New World A-Coming

Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration

Judith Weisenfeld

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479812936
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Demonstrates that the efforts to contest conventional racial categorization contributed to broader discussions in black America that still resonate today. When Joseph Nathaniel Beckles registered for the draft in the1942, he rejected theracialcategories presented to him and persuaded the registrar to cross out the check mark she had placed next to Negro and substitute “Ethiopian Hebrew.” “God did not make us Negroes,” declared religious leaders in black communities of the early twentieth-century urban North. They insisted that so-called Negroes are, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or raceless children of God. Rejecting conventional American racial classification, many black southern migrants and immigrants from the Caribbean embraced these alternative visions of black history, racial identity, and collective future, thereby reshaping the black religious and racial landscape.
Focusing on the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, and a number of congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews, Judith Weisenfeld argues that the appeal of these groups lay not only in the new religious opportunities membership provided, but also in the novel ways they formulated a religio-racial identity. Arguing that members of these groups understood their religious and racial identities as divinely-ordained and inseparable, the book examines how this sense of self shapedtheir conceptions of their bodies, families, religious and social communities, space and place, and political sensibilities. Weisenfeld draws on extensive archival research and incorporates a rich array of sourcesto highlight the experiences of average members. The book demonstrates that the efforts by members of these movements to contest conventional racial categorization contributed to broader discussions in black America about the nature of racial identity and the collective future of black people that still resonate today.

Part I

Narratives

Carrie Peoples probably found it strange that the peddler going door-to-door in her Detroit “Paradise Valley” neighborhood in the summer of 1930 offered history lessons along with the clothes he sold. Indeed, the clothing itself provided a lesson, serving as the starting point for a broader discussion of history, identity, and the sacred. The man told Peoples that her “home country [was] in the East” and that the people there, “her own people,” had made the silks he offered to her and her neighbors.1 She found the peddler’s wares appealing enough to invite him into her home and, over time, he continued to talk with her and other African Americans, mostly migrants from the South, about the history of their people. Gradually the gatherings grew larger and larger until the group moved to a rented hall on Hastings Street. Peoples remembered that the peddler-turned-teacher eventually told his auditors, “My name is W. D. Fard and I came from the Holy City of Mecca. More about myself I will not tell you yet, for the time has not yet come. I am your brother. You have not seen me in my royal robes.”2 Fard said that his divine mission was “to find and bring back to life his long lost brethren, from whom the Caucasians had taken away their language, their nation and their religion,” Islam.3 Whatever her first impressions of these encounters, Peoples became persuaded of the truth of his account of history and understanding of her racial and religious identity. The man she came to view as a prophet convinced her that her true home was the city of Mecca and that her ancestors had been stolen away from there only to end up in “the wilderness of North America.” To signal her full acceptance of Fard’s teaching, Carrie Peoples became Carrie Mohammed and joined an estimated eight thousand members of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in Detroit in the early 1930s.4

The black “cities within cities” of the early twentieth century offer many compelling stories similar to Carrie Peoples’s of migrants from the South and immigrants from the Caribbean encountering preachers and teachers who insisted that black people had been laboring under the false belief that they were Negroes. These preachers proclaimed that this misconception had caused social, economic, psychological, physical, and spiritual damage, and they taught that the only way to restore complete health for individuals and black people as a whole was to embrace one’s true identity. They found many eager listeners, hungry for meaning in an urban world of simultaneous promise and hardship and in an era of continued struggle for civil rights. As these newer groups grew and left their marks on the cultural and religious landscape, their presence also produced significant anxiety among some observers.

Many critics of the shifting religious landscape of early twentieth-century black urban life focused on the spellbinding personal magnetism of the groups’ leaders.5 Critics most often spoke of the dangers of charisma in relation to leaders who claimed divinity, but also condemned those who presented themselves as uniquely empowered to deliver the truth of black religio-racial identity. Commentators often linked narratives about the natural susceptibility of the black masses to such “fakers” to these tales of the irresistible power of the dangerously charismatic “cult” leader. One white ethnologist captured the sentiment of some about the striking religious diversity of the black communities of the urban North when he observed, “Generally speaking my impression is that while negroes are a race inclined to be religious, they are not particular, however, as to the nature of the religion of their worship. You will find among them in Harlem also Mahometans and Buddhists. They go where they are led.”6 Even as this analysis emerged from trenchant stereotypes among many whites about blacks’ natural religiosity, the emphasis on the fluidity of affiliation in urban areas in this period resonates with many black commentators’ expressions of concern about the religious diversification set in motion by the Great Migration.

Following the lead of contemporary critics of these groups in focusing solely on charismatic personalities whose followers were eager to be guided anywhere obscures the complexity and variety of presentations of alternative religio-racial identities in these movements and the seriousness with which prospective members engaged them. The power of personality undoubtedly contributed to the founders’ success in gaining a following, particularly because each presented himself as having privileged access to divine knowledge. It was a combination of charisma and the persuasiveness of the narrative of sacred history and divinely ordained identity that ultimately moved Carrie Peoples and others to reject much of their former lives in favor of a new framework of religio-racial identity. Peoples believed that Fard was a trustworthy vehicle of religio-racial truth, but her ongoing commitment to the identity he promoted stemmed from more than susceptibility to the lure of charisma. Those who embraced a new religio-racial identity were motivated as much by the information they learned about their individual and collective history, their relationship to God, and their place in the world as by the person of the leader.

The narratives of identity the founders and leaders of congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews, the MST, Father Divine’s PM, and the NOI put forward all reject the category of Negro as a fabricated product of slavery and subjugation in the Americas. Each argued, albeit through different routes, that their followers’ true history, whether as Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or raceless humans, began long before the establishment of European colonies in the Americas and the enslavement of Africans. These approaches to reorienting the identities of so-called Negroes drew on and contributed to broader political and social currents in the period, and the groups’ leaders and members cared deeply about equipping themselves to be agents in the global political context of the interwar years. But narratives of alternative religio-racial identity were more than political charters for action in the present moment; they were spiritual maps that oriented followers toward the past and the future in new ways that, in turn, shaped members’ daily lives and interactions with others. Government, religious, and scholarly observers may have routinely characterized these as primarily political movements and excluded them from the realm of the religious, but for those who embraced this new knowledge about self, community, and history, religion was central to their transformations.

While each person’s path to accepting a new identity reflected an individual history and private spiritual longings, the particular details of which are often difficult to recover from the surviving records, we can come to understand the transformative power of these religio-racial identities by considering how they frame questions of ultimate meaning, conceptions of the divine, understandings of divine will, and produce ideas about the nature of and relationship between the spiritual and the material. For members of these groups, such questions were refracted through a desire for knowledge about history and a sense of place in the world and, as such, were shaped by the specific racial context of early twentieth-century America. Many migrants and immigrants to northern cities were seekers, looking not only for economic opportunity but also new personal and spiritual options. As many commentators at the time noted, these seekers encountered an abundance of theologies and identity options though which to satisfy their spiritual needs. Indeed, in many cases, people moved from one group to another. NOI members in Chicago in the late 1940s reported belonging to a number of religious groups and organizations in sequence, including the Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, an “Israelite Movement,” and Garvey’s UNIA, among others, before finding answers and fulfillment in the NOI.7 In other cases members of religio-racial movements combined political, social, and religious options as suited their individual needs. In 1944 a Newark, New Jersey, man who was affiliated with an African repatriation organization reported that he had belonged to the MST from 1929 to 1932, but was also a follower of Father Divine from 1930 on and lived in a PM residence while still a member of the MST.8 Immigrants, southern migrants, and native-born northerners crossed paths in these groups, adopting identities and affirming histories that linked them in new ways that were fostered by the city’s diversity.

At the same time, immigrants and migrants frequently took divergent paths, manifesting attraction to different religio-racial options. Members of the MST and the NOI, for example, were more likely to have been southern migrants than immigrants. Members of the most prominent Ethiopian Hebrew congregations were more likely to have been immigrants from the Caribbean. Father Divine’s PM attracted a combination of migrants and immigrants, but more of the former than the latter. Part of the explanation for this tendency of migrants to congregate in certain groups and immigrants in others lies in patterns of migration in the period. The MST and the NOI, led by men who themselves had migrated from the South, were headquartered in midwestern cities where there were fewer immigrants from the Caribbean than in East Coast cities. Congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews, founded and led by immigrants, tended to be concentrated in New York City, home to a large population of Caribbean immigrants. The PM was headquartered on the East Coast, where it drew both black southern migrants and Caribbean immigrants, and the membership of the West Coast branches in California and Washington State was predominantly white.

Leaders of religio-racial movements provided answers to questions about black identity that, in some cases, engaged specific religious traditions: Judaism in the case of the Ethiopian Hebrews, Islam for the MST and the NOI, and Christianity in the PM’s case. They did not simply call on followers to exchange one religion for another, however, but provided frameworks for understanding black history and identity that reoriented members in space and time. Rather than concentrating solely on the charismatic leader or the religious traditions they engaged, the two chapters that follow examine the movements’ authorizing frameworks to explore how they functioned as comprehensive religio-racial systems of meaning. One chapter focuses on formulations of religio-racial identity in relation to sacred geography in the MST and Ethiopian Hebrew congregations and the other examines how concern with divine time and chronology structured the narratives of identity in the NOI and PM. Members of the MST and Ethiopian Hebrew congregations embraced a narration of black sacred history elaborating a racial link to regions of Africa and arguing that right understanding of this connection restored their religio-racial identity. Although space and place were significant for the NOI and the PM—Mecca in the case of the former and the utopic space of Father Divine’s kingdom on earth in the latter—time or sacred chronology organized the narratives of identity in these groups, with members of the NOI emphasizing their status as the earth’s original people and PM members striving to inhabit Father Divine’s eternal earthly kingdom. Attending to these thematic commonalities opens up new ways of understanding the movements’ appeal to potential members and highlights how their religio-racial systems oriented believers toward the past, present, and future.

Figure 1.1. Rabbi A. Josiah Ford (left) of the Congregation Beth B’nai Abraham, with members of his choir, 1925. © Underwood & Underwood/CORBIS.

1

Geographies of Race and Religion

Ethiopia, Land of Israel

On Sunday afternoons in the early 1920s one could find a small group of people at the UNIA’s Liberty Hall in Harlem with their heads bent over texts and engaged in avid study. Among those leading the session was Arnold Josiah Ford, an immigrant from Barbados who considered himself an Ethiopian Hebrew and had helped to organize the study group to persuade other black Harlemites that they too were Hebrews.1 The group became formal in 1924 when Ford joined with colleagues Samuel Moshe Valentine and Mordecai Herman to organize a Hebrew congregation in Harlem.2 The religious sensibility UNIA founder Marcus Garvey had integrated into his project to achieve black unity appealed to Ford, who served as the organization’s musical director. Grounded in Christianity and institutionalized in the office of Chaplain General, the UNIA’s religious orientation was nevertheless general enough for non-Christian members of the movement to combine their religious commitments with their political work.3 An engaged and visible UNIA member, Ford contributed to its religious ethos through his renditions of familiar songs and hymns and by composing hymns specifically for the movement, including cowriting the “Universal Ethiopian Anthem.”4 Ford remained committed to the UNIA’s broad goals, particularly the focus on Africa as spiritual homeland and political future, but he worked to develop an institutional context in which he could “gather all the negroes together and make them understand themselves.”5 While Beth B’nai Abraham (BBA), the congregation he eventually served as rabbi, became an important focus for him, he also organized a civic club to raise funds for an exodus to Africa. For Ford, the connection to Africa was so significant and the continent such a unique source of spiritual power that he eventually led a small group to Ethiopia following the coronation of Haile Selassie as emperor. He died there in 1935 on the eve of the Italian invasion and before he could realize his goals of establishing an Ethiopian Hebrew community.

In looking to Africa for religious inspiration, Ford and his congregants participated in broader cultural currents. A deep spiritual connection to Africa has marked much of the religious history of the African diaspora, with diaspora blacks highlighting the continent’s significance as a place of origin, a site of mission work for Christian redemption, or the promised land beckoning for return. Christian commitment set the context for the elaboration of such spiritual connections for many blacks as they mined the Bible for ways to understand enslavement a...