Major (Father) Divine

• Father Divine
• Born: 1877c.
• Died: September 10, 1965

A Harlem-based clergyman, organized the interracial Peace Mission movement that flourished during the Great Depression and profoundly influenced black sensibilities. He was born to a sharecropper family sometime after Reconstruction and early became an itinerant evangelist. Despite his lack of education and extremely short stature, he was venerated as a heavenly deliverer as he offered his message of present-centered hope to poor southern blacks. Under guises like “the Messenger,” Divine preached that God was in every being, that divisions based on color had no meaning, and that religion should help people enjoy heaven on earth. Such ideas did not fit well into Jim Crow traditions, and perhaps for this reason he was sentenced to sixty days on a chain gang in Savannah, Georgia, at about the turn of the century.

He moved to Baltimore bearing the name George Baker, working as a gardener and also as a Sunday school teacher in a black Baptist church. Yet in 1912 he returned to the South to continue his evangelizing. After further skirmishes with southern white authorities and black ministers who resented his influence on their congregations, Divine settled in New York City in 1915. Four years later he became the only black resident of a Long Island town called Sayville. Over the next decade he presided quietly over a small communal movement of mostly lower-middle-class blacks, for whom he found work and lodging in his spacious home. But with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, Divine began a rapid ascent as a reform leader determined to bring a new “heaven on earth.”

Father Divine moved into the role of reformer through a transitional stage as philanthropist to poor and unemployed ghetto residents. As his modest communal movement continued to prosper during the Depression, Divine presented free Sunday banquets that drew hundreds of poor blacks and dozens of whites to his Sayville home. His bounty in these hard times assumed a larger-than-life quality for many visitors, who hailed him as the embodiment of God on earth. Partly because of this, and partly from fear that Sayville was becoming a “Negro colony,” townspeople had Divine arrested for disturbing the peace in 1931. After a blatantly racist trial, he was sentenced to a year in prison in June 1932. However, three days later the judge suddenly died, prompting Divine to observe, “I hated to do it.” Released shortly afterward on appeal, he found that the episode had enlarged his following, especially among blacks who viewed him as a target of racism. Bands of disciples formed throughout the ghettos and occasionally outside them. A substantial minority of whites also joined these groups, in places as far west as California and as distant as Switzerland.

The mass conversions elicited a highly practical side to Divine’s leadership. Relocating in Harlem, the heart of his following, he organized the farflung group of disciples—known collectivly as the Peace Mission—into a tightly standardized network of religious cooperatives, dedicated to racial equality and responsive to his every command. His core following, perhaps 10,000 at an outside limit, pooled their funds and lived communally in Peace Mission hotels. In all, Divine directed the largest, most cohesive social movement in the northern ghettos during the 1930s.

The Peace Mission was a vehicle for social uplift among the most disadvantaged ghetto residents. Like other cults such as the Nation of Islam, the Peace Mission inculcated a puritanical code, prohibiting alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. Disciples also lived chastely, and demonstrated their honesty by repaying debts that sometimes went back years. Many followers enrolled in night-school literacy courses, at Divine’s urging, in order to qualify for the ballot and, in the case of West Indian immigrants, American citizenship.

Divine’s activity also represented nearly the full range of ideas and strategies among contemporary civil rights activists. He encouraged black and white followers to mingle on a basis of strict equality, to demonstrate that color was no barrier to self-esteem or to respect by others. The Peace Mission was one of the very few interracial religious bodies in the nation, and in the mid-1930s Divine sought aggressively to expand it into the most exclusive northern neighborhoods. Using disciples as secret emissaries to circumvent restrictive housing covenants, he acquired homes, hotels, and beachfronts for his integrated following in areas long barred to blacks. In 1938, he purchased a 500-acre estate that bordered Franklin Roosevelt’s Hyde Park mansion, in order to show that people of disadvantaged backgrounds could be model neighbors to the president.

Economic uplift also engaged Divine’s attention. Under his careful supervision, disciples opened inexpensive restaurants, clothing stores, and entered numerous other trades, volunteering their labor and sharing all income. These enterprises flourished during the worst years of the Depression, relying on a heavy volume of trade and on low communal living costs to insure profits. By the end of the decade the Peace Mission had come to handle millions of dollars in business annually, accumulating savings reportedly in excess of $15 million. At the same time the Peace Mission’s nominal prices for food and rent helped poor or marginally independent people survive the Depression, including many otherwise unconnected with Divine’s movement.

In 1935 Divine also began a network of farm cooperatives he called “the Promised Land” for the benefit of migrants from the rural South who could not adjust to urban life. The idea of resettling poor urban dwellers in rural areas was widely advocated during the Depression, but federal efforts tended to slight poor blacks most in need of such programs. Therefore Divine purchased,in the names of his followers, thousands of choice acres in Ulster County northwest of New York City. These followers became joint owners of cooperative communities, each receiving small tracts of land of between five and ten acres. The communities soon began to produce vegetables, poultry, milk, and eventually—with more than a passing thought to the symbolism— honey.

Father Divine became involved in politics during the mid-1930s, reflecting the black community’s growing optimism about the possibilities for reform during the Roosevelt presidency. Beginning in 1934 he had his followers join marches against war and fascism, organized by the Communist party. He brushed aside charges that he was a Communist by asserting that he would cooperate with any group in support of a common cause. Toward that end, Divine supported the Harlem Political Union, a confederation of sixty-five civil rights organizations formed in 1935 to lobby for more equitable apportionment of black districts. He also joined other Harlem-based groups in founding the All People’s party in June 1936, which fought for full employment at trade union wages for ghetto dwellers, higher unemployment compensation, and forty percent rent reductions. In January 1936 Divine held his own political convention in New York City, which issued a “Righteous Government Platform” for social change. It proposed sweeping legislation to eliminate all segregation and racial discrimination, an absolute government commitment to insuring full employment, and varied pacifist measures including the abolition of capital punishment. The platform presupposed a voluntary cooperative economy but with extensive government regulation, including the nationalization of all banks. The document focused throughout on the needs of the disadvantaged, citing Divine’s observation, “The spectacle of hungry people in a land of plenty is worse than uncivilized.”

Divine’s leadership transformed many apolitical ghetto residents, particularly those from the rural South, into active reformers. In 1940, Peace Mission members obtained 250,000 signatures for a petition in support of antilynching legislation. Yet while numerous local politicians courted Divine in his Harlem headquarters, his reluctance to endorse individual candidates checked his personal influence. In 1936, he kept his followers from the polls, indignant that Franklin D. Roosevelt had failed to endorse an antilynching bill. Roosevelt’s landslide victory in Harlem, as well as in the nation at large, ended Divine’s mystique as a potentially formidable electoral broker among urban blacks.

With the end of the Great Depression Father Divine’s Peace Mission movement waned sharply. He was already an aged man when he left Harlem in 1942, incensed by a pattern of Federal Bureau of Investigation harassment and lawsuits by several former followers seeking recovery of funds they claimed to have contributed to his movement. Divine relocated in Philadelphia, to preside in relative quiet over a few hundred devoted followers. In 1946 he married a twenty-one-year-old white follower from Canada, describing this as a spiritual marriage to symbolize integration. His new bride, who came to be known as Mother Divine, gradually assumed responsibilities for guiding the movement.

In all, Father Divine’s ministry played a distinctive part in the transition by the black church from an era of absorbing spirituality to one of vital commitment to the struggle for racial justice. The period of Divine’s greatest influence, the Depression, was a time of growing black militance and demands for a church more responsive to the earthly needs of its members. Divine’s radical impulses, frustrated in the years following Reconstruction, placed him among the most prominent black clerical leaders during the Depression decade. Civil rights leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois, though feeling scant kinship with the Peace Mission’s cult qualities, nevertheless praised Father Divine for his successful fusion of social and religious concerns. Many poor blacks seconded this judgment by deserting the established denominations in favor of Divine’s Peace Mission “kingdoms.” Therefore, while some black ministers deplored his “demagoguery” and scorned his “bread and butter religion,” others increasingly sought to match his social activism, whether to emulate or compete with him. Divine himself rejected the idea that religion should focus on an afterlife to the exclusion of social issues, bluntly stating, “I would not give five cents for a god who could not help me here on the earth…. If God cannot prepare heaven here for you, you are not going anywhere.”

Divine’s leadership, for all its uncommon and flamboyant features, also reflected the search for community, security, and equity that marked varied mass movements during the 1930s. This was a decade that witnessed the rise of Father Charles E. Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice, Huey P. Long’s Share Our Wealth Plan, and Francis Townsend’s crusade for a Revolving Old-Age Pension, each numbering their dues-paying members in the millions. Without approaching their political influence, Father Divine shared certain key traits of their leadership: be looked to radical reform of the economic order, he tapped elements that felt profoundly alienated from society, and he claimed to represent traditional national values, stressing the need to extend the benefits of democracy to all Americans. In this sense, Divine, though focusing particularly on the urban black proletariat, represented a long tradition of American political reform.

Divine survived into the 1960s but was by then so ill he could only watch passively as the civil rights movement reached its height during these years. He died in 1965, some six months after sending a message congratulating President Lyndon B. Johnson for a speech urging enactment of voting rights legislation. Among civil rights activists, Divine’s passing did not go unmourned. Roy Wilkins, who first came to prominence in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during the 1930s, recalled Divine as having done “a lot of good” as a social leader who “held up an example to the Negro community of cooperative endeavor.” One of the younger generation of activists who acknowledged a debt to Divine was Leon Sullivan, a black minister in Philadelphia who founded the nationally famous Opportunities Industrialization Center to train disadvantaged youth. Sullivan described Divine “as the forerunner of much that we see in the practical aspects of religion today. While many people were yet talking about what religion could do about integration and self-determination and human dignity, he was practicing it.”

For biographical information see R. Parker, Incredible Messiah (1937); J. Hoshor, God in a Rolls-Royce (1936); and R. Weisbrot, Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality (1983).