God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story - Softcover

Watts, Jill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520201728 ISBN 13: 9780520201729

Publisher: University of California Press, 1995

Synopsis

How did an African-American man born in a ghetto in 1879 rise to such religious prominence that his followers addressed letters to him simply "God, Harlem U.S.A."?

Using hitherto unknown materials, Jill Watts portrays the life and career of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing religious leaders, Father Divine. Starting as an itinerant preacher, Father Divine built an unprecedented movement that by the 1930s had attracted followers across the nation and around the world. As his ministry grew, so did the controversy surrounding his enormous wealth, flamboyant style, and committed "angels"-black and white, rich and poor alike.

Here for the first time a full account of Father Divine's childhood and early years challenges previous contentions that he was born into a sharecropping family in the deep South. While earlier biographers have concentrated on Father Divine's social and economic programs, Watts focuses on his theology, which gives new meaning to secular activities that often appeared contradictory. Although much has been written about Father Divine, God, Harlem U.S.A. finally provides a balanced and intimate account of his life's work.

About this title

About the Author

Jill Watts, Associate Professor of History at California State University, San Marcos, is at work on a book about Mae West.

From the Back Cover

Unearthing rare, scarce, and previously unknown original sources, Watts spells out a comprehensive, even definitive account of Father's controversial life and charismatic ministry. In addition to the fascinating biography, this is solid social and intellectual history as well.--American Academy of Religion

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

God, Harlem U.S.A.

The Father Divine StoryBy Jill Watts

University of California Press

Copyright © 1995 Jill Watts
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520201729
1
According to the Flesh

But if I would bear record of myself according to the flesh, it would only be a material or literary record. It would not really be practical or essential for the good of mankind. . . . Man, consciously, has in himself and in his history the records of every material thing in history of man and the history of the earth, and it proves nothing, in a way, towards salvation in my opinion.
New York News, August 20, 1932

Before the 1870s, Rockville was a quiet, modest village tucked among the rolling hills and dense woods of Montgomery County, Maryland. But after the Civil War, land developers saw an opportunity to make a profit and began promoting the town as "Peerless Rockville," an undiscovered treasure for "homeseekers and investors" searching for "health, wealth, and comfort." In 1873, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad established a regular route through Rockville, and by 1880, the town was in the midst of a housing boom. Sixteen miles up the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., Rockville, with its mild temperatures and cool breezes, offered a summertime refuge from the sweltering heat and humidity of the nation's capital. Rockville quickly became a popular resort town and lured the elite of Washington society, who fled from mugginess, mosquitoes, and malaria to the elegant homes and quaint cottages in the growing but still serene little town.1

Yet not everyone in Rockville enjoyed the pleasures of prosperity and leisure. At the northern edge of town was a black ghetto known as Monkey Run. White vacationers and residents of Rockville maintained an awkward relationship with the black population. Although they treated African Americans with contempt, whites were thoroughly dependent on the inhabitants of Monkey

Run to work in their homes, on their farms, and in their businesses. Six days a week, black men, women, and children trudged up a gentle slope to work in white neighborhoods. Except for the police, who monitored the ghetto from the courthouse bell tower, white residents paid little attention to the lives of those who lived in Monkey Run.2

However, in May 1897 the local white newspaper took notice of the death of Nancy Baker, a resident of Monkey Run. The paper reported that when Nancy Baker passed away, she was five feet tall and weighed 480 pounds. Her body lay in her home for almost two days as a local carpenter rushed to build a coffin large enough to accommodate her. On the day of her funeral, the coffin could not be removed until the door of her home had been cut away. Ten pallbearers carried Nancy Baker to her final resting place in a black Rockville cemetery. She left behind a husband and several children, including a teenage son, George Baker, Jr., who would become the evangelist Father Divine.3

Nancy Baker's life had never been easy. She was born into slavery in the 1840s in Gaithersburg, an agricultural hamlet about five miles from Rockville.4 Slavery in Maryland differed from that in other parts of the South. The need for slaves had lessened as Maryland farmers abandoned tobacco to cultivate grains and produce. While many planters sold their slaves to buyers from the lower South, others manumitted them. By 1850, over 45 percent of Maryland's African-American population was free. But Nancy was not so fortunate. Actually, the decline of slavery had detrimental effects on those like Nancy who remained enslaved in Maryland. They were separated from relatives and friends who had been sold away or freed and isolated from the support network that had developed among large slave populations.5

Under these conditions, Nancy grew to adulthood. She spent her early life on Mount Pleasant, a 180-acre plantation owned by Lemuel Clements and located just outside Gaithersburg. Local residents considered Mount Pleasant, with its two-story brick manor house high on a knoll, one of the finest estates in the area. A devout Catholic, Clements probably followed the church's requirements concerning the treatment of slaves and saw that all, including Nancy, were baptized and catechized. But Clements, like other Catholic masters, regarded blacks with animosity and treated his

slaves callously. In 1859, Clements participated in an unsuccessful campaign to expel free blacks from the state. Like other masters, he had no reservations about separating slaves from their families and friends, and sold Nancy away from the community that nurtured her to another Catholic slaveholder, Henry B. Waring.6

A longtime resident of Montgomery County, Henry Waring lived only a few miles from Mount Pleasant. In the late eighteenth century the Warings, prosperous tobacco planters and merchants, owned many slaves, but by 1864, Henry Waring had only nine slaves. As the Warings' only female slave, Nancy assumed the responsibilities of a house servantb cooking, cleaning, and caring for the master's and the slaves' children. Nancy's hours began before breakfast and lasted long past dinner. Expected to attend to any household or family emergency, she often worked late into the night. In constant contact with the master and his family, she bore the brunt of white racism and lived in danger of physical and sexual abuse. Improper clothing and inadequate nutrition contributed to the severity of her life. To add to her hardships, in 1860 she gave birth to her first child, Annie, who by the time she was four had been separated from her mother, possibly sold to another master.7

Nancy's slave community rarely accepted its subordinate status and devised a variety of covert and overt protests. One of the most powerful means of slave resistance was religion. Nancy lived in an intensely spiritual society whose flexible character embraced a variety of religious traditions and molded them into a doctrine that challenged slavery. The major organizational basis of the slave community, religion attracted enthusiastic participation by most slaves. Hidden from the master, religious practices and institutions evolved that affirmed black independence and defied the white superstructure. Combining teachings from European Christianity with African religious traditions, slaves fashioned their own syncretic belief system. Drawing from African roots, slave religion fused the sacred with the profane and maintained that spiritual forces actively controlled the material world. Moreover, as in Africa, everyone in the community played an active role in religious celebrations, and without a doubt, Nancy worshiped with her brothers and sisters in bondage when she could. These clandestine devotionals were held in safe private placesb the woods or slave cabins. Worship began with a song of praise and continued with biblically

inspired sermons, witnessing, singing, and dancing. The rituals and theology affirmed community solidarity and disseminated messages of hope and strength to those under white oppression.8

But like many other slaves, Nancy worshiped in two religious spheres, for her Catholic masters demanded that she attend their church. The Warings had built a small brick chapel on their farm that in the early 1800s served as the principal place of worship for local Catholics. Since she worked in the Waring home, she received further exposure to Catholicism. Frequent visits from parish priests, whom the Warings entertained and lodged, increased her familiarity with Catholicism. As a house servant caring for the slaveowner's offspring, Nancy must have internalized some Catholic values, for she was expected to uphold Catholic standards for the master's children.9

In 1861, life on the Waring farm changed quickly for everyone, especially Nancy. With the outbreak of the Civil War came confusion and chaos. Although the presence of the U.S. military ensured Maryland's loyalty to the Union, the white residents of Montgomery County were staunch Confederate sympathizers who dung to the institution of slavery. In spite of their efforts, the war dealt a final blow to slavery in Maryland, and on November 1, 1864, the state assembly outlawed slavery. As the war came to an end, Nancy joined other former slaves as they asserted their independence and searched for their families and friends. Nancy left her master and selected the surname Smith. Reunited with Annie, she settled in Rockville with a newborn daughter, Margaret. In July 1866, Nancy bore another daughter, Delia, and to support her family, secured a position as a domestic in one of Rockville's white homes. Since housing for blacks in Rockville was scarce and rents high, several families usually crowded into a single home. On her meager wages Nancy Smith found lodging for her young family in a small cabin with twenty-seven other people.10

During the transitional years of Reconstruction, life changed quickly for Nancy Smith and her family. Once old enough, Annie, Margaret, and Delia went to work in white homes but unlike their mother, had an opportunity to gain some education through the local Freedmen's School. Their home life changed significantly in the 1870s when Nancy Smith married George Baker, a newcomer to Rockville. Born in Maryland in the 1840s, George Baker's exact

origins remain a mystery, but some claim that he migrated from Prince George's County, which borders Montgomery on the southeast. He began supporting his family as a farm laborer, a skill he probably acquired while a slave on a Maryland plantation. George moved his new family into a small home on Middle Lane owned by a fellow field hand, Luther Snowden. There, in May 1879, Nancy gave birth to her first son and named him George after his father.11

George Baker, Jr., was born at the beginning of a new era for black Americans. By 1876, the U.S. government had terminated all Reconstruction assistance to former slaves. Without federal support, blacks independently continued their struggle to establish and protect their rights as American citizens. But Maryland remained unique among southern states, and the experience of African Americans there during the post-Reconstruction years differed from that in other parts of the South. Although black Marylanders suffered segregation and discrimination, the state's distinctive economic, political, and social atmosphere offered them limited opportunities unavailable in other southern states. As the young George discovered, Maryland society both carried on the traditional repression of the South and offered the restricted freedoms of the North. Thus George Baker, Jr.'s beliefs and actions as an adult did not develop exclusively from a background of oppression but also derived from his maturation in an African-American community that maintained a heritage of economic activity, political participation, and social activism.12

In 1879, Luther Snowden was the only black landowner within Rockville's city limits, but over the course of the next twenty years, whites sold small parcels of land along Middle Lane to African Americans. As the population swelled with constant new arrivals from the country, Monkey Run was born. On Middle Lane poor blacks could purchase inexpensive lots and live close to their jobs as domestics and laborers. By the late nineteenth century, landowning among blacks in the city was common. Rockville banks willingly made loans to blacks who lacked the resources to buy land. Such lenient policies not only expanded black landholding but also increased African-American indebtedness. Many blacks developed a distrust of banks, which controlled them through financing and by shortchanging their accounts. Bound to their small

homes by bankers' mortgages and loans, Rockville blacks resorted to taking in boarders to bolster insufficient family incomes.13

George Baker, Jr., spent his childhood in a small cabin full of people who barely subsisted on limited wages. In 1880, the Snowden household had fourteen occupants: Luther, his wife, his two teenage daughters, a young married couple, a bachelor, and the Baker family, which now included a new baby, Milford. Young George's standard of living did not differ significantly from that of his slave ancestors. Clad in hand-me-downs or inexpensive clothes, he went barefoot for most of the year. Like his enslaved forefathers and foremothers, he grew up on a diet of cornmeal, pork fat, red herring, and hominy. Disease spread quickly among the impoverished residents of Monkey Run, and the life expectancy of blacks in Montgomery County was well below national and state levels.14

Eventually Nancy Baker's obesity rendered her incapable of working. Although most African-American children were hired out to supplement their families' earnings, the loss of Nancy's income probably drove young George into the work force at an early age. George followed his father, who had begun taking odd jobs around town, which probably included doing yard work for whites. For blacks the hours were long, the work hard, and the pay low. But young George, who brought home about twenty-five cents a day, made an important contribution to the Baker family.15

Although the employment situation of African-American Marylanders was in many ways similar to that in other southern communities, the opportunities for landholding differentiated the black experience in post-Reconstruction Maryland. Farther south, blacks found themselves increasingly drawn into sharecropping. However, in Maryland, whites, compelled by indebtedness and a desperate need for laborers, willingly sold land to African Americans. Whites parceled out just enough property to inhibit African Americans from moving away, restricting lot sizes so that blacks were unable to support their families off the land; to make a living, black landowners had to work for whites. But throughout Maryland, black landholding was common, and even the few sharecroppers eventually made enough money to purchase small farms.16

Black Marylanders bought land whenever and wherever it was available, from urban centers to rural districts. Small farms owned by African Americans sprang up throughout the countryside. Some

blacks purchased adjoining lots and established cooperative farming communities. As a child and young man, George observed the efficiency of these collective enterprises, for many were close to his Rockville home. These farms illuminated the changing state of African-American attitudes toward land and labor. Immersed in Western culture and values, black Americans trying to compete in the American economy adopted the individualism of the Euramerican economic tradition. Families in black farming communities maintained separate plots and retained individual profits. Yet blacks did not completely abandon their African heritage; following the African communal tradition, they shared labor and equipment. African Americans saw landowning as an assertion of their independence and often sacrificed much to become landowners. Joseph Sutton, a contemporary of George's from Talbot County, Maryland, explained: "It was very important to own land. To have a home to go to. . . . It was right hard on them the wages they had working."17

Landholding was also a reality in the Baker family, and by 1886, the senior George Baker had saved and borrowed enough money to purchase a ninety-by-seventy-foot lot on Middle Lane. On the plot Baker built a small home for his family. Growing up in a home owned by his father exposed young George to the ideals of independence and status associated with the ownership of land. In an age when most African Americans in the South could never hope to own land, for George it was simply part of everyday life.18

Landholding was not the only freedom maintained by black Marylanders. George matured in a community that proudly guarded its constitutional rights and fully participated in the electoral process. In 1870, with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, African-American men in Maryland won the right to vote. By the 1890s, when most southern states had passed legislation disenfranchising blacks, African Americans in Maryland had fought successfully to retain their rights. Welcomed into the Republican party, whose victories depended on African-American votes, black males had some say in political affairs. African Americans were appointed to governmental posts and called to jury duty. But even though the Republicans campaigned to protect black suffrage, they denied African Americans leadership positions in the party and resisted nominating them for elective office. Nevertheless, because

African Americans identified the Republicans with Lincoln and believed that the party addressed at least some of their interests, they continued to support Republican candidates.19

Although Maryland blacks fended off threats of disfranchisement, they suffered under the severe segregation enforced by Jim Crow laws passed in the late nineteenth century. Young George lived in a world where strongly entrenched legal and social barriers separated blacks from whites. Even though Republicans supported African-American suffrage, the party abandoned its black constituency on issues of segregation and discrimination. Theaters confined blacks to the galleries, and white restaurants and hotels refused to serve them. Interracial marriages were illegal. Strict social and legal codes prohibited blacks from residing in white neighborhoods unless they worked as live-in help. Racism confined young George to a ghetto whose name, Monkey Run, invoked the image of caged primates in a zoo.20

The ugliness of the white racism George encountered was often manifested in shocking acts of violence. Throughout his early life, he heard of lynchings in Maryland, and several took place close to Rockville. In Rockville local authorities made no effort to prosecute members of lynch mobs. The Montgomery County Sentinel labeled these vigilantes "respectable, conscientious men" and warned the black population that "when the wolf comes and carries off our lambs we must hunt him with dog and gun and shoot him down in his tracks."21

Any black male could be targeted by a lynch mob acting on rumors and false information. Punishment was usually meted out to blacks who challenged white authority or deviated from the rigid social code. The loss of a family member not only created emotional pain but also increased economic hardships. Each lynching symbolically asserted that the law did not protect blacks and did not bind whites. But the African-American community in Maryland that nurtured George Baker, Jr., did not passively submit to white violence. Lynchings prompted black citizens to organize committees to agitate for legal protection, one group vowing to take "whatever precaution necessary to prevent similar occurrences."22

On occasion, black frustration with white oppression exploded into violence. Some Montgomery County African Americans were

not afraid to match force with force. In several cases when white men whipped blacks who had allegedly insulted white women, Montgomery County blacks retaliated with fierce retribution. At a Montgomery County religious revival, a bloody confrontation broke out when members of the African-American community intervened in the unwarranted arrest of a black man. Nine years old at the time of this clash, George surely heard of the incident, which must have generated much discussion among the residents of Monkey Run. Reared in a community that militantly rejected white oppression, he observed the methods employed by blacks challenging the injustices in American society.23

Following a pattern initiated by those in slavery, George's community asserted independence through the evolution and maintenance of separate cultural practices and institutions. Such features, collectively based, fostered black solidarity and served as a release of tension. In Rockville, leisure activities usually included the entire neighborhood. Sunday was the only day off for most African Americans, so on Saturday night Rockville came alive. By sundown, Middle Lane was tilled with people from the city and surrounding areas, some shooting craps, drinking, and playing cards, and others just sitting on their porches and talking. "Cakewalks," dances popular since slavery, drew large crowds. Some people threw parties or had picnics, and others flocked to concerts given by Rockville's black brass band.24

Excessive drinking was common at social gatherings and was not confined to the black population. Temperance fever ran high throughout the county, and in April 1881 antialcohol activists pushed through legislation prohibiting the production and sale of alcohol in Montgomery County. But temperance advocates, including African-American clergymen, continued their campaign against alcohol, and Montgomery County "drys" organized integrated rallies. White teetotalers attempted to organize an AfricanAmerican temperance union in the county. Despite these efforts, blacks in Rockville violated prohibition, continuing to manufacture bootleg liquor and run speakeasies in their homes. Local authorities prosecuted Luther Snowden several times for selling whiskey.25

Growing up in the Snowden household where Middle Lane residents came to drink and buy whiskey, George witnessed the de-

bilitating effects of alcohol abuse. He watched as his friends and family, who lived on subsistence wages, spent their earnings and became addicted to alcohol. For inhabitants of Monkey Run, alcohol offered an escape from their confinement in a slum surrounded by a society that offered little hope for a better future. George, like most young people, searched for direction in his life and found inspiration from the temperance advocates.

The black public schools also shaped George during these formative years. His attendance was probably sporadic, but he learned basic skills and became an avid reader. Young George attended a segregated public school on the outskirts of town that was supplied with desks and books discarded by white schools. The expenditures for black schools were considerably less than those for white schools, but despite inequitable resources, black schools were well patronized, with an absentee rate slightly lower than that in white schools. Terms in black schools ran six weeks shorter than in white schools because, education officials explained, abbreviated semesters gave the black "children time to learn to work."26

The African-American community considered education a tool for liberation. But most whites supported only occupational education, dedicated to producing farmhands, day laborers, or domestics. Schools partially satisfied African-American demands without threatening the white community. Crowded into a one-room schoolhouse with students of all ages and abilities, George learned reading and mathematics. However, following the Freedmen School model, the curriculum in black schools was designed to freeze African Americans into a position that would benefit and not endanger the hierarchical structure of American society. Christianity, patriotism, and the work ethic provided the foundation of black education, and textbooks bombarded African-American students with Victorian standards. Lessons emphasized punctuality, cleanliness, temperance, and hard work; tardy or disorderly students were whipped. Young George's instructors also taught the philosophy of "self-help," based on the notion that blacks had to improve their position independently through self-reliance and vocational training. Self-help ideology also promoted the American ideal that through hard work all Americans, including blacks, could climb the ladder of success. According to this philosophy, African

Americans bore the obligation for their own advancement. Educators anticipated that self-help would produce black citizens anxious to assume positions as subordinate laborers in the southern economy. But many black teachers and their students, including George, refined self-help ideology into a radical doctrine of racial uplift.27

However, it was religion, the core of African-American society, that most strongly influenced the development of young George. Nancy Baker raised her children in Rockville's Jerusalem Methodist Church, formed in 1867 after white Rockville Methodists abandoned the church over a dispute with the national leadership, who supported African-American civil rights. Black members continued to worship in the church, although they were relegated by the Methodist bureaucracy to the basement. In an attempt to free themselves from white restrictions, the black Methodists founded their own church in a building across the street and joined the Washington Mission Conference for Negroes of the Methodist Church. The conference assigned a white bishop to oversee the new church and a black pastor to supervise the congregation. In George's congregation church activities encompassed all aspects of life. He spent his Sundays in church school and worship services, his weeknights at prayer meetings and Bible study. The church closely coordinated social life, organizing picnics, dinners, and camp meetings. Inevitably, the intense spirituality and religious dedication of the African-American community left a deep impression on George.28

Perhaps most inspiring to his developing mind was the inclusiveness of the Methodist ministry. For Methodists, spirituality came from the heart, not from laborious study. The church did not require formal clerical training and selected as preachers AfricanAmerican members who demonstrated inspirational speaking ability. This denomination promised black communicants opportunities for leadership and some degree of self-determination. The church provided George with a loving community, and through his participation in worship services and Sunday school, he won acceptance and respect. His life was filled with the insecurities of poverty and the sting of racism, compounded by ridicule because of his petite size, for even as an adult, he stood only five feet two inches. In the

church George discovered an arena that furnished him with admiration and power.29

But George was not influenced only by Methodism. In Maryland a history of religious tolerance permitted a variety of churches to flourish and exposed Marylanders to a wide selection of religious traditions. Through his mother he became familiar with Catholicism. As an adult, he expressed admiration for celibate nuns and priests endeavoring to draw nearer to God. Further, he undoubtedly came into contact with Quakerism, for the Society of Friends thrived in and around Montgomery County and historically had a strong allegiance to the black community. But at the root of his early religious experiences was black religion, the combination of traditional African religion and Christianity passed down through generations of African-American slaves. Black religion provided young George with specific rituals, theological tenets, and a legacy of syncretism. As a young man, he sifted through different faiths and creeds, developing his personal spiritual convictions from a conglomeration of religious teachings.30

Family and personal relations also molded George. Nancy's obesity undoubtedly embarrassed and created tension in the family. George struggled to adulthood in his small home, watching obesity slowly overcome his mother. When she died, the Montgomery County Sentinel reported that "she was without a doubt the largest woman in the county, if not the state," memorializing Nancy as a curiosity.31

One day not long after his mother died George vanished from Rockville. He fled the poverty and agony of Monkey Run, leaving behind relatives and friends puzzled over his disappearance. He rejected destitution, his obese mother, his struggling family, and the white racism that promised to imprison him in Monkey Run for life.

The George Baker who disappeared from Rockville was a religious man who, confronted by the alcoholism, crime, and poverty of Middle Lane, had chosen to live a temperate, righteous, and Christian life. With fresh memories of his obese mother as a reminder of the suffering caused by destitution and white domination, George sought a new life free of these woes. His departure marked the beginning of a search for a new identity and a spiritual quest for existential truths. Reflecting on his experiences several

years later, he declared to his congregation, "Cast all mortal tendencies, personal ideas and fancies out of your consciousness and consequently out of your system and you will feel light. You feel like a new creature. It is such a wonderful blessing to know that when you deny yourself . . . Christ is there . . . waiting to arise."32

Continues...

Excerpted from God, Harlem U.S.A.by Jill Watts Copyright © 1995 by Jill Watts. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520201728
• ISBN 13: 9780520201729
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 286