Father Divine Research Articles

Freedom to dream: Black Owenites and co-operation in America

Robert Owen’s vision of a co-operative society inspired two centuries of utopian experimentation among African Americans. In the nineteenth century white planter Joseph Davis and Scottish reformer Fanny Wright attempted to apply Owenite principles to their management of slave plantations. After emancipation freed people founded Black towns, such as Mound Bayou, Mississippi, pooling their resources to protect themselves against white supremacist violence. During the Great Migration in the 1910s and 1920s, W. E. B. DuBois and other Black activists and intellectuals promoted co‑operatives in urban centres. And the Great Depression of the 1930s inspired significant experiments in co‑operation, most notably the prosperous utopian community of Father Divine’s Peace Mission. While the post-war period saw a decline in co-operation, in more recent decades there has been a resurgence in interest in the movement. From co-operative grocery stores to large-scale utopian communities, African Americans drew on Owenite ideas of co-operation to assert their independence and self-sufficiency.

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria W. Wolcott

Reviewed by: Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria W. Wolcott Alison Collis Greene Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement. By Victoria W. Wolcott. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. x, 262. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-226-81725-5.) Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement links several cohorts of twentieth-century utopian radicals who worked to build a world they envisioned in the midst of one they lamented. Among the broader range of liberal and radical freedom movements, Victoria W. Wolcott focuses on utopians tied by an emphasis on racial and economic justice and a commitment to cooperative economics, interracialism, and nonviolent direct action. This “matrix of intentional communities” included key members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and, later, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) (p. 10). Wolcott argues that these utopians—all well-documented individually—together “situated utopian interracialism and radical nonviolence at the center of the civil rights movement” (p. 10). Wolcott’s first chapter opens with “The Workers” at Brookwood Labor College in New York, founded in 1921 by the pacifist Christian labor organizer A. J. Muste, and Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, established by Myles Horton in 1932. The workers’ education movement “went beyond trade unionism to advocate for a new and more just world that would embrace racial and gender equality” (p. 18). Brookwood and Highlander provided a practical democratic education to many women and created “a new generation of Black activists,” including Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, and Rosa Parks (p. 18). This chapter establishes an argument central to the socialist utopianism of the 1920s and 1930s that Wolcott traces directly into the civil rights movement: that “the working classes could only rise on the basis of full racial equality,” and that Black workers in particular faced myriad forms of individual and systemic injustice based specifically on race and not reducible to class (p. 17). To live into a future of racial and economic justice in the midst of the profoundly segregated North was difficult and often dangerous; to do so in the Jim Crow South could be deadly. Chapter 2, “The Cooperators,” explores the Christian socialist dreams that shaped Delta and Providence farms, two agricultural cooperatives constructed to house displaced Black and white sharecroppers in Depression-era Mississippi. As historian Robert Hunt Ferguson has recently argued in his book Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (Athens, Ga., 2018), the farmers’ own dreams carried them through two remarkable decades of work before they fell to racism from within and without. “The Divinites” of chapter 3 proved “the most successful utopian community in the twentieth century”; theirs is not coincidentally also the first Black-led movement that Wolcott discusses (p. 88). Following the lead of scholars Judith Weisenfeld and Father Divine biographer Jill Watts, Wolcott analyzes both the religious and the political work of the Peace Mission movement to demonstrate the real-world value of a utopian vision in which class, racial, and gender hierarchies (and even gendered difference) did not exist and where self-sufficiency came from shared resources and vision. Chapters 4 and 5, “The Fellowshippers” and “The Pacifists,” follow the utopian dreams of the pre–World War II era into Cold War antiradicalism and [End Page 391] the freedom movements led by FOR, CORE, and the inheritors of the prewar socialist Left. Here, Wolcott focuses on a number of outward-facing communes, from cooperative farms to the Catholic Worker movement to the Harlem Ashram. Wolcott contrasts—and defends—these activists’ radical, provocative, and nonviolent interracialism with the ameliorative liberal interracialism of more conventional white-led organizations. Wolcott demonstrates a coherence of vision across civil rights efforts where historians have more often seen fracture and rupture. This is not a consensus history, but it is a history of coherent, deeply rooted, and ideologically cohesive dissent—and a plea for its continuation. Alison Collis Greene Emory University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Dialogue on Democracy

Dialogue on Democracy

The Other Black Church: Alternative Christian Movements and the Struggle for Black Freedom

The Other Black Church: Alternative Christian Movements and the Struggle for Black Freedom

Leonard Norman Primiano (1957–2021)

Leonard Norman Primiano (1957–2021)

Queering Growth in Mid-20th Century Philadelphia

In this essay, I highlight a critical, if under-examined, dialectic between dominant urbanism and Black queer urbanism. First, I demonstrate the ways that dominant urbanists drew on a sedimented historical imaginary of the slum as a racialized site of debilitation and death in their articulation of and support for new urban infrastructures designed to support long-term stability through capitalist growth. Anti-blackness formed a fundamental aspect of the syntax and grammar of urban renewal and redevelopment. Next, I examine the efforts of the adherents of Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement to build a world centered in spiritually appropriated, communal architectures wherein their disruptive forms of social-geographic life challenged heteronormative futurity and segregation through the haptic politics of touch and what I term ecstatic consecration.

Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States ed. by Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, Heather R. White

Reviewed by: Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States ed. by Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, Heather R. White Andrea L. Turpin Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States. Edited by Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather R. White. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 303. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3626-9; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-3625-2.) The story is a familiar one: as the United States has grown more secular over the course of the twentieth century, it has simultaneously grown more permissive and more positive regarding sex—because, as everybody knows, religious belief corresponds to negative and restrictive views on sex. The story is wrong. Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States demonstrates why. This edited volume brings together thirteen essays on the intersection of two historical fields that have more often stared awkwardly at each other from across the room than embraced in the same bed: religious history and the history of sexuality. Taken together, the essays argue that American religious traditions have led to a wide variety of sexual views and expressions. Religion per se has not automatically led to particular beliefs about sex. There is a growing scholarship on the complex relationship between liberal religious traditions and sexuality in the twentieth century; there is less work complicating the relationship that exists for conservative groups. This volume therefore helpfully puts the histories of a wide spectrum of religious traditions in conversation with one another. For example, essays on same-sex desire in the Young Women’s Christian Association and on the mainline Protestant rationale for embracing birth control constitute nuanced explorations of theological rationales for changing sexual attitudes. Meanwhile, essays on Catholic sex education reformers and Mormon sex advice for married women demonstrate how conservative religious traditions nurtured sex-positive theology and practice among some adherents. Catholicism gets extensive treatment as other essays explore how Catholics protested eugenic impulses in American policy for post–World War II Japan and how American Catholic activists succeeded in encouraging public censorship as late as the mid-twentieth century by adopting a more secular vocabulary for their aims. Significantly, Devotions and Desires also explores the developing sexual beliefs of less common subjects of American religious history. The collection is particularly strong on Judaism: essays analyze how Jewish concerns influenced [End Page 939] that tradition’s approach to marriage counseling and theology of heterosexuality; how the Women’s League of Conservative Judaism related in a surprising way to the politics of legal abortion; and how another branch gradually shifted its perspective on homosexuality. Two essays also explore the influence of eastern religions on American sexual practices: one on different streams within the American yoga movement during the long twentieth century and one on gay communes in the 1970s. Finally, an additional two essays explore the role of same-sex desire and practice within two religious communities that defied traditional religious categories: Father Divine’s Peace Mission movement and the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco. As is by now evident, this collection also covers a wide variety of topics under the heading of sexuality: norms of heterosexual marriage practice, same-sex desire, same-sex practice, birth control, and abortion, to name major unifying themes. The scope of this many diverse topics and religious communities could result in lack of coherence. Happily, it does not. Great credit goes to the editors, who insert into many essays references to other chapters in the volume that develop a particular theme in similar or contrasting ways. The essays thus read as a conversation from which trends emerge in how the development of American religious communities and sexual practices interacted during the twentieth century. Devotions and Desires is a model edited volume. Gaps do, however, exist, and they are noted by the editors. Perhaps most glaring, no essay considers conservative Protestantism, a major player in twentieth-century culture wars about sex. Much scholarship exists on this topic, and the volume seeks instead to break new ground. Other gaps include less well covered topics, such as...

Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf by Lane Demas

Reviewed by: Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf by Lane Demas Donald Spivey (bio) Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf. By Lane Demas. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 363. $30.00 cloth; $19.99 ebook) [End Page 128] Lane Demas, an associate professor of history at Central Michigan University, has penned the most important study of African American golfers yet published. The author masterfully weaves the story of black golfers into the African American journey for equality and personhood. The work is laced with historical nuggets as Demas traces black golf from ancient Egypt to slave caddies, to George Grant and the invention of the golf tee, to the pioneer black amateur and professional golfers, to Tiger Woods. Blacks were pitted against the color-line in golf as they were in every other sport from boxing to baseball. Struggling for admission and acceptance in the world of professional white golfers since the founding of the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) in 1916, blacks established their own association, the United Golfers Association (UGA), in 1925. Their continuing fight for the integration of the PGA was made even more difficult by the organization's official adoption of the "Caucasian-only clause" in 1934 lasting for twenty-seven years thereafter. Even the Harlem Renaissance did not earn blacks acceptance into the privileged world of white golf and its country clubs. African Americans built their own country clubs and golf courses, such as the famous Shady Rest County Club in South Plains, New Jersey, which served Harlem's elites, both non-golfers and golfers, including James Weldon Johnson, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Chuck Webb, and Count Basie. Female players Nettie Speedy, Maggie Mae Hathaway, and Sarah Spencer Washington, were mainstays in the development and promotion of African American social clubs, golf courses, and important as players. They helped to bring other black women into the sport. None excelled more on the greens than the great Althea Gibson. The author does not avoid the critics of black golfing such as W. E. B. Du Bois, H. L. Mencken, Marcus Garvey, Father Divine, Thur-good Marshall, and Ella Baker. For many it was a game of privilege, conspicuous consumption, and a waste of intellect and resources. The NAACP was hesitant to devote any of its resources to the fight [End Page 129] to desegregate golf courses and clubs. However, the struggle on the greens gained recognition as a part of the overall battle against the color line and racial discrimination with the Supreme Court victory of Holmes v. Atlanta (1955). The win against segregated public golf courses in Georgia was a substantive implementation of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and a blow against the counter-revolution occurring in the defiant Jim Crow South. Golf echoed the protest spirt of the times from the debates about integration to direct-action and Black Power. Joe Louis's favorite sport outside the boxing ring was golf. The Champ sponsored tournaments and individual players, along with taking to the links himself. Sammy Davis, Jr. and other celebrities lent name and fame to the movement on the greens. The author places the pioneer black golfers within the movement for civil rights: Walter Speedy, John Shippen, Bill Spiller, Ted Rose, Charlie Sifford, Lee Elder, and others. Some were, of course, more radical than others—just like the movement and its leading voices-such as Bill Spiller, one of the most militant of the black golfers who engaged in direct-action protest against the PGA and segregated golf tournaments. The final chapter is devoted to Tiger Woods and is a valuable exploration of race, class, and ethnic identity that Woods personifies. The chapter makes perfect sense, but ends the book without a conclusion or even a final paragraph in which the author ties the pieces together and gives the reader a concluding salvo to golf and its importance to the civil rights movement. That missing hole-in-one aside, Demas is to be commended for putting the game of privilege into its proper historical context as a significant player in the struggle for civil rights. His is a vital contribution to sport...

Drinking the Kool-Aid

Drinking the Kool-Aid Christine Leigh Heyrman (bio) Adam Morris. American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation. New York: Liveright, 2019. xvi+413 pp. Appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $28.95. The grifters swarm. They infest the capital's corridors of power, the channels of cable news and talk radio, the business communities of Wall Street and Main Street. Dazed and distracted as we are by the confidence men and women who abound in the nation's politics and media, commerce and finance, it is easy to forget that America's religious life, present and past, has afforded as many opportunities for hustlers. Faithful only to W.C. Fields' dictum, "Never give a sucker an even break," traffickers in the spiritual realm have gained—and continue to gain—profit, power, and prestige by exploiting their followers' desperation and by promising that they alone offer solutions. Adam Morris's American Messiahs focuses on a particular subset of those frauds—and a smaller number of true believers—who identified themselves as divine beings and founded communes that rejected private property, sex, marriage, and the family. In his view, a direct lineage connects Ann Lee, who midwived Shakerism in the late eighteenth century, to Jim Jones, the holy-rolling socialist who founded the Peoples Temple and the Guyana commune of Jonestown. To reconstruct that genealogy, Morris takes the reader on a long, strange trip, one that starts with some of the religious communities of the early republic and makes stops among the devotees of spiritualism and mind-cure of the nineteenth century and at the Depression-era Peace Mission of Father Divine. More than any other messiah, Jones fascinates the author. The ministry of this would-be savior ended in the largest loss of American civilian lives to occur on a single day until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Jones directed the mass murder-suicide that resulted in the deaths more than 900 people, more than one-third of them children or adolescents. By now, many have forgotten—or never heard of—the Jonestown massacre of 1978, but media coverage of how most of Jones's followers met their end by drinking poisoned fruit punch inspired an expression that endures to the present. "Drinking the Kool-Aid" has come to refer to an inability or unwillingness to be disabused of falsehoods—even when confronted with facts—often out of a sense of loyalty to group identity. The phrase implies the complicity of [End Page 458] an individual or a group of people in their own deception. They are suckers who do not want an even break; better to risk being hoodwinked than to feel isolated, defenseless, and under attack. Over more than two decades, Jones perfected his potent appeal, drawing an ever-wider following from adherents who thirsted for justice. As a young minister in the 1950s—first with the Methodists and then the Pentecostals—Jones worked to integrate the churches of Indianapolis. As his reputation for miraculous cures spread and crowds flocked, Jones aimed to translate that popularity into a broad-based movement for change with sermons that advocated both racial equality and socialism. The church he founded, the Peoples Temple, drew mainly from that city's black working class; his congregants translated their pastor's message into action by operating nursing homes and free restaurants as well as by offering employment services and counseling for addicts. By the mid-1960s, Jones had abandoned even his initial pretense to Christian orthodoxy. He took to claiming that he was the reincarnation of the monotheist Pharaoh Ikhnaton, the Buddha, Jesus, and Lenin and to launching pulpit attacks on the Bible's "Sky God," a deity he dismissed as an arch-villain responsible for the world's ills. To delusions about his own divinity, Jones added warnings of an impending nuclear holocaust, an obsession which prompted the preacher and many of his followers to move to California in 1965. Once on the West coast, Jones continued to provide aid to the elderly, poor, and desperate, and he positioned himself as a civil rights leader, hoping to invite comparisons with Cesar Chavez, Angela Davis, and the Black Panthers. His progressive ministry attracted a...

Introduction: But Sometime Between—Living Archives and the Power of Black Agency

Introduction: But Sometime Between—Living Archives and the Power of Black Agency

New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration by Judith Weisenfeld

Reviewed by: New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration by Judith Weisenfeld Curtis J. Evans Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration. New York: New York UP, 2017. 368 pp. $35.00. Judith Weisenfeld's New World A-Coming is a deeply researched and well-theorized analysis of black religious groups that emerged between the end of the First, and the beginning of the Second World War: Moorish Science Temple of America, Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, and Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation (more generally, Black Israelite groups). Emerging in cities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Newark, among others, these religious groups had an influence that was greater than their actual [End Page 152] numbers within African American communities. This book is the first work since Arthur Fauset's Black Gods of the Metropolis (1944) to treat them in this comprehensive way, although Weisenfeld does not address Holiness and Pentecostal groups, and takes a much longer historical view than Fauset (who did field work among the various groups). Weisenfeld refers to these religious groups as religio-racial movements, by which she means that they were committed to "understanding individual and collective identity as constituted in the conjunction of religion and race" (5). They held a common conviction that people of African descent could only achieve their collective salvation by embracing their true and divinely ordained identity. This self-and-group belief was crucial to their theological beliefs and religious practices. The book is organized thematically, giving us a sense not only of what the leaders of these groups believed and practiced, but also what the lived experience of everyday practitioners was, why they joined, and what they found compelling in these groups. The book is divided into three parts: narratives, selfhood, and community. In the section on narratives, Weisenfeld digs deeply into how geographies of space and time were constructed and understood by these religio-racial movements. In the same section, she looks at their narratives of sacred time and conceptions of divine history. In each case, Weisenfeld shows how these groups, although with different theologies and variant understandings of race, sought to transcend their situation in the United States, where their history and circumstances were circumscribed by racial oppression and an official narrative of subordination based on either explicit claims of racial inferiority or implicit notions of unfortunate enslavement, which, in their view, tethered their history to debasement and shame. In the second part of the book, Weisenfeld examines the ways in which naming practices and adornment and maintenance of the body helped shape participants into "fit" members of each group. The final section looks at their respective understandings of family (with much attention focused especially on Father Divine's Peace Mission's more stringent demands to break from biological families and practice sex-segregated celibate lifestyles for new members) and their conception of space and place, especially how the United States figured in their racial and religious imagination. This book is the most thorough and sophisticated treatment of the emergence and early development of these religio-racial movements. It deepens our understanding of the impact of the Great Migration on black religious life while enriching our knowledge of the debates about black religious identity in this fluid moment. Weisenfeld is careful to note that although she organizes her work around these movements, there is a way in which all religious groups in the United States can be characterized as religio-racial, given the powerful ways in which race has structured religious beliefs, practices, and institutions for all Americans. Yet her book focuses particular attention on a set of black religious movements that explicitly called for all black Americans to reject the classification "Negro," which they believed was a false category created and foisted upon them for the purposes of enslavement and subordination. They offered alternative identities both to members and to black people as a whole. Weisenfeld's illuminating and thorough book provides rich details about the various ways in which these movements differed in addressing the problem of race in the United States. Weisenfeld argues that while rejecting...

"As a Living Shrine I Came": Remembrance, Creativity, and Paradox in God's American Tomb

This article discusses the development of a sacred sense of place in an American sectarian religion and the complementary creation of a provocative twentieth-century religious "shrine" within that space. This "shrine" can be found near the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The edifice is the tomb holding the body of the African American minister and religious innovator named the Reverend M. J. Divine, better known as Father Divine, the founder of the International Peace Mission Movement. The creation of a North American indigenous religion, the tomb and shrine it represents a union of devotionalism and creativity, of tradition and innovation. This essay is centered on the birth of the shrine, as well as the memorial building, and the forces that gave birth to it within a religion whose doctrine generally resisted "shrinified" spaces.

Religion, Food, and Eating in North America

Religion, Food, and Eating in North America

Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. By Kate Bowler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xi + 337 pp. $34.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Blessed: A History of the Prosperity Gospel . By Kate Bowler . New York : Oxford University Press , 2013. xi + 337 pp. $34.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesMuch maligned by its critics as a simple example of materialism and greed, the prosperity gospel gets a fair and even sympathetic hearing from Kate Bowler in Blessed , the first book-length monograph on the subject. Her thesis, that the prosperity gospel both reflects and influences the theology and culture around it, allows for an unbiased study of the movement. Far from being a tangential and irrelevant phenomenon, the prosperity gospel becomes, in Bowler's account, a rather logical outgrowth of its religious surroundings and of Protestant soteriology. She convincingly argues that the prosperity gospel holds that faith is a causal agent: faith causes blessings to happen. Some blessings--wealth and health, for example--can occur in this world, while salvation will follow in the next.Bowler begins with a brief history of the individuals and movements that shaped the prosperity gospel. She demonstrates that the tangled confluence of New Thought, Pentecostalism, and, as she calls it, the American gospel of pragmatism, individualism, and upward mobility provided a hospitable soil for prosperity gospel seeds to grow roots (11). While at times the parade of personages--from Mary Baker Eddy to E. W. Kenyon to Father Divine--can seem overwhelming, Bowler ties the actors together in a thoughtful narrative of popular religion. After establishing the historical roots, Bowler moves into the post-World War II era. Here, she argues, the modern prosperity gospel, which was the heir of the initial movement, arose in the crucible of post-war revivals and depended heavily on a loose confederation of leaders who often appeared at each other's events. These leaders, their successors, and their successors' spouses then benefited greatly from the twin influences of the 1970s charismatic movement and the rise of televangelism to launch their message beyond Pentecostals and into a larger audience. Bowler covers recent proponents, such as Joel Osteen and T. D. Jakes, and explains that they are part of a transformation of popular religious imagination that has not yet ended (7).Bowler's initial focus is historical, and when tracing the origins in the late nineteenth century and moving into the mid-twentieth century, she shows a deft touch with magazine articles and advertisements. She also delves into ethnography, traveling to many megachurches that preach the prosperity gospel and providing anecdotes of her encounters with both preachers and parishioners. Finally, she engages in social network analysis. She has carefully researched and calculated the interactions among various revival leaders and pastors in an effort to determine which individuals held more influence and how closely tied together the entire movement has been. …

“Seen and Read of Men”

Abstract This article seeks to redress certain historiographical oversights in the study of Father Divine's Peace Mission movement by turning away from exclusive consideration of Divine's own theological agenda and toward the very tactile devotional culture of his diverse followers. Recent scholarship has rightly pointed out the influences of New Thought on Divine's theologies of materialization and on his reconceptualization of cosmic dramas of personal and corporate salvation, developments that can be seen in the theological sensibilities of his followers as well. Yet, the Peace Mission's “living epistles” also had deep histories, whether personal or familial, in Protestant and Catholic traditions that were not simply discarded when they turned to Father Divine. Lastly, much of the current scholarship on Father Divine and the Peace Mission has been limited to the highly charged Harlem decade of the 1930s. Drawing on the rich material archive of subsequent decades, this article looks primarily at the Peace Mission's activities of the 1940s and 1950s, thus yielding insight into the changing racial dynamics of the movement as well as its ongoing relationship with postwar American cultures.

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.)

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).

The Other Harlem Renaissance: Father Divine, Celibate Economics, and the Making of Black Sexuality

The Other Harlem Renaissance:Father Divine, Celibate Economics, and the Making of Black Sexuality Benjamin Kahan (bio) Divine Alternatives In his foreword to Bobby Seale's A Lonely Rage (1978), James Baldwin describes feeling "inept" and "almost presumptuous" in writing an introduction to the autobiography of the co-founder of the Black Panthers. These feelings stem from the differences in generational outlook between the older Baldwin and the younger Seale: The time of my youth was entirely different and the savage irony of hindsight allows me to suggest that the time of my youth was far less hopeful . . . . Our most visible heroes were Father Divine and Joe Louis—we, in the ghetto then, knew very little about Paul Robeson. We knew very little about anything black, in fact, and this was not our fault. ("Stagolee" ix–x) Here, the spiritual leader "Father Divine" and the heavy-weight champion "Joe Louis" seem to signify knowledge about blackness, constituting some of the "little" known "about anything black."1 Langston Hughes similarly flags the importance of Divine and Louis in his distinctly inclusive "The Heart of Harlem" (1945): The buildings in Harlem are brick and stoneAnd the streets are long and wide,But Harlem's much more than these alone,Harlem is what's inside— It's Joe Louis and Dr. W. E. B.A Stevedore, a porter, Marian Anderson, and me.It's Father Divine and the music of Earl Hines,Adam Powell in Congress, our drivers on bus lines. (Collected 311–12) Joe Louis' 1938 defeat of the German Max Schmeling was understood allegorically as an American victory over Nazism. Louis was a national hero and a model for (black) manhood during the fearful time of the Depression and coming war. While much has been written about the importance of Joe Louis in relation to national and international politics,2 it is far less clear what the much-misunderstood and much-maligned Father Divine signifies for black identity in the 1930s and 1940s. Father Divine was an intellectual and religious leader who believed he was God. In the 1930s, when his religion, the Peace Mission Movement, was at its apex, he had a large following both nationally and abroad. In Harlem, he is estimated to have had between three and four thousand core followers, though his appearances drew crowds of ten to fifteen thousand and his newspaper, the Spoken Word, had a national circulation of about thirty thousand (Watts 141–42). The size of his global following in the 1930s is disputed, but was estimated to be in the millions (Griffith 119–20).3 The central ritual of the religion was the banquet table at which Divine lavished abundant and delicious food on thousands of unemployed and hungry people. At the table, Divine impresses the hungry visitors with his overwhelming bounty, quieting their stomachs' grumblings long enough to hear his message. Divine's strong emphasis on celibacy seems at odds with this practice of gluttonous eating, but both practices have the effect of focusing followers' attention on the materiality of his body.4 He organized his followers into communal interracial celibate living situations called kingdoms. Members of these celibate kingdoms broke ties with their families, friends, and spouses, creating an environment in which to meditate on Divine and his teachings, minimizing influences outside the Peace Mission Movement. Divine's own abstinent marriage underwrites rather than undermines this emphasis on celibacy as he considered his marriage sacrificial, marrying so that his followers would not have to suffer the burdens of conjugality. [End Page 38] Despite Father Divine's following and mass appeal, many believed he was a charlatan and a swindler. Hughes' own "Projection of a Day" (1946) imagines Father Divine speaking the truth "when the Savoy / leaps clean over to Seventh Avenue / and starts jitterbugging" (Collected 403–04). Owen Dodson's Divine Comedy (1938) presents a similarly unfavorable portrait of Divine, as does Chester Himes' A Rage in Harlem (1957), where the protagonist analogizes getting conned and believing in Father Divine: "It [the con] hadn't been too hard for him to believe. Other people in Harlem believed that Father Divine was God" (31). Period journalism bolsters these literary depictions...

The forgotten man: a new history of the Great Depression

Challenging conventional history, Amity Shlaes offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. She shows how both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt failed to understand the prosperity of the 1920s and heaped massive burdens on the country that more than offset the benefit of New Deal programs. From 1929 to 1940, federal intervention helped to make the Depression great by forgetting the men and women who sought to help themselves. In this illuminating work of history, Shlaes follows the struggles of those now forgotten people, from a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a stunning blow to the New Deal, to Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, and Father Divine, a black cult leader. She takes a fresh look at the great scapegoats of the period, from Andrew Mellon to Sam Insull of Chicago. Finally, she traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves. Authoritative, original, and utterly engrossing, The Forgotten Man reveals how those dark years shaped both current political challenges and the strong national character that helps Americans to confront them.

Race over Region

What does everyone on the following list have in common: musical greats Gene Autry, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Woody Guthrie, and Aretha Franklin; religious leaders Robert Shuler, Father Divine, C. L. Franklin, and J. Frank Norris; sports stars Ty Cobb, Dizzy Dean, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Joe Louis; entertainers Lily Tomlin, D. W. Griffith, and Will Rogers; writers Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Wolfe, Lillian Hellman, Charles S. Johnson, and E. Franklin Frazier? According to James Gregory, these twenty-five famous figures are just a few of the twenty-eight million participants in a Southern Diaspora that reshaped American culture, religious life, race relations, and political alignments during the twentieth century. The Southern Diaspora is a provocative and pathbreaking book, the first scholarly effort to synthesize what Gregory calls the two Great Migrations out of the South, meaning the parallel resettlement of southern-born black and white populations in the North and West (p. 5). Between 1900 and the mid-1970s, this Southern Diaspora included twenty million white southerners, eight million African Americans, and approximately one million Latinos as well. In Gregory's comparative analysis, southern migrants of both races became agents of change who used the opportunities of geography to alter the cultural and political landscape of the nation and all its regions (p. 7). The simultaneous Great Migrations of black and white southerners played a critical role in collapsing what had been huge cultural differences between the South and the rest of the nation while highlighting the centrality of race over region in the experiences of the migrants themselves (p. xii). By placing internal migration at the center of modern American history, The Southern Diaspora presents scholars with a conceptual model based on the twin themes of racial divergence and regional convergence. The first half of the book contains the most convincing arguments, grounded in traditional social history and an extraordinary new census resource, the Integrated Public

Research article

The Peace Mission Movement, an American intentional religious community founded by the Revd M. J. Divine, also known as “Father Divine,” expressed through an intentional use of architecture their own quest for a utopian perfection of consciousness in America. What is especially significant about this expression of perfection is that they did not seek it by building environments of their own creation. Instead, the movement and its leader created a unique religious vernacular architecture not by architectural design, but by a spiritualised appropriation of existing spaces. Through purchasing, restoring, re‐using, and preserving many different types of American domestic and commercial structures, Father Divine and his followers developed a theology of material culture and historic preservation that expressed a major theological perspective of their belief system—to spiritualise the material and to materialise the spiritual—all in the service of God and for the transformation of human nature.