Divine, Father 1877(?)–1965
Father Divine 1877(?)–1965
Peace Mission founder
Father Divine is one of the more perplexing figures in twentieth-century African American history. The founder of a cultish religious movement whose members regarded him as God, Father Divine was also an untiring champion of equal rights for all Americans regardless of color or creed, as well as a very practical businessman whose many retail and farming establishments flourished in the midst of the Great Depression.
Regarded by many members of the traditional black church as an imposter or even a lunatic, Divine was praised by other observers as a powerful agent of social change, alone among the many cult leaders in Depression-era New York in providing tangible economic benefits for thousands of his disciples.
The early biography of the man who later called himself Father Divine is little more than a patchwork of guesses: Divine was apparently unwilling to discuss his life except in its “spiritual” aspects. Believing himself to be God incarnate, he felt the details of his worldly existence were unimportant; the result is that historians are not certain even of his original name or place of birth. Most agree, however, that Father Divine was probably born ten to twenty years after the end of the Civil War, somewhere in the Deep South, and that his given name was George Baker.
As betrayed by the accent and colloquialisms of his speaking style, Baker seemed to have grown up in the rural South, no doubt in a family of farmers struggling to survive under the twin burdens of economic exploitation and racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws. At an early age, Baker escaped the drudgery of farm work by becoming a traveling preacher, gradually working his way north to Baltimore, Maryland, in the year 1899.
“The Messenger”
In Baltimore, Baker worked as a gardener, restricting his preaching to an occasional turn at the Baptist church’s Wednesday night prayer meeting, where his powerful speaking style was much encouraged by his fellow churchgoers. Though a man of stubby proportions with a high-pitched voice, Baker enthralled listeners with his fluid storytelling and highly emotional delivery, typical of the sermons given at the rural southern churches where he grew up.
At a Glance…
Original name believed to have been George Baker, changed name to Father Divine, 1930; bom c. 1877 Hutchinson Island, on the Savannah River, GA; died of complications of diabetes and arteriosclerosis, September 10, 1965; son of sharecroppers; married Pínninnah (’Sister Penny’), 1919 (died 1937); married Edna Rose Ritchings (’Sweet Angel’), 1946.
Traveling preacher in the Deep South, c. 1894–99; gardener in Baltimore, MD, 1899 1903; preached intermittently in the southern United States and in Baltimore, settling in Georgia from 1912 to 1914; Peace Mission, New York City, founder, 1915, served as director through 1955.
But Baker was also a restless man of independent opinions, and it was not long before he felt compelled to resume the life of a traveling preacher. He returned to the South with two specific goals: to combat the spread of Jim Crow segregation and to offer an alternative to the otherworldly emphasis of most established churches. Such a crusade was not likely to meet with much success— indeed, Baker was fortunate not to be lynched—yet it reflected a concern for social issues that would remain constant throughout the long career of Father Divine.
Baker returned to Baltimore around 1906 and there fell under the influence of an eccentric preacher named Samuel Morris. Morris had been thrown out of numerous churches for proclaiming himself to be God, a belief he derived from a passage in St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians which asks, “Know ye not that … the spirit of God dwelleth in you?” This teaching provided Baker with a religious foundation for his social activism: if God lived within every human being, all were therefore divine and hence equal. Baker became Morris’s staunch supporter and disciple. Morris took to calling himself “Father Jehovia,” while his prophet Baker adopted the appropriate title of “The Messenger.” It was not long before The Messenger again felt the need to spread his gospel southward, and in 1912 Baker set off for the backwoods of Georgia.
At some point in his travels Baker apparently realized that if Samuel Morris were God, so too was he, and he henceforth referred to himself as the living incarnation of the Lord God Almighty. Such a claim was naturally alarming to the pastors of the churches where Baker stopped to preach, and in 1914 he was arrested in Valdosta, Georgia, as a public nuisance who was possibly “insane.” The court recorded his name as “John Doe, alias God,” but with the help of a local writer who took an interest in The Messenger’s strange story, Baker was released and told to leave the state of Georgia. Instead, he was promptly rearrested in a nearby town and sent to the state insane asylum, whereupon his benefactor once again freed him after a short time.
Though Baker’s theology was no doubt peculiar, he impressed most people as a man of sound mind and deep moral commitment. “I remember,” his attorney later told the New Yorker, “that there was about the man an unmistakable quiet power that manifested itself to anyone who came in contact with him.”
The Making of a Cult
Baker soon tired of his troubles in Georgia and in 1915 made his way to New York City, bringing with him a handful of disciples he had picked up along the way. With these followers, Baker set up a communal household in which income was shared and a life of chastity and abstinence was encouraged, all under the direction of “Major J. Devine,” as Baker was then styling himself. Major Devine preached the doctrine of God within each individual, but there was never any doubt among his followers as to who was the actual incarnation of the deity—only Devine, or “Divine,” as the name inevitably came to be spelled, could claim that honor. Divine helped his disciples find work, and they in turn entrusted him with the management of the group’s finances as well as its spiritual well-being. By living simply and pooling their resources, Divine’s movement was able to purchase a house in suburban Sayville, New York, in 1919, by which time Divine had also taken as his wife a disciple named Pinninnah.
In contrast to his earlier, public preaching, which had often expressed the need for racial equality and justice, Divine’s spiritual work was now confined to the salvation of his followers and was based on harmony within and between individuals. To the outside world, Father Divine was a quiet, well-respected member of the Sayville community (otherwise all-white) who ran an employment agency for the many African American men and women staying at his house on Macon Street. Divine excelled at both of his professions.
As his church grew by leaps and bounds, the preacher— also a shrewd businessman—not only found work for his disciples but oversaw the investment of their common earnings with the talent of a natural entrepreneur. Father Divine taught his followers the virtues of hard work, honesty, and service in their business dealings, exhorting them to achieve economic security in this world as preparation for salvation in the next. Under the guidance of Divine’s leadership, his disciples gained a reputation as excellent employees and the operators of honest, efficient businesses.
Father Divine’s “Peace Mission,” as he called his following, remained relatively unknown until the start of the Great Depression in 1929. New York was full of such cult organizations, each boasting its own charismatic preacher and offering to the thousands of recently arrived black southern emigrants an emotional brand of religion similar to what they had known in their hometowns. With the advent of the Depression, however, desperate economic conditions made the Peace Mission’s generosity all the more striking.
Each Sunday at the Sayville residence featured an all-day banquet, free of charge and open to anyone who cared to attend. Father Divine would accept no payment for these feasts, nor did he take charitable contributions; he asked only that everyone who sat down to dinner behave in a Christian manner and abstain from the consumption of alcohol. Word quickly spread of Divine’s “miraculous” bounty, and by the early 1930s his Sunday dinners were attracting hundreds of hungry poor people—mostly black but not exclusively so—to the house in Sayville.
Disturbed by this eruption of black power in their midst, residents of Sayville had Divine arrested as a public nuisance. A thorough police investigation uncovered no signs of financial or moral improprieties at the Peace Mission, but Divine was nevertheless sentenced to one year in prison by a judge who considered him a dangerous fraud. When the judge promptly died three days later, Divine’s reputation as a divine Christian being was enhanced: like Jesus, he had been wrongly accused, and now his persecutor was paid back in full. Divine was set free on bail, his conviction was later overturned, and the Peace Mission attracted new followers by the thousands.
Peace Mission Flourished
Divine’s success in the 1930s was indeed nothing short of “miraculous.” After moving his headquarters to Harlem, the center of black artistic and cultural life in New York and the nation, his Peace Mission rapidly added scores of affiliated branches elsewhere in New York, in New Jersey, and as far away as California. About 85 percent of Peace Mission disciples were black, and at least 75 percent of the followers were female, many drawn as much by the electrifying person of Father Divine as by his social or theological message.
Since full-fledged disciples (known as “Angels”) were required to donate all of their worldly possessions to the Mission, Father Divine was soon overseeing an organization of considerable financial size. By all accounts, he did so honestly and skillfully, helping his followers to find jobs, start innumerable small businesses, and after 1935 settle on farmland purchased by the Mission in upstate New York—all of this in the midst of the worst depression in the history of the United States. Divine did allow himself a few luxuries: he lived in the finest of the Mission’s many Harlem properties, was chauffeured in a Rolls Royce, and was rarely seen in anything but a fashionable three-piece business suit.
Father Divine never advocated the virtues of poverty: his followers had all too much of that as it was. In his preaching, Divine combined an almost fanatical faith with strict adherence to the ethics of American life, urging his followers to rise from poverty by old-fashioned thrift, hard work, and scrupulous honesty. To work, in his eyes, was to serve God. Divine was especially wary of the dangers of borrowing money, and all of the Mission’s business was conducted in cash, even real estate being paid for in cash and in advance. The flaunting of large amounts of money naturally drew the attention of the Internal Revenue Service, which never found any irregularities in the dealings of Father Divine or the Peace Mission. On the contrary, on many occasions his disciples startled former employers or tradesmen by repaying long forgotten debts; in one instance, this involved the sum of 66 cents for a train ride taken 40 years before.
Father Divine saw economic independence as a stepping stone toward his overall goal of racial equality. He was unequivocally opposed to any form of racial discrimination, or even to the recognition of racial difference. For Divine, all human beings partook of the divine essence, and all Americans were due the rights granted them by the Constitution. He therefore purposely bought many pieces of property in all-white areas, including most notably an estate on the Hudson River opposite the home of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as a beachfront hotel near Atlantic City, New Jersey, and extensive tracts of farmland in upstate New York. When challenged by segregationists for such moves, Divine would often speak of the American way of life, as in an article published in New Day, a Mission newspaper: “My co-workers and followers are endeavoring to express our citizenry and enact the Bill of Rights in every activity and even in every community … to enjoy life, liberty and the reality of happiness.”
Divine’s Retirement
The end of the Depression also witnessed the gradual retirement of Father Divine. Already in his sixties, Divine was shaken by a lawsuit filed in 1937 by a former disciple who sought repayment of money she had given to the Peace Mission over the years. A long series of legal maneuvers eventually resulted in the incorporation of the Peace Mission and Father Divine’s move to Philadelphia, beyond the reach of New York State law. Of greater fundamental importance to the Peace Mission was the advent of war in 1939, when the American economy snapped out of its long depression and jobs became plentiful. The Peace Mission’s style of frugal collective living lost much of its appeal in a booming economic climate, and the organization stagnated, with Father Divine gradually retiring to a life of quiet wealth outside Philadelphia.
In 1946 Divine married his second wife, a 21-year-old white disciple named Edna Rose Ritchings—a move that required all of his rhetorical skill to explain as the act of a celibate divinity. Ritchings nevertheless went on to become de facto head of the Mission, known first by her cult name of “Sweet Angel” and later simply as Mother Divine.
Father Divine lived until 1965, little seen and not active in the few remaining Mission projects. However, he did remain a powerful symbol of hope for racial unity and a role model for later generations of people of color. Divine is probably best remembered as a man who, in his own peculiar way, acted in his own interest while skillfully advancing the cause of thousands of inner city African Americans.
Sources
Books
The African-American Almanac, edited by Kenneth Estell, Gale, 1994.
Dictionary of American Negro Biography, edited by Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, Norton, 1982.
Harris, Sara, Father Divine, Collier Books, 1971. Parker, Robert Allerton, The Incredible Messiah: The Deification of Father Divine, Little, Brown, 1937.
Weisbrot, Robert, Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality, University of Illinois Press, 1983.
Periodicals
Nation, February 6, 1935.
New Day (Peace Mission publication), various issues, 1936.
New Yorker, June 13, 1936; June 20, 1936; June 27, 1936.
New York Times, September 11, 1965, p. 1. Spoken Word (Peace Mission publication), various issues, 1934-37.
—Jonathan Martin
Father Divine
Father Divine
Father Divine (c. 1877-1965) founded a cultish religious movement known as the Peace Mission. He served as its director from 1915 to 1965.
Father Divine is one of the more perplexing figures in twentieth-century African American history. The founder of a cultish religious movement whose members regarded him as God, Father Divine was also an untiring champion of equal rights for all Americans regardless of color or creed, as well as a very practical businessman whose many retail and farming establishments flourished in the midst of the Great Depression. Regarded by many members of the traditional black church as an imposter or even a lunatic, Divine was praised by other observers as a powerful agent of social change, alone among the many cult leaders in Depression-era New York in providing tangible economic benefits for thousands of his disciples.
The early biography of the man who later called himself Father Divine is little more than a patchwork of guesses: Divine was apparently unwilling to discuss his life except in its "spiritual" aspects. Believing himself to be God incarnate, he felt the details of his worldly existence were unimportant; the result is that historians are not certain even of his original name or place of birth. Most agree, however, that Father Divine was probably born ten to twenty years after the end of the Civil War, somewhere in the Deep South, and that his given name was George Baker.
As betrayed by the accent and colloquialisms of his speaking style, Baker seemed to have grown up in the rural South, no doubt in a family of farmers struggling to survive under the twin burdens of economic exploitation and racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws. At an early age, Baker escaped the drudgery of farm work by becoming a traveling preacher, gradually working his way north to Baltimore, Maryland, in the year 1899.
"The Messenger"
In Baltimore, Baker worked as a gardener, restricting his preaching to an occasional turn at the Baptist church's Wednesday night prayer meeting, where his powerful speaking style was much encouraged by his fellow churchgoers. Though a man of stubby proportions with a high-pitched voice, Baker enthralled listeners with his fluid storytelling and highly emotional delivery, typical of the sermons given at the rural southern churches where he grew up.
But Baker was also a restless man of independent opinions, and it was not long before he felt compelled to resume the life of a traveling preacher. He returned to the South with two specific goals: to combat the spread of Jim Crow segregation and to offer an alternative to the otherworldly emphasis of most established churches. Such a crusade was not likely to meet with much success—indeed, Baker was fortunate not to be lynched—yet it reflected a concern for social issues that would remain constant throughout the long career of Father Divine.
Baker returned to Baltimore around 1906 and there fell under the influence of an eccentric preacher named Samuel Morris. Morris had been thrown out of numerous churches for proclaiming himself to be God, a belief he derived from a passage in St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians which asks, "Know ye not that … the spirit of God dwelleth in you?" This teaching provided Baker with a religious foundation for his social activism: if God lived within every human being, all were therefore divine and hence equal. Baker became Morris's staunch supporter and disciple. Morris took to calling himself "Father Jehovia," while his prophet Baker adopted the appropriate title of "The Messenger." It was not long before The Messenger again felt the need to spread his gospel southward, and in 1912 Baker set off for the backwoods of Georgia.
At some point in his travels Baker apparently realized that if Samuel Morris were God, so too was he, and he henceforth referred to himself as the living incarnation of the Lord God Almighty. Such a claim was naturally alarming to the pastors of the churches where Baker stopped to preach, and in 1914 he was arrested in Valdosta, Georgia, as a public nuisance who was possibly "insane." The court recorded his name as "John Doe, alias God," but with the help of a local writer who took an interest in The Messenger's strange story, Baker was released and told to leave the state of Georgia. Instead, he was promptly rearrested in a nearby town and sent to the state insane asylum, whereupon his benefactor once again freed him after a short time.
Though Baker's theology was no doubt peculiar, he impressed most people as a man of sound mind and deep moral commitment. "I remember," his attorney later told the New Yorker, "that there was about the man an unmistakable quiet power that manifested itself to anyone who came in contact with him."
The Making of a Cult
Baker soon tired of his troubles in Georgia and in 1915 made his way to New York City, bringing with him a handful of disciples he had picked up along the way. With these followers, Baker set up a communal household in which income was shared and a life of chastity and abstinence was encouraged, all under the direction of "Major J. Devine," as Baker was then styling himself. Major Devine preached the doctrine of God within each individual, but there was never any doubt among his followers as to who was the actual incarnation of the deity—only Devine, or "Divine," as the name inevitably came to be spelled, could claim that honor. Divine helped his disciples find work, and they in turn entrusted him with the management of the group's finances as well as its spiritual well-being. By living simply and pooling their resources, Divine's movement was able to purchase a house in suburban Sayville, New York, in 1919, by which time Divine had also taken as his wife a disciple named Pinninnah.
In contrast to his earlier, public preaching, which had often expressed the need for racial equality and justice, Divine's spiritual work was now confined to the salvation of his followers and was based on harmony within and between individuals. To the outside world, Father Divine was a quiet, well-respected member of the Sayville community (otherwise all-white) who ran an employment agency for the many African American men and women staying at his house on Macon Street. Divine excelled at both of his professions. As his church grew by leaps and bounds, the preacher—also a shrewd businessman—not only found work for his disciples but oversaw the investment of their common earnings with the talent of a natural entrepreneur. Divine taught his followers the virtues of hard work, honesty, and service in their business dealings, exhorting them to achieve economic security in this world as preparation for salvation in the next. Under the guidance of Divine's leadership, his disciples gained a reputation as excellent employees and the operators of honest, efficient businesses.
Divine's "Peace Mission," as he called his following, remained relatively unknown until the start of the Great Depression in 1929. New York was full of such cult organizations, each boasting its own charismatic preacher and offering to the thousands of recently arrived black southern emigrants an emotional brand of religion similar to what they had known in their hometowns. With the advent of the Depression, however, desperate economic conditions made the Peace Mission's generosity all the more striking.
Each Sunday at the Sayville residence was set aside for an all-day banquet, free of charge and open to anyone who cared to attend. Father Divine would accept no payment for these feasts, nor did he take charitable contributions; he asked only that everyone who sat down to dinner behave in a Christian manner and abstain from the consumption of alcohol. Word quickly spread of Divine's "miraculous" bounty, and by the early 1930s his Sunday dinners were attracting hundreds of hungry poor people—mostly black but not exclusively so—to the house in Sayville. Disturbed by this eruption of black power in their midst, residents of Sayville had Divine arrested as a public nuisance. A thorough police investigation uncovered no signs of financial or moral improprieties at the Peace Mission, but Divine was nevertheless sentenced to one year in prison by a judge who considered him a dangerous fraud. When the judge promptly died three days later, Divine's reputation as a divine Christian being was enhanced: like Jesus, he had been wrongly accused, and now his persecutor was paid back in full. Divine was set free on bail, his conviction later overturned, and the Peace Mission attracted new followers by the thousands.
Peace Mission Flourished
Divine's success in the 1930s was indeed nothing short of "miraculous." After moving his headquarters to Harlem, the center of black artistic and cultural life in New York and the nation, his Peace Mission rapidly added scores of affiliated branches elsewhere in New York, in New Jersey, and as far away as California. About 85 percent of Peace Mission disciples were black, and at least 75 percent were female, many drawn as much by the electrifying person of Father Divine as by his social or theological message.
Since full-fledged disciples (known as "Angels") were required to donate all of their worldly possessions to the Mission, Father Divine was soon overseeing an organization of considerable financial size. By all accounts, he did so honestly and skillfully, helping his followers to find jobs, start innumerable small businesses, and after 1935 settle on farmland purchased by the Mission in upstate New York— all of this in the midst of the worst depression in the history of the United States. Divine did allow himself a few luxuries: he lived in the finest of the Mission's many Harlem properties, was chauffeured in a Rolls Royce, and was rarely seen in anything but a fashionable three-piece business suit.
Father Divine never advocated the virtues of poverty: his followers had all too much of that as it was. In his preaching, Divine combined an almost fanatical faith with strict adherence to the ethics of American life, urging his followers to rise from poverty by old-fashioned thrift, hard work, and scrupulous honesty. To work, in his eyes, was to serve God. Divine was especially wary of the dangers of borrowing money, and all of the Mission's business was conducted in cash, even real estate being paid for in cash and in advance. The flaunting of large amounts of money naturally drew the attention of the Internal Revenue Service, which never found any irregularities in the dealings of Father Divine or the Peace Mission. On the contrary, on many occasions his disciples startled former employers or tradesmen by repaying long forgotten debts; in one instance, this involved the sum of 66 cents for a train ride taken 40 years before.
Father Divine saw economic independence as a stepping stone toward his overall goal of racial equality. He was unequivocally opposed to any form of racial discrimination, or even to the recognition of racial difference. For Divine, all human beings partook of the divine essence, and all Americans were due the rights granted them by the Constitution. He therefore purposely bought many pieces of property in all-white areas, including most notably an estate on the Hudson River opposite the home of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as a beachfront hotel near Atlantic City, New Jersey, and extensive tracts of farmland in upstate New York. When challenged by segregationists for such moves, Divine would often speak of the American way of life, as in an article published in New Day, a Mission newspaper: "My co-workers and followers are endeavoring to express our citizenry and enact the Bill of Rights in every activity and even in every community … to enjoy life, liberty and the reality of happiness."
Divine's Retirement
The end of the Depression also witnessed the gradual retirement of Father Divine. Already in his sixties, Divine was shaken by a lawsuit filed in 1937 by a former disciple who sought repayment of money she had given to the Peace Mission over the years. A long series of legal maneuvers eventually resulted in the incorporation of the Peace Mission and Father Divine's move to Philadelphia, beyond the reach of New York State law. Of greater fundamental importance to the Peace Mission was the advent of war in 1939, when the American economy snapped out of its long depression and jobs became plentiful. The Peace Mission's style of frugal collective living lost much of its appeal in a booming economic climate, and the organization stagnated, with Father Divine gradually retiring to a life of quiet wealth outside Philadelphia.
In 1946 Divine married his second wife, a 21-year-old white disciple named Edna Rose Ritchings—a move that required all of his rhetorical skill to explain as the act of a celibate divinity. Ritchings nevertheless went on to become de facto head of the Mission, known first by her cult name of "Sweet Angel" and later simply as Mother Divine.
Father Divine lived until 1965, little seen and not active in the few remaining Mission projects. However, he did remain a powerful symbol of hope for racial unity and a role model for later generations of people of color. Divine is probably best remembered as a man who, in his own peculiar way, acted in his own interest while skillfully advancing the cause of thousands of inner city African Americans.
Further Reading
The African-American Almanac, edited by Kenneth Estell, Gale, 1994.
Dictionary of American Negro Biography, edited by Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, Norton, 1982.
Harris, Sara, Father Divine, Collier Books, 1971.
Parker, Robert Allerton, The Incredible Messiah: The Deification of Father Divine, Little, Brown, 1937.
Weisbrot, Robert, Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality, University of Illinois Press, 1983.
Nation, February 6, 1935.
New Day (Peace Mission publication), various issues, 1936.
New Yorker, June 13, 1936; June 20, 1936; June 27, 1936.
New York Times, September 11, 1965, p. 1.
Spoken Word (Peace Mission publication), various issues, 1934-37. □
Father Divine
FATHER DIVINE
FATHER DIVINE . The Harlem-based minister known as Father Divine (1879–1965) became famous during the Great Depression for feeding the hungry and drawing thousands of disciples (white as well as black) who venerated him as God on earth. A short, balding man of great energy and charisma, Divine promoted racial integration in his Peace Mission movement at a time when nearly all American congregations were segregated. He summed up his religious crusade for social justice, saying, "If God cannot prepare a heaven here for you, you are not going anywhere."
Born George Baker in Rockville, Maryland, in 1879, Divine grew up in a southern black farm-laborer's family. As a young man he traveled through the South preaching to poor blacks. Citing 1 Corinthians 3:16, "the spirit of God dwelleth in you," he declared that all people were godly and so deserved equal rights and dignity. But after several arrests and detention in an insane asylum, Divine left the Jim Crow South and, in 1915, settled in New York City, then emerging as a center of African American culture amid an influx of migrants from the rural South.
In 1919, Baker, calling himself the Reverend M. J. Divine, relocated to Sayville, Long Island. Living with a few followers who pooled their funds, he distributed books on New Thought, such as Robert Collier's multivolume works, The Book of Life (1925), The Secret of Gold (1927), and The Life Magnet (1928), which taught that everyone could achieve earthly success by visualizing positive images and tapping an inner spiritual power. Disciples also strived for unity with God by renouncing carnal temptations such as tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and sexual relations.
As Divine's communal movement continued to prosper after the onset of the Great Depression in late 1929, his free Sunday banquets attracted blacks from Harlem and Newark, plus a growing minority of whites. These interracial gatherings, though, led to "Father's" arrest in 1931 for "disturbing the peace," and he was convicted the following June after a blatantly racist trial. Yet even before the verdict was overturned in January 1933, Divine found his messianic aura enhanced when, three days after sentencing and censuring Divine, the judge suddenly died. Relocating to Harlem, Divine presided over a burgeoning movement called the Peace Mission, which was clustered in northern ghettos but also featured predominantly white branches in California and other states.
Divine's Peace Mission became a melting pot of the discontented. A majority of Divine's followers were poor black women, often widowed or divorced, and generally from the lowest strata of ghetto society. But others, men and women, held well-paying jobs and were highly educated, including a substantial minority of affluent whites who were drawn to Divine out of idealism or spiritual seeking. In New York and New Jersey, states that contained the heart of Divine's support, the following was 85 to 90 percent black. In states farther west the proportion of blacks in the movement often dropped sharply, but almost never fell below a third of the disciples in any Peace Mission center.
Estimates of the total Peace Mission membership during the 1930s varied sharply. At its peak in the mid-1930s, the movement had perhaps ten thousand hard-core followers who believed fervently in Father Divine's divinity, gave their possessions to the Peace Mission, and lived in one of the more than 150 movement centers. This conservative count excludes many ghetto residents who disdained notions of Father Divine's godhood yet admired his leadership as a philanthropist and champion of racial equality.
Divine pioneered in the growing struggle for equal rights and opportunity. He encouraged integration of "light and dark complected" followers (the words Negro and colored were forbidden) and used whites as secret emissaries to circumvent restrictive housing covenants and acquire homes, hotels, and beach fronts for his followers in northern white neighborhoods. The Peace Mission proved the vitality of cooperative enterprise by becoming the largest landowner in Harlem and operating businesses with an estimated value of $15 million. In January 1936 the Peace Mission's "Righteous Government Convention" in Harlem called for the abolition of segregation, lynching, and capital punishment, and also urged an expanded government commitment to end unemployment, poverty, and hunger.
After 1940 the Peace Mission sharply declined in numbers and influence as the return of prosperity lessened its philanthropic appeal, and it evolved from a mass movement to a formal sect featuring a half-dozen incorporated churches. In 1942 Divine left Harlem for Philadelphia, and four years later he announced a "spiritual" marriage to a 21-year-old white disciple, Edna Rose Ritchings, thereafter known as Mother Divine. When Father Divine died in September 1965 after a long illness, disciples were stunned and saddened, but not to the point of mass desertion. He had been largely out of public view for several years, during which time Mother Divine had prepared followers for the day when "Father will not be with us personally."
Since the late 1950s Mother Divine and her secretarial staff have administered the Peace Mission from a 72-acre estate called Woodmont, outside Philadelphia. Although the Peace Mission's membership has dwindled to perhaps a few hundred and most of its properties have been sold off, disciples still save a place for "Father" at their banquet tables. They pay special homage to Woodmont's Shrine to Life, a structure designed by Mother Divine: it surrounds a red marble crypt that holds the body of Father Divine. Followers believe that "Father" did not die, but rather cast off his mortal body in order to rule the universe through his spirit.
See Also
New Thought Movement.
Bibliography
Two early biographies that emphasize sensational or allegedly scandalous aspects of Father Divine's ministry are John Hoshor, God in a Rolls-Royce; The Rise of Father Divine: Madman, Menace, or Messiah (New York, 1936); and Robert A. Parker, Incredible Messiah: The Deification of Father Divine (Boston, 1937). Robert Weisbrot's Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Urbana, Ill., 1983) focuses on Divine's vanguard activism for racial justice; the volume contains an annotated listing of primary and secondary sources for further study (pp. 224–232). Jill Watts's God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992) sheds new light on Divine's origins and highlights the role of New Thought in his religious leadership.
Robert Weisbrot (2005)
Father Divine
Father Divine
c. 1880
September 10, 1965
Father Divine, a minister in New York City's Harlem and other locations, was born George Baker to ex-slaves in Rockville, Maryland. He endured poverty and segregation as a child, and at age twenty he moved to Baltimore, where he taught Sunday school and preached in storefront churches. In 1912 he began an itinerant ministry, focusing on the South. He attracted a small following and, pooling his disciples' earnings, moved north and purchased a home in 1919 in the exclusively white Long Island community of Sayville, New York. He opened his doors to the unemployed and homeless.
By 1931, thousands were flocking to worship services in his home, and his white neighbors grew hostile. In November 1931 they summoned police, who arrested him for disturbing the peace and maintaining a public nuisance. Found guilty, he received the maximum fine and a sentence of one year in jail. Four days later, the sentencing judge died.
The judge's sudden death catapulted Father Divine into the limelight. Some saw it as evidence of his great powers; others viewed it as sinister retribution. Although Father Divine denied responsibility for the death, the incident aroused curiosity, and throughout the 1930s the news media continued to report on his activities.
Father Divine's Peace Mission movement grew, establishing extensions throughout the United States and in major cities abroad. He relocated his headquarters to Harlem, where he guided the movement, conducted worship services, and ran an employment agency. During the Great Depression, the movement opened businesses and sponsored a national network of relief shelters, furnishing thousands of poor people with food, clothes, and jobs.
Father Divine's appeal derived from his unique theology, a mixture of African-American folk religion, Methodism, Catholicism, Pentecostalism, and New Thought, an ideology based on the power of positive thinking. He encouraged followers to believe that he was God and to channel his spirit to generate health, prosperity, and salvation. He demanded they adhere to a strict moral code, abstaining from sexual intercourse and alcohol, and disciples cut family ties and assumed new names. His worship services included a banquet of endless courses, symbolizing his access to abundance. His mind-power theology attracted many, especially those suffering from racism and economic dislocation, giving disciples a sense of control over their destinies in a time filled with chaos and confusion.
His social programs also drew followers. Although rigid rules governed the movement's shelters, they were heavily patronized. An integrationist, Father Divine campaigned for civil rights, attracting both African-American and Euro-American disciples. Challenging American racism, he required followers to live and work in integrated pairs.
With economic recovery in the 1940s, Father Divine's message lost much of its appeal; membership in the movement declined and Peace Missions closed. In 1946 he made headlines with his marriage to a white disciple named Sweet Angel, and he spent his declining years grooming her for leadership. Upon his death in 1965, she assumed control of the movement, contending that Father Divine had not died but had surrendered his body, preferring to exist as a spirit. The movement perseveres with a small number of followers and businesses in the Philadelphia area.
See also Catholicism in the Americas; Folk Religion; Pentecostalism in the United States; Religion
Bibliography
Watts, Jill. God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Weisbrot, Robert. Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
jill m. watts (1996)
Father Divine
FATHER DIVINE
Father Divine (May 1879–September 10, 1965), the noted and controversial founder of the Peace Mission movement, gained national prominence during the Great Depression for his ability to feed and provide jobs for the poor, as well as for his followers' claims that he was God.
Born George Baker in Rockville, Maryland, in 1879, Divine grew up in poverty and segregation, the son of ex-slaves who were menial laborers. Although he had limited educational opportunities, he became an avid reader of religious literature. In 1899, he moved to Baltimore, where he worked as a gardener and taught Sunday school in a storefront church. During these years, Baker formulated a unique theology that blended New Thought (the mind power philosophy that encouraged believers to channel God's inner presence for happiness, prosperity, and health), African-American Christianity, Pentecostalism, and other religious ideologies. In 1912, convinced that he had achieved oneness with God, he set out as an itinerant preacher and attracted a small following who recognized his divinity.
In 1919, Baker, now known as Father Divine, settled with his flock and lived peacefully in Sayville, Long Island. But with the onset of the Depression, Divine's congregation expanded and his white neighbors turned hostile and complained, which lead to his conviction in 1932 for maintaining a public nuisance. Only four days after handing down the maximum sentence, the presiding judge died suddenly. The incident propelled Father Divine into the national limelight.
After his conviction was overturned, Divine relocated his headquarters to Harlem, where interest in his teachings boomed. Thousands attended Peace Mission banquets and rallies. Nationwide disciples followed his example by pooling their resources to open up Peace Missions and collective business endeavors. Additionally, Divine campaigned vigorously for civil rights, sponsoring voter registration drives and various challenges to segregation. Divine emerged as a critic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Charging that Roosevelt's New Deal perpetuated dependency, Divine preached self-reliance and collective capitalism. He also attacked Roosevelt's refusal to address racial issues and endorse anti-lynching legislation.
The Peace Mission movement was one of the few genuinely integrated organizations of the 1930s and offered hope to a variety of Americans. Certainly, many were drawn to Father Divine for their basic needs. But his social agenda, as well as his conviction that everyone could achieve success through positive thinking, was particularly empowering for both blacks, whose community had historically languished economically in depression, and whites who were also confronting economic chaos.
See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; CHARITY; RELIGION.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Watts, Jill. God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story. 1992.
Weisbrot, Robert. Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality. 1983.
Jill Watts