Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North

BLACK GODS OF THE METROPOLIS

BLACK GODS OF THE

METROPOLIS

Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North

ARTHUR HUFF FAUSET

Foreword by Barbara Dianne Savage

Introduction by John Szwed

Originally Published 1944 by the University of Pennsylvania Press

Reprinted with a new Foreword 2001

Copyright © 1944, 1971, 2002 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fauset, Arthur Huff, 1899–

Black gods of the metropolis : Negro cults of the urban North / by Arthur Huff Fauset

p.  cm

ISBN 0-8122-1001-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Afro-Americans—Religion.  2. Afro-Americans—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia.  3. Cults—United States.  I. Title.  II. Szwed, John.  III. Savage, Barbara Dianne

BR563.N4 F3

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

WHEN the Philadelphia Anthropological Society sponsored the publication of Arthur Huff Fauset’s Black Gods of the Metropolis in 1944, his fellow members at the Society considered him uniquely qualified to conduct a study of black religious cults in Philadelphia. Himself partly of Negro origin, the Society’s Publication Committee wrote in a foreword to the book, Fauset was endowed for this study with a background, a point of view, and an entrée to the field which could never have been possessed by one of exclusively European tradition and descent.¹

By citing only his racial credentials without commenting on the study itself, the foreword vividly illustrated the paradoxical position of black social scientists as they alternately foiled and wielded the double-edged sword of racial essentialism. The Society’s words also spoke to prevailing assumptions about the nature of the nexus between race, religion, and culture, ironically the central intellectual debate in the book.

Born in New Jersey in 1899, Fauset was the son of Redmon Fauset, a black African Methodist Episcopal minister, and of Bella White, a Jewish convert to Christianity. Fauset’s father died when his son was an infant. Fauset spent most of his youth in Philadelphia, where he graduated from Boys Central High School in 1916, the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy in 1918, and the University of Pennsylvania with an AB degree in 1921. He began a career as a teacher and was soon promoted to be a principal in the Philadelphia public school system, a position he held from the 1920s to the late 1940s.

During the 1920s, Fauset also pioneered the study of black folk culture and, like his much better-known older half-sister Jessie Redmon Fauset, engaged in literary pursuits as well. With encouragement from Alain Locke, Fauset turned to short story and essay writing; he won many awards, including an O. Henry Award for the best short story in 1926, and earned inclusion in several important anthologies. In addition to his love of writing, Fauset developed an interest in black folklore, which led him to the University of Pennsylvania to receive a master’s degree in anthropology in 1924. Fauset published articles and books based on his work collecting folktales from black people living in Nova Scotia, in the south, and even in Philadelphia. Some of his literary writing in that period also reflected the influence of his study of folklore, including his three entries in Locke’s influential The New Negro in 1925.²

Fauset had developed a commitment to political activism that came to full expression in the 1930s and 1940s. Frustrated by his own experience in the Philadelphia school system, he helped reorganize the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, later serving as one of its vice-presidents. Fauset founded a local political organization that worked with the NAACP to help end the Philadelphia Transit Company’s refusal to hire black employees. He also wrote a weekly column of political commentary in Philadelphia’s black newspaper, the Philadelphia Tribune. Increasingly critical of national racial politics, he served for several years as the national vice-president of the National Negro Congress, working alongside labor leader A. Philip Randolph. His wife, Crystal Bird Fauset, also was politically active, becoming in 1938 the first black woman to be elected to a state legislature.

Fauset’s political views did not deter him from trying to become an officer in the armed forces during World War II, a step he took with the hope of helping black enlisted men. However, after successfully completing rigorous training and Officer Candidate School, he was denied a commission as an officer based on secret federal investigations into his political activities. Deeply disappointed, Fauset returned to Philadelphia and resumed work as a high school principal.

This is the life Arthur Huff Fauset had lived before he became the fourth black person to earn a PhD in anthropology, a degree he received from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942.³ His dissertation became his fourth book, Black Gods of the Metropolis. Many years later, when he gained access to the files compiled about his political activities in the 1940s by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he learned that the Bureau had urged the University of Pennsylvania Press to withdraw his manuscript from publication, a request the Press failed to heed.⁴

Half the text of Fauset’s book is devoted to case studies of five black religious sects in Philadelphia; the other half builds an interpretative framing for understanding the rise of cults, their appeal, and their implications for broader debates about African American religious practices. The case studies present us with a compelling example of urban ethnographic work. Based on two years of repeated visits to worship services and extended interviews with leaders and lay people, these case studies are presented in a dispassionate, respectful, and nonjudgmental tone. The fluidity and grace of the writing reflect Fauset’s broader abilities and experience in both narrative fiction and journalism, especially in its attention to telling descriptive detail.

Fauset profiled five different sects: Mt. Sinai Holy Church of America, Inc., a Christian holiness church founded by Bishop Ida Robinson; United House of Prayer for All People, a Bible-based sect led by Daddy Grace who emphasized a prosperity doctrine; Church of God, a group of so-called black Jews who taught that all white Jews were imposters and that Jesus was a black man; Moorish Science Temple of America, founded by Noble Drew Ali, who wrote his own Holy Koran and drew from the teachings of many prophets, including Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, and Confucius; and, perhaps the best known, the Father Divine Peace Mission Movement, an eclectic, racially egalitarian and communitarian group. By choosing to focus on these sects, Fauset did not follow the lead of other scholars at the time who designated as cults most Christian holiness, Pentecostal, and storefront churches. He distinguished the latter institutions by referring to them not as cults but as orthodox evangelical churches. He justified his inclusion of Mt. Sinai because of its charismatic founding bishop and its marriage restrictions which limited members to in-sect partners.⁵

Whether intended or not, Fauset’s selections for study made it difficult for him and for his readers to easily draw comparisons or generalizations. His case studies point clearly toward the idiosyncratic nature of each of the groups. However, what his examples did offer then and now is a glimpse of the adventuresome range of religious ideas and practices that appealed to disparate groups of African Americans in the 1930s and 1940s. Because Fauset relied so heavily on oral interviews and personal testimony from the members of these groups, what is preserved in the book, to our great benefit, are the voices of ordinary black men and women explaining why they made the religious choices they did. So much of the scholarly attention given to African-American religion focuses on the leadership class, overlooking evidence of how lay people thought about and articulated their own spiritual needs and experiences.

When Fauset turned to explaining why the cult attracts, his own interpretation reflected that of his subjects, who almost uniformly told him that their driving motivation for joining their chosen sect was a desire to get closer to some supernatural power. In other words, they joined primarily to meet their personal religious and spiritual needs. This exegesis, as plain and as obvious as their own words, is often given short shrift in the psychoanalytic, political, and functional explication of religious motivation that scholars often impose in studying religious practices and institutions. Fauset did not abandon those constructs in his own analysis, but, to his credit, he deferred to the findings of his own research, letting stand as the final arbiter the spoken explanations of his subjects.

The intellectual construct that Fauset could not escape and that framed his entire book was the debate about the presence of African retentions in African-American religious practices, and the related notion that black people were by nature overly and primitively religious. Indeed, the first chapter of Fauset’s book is a summary of that debate, casting Melville Herskovits as the primary advocate of the retentions and religious by bent position and E. Franklin Frazier as his emphatic adversary who argued against any African influences in African-American religion.

Much was at stake in these disagreements, as they carried deep and subtle implications not only about the essentials of race and the transmission of culture, but about the prospects of political progress for African-Americans. What many most objected to in Herskovits’s formulation was his conclusion that black people’s orientation toward spiritual practices causes them, in contrast to other underprivileged groups elsewhere in the world, to turn to religion rather than to political action or other outlets for their frustration.⁶ Frazier and others found especially disturbing Herskovits’s overall implication that African American religiosity—and the primitivism and political passivity associated with it—was somehow an innate and immutable racial characteristic. Allying himself with his mentor Robert Park, Frazier offered instead a functional and historical explanation of the appeal of religion and Christianity to black people. Although ambivalence about the relationship of black Americans to Africa and Africans was at play in objections to Herskovits’s work, so too were class-driven concerns that the religiosity of the masses of black working-class people, with its cultural and political implications, was also being imputed to well-educated blacks.

Fauset did not reject Herskovits’s claims altogether, but he advised considerable caution in accepting the claims of African retentions. He grudgingly acknowledged that although there might be a modicum of such influence, it had been overwhelmingly outweighed by American cultural influences. Fauset also suggested that Herskovits revise his basic thesis that religion was a natural or temperamental attribute of black people. He attempted to use his own research on black religious cults to counter another part of Herskovits’s thesis, arguing that the nationalistic tendencies in some of the sects demonstrated a blend of religious and political activity. But Fauset’s case was a weak one; he was unable to escape the conundrum that the most political of the sects often looked back to African-based or Moorish inspiration for their origins.

However, Fauset’s main problem was that his research, for all that it tells us about the practices of these five fascinating religious groups, was too limited to counter the weight of Herskovits’s sweeping claims—which though spelled out in anthropological terms would have required historically grounded disputation.⁷ Although cults attracted sensationalized press and scholarly attention in the early decades of the twentieth century, in fact, as Fauset reminds us and as we still need to remember, the numbers of black people involved with these sects were always an extremely small minority. Then as now, scholars were limited in generalizing more broadly about black religious practices based solely on the study of small cults and sects. The overwhelming majority of religiously oriented black people remained then, as they do now, in Baptist and Methodist churches.

Fauset’s attempts to use his own study as the basis for expansive arguments about black religion were weakened and unpersuasive as a result. He appeared to understand these limitations because he abandoned his own research as evidence when he turned to his more nuanced explanations of the evolution of black religious experience. He linked the rise of black religious cults to urbanization and migration, asserting, as had Benjamin Mays in the late 1930s, that these groups were in part an attempt to recreate the small, family-oriented Southern rural church and its expressive worship, prayer, and music styles.⁸

The limited parameters of Fauset’s study did not diminish contemporary assessments of the strengths, overall quality, and importance of the work. Reviewers praised Fauset for his vivid reporting and for his accounts of the testimonies of the faithful. One reviewer commended Fauset for the study because its clear and detailed exposition makes a considerable addition to the scant knowledge of the ordinary person. The book’s engagement with the Herskovits debate was also noted, with one reviewer observing that Fauset found little use for the alleged factor of ‘racial temperament’ and is inclined to deny the importance of African cultural survivals. One writer suggested that something could have been added to the book by including a comparative study of cults of other peoples and other minority peoples in particular; he suggested, for example, that a study of migrant peasant cults in Mexico could have shed light on the validity of Herskovits’s claims.⁹

Although all these reviews were complimentary, most classified the book as sociological, failing to recognize Fauset’s innovative application of an ethnographic methodology to an urban setting. The complete objectivity of the author, his thoroughness, his impartiality, and a fine sense of fitness involving the ‘feelings’ of the cults discussed, one scholar wrote, make this work a scholarly and valuable contribution to the field of sociology and comparative religion.¹⁰ Had Fauset been an anthropology faculty member rather than a high school principal in Philadelphia, or if had he focused on rural rather than urban folk, perhaps the anthropological nature of his work also would have been noticed.

Fauset’s nonjudgmental reporting of his findings was both remarkable and refreshing coming as it did at a time when black cults and sects garnered an inordinate amount of bad press. Often held up as the provinces of charlatans and easily duped followers, these religious groups were subject to dismissive ridicule and outright attack. Some of this press venom was reserved for more orthodox ministerial leadership, as black ministers were often vividly portrayed when they were caught in the throes of financial or sexual impropriety, or both. Significantly, this was also a period in which there was controversy among African Americans about what the political responsibility of black religious institutions and their leaders ought to be. Black intellectuals and black social scientists in particular played a role in framing this issue, as many, in addition to Fauset, Frazier and Mays, published important scholarly and popular works that discussed black religious practices. These scholars included W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Charles S. Johnson, Ira Reid, and St. Clair Drake.¹¹

Black Gods hints at Fauset’s own views on the debate about the political potential and obligation of black churches. In a concluding chapter, he argued against Herskovits’s conclusion that black religion was evidence of black political passivity by asserting that the Negro church is still to be reckoned with as a positive factor in the further social, political, and economic development of the American Negro. Fauset predicted that the American Negro church is likely to witness a transformation from its purely religious function to functions which will accommodate the urgent social needs of the Negro masses. The original revolutionary potential of the American Negro church, he concluded, may again be in evidence in these phenomena. As his example and model for that potential, in a revelatory move, Fauset directed his readers to his case study of Father Divine.

Because of its adherence to the conventions of scholarly impartiality, one needs to