Harlem is Heaven

In the 1930s and 1940s, thousands of people in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand declared that God had taken on the body of a man and was living among them in a kingdom he had established on earth in Harlem, New York City. While he may have appeared to be simply an ordinary and unassuming African American man, his followers in the  International Peace Mission Movement  hailed him as Father Divine: “GOD – Jesus Christ – returned in the Fathership Degree.”

This project highlights the world of the Peace Mission in its most densely populated geographic location of Harlem to explore the spatial dimensions of African American religious creativity in the early twentieth-century urban North. It considers how members of the movement mapped their heavenly utopia within the vibrant religious, cultural, and economic landscape of the city’s “ Negro Mecca ” and the mundane and spectacular ways they created the Kingdom of Father Divine.  

It is no surprise that Father Divine’s claim to be the omnipotent, eternal God who was only inhabiting this body temporarily, and the fact that he had attracted an international following, prompted a great deal of public attention. First and foremost, outsiders wanted to know who Father Divine really was, given that he sometimes claimed that he had combusted on a street corner in Harlem and, on other occasions, said he hailed from Providence, Rhode Island, no doubt to announce himself as the manifestation of Divine Providence.

Historian Jill Watts has written that Divine was born in Maryland in 1879 as George Baker and grew up in the Methodist Church. After time in a small, eclectic religious community in Baltimore and itinerant preaching in the South as “the Messenger,” Divine joined the millions of African Americans migrating north in the early-twentieth century and headed for New York City, accompanied by a small group of followers and Peninnah, an African American follower who had become his spiritual wife and joined him in his mission.

The small group lived in Brooklyn for a time and then moved to a house at 72 Macon Street in Sayville, Long Island, where the household of African Americans living with the man who then called himself Rev. M. J. Divine undoubtedly stood out in the largely white community. From 1919 to 1932, between ten and twenty followers lived and worshipped together in Sayville, sharing resources and spreading the message that a new day had dawned with Father Divine’s appearance (Watts, 5; 11; 27; 44; 46; 48; 52).

In a 1931 sermon to the group at Sayville, Divine articulated a core element of his theology, declaring, “you will not think of GOD as a GOD AFAR OFF, but humanity as a whole is coming to THIS REALIZATION, that GOD IS A GOD AT HAND and NOT a GOD afar off! You don’t have to go anywhere to find HIM, but He is AT HAND.” (Father Divine, “Light and Shadow”). This small community of people who affirmed that God was at hand and embraced Divine’s promise that communion with his spirit could produce eternal health, life, and bounty, began to establish what they understood as the Kingdom of God on earth.

The Holy Communion Banquets that would become the center of Peace Mission worship took shape in Brooklyn. In Sayville, they attracted an interracial group of hundreds visitors whose growing presence and enthusiastic worship aroused the ire of neighbors, leading to his arrest in 1931 as “public nuisance.” Convicted and sentenced to a year in jail, Divine’s fortunes changed when the judge died unexpectedly and his conviction was overturned (Watts, 74; 96-97; Weisenfeld, 74). Rather than contain the movement, as Sayville authorities had hoped, Divine’s arrest, trial, conviction, and seemingly miraculous release, only broadened his appeal and increased his fame. Harlem would soon become the center of Divine’s work to expand his kingdom.

As much as curious, and often critical, observers of the Peace Mission were focused on and fascinated by Father Divine himself, questions about the appeal of this man claiming to be God turned attention to his followers. These questions became even more pressing as increasing numbers of followers – mostly Black women and men, but also white followers from across the U.S. and internationally – took up his call to live “angelically.” This involved renouncing the things of the mortal world, including family connections, and embracing the promise of eternal health and bounty by living sex-segregated, celibate lives in communal residences, often referred to as “heavens.”

By the mid-1930s, the largest concentration of Peace Mission members in heavens was in Harlem. This convergence was the result of the fact that, by 1930, Harlem was already home to 580,000 residents, many of whom had migrated from the South over the previous decades or immigrated from the Caribbean (Beveridge, “Harlem’s Shifting Population.”). As journalist Roi Ottley, himself the son of immigrants from Grenada, wrote in his 1943 study of Black life in America, Harlem was “the capital of Black America,” and the “cultural and intellectual hub of the Negro world” (Ottley, 1). When Divine moved to the neighborhood in 1932, the Peace Mission already counted some Harlemites among its numbers, some of whom traveled to Sayville on weekends to attend Holy Communion banquets. The ranks almost certainly grew through the presence of Divine and his followers in the neighborhood as residents interacted with the group and followed its growing presence. As Father Divine and the Peace Mission settled in Harlem, the neighborhood became a destination for devoted followers from  other parts of the United States  and around the world.

Examining the world members of the group created allows us to see beyond the charisma of Father Divine as the explanation for the Peace Mission’s appeal – although he was certainly the focus of their devotion – and to see how members’ work to create the Kingdom of God on earth highlights the power of their spiritual hopes and desires.

In joining the kingdom, they became children of Father Divine, and many took spiritual names to signify the values of the movement and articulate their religious aspirations. "Peace," Father Divine’s preferred greeting (in rejection of hello because it contains the word hell), was a common element of members’ names, as was "Wonderful," another word Divine used often in combination with Peace, as in his proclamation, “Peace, its Wonderful!” Among the group’s members Harlem, one would find “multiple Wonderful Faiths, Wonderful Joys, Wonderful Peaces, Wonderful Praises, Wonderful Loves, and more, as reflected in the 1940 Federal Census. ‘Love’ was another frequently featured part of Peace Mission members’ spiritual names, with one female residence in New York serving as home to two Charity Loves, True Love, Obedience Love, Truemind Love, Love Joy, and more” (Weisenfeld, 101-102).

Not everyone who affirmed Father Divine as God took a spiritual name or did so immediately, and not all were able or chose to move into a Peace Mission residence. But many sought to be near Divine’s presence, and those who did so modeled “True Democracy,” as they characterized their rejection of racial categories and integrated living. Members looked to the fulfillment of Divine’s promise of profound transformation when he preached: “Every one of you can be free from every barrier, from every lack, from every want, from every limitation, from all segregation, from all prejudice, from every adverse condition and undesirable condition, whatsoever they may be, for the Mouth of the LORD has spoken it. I declare it unto you that 'he that the son sets free, is free indeed,' free from every adverse condition, free from every limitation, free from every undesirable condition and having a free access in this present world, for the Kingdom has truly come and the Will is now being done, here and now on this earth, in this Divine Impersonal Life in which we all live, and move, and have our being, and you in whom GOD lives, and moves and has HIS Being” (The Word of God Revealed, 144).

As had been the case in Brooklyn and Sayville, many Peace Mission members in Harlem residences pooled their resources, and did so in a variety of arrangements. Some maintained their employment as domestic laborers, cooks, waiters, chauffeurs, barbers, dressmakers, laundry and factory workers, for example, and contributed their earnings to the household in which they lived. Others worked in one of the many Peace Mission businesses run collectively by members. Jill Watts argues that “Peace Mission businesses combined communalism with capitalism to make lucrative enterprises that drew still more followers, especially those interested in profitable commerce” (Watts, 104).  Through self-sufficiency and demonstration of the abundance of the angelic life, most clearly through the Holy Communion banquets that non-members could attend, Peace Mission members strove to be living examples of the Kingdom of God on earth.

The 1940 U.S. Federal Census captures the presence of the Peace Mission in Manhattan at a moment at which Father Divine was an influential figure in the city and many members had joined him in Harlem. While there were Peace Mission members living in neighborhoods in other boroughs of New York City, Harlem was the movement’s hub. In a 1936 profile of Father Divine in The New Yorker, St. Clair Mckelway and J. Liebling estimated that 1500 of Divine’s followers lived in Peace Mission residences in the neighborhood (Mckelway and J. Liebling, 23).

Drawing from the 1940 Federal Census, this map shows buildings in Manhattan, and particularly in Harlem, with residents whose spiritual names indicate a connection to the Peace Mission. Because the group did not keep membership records and people moved in and out of association with it, it is difficult to know with certainty the number of Peace Mission members. In addition, not everyone who affirmed the Peace Mission's theology lived in a communal residence or adopted a spiritual name. This map represents 988 Harlem residents who were probably connected to the Peace Mission in 1940. In cases where the majority of residents in an apartment had spiritual names associated with the Peace Mission, all members of the household are included in the count. In cases in which a single person with a spiritual name lived as a lodger with others in a household, only that individual has been counted.

The map also includes selected Peace Mission businesses in Harlem, drawn from advertisements in several issues from 1940 of The New Day, a movement publication.

• Large markers indicate buildings with more than 35 residents.
• Medium markers indicate buildings with between 20 and 35 residents.
• Small markers indicate buildings with fewer than 20 residents.

Of course, the Peace Mission was located in the broader community of Harlem, populated by many other religious institutions whose very presence posed a challenge to Father Divine’s kingdom and an opportunity to broaden the group’s appeal. The movement’s striking parades in which members promoted Peace Mission theology and faith in Father Divine served to assert their vision of sacred space throughout the neighborhood.

“On Easter Sunday 1934, an estimated five thousand Divinites marched through the streets of Harlem for three hours, starting out at the 115 ^th  Street headquarters and making their way to the Rockland Palace on 155 ^th  Street, where the movement often held enormous Holy Communion Banquets. Divine circled above them in a red monoplane piloted by “the Black Eagle of Harlem,” Trinidad-born  Hubert Fauntroy Julian , and pulling a banner declaring “Peace to the World – Father Divine’s Mission” (Weisenfeld, 239).

In this map, we see the route of the 1934 Peace Mission Easter Parade in which members, singing and shouting praise to Father Divine passed by many prominent Harlem churches and other religious organizations on their way to the  Rockland Palace  for a Holy Communion banquet and message from Father Divine. Newspaper accounts of the parade report that events at churches along the route were disrupted by the boisterous parade. One reporter noted that Sunday School teachers at St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church called on the police to help silence the Peace Mission paraders as they passed by (Fleming, “Father Divine Gives Harlem Easter Show”).

As we see in the 1939 RKO-Pathé newsreel, the Peace Mission was not confined to Harlem. As an  International Peace Mission Movement , the group had members in many states in the U.S., with substantial concentrations in Ulster County, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,  California , and Washington State. Outside the United States, the Peace Mission was represented in Canada, the  Panama Canal Zone , Jamaica, Barbados, England, Switzerland, Austria, and Australia.

Still, while Father Divine’s residence and the Peace Mission’s headquarters were in New York, Harlem beckoned.

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Dallam, Marie W. Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

“Affidavit of Charles Calloway Read in Opposition to the Motion,” Verinda Brown v. Father Divine, Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, Record on Appeal (New York: Ackerman Press, Inc., 1938)

Divine, Father. Message on “Light and Shadow (and) The Impersonal,” Sayville, L.I., 1931, Father Divine Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

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