Let's Celebrate

Hey Everyone - I decided it was time to celebrate Black History Month. As an undergrad I majored in History, with emphasis in African American History. I went back into my catalog of history papers and found this doozy. Hope you learn something... a rarity on my blog. Note to the reader, when I copied and pasted this from Word, the footnotes did not come with. If you are interested in any further readings on this topic, I will place a bibliography after the essay.


Ryan Schmidt
July 28, 2001
History 174B

Divine and Gravey
Black Social Uplift


The beginning of the twentieth century marked a turning point in African American social history. With the changes of American dominance on the world stage during and after World War One and the Great Depression, blacks during these decades took it upon themselves, with assistance from dynamic black leaders, to advance their social status in the United States. During World War One, black society turned to the leadership of Marcus Gravey, and a decade later, many turned to George Baker, also known as Father Divine for guidance. Father Divine’s American nationalism distinguished him from the majority of movements that shared his focus on issues of race and oppression. While contemporary movements like the Nation of Islam retreated from white society, Divine pressed integration of his followers into the mainstream of national life. Millions of poor urban blacks, as well as some whites worshiped Father Divine. During the Great Depression, Father Divine and his Peace Mission movement fed the hungry, created jobs, and led a crusade for social justice and human equality. Despite Divine’s avowed faith in America, he was also known for attracting many former disciples of Marcus Garvey, the premier black separatist of the nineteen teens and twenties. Garvey is remembered as a champion of the back-to-Africa movement. He was hailed as a redeemer, a "Black Moses." Though he failed to realize his objectives, his movement represented liberation from the psychological bondage of racism. Divine shared with Garvey some doctrines of racial uplift often associated with black separatists. Followers of both men rejected traditional Western images of a white god and the racist attitude that fostered such images. Both men spurred their followers to cultivate both mental and financial independence, and envisioned a society free of oppression.

Father Divine was unique among black leaders of the early twentieth century. He enjoyed a following of poor urban blacks as well as educated whites. Father Divine’s following started during the great migration of blacks into urban settings in the mid-nineteen teens. He claimed to have a direct connected to God, and after garnering a handful of followers, became to see himself as a savior, hence the name Father Divine. Through religion, Divine and group grew at a rapid pace throughout the nineteen twenties. He and his followers lived in communes and “lived by a strict moral code that required abstinence from sex, smoking, profanity, drugs and alcohol.” Divine had great success in lifting his followers, both black and white, from poverty and in breaking down the color line with his social movement, The Peace Mission.

Garvey had shattered the outward complacency of the ghettos in the early twenties with his massive appeals for black unity and the regeneration of the blacks’ true homeland, Africa. But his imprisonment in 1925 and deportation two years later left thousands of his followers in every large ghetto craving a successor to his dynamic leadership. Some former members of Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) joined offshoots of their old movement or new separatist groups like the Nation of Islam. The greatest bloc of former followers turned to the Peace Mission Movement, although Divine abhorred the racial separation that Garvey encouraged.

The seeming paradox reflects both the complex motives for joining a social movement and the inevitable similarities between the organizations responding to the common heritage and hardships of urban blacks. Yet while Divine’s ministry built on the techniques through which Garvey had drawn the ghetto’s masses, he directed their hopes in ways ultimately at odds with the black nationalist vision Garvey proclaimed. The UNIA, like the later Peace Mission, was a multifaceted social movement with a pronounced evangelical Christian character. Chaplains were prominent among the UNIA leadership. Christian hymns were integral features of UNIA meetings, and members often remarked on the spiritual enthusiasm that the rallies generated. It was also widely noted that Garvey and his aides thoroughly entwined their pan-American exhortations with biblical imagery.

The two movements also shared a cult like devotion to their respective leaders. Garvey and Devine were both objects of frenzied adulation by their masses of followers, and were equally zealous as well as skillful in encouraging such displays. Garvey, like Divine, a short but magnetic individual with a compelling speaking manner, mesmerized audiences and made his own personality the unifying center of his movement. It is true that Garvey did not hint at divinity as did Father Divine, he lashed out at Divine’s “blasphemy” on setting himself up as false god. Yet in his prime Gravy had also come to view himself as a vassal of God. He freely superimposed the life of Jesus with his own career, noting their common radicalism and suffering. He encouraged the crowds who hailed him as the savoir of the Negro race and even wore colorful military attire, complete with decorative sword, to perfect the image of a liberator. That Garvey passed up the title of God in favor of “Provisional President of Africa” may indicates he too viewed himself as a savior to his followers.

Both Garvey and Divine drew upon their charisma to generate self-respect and a feeling of community among the most disadvantaged blacks. Divine spoke often of how the need of “the most underprivileged” made the greatest before God, who “will hear their simplest cry.” Garvey, too, exhorted followers never to lose confidence in themselves for “God Almighty created each and every one of us for a place in the world.” Similarly, the shared rituals of each movement reminded followers that they were apart of a much greater social entity that recognized their common humanity.

The UNIA and the Peace Mission provided tangible benefits for their members. While the Peace Mission Movement gained lasting loyalties by offering food and shelter, the UNIA filled the more conventional functions of black fraternal orders, drawing from members’ dues to assure sums of money to their families in event of sickness or death. Edmund David Cronon quotes Garvey’s widow, Amy Jacques-Garvey, in explaining that this arrangement “was the easiest means of reaching the common man, who wanted security in his distress; hand him this first, the tell him of the spiritual, racial benefits that would come in time.”

Uplift through economic enterprise also ranked high on the list of the UNIA aims, foreshadowing Peace Mission concerns a decade later. The UNIA set up the Negro Factories Corporation in 1919, with one million dollars worth of capital, to “build and operate factories in the big industrial centers of the United States, Central America, the West Indies, and Africa to manufacture every marketable commodity.” Garvey sometimes promoted his ideas on black progress in terms of conservative American values such as Father Divine later exulted. Garvey’s advocacy of business development, seemed to be a product of the nineteen twenties. Cronon notes a stock circular for Garvey’s most famous enterprise, the Black Star Line steamship company that appealed to urban blacks. “The Black Star Line Corporation present so every Black Man, Woman, and Child the opportunity to climb the great ladder of industrial and commercial progress…The Black Star Line will turn over large profits and dividends to stockholders, and operate to their interest even whilst they will be asleep.”

Father Divine and his followers of the Peace Mission Movement were committed to being economically independent and self-supporting. The Peace Mission business ventures started small with a few restaurants located in and around New York City vicinity. As the Peace Mission grew during the decade of the thirties, other avenues opened up, and Divine and his followers opened up hotels, markets and garages all across the country. Divine did not believe in any sort of credit system, a rule which was carried over into businesses they operated, and only accepted cash as payment for services rendered. Such were the cases at the Divine Tracy Hotel in Philadelphia and Newark, where the only form of payment accepted was cash .

Perhaps the most significant common denominator of the two movements is that both advance a theology of social action, enriching the religious aspect of African Americans. Garvey stressed that God never intended that any person “should descend to the level of a peon, a serf or a slave… These different classes God never created. He created Man.” He told his followers that because they were formed in God’s image that there will be a spiritual and material resurrection among Nergroes everywhere…” Divine placed himself at the center of the most powerful component of black life, the church. His theology borrowed from the self-help ideology of the day, and presented it in a religious context for his followers.

In terms of the impact the UNIA and the Peace Mission had as American reform movements, their conflicting perspectives of white, American society proved a crucial divide. Garvey’s beliefs that blacks had to work out their aims apart from whites recluded vigorous pursuit of the integrationist goals central to most civil right leaders, including Divine. Garvey’s insistence on strictly black membership in the UNIA and investment in its financial projects further reduced his influence beyond the inner city. This deprived him of a core of politically liberal whites. In fact, Garvey courted as white “allies” mainly such extremists as the Ku Klux Klan, which he praised for candidly espousing the white man’s view of blacks and for agreeing with his aim of sending blacks to Africa.

While steep financial, diplomatic, and logistical obstacles all undermined Garvey’s ambitious plans to transport millions to Africa, an underlying problem was his severe misreading of African American attitudes. Many poor urban blacks cheered Garvey as a liberator, but only a few black intellectuals of the time fully shared his vision of restoring the black man’s African heritage. The vast majority of America’s black population had little desire to return to Africa. As a result, Garvey’s resettlement projects developed importance as a symbol of black pride in the face of white racism, without fulfillment.

By contrast, Father Divine’s own colonizing venture, which he viewed as a symbol of his wider integrationist program, was less ambitious and more attuned to mass sentiment. In setting up communes in urban and rural America, Divine aimed not to return to a particular land, thousands of miles away, but to take back the land that he was born. Divine built his utopian world out of conservative materials, i.e. careful investment by blacks and white, avoidance of debts, and self-sustaining economies. The interracial colonization project was based upon Divine’s faith that black Americans would free themselves of the ghetto lifestyle without have to reject their native land.

It remains to be explained why Father Divine, rather than Garvey held such confidence in the American people. One possible reason is that Divine reached his height of influence during the New Deal era. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party were viewed as a new ray of hope for African Americans and during the nineteen thirties there was an upswing in civil rights activism. Garvey’s movement on the other hand began to flourish after World War I, when racism was resurgent and the rise of poor black seemed more noticeable than in the nineteen thirties.

There were, in short, many bridges of culture, doctrine, and outlook that aided passage from Garvey’s UNIA to Divine’s Peace Mission. Whether a person joined for religious reasons, escape from society, self-esteem, racial equality, or a combination of these, the urban black citizen might find fulfillment in either one of these organizations.

Bibliography -

Sara Harris, Father Divine (New York: McMillian, 1971).

Jill Watts, God Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses- The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1962).

Amy Jacques-Garvey, ed., Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (New York: Atheneum, 1970).