The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions. Ed. by Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. xvi, 269 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-253-35282-8. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 9780-253-22057-8.)

Abstract

This book builds on the anthropology of Arthur Huff Fauset. In an effort to correct the relative neglect of Fauset—whose reputation has been overshadowed by W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, and Melville Herskovits—the eleven essays in this volume promote, enrich, and critique Fauset's work. In 1944 Fauset conducted field work among African American religious “cults” and “sects,” such as those centered on leaders known as Daddy Grace, Father Divine, Noble Drew Ali, and Prophet Cherry. As the contributor Sylvester A. Johnson explains, Fauset's “primary interest … lay in making visible the patently unusual and novel manifestations of African American religion” (p. 145). In his Black Gods of the Metropolis (1944), Fauset refused to patronize these groups as unworthy “deviants” from “normative” religious bodies that commanded a larger national membership. Johnson praises Fauset for explaining why the world views of unusual religious groups “made sense to their respective adherents” and for refusing to dismiss believers as “pathologically gullible” or “pre-rational” (pp. 148, 150). Seeming to speak for all the essayists in the book, Nora L. Rubel lauds Fauset's work as “groundbreaking” (p. 64).