This Little Light of Mine.

“We gotta get y’all married!” announced Michael Curry, the first African American presiding bishop and primate of the US Episcopal church, as he invoked Martin Luther King Jr in a homily about love that could have been delivered in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he served as a bishop for 16 years.

“There’s power in love,” he said. “Love can help and heal when nothing else can. There’s power in love to lift up and liberate when nothing else will.”

Such power could be seen in the service, Curry continued, saying: “Two young people fell in love and we all showed up.”

Play Video 2:02 US minister Michael Curry captures world's attention with powerful royal wedding sermon - video

Nor was the US under-represented on the guest list. Taking its lead from the bride, the star of the USA Network hit Suits, now titled Duchess of Sussex, the bright star power of American glamour radiated from Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams and George Clooney.

Across the cable networks, anchors, commentators and guests filled six hours of early morning coverage with expressions of mounting delight.

“If there’s any question about Meghan Markle bringing some change to the royal family, this ceremony was the beginning,” Anderson Cooper enthused, anchoring coverage for CNN.



“She did it in a way that was incredibly bold,” agreed the commentator Bonnie Greer. “This was not a tiptoeing gesture. She changed the tenor of the ceremony completely.”

Over on CBS, the former Vanity Fair editor and guest royal expert Tina Brown gushed: “It was a real blend of black and white, American and British.”

“Perfection from beginning to end, a fairy tale,” the host Gayle King agreed, between hourly changes of her fascinator.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest CBS News at the royal wedding. Photograph: CBS News

The service also evoked deep historical roots between black America and the crown, dating back to the loyalists who, for a promise of emancipation from slavery, fought for Britain in the American revolutionary war. Though black abolitionists often understated the historic fight for the British, as they tried to win favour in mainstream American politics, some connections remain.

“A general coincidence of anti-oppression – and British honoring of the Loyalists over time – is clear,” the historian Alan Gilbert, author of Black Patriots and Loyalists, told the Guardian. “Meghan is becoming a royal while keeping to her views. Britain (and more France) have been friendly to American blacks despite rapacious British colonial racism. So it is all somehow connected, if not quite sharply.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People watch the wedding in Los Angeles. Photograph: Kyle Grillot/AFP/Getty Images

Almost 100 years after the revolution, in the mid-19th century, British-controlled Canada offered freedom to African Americans. On Saturday, the bridal veil contained Commonwealth references in the forms of more than 50 national flowers.

Seeking to explain the American sense of connection to the crown, other historians and commentators simply point to the notion that American culture is built on the idea of fairy tales being the ultimate achievement in love.

US TV viewership for Markle’s wedding was expected to easily exceed the 23 million who tuned in for Prince William’s wedding to Kate Middleton in 2011. Veronica Hefner, a quantitative media scholar at University of California, told NBC this wedding may prove more popular because the bride “is literally living out the American princess fairy tale”.