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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2008
2 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Gift of the Spirit,” in Du Bois on Religion, ed. Phil Zuckerman (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2000), 165.
3 Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001 [1944]), ix. Fauset was the son of a black clergyman and a Jewish convert to Christianity and the half-brother of the more famous novelist Jessie Fauset. For a brief recounting of Fauset's life, see Barbara Savage's foreword to the newest edition of Fauset's classic text.
4 Wallace D. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2. Randall K. Burkett forcefully argues a similar case in his “The Baptist Church in the Years of Crisis: J. C. Austin and Pilgrim Baptist Church, 1926–1950,” in African-American Christianity: Essays in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 135. See also Milton Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 7.
5 Fredric Miller, “The Black Migration to Philadelphia: A 1924 Profile,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108 (1984), 320, 325.
6 Judith Weisenfeld, “On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Margins, Center and Bridges in African American Religious History,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York: Oxford University, 1997), 433.
7 Joel Dinerstein offers this most incisive interpretation of black expressive culture during the interwar period and shaped significantly my own reading in his Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 109.
8 Quoted in Wallace Best, Passionately Human, 220 n. 43.
9 Junius C. Austin, Jr., quoted in Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 197.
10 Best, Passionately Human, 107.
11 Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 158.
12 Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church (Berkeley, Calif.: Turtle Island, 1981), 104.
13 Jonathan R. Baer, “Redeemed Bodies: The Functions of Divine Healing in Incipient Pentecostalism,” Church History 70:4 (December 2001): 735–36. For years the question of origins has bedeviled pentecostal historiography with a dominant narrative that generally overlooked the influence of black figures on the development of pentecostalism and overemphasized doctrinal innovations. The debate over the significance of Charles Parham's doctrinal innovation in Topeka, Kansas, and William Seymour's leadership at Los Angeles has crowded out many other issues. In recent years there has been a move to look at pentecostalism from a broader perspective in which scholars interpret pentecostalism as more intermeshed with evolving developments in American religious culture. For attempts (other than Baer's) beyond the impasse, see Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., The Azusa Street Mission and Revival (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006); and Joe Creech, “Visions of Glory: The Place of the Azusa Street Revival in Pentecostal History,” Church History 65:3 (September 1996), 405–424.
14 Quoted in Jonathan Baer, “Redeemed Bodies,” 765.
15 For more on William Durham and his “Finished Work” doctrine that was crucial for the formation of the Assemblies of God, see Douglas Jacobsen's Thinking in the Spirit: Theologies of the Early Pentecostal Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 145–164.
16 “A Chicago Evangelist's Pentecost,” The Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles) 1, no. 6 (Feb.–Mar. 1907): 4; C. H. Mason, “Tennessee Evangelist Witnesses,” The Apostolic Faith, 7.
17 Anthea Butler, “Observing the Lives of the Saints: Sanctification and Practice in Everyday Life,” in Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Lives in America, ed. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 160.
18 Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), 71.
19 Countee Cullen, “The Black Christ,” in My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, ed. Gerald Early (New York: Anchor, 1991), 207–236.
20 Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes, 30, 43.
21 Fauset gathered this testimony but did not include it in his influential study. Barbara Savage's foreword to a new edition of Fauset's classic text offers a possible explanation for this omission. He did not focus his study on pentecostal churches Mrs. W chose to attend. In describing why Fauset profiled the five “sects” he did, she writes: “Fauset did not follow the lead of other scholars at the time who designated as ‘cults’ most Christian holiness, Pentecostal, and storefront churches. He distinguished the latter institutions by referring to them not as cults but as ‘orthodox evangelical churches.’” See Savage's foreword in Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis, ix.
22 Arthur Huff Fauset Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, box 5, folder 96, unnumbered page.
23 Quoted in William Thomas Dargan and Kathy White Bullock, “Willie Mae Ford Smith of St. Louis: A Shaping Influence upon Black Gospel Singing Style,” in This Far By Faith: Readings in African-American Women's Religious Biography, ed. Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman (New York: Routledge, 1996), 34.
24 Fauset Collection, box 5, folder 96, unnumbered page. The reference to being baptized in Jesus' name suggests that Mrs. W was connected with Apostolic Oneness Pentecostalism—a minority expression within the pentecostal movement that challenged traditional Trinitarian doctrine.
25 Dargan and Bullock, “Willie Mae Ford Smith of St. Louis,” 34.
26 See Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Culture,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992), 738–755.
27 Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies-Cities,” in Places Through the Body, ed. Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile (London: Routledge, 1998), 48.
28 Fauset Collection, box 5, folder 96, unnumbered page.
29 Best, Passionately Human, 102–3.
30 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 1271.
31 Lawrence R. Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 30.
32 Steven Hahn, A Nation under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 322.
33 Langston Hughes, “The Big Sea,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1282.
34 Quoted in Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 180.
35 Langston Hughes, “The Blues I'm Playing,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1278, 1280.
36 Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes, 170, 172.
37 A. W. Nix, Black Diamond Express to Hell, Vocalion 1098 (1927). For more on race records and black religion during the interwar period, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's influential article, “Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religion and Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s,” in The House That Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Random House, 1997).
38 Advertisement reproduced and quoted in Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (New York: Stein & Day, 1970), 57.
39 Letter found in Milton Sernett, ed., African American Religious History: Documentary Witness, 2nd ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 366. A version of this same letter is found in seminal texts of black literature before mid-century. See a portion of this letter also in Alain Locke's famous 1925 The New Negro (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 286; and Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy's invaluable They Seek a City (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1945), 146.
40 For a brief but quite informed discussion of the Church of God in Christ and its evolution from a rural communion to a predominantly urban one, see C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 83–84.
41 Jerma Jackson, Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 34; Lucille Cornelius, The Pioneer: History of Church of God in Christ (Memphis: Church of God in Christ Publishing, 1975), 68.
42 Quoted in Jerma Jackson, Singing in My Soul, 35.
43 Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes, 183–84.
44 “Faithful Mary Issues Statement: God Gave her Name of Faithful Mary, Not ‘Mother,’” New Day, 27 August 1936, 6.
45 Faithful Mary [Mary Rozier], “God,” He's Just a Natural Man (New York: Universal Light, 1937), 13.
46 Jill Watts, God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 25.
47 Fauset Collection, box 5, folder 96, unnumbered page.
48 Ollie Stewart, “It's Not all Swing in Harlem,” The New York Times Magazine, 1 October 1939, 7, 20.
49 Jill Watts, God, Harlem, 113.
50 To support this connection between the vibrant New Thought Movement at the turn of the century and Father Divine, scholars have noted his one-time selling of Unity literature. In addition, aspects of Divine's religious language that celebrate the link between mind and body and the mind's ability to have its positive thoughts materialized in the physical world are certainly suggestive of a connection to New Thought, Unity, and Charles Fillmore. For evidence of Divine's connection with Unity literature of the period, see Charles Samuel Braden, These Also Believe: A Study of Modern American Cults and Minority Religious Movements (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 75. For an extensive discussion of Divine's connections to New Thought generally and Charles Fillmore in particular, see Watts, God, Harlem, 24–26, 189–90 n. 24.
51 St. Clair McKelway and A. J. Liebling, “Who Is This King of Glory?” New Yorker, pt. 1, June 13, 1936, 21.
52 Jill Watts, God, Harlem, 33.
53 Claude McKay, “‘There Goes God!’ The Story of Father Divine and His Angels,” Nation (6 February 1935): 152.
54 Braden, These Also Believe, 72.
55 As R. Marie Griffith writes in her groundbreaking work on the Christian body in U.S. religion: “Satter reads Father Divine (erroneously, in my view) as having denied the body, because of his emphasis on celibacy… . This chapter claims that the concrete reality of the human was, rather, crucial for Divine and his followers.” My argument is very much influenced by Griffith here and affirms her basic insight that “sexuality is not the only criterion for viewing the human body”: see her Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 141–43, 154–55, 274–75 n. 58 and “Body Salvation: New Thought, Father Divine, and the Feast of Material Pleasures,” Religion and American Culture 11:2 (Summer 2001), 119–153. For Griffith's interlocutor, see Beryl Satter, “Marcus Garvey, Father Divine and the Gender Politics of Race Neutrality,” American Quarterly 48:1 (1996), 43–76.
56 Griffith, Born Again Bodies, 143.
57 From an unpublished edition of Fauset's Black Gods of the Metropolis found in Fauset Collection, box 5, folder 98, page 87.
58 Numerous examples can be found in Correspondence, 1941–43, Father Divine papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
59 Leonard Norman Primiano, “‘Bringing Perfection in these Different Places’: Father Divine's Vernacular Architecture of Intention,” Folklore 115 (2004): 3–26.
60 Watts, God, Harlem, 33; Robert Weisbrot, Father Divine: The Utopian Evangelist of the Depression Era Who Became an American Legend (Boston: Beacon, 1983), 17.
61 Primiano, “‘Bringing Perfection,’” 7.
62 This use of this-worldly heaven language draws a further connection between Father Divine's teachings and that of the New Thought Movement. At its 1917 St. Louis convention, the International New Thought Alliance offered a “Declaration of Principles” that included the statement: “We affirm Heaven here and now, the life everlasting that becomes conscious immortality”: See Braden, These Also Believe, 137.
63 The New Day, 28 July 1938, 29.
64 Father Divine, Here's the Answer (N.p: n.p., n.d.), n.p. Burke Library, Union Theological Library Pamphlet Collection, New York.
65 Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis, 52–53.
66 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: Harper, 1957 [1841]), 172, 175. I thank Christopher Morse for this reference. See his “The Virtue of Heaven: From Calvin to Cyber-Talk and Back,” Modern Theology 19:3 (July 2003), 317.
67 Father Divine to Mrs. E. M. Terry, 22 October 1943, Correspondence, 1941–43, Father Divine Papers, Emory University.
68 See Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
69 FBI File 25-20607, vol. 1: Wallace D. Fard, 44. See the catechism also quoted in part in Erdmann Doane Benyon, “The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants in Detroit,” The American Journal of Sociology 43:6 (May 1938), 898.
70 Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman (Philadelphia: Hakim's Publications, 1965), 5.
71 Elijah Muhammad, How to Eat to Live, vol. 2 (Atlanta: Messenger Elijah Muhammad Propagation Society, 1972), 7. See also Griffith, Born Again Bodies, 155–56.
72 Elijah Muhammad, The Supreme Wisdom: Solution to the So-Called Negroes' Problem (Atlanta: M.E.M.P.S., 1957), 26.
73 Other than Countee Cullen's aforementioned piece, a good example of divine embodiment in black poetry is James Weldon Johnson's 1920 composition, “The Creation.” As Johnson writes in one stanza:
See his God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (New York: Viking, 1969), 18.
74 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 317.
75 Benyon, “The Voodoo Cult,” 896.
76 Note that the first step toward full reclamation for the Lost-Found Original Men (that is, black people) in the teaching of the Nation of Islam is to “know thyself”: See Elijah Muhammad, Message for the Blackman, 31–32.
77 Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 465.
78 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 5; see also Daniel Joseph Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly 39:1 (Spring 1987): 7–26.
