Heaven Was a Place in Harlem

A Holy Banquet

The quiet town of Sayville, New York, had its world turned upside down in October 1919, when a mysterious couple purchased a large house on Macon Street. The buyers, the first African-American homeowners in the town, turned out to be spiritual leaders who called themselves Father and Mother Divine. Large groups of people — racially diverse, but mostly women — could be seen coming in and out of the home for dinner, inspiring salacious rumors in the majority-white Long Island town. The so-called “Holy Communion Banquets” doubled as worship services, where attendees would shout and sing praises to Father Divine, who they thought was God. Neighbors, on the other hand, thought he was a problem.

The Sayville community spent nearly four years trying, but failing, to oust Divine and his rowdy flock. Finally, during one of Divine’s worship banquets in November 1931, police raided his home and arrested him, along with 30 of his followers, on noise and nuisance charges.

The case was brought to Justice Lewis J. Smith, who sentenced Divine to a year in prison. But four days after the sentencing, the 55-year-old judge died of a sudden heart attack. When journalists asked for Divine’s reaction, his brazen response made headlines, and helped turn the cult leader into a media phenomenon: “I hated to do it,” he reportedly said.

Divine appealed the late Judge Smith’s sentence and won; the appellate court overturned the conviction and he was released from jail. His followers had, in their eyes, just witnessed proof of their leader’s divine power. The frenzy over the judge’s death and Divine’s release was covered in newspapers from New York to Baltimore, and his congregation, the International Peace Mission, leapt into the public consciousness.

For decades to come, Divine and the Peace Mission were at the center of controversies, contradictions, and ironies. Divine was one of the best-known spiritual figures of his time, but he had eccentric beliefs and a mysterious past, and many considered him little more than a kook. He was accused of breaking up families to increase his following, yet Divine and the Peace Mission also opened a network of hotels, farms, grocery stores, and restaurants that fed thousands of ordinary Americans throughout the Great Depression. The movement peaked during an era of Ku Klux Klan lynchings and Jim Crow segregation in the South, yet Divine’s numerous followers, black and white, worshipped him as a god. Divine refused to acknowledge the notion of race, but historians have argued that his vocal opposition to segregation made him a link between Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King Jr. Father Divine was equal parts holy man, charlatan, civil rights leader, and wildly successful restaurateur. The key to his movement’s influence and longevity could be found in the bit that started it all — food.

The Use of Restaurants

No one knows exactly when or where Father Divine was born, or even what his real name was; he presented himself as having simply manifested from heaven. When asked for his age, he’d say he didn’t know. Historians have surmised that Divine was born in poverty around 1879 in Rockville, Maryland, and that he was named George Baker — possibly after his father, though in other accounts his father’s name may have been Joseph Baker. Throughout his life in the public sphere, Divine declined to confirm these details, claiming that “God has no mother.” What scholars know is that around 1912, he began travelling and preaching in the South, gradually refining his god-like persona. He experimented with various names that depicted him as holy figure, including “The Messenger,” Major J. Devine, and Major Jealous Divine (alluding to the jealousy of the biblical God), before finally settling on Father Divine.

The weekly worship banquets became enshrined as the focal point of Divine’s movement, with Divine and his wife lavishing food upon their 30 or so followers. In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration, Princeton University religion scholar Judith Weisenfeld writes that the couple also ran an employment agency from the home to help their members find jobs, housing, and food. The congregants showed their appreciation by singing it to Divine. By the early 1930s, these praise gatherings had grown popular and loud enough to create the noise disturbances that led to Divine’s arrest, conviction, and the remark about striking dead the judge who’d sentenced him. After Divine’s conviction was overturned, he became famous. “It allowed the media to publicize his claims,” Johnson said, adding that even though the media dismissed Divine’s more unusual beliefs, “controversy sells.”

Emboldened by the growing interest, Divine moved his headquarters to Harlem in 1933. The Peace Mission’s arrival in New York City dovetailed with the waning years of the Harlem Renaissance and the ongoing Great Migration of millions of black Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, Midwest, and West. This timing proved fruitful for Divine and his burgeoning movement. Urban black communities were especially open to experimenting with religious identity, according to Weisenfeld, as many people rejected traditional forms of Christianity that had been passed on through slavery. Instead, they sought Afrocentric forms of worship and turned to black religions like Divine’s International Peace Mission, the Nation of Islam, and other groups such as the Moorish Science Temple, the Shakers, and the Ethiopian Hebrews.

The Peace Mission presented itself as a form of evangelical Christianity. It practiced belief in the Christian Bible and its core teachings: that Jesus Christ died for all people and that everyone should live moral and righteous lives. Their beliefs differed from mainstream Christianity in the claims that Divine was God in the flesh, and that he had come to earth to make heaven accessible in the here and now. The group also preached celibacy and segregating sexes in all its properties, and rejected the existence of race, meaning members did not see Divine or themselves as white, black, or any other race.

“We see lots of religious movements that are raising questions about religious orientation and racial identity,” Weisenfeld said in an interview. “The cultural movements, political movements, religious movements, social movements of the Great Migration are all part of a period of searching for different ways of thinking about collective identity.”

For many Peace Mission believers, creating a new collective identity meant sacrificing their old lives. Divine’s followers took on new names that often contained Biblical allusions, like Simon Peter, or expressed themes of nature and peace, like Sunshine Satisfied and Venus Star. The staunchest devotees lived in the movement-owned compounds called “heavens.” Neither smoking and drinking nor the “undue mixing of the sexes” was allowed on Mission property. Celibacy was required and marriage was discouraged — even though Divine would eventually marry twice.

Many members, most of whom were women, walked out on their families to follow Divine, facing public scrutiny. “The husbands of these women actually instigated a cultural distance against Father Divine,” Johnson said. “[They claimed] he was a religious fraud and that he was breaking up their families.”

In addition to the criticism of members who abandoned their previous lives to follow Divine, the Mission generated no shortage of other scandals and salacious allegations. Publications like the New York Times and New York Evening Journal tracked Divine’s never-ending drama, including the in-fighting and the numerous lawsuits, arrests, and accusations circling the cult.

The year 1937 was particularly difficult for the group. In April, a man was stabbed with an ice pick while his friend, a process server, tried to deliver a summons to Divine at a Harlem Peace Mission location on behalf of an ex-member who wanted money that she had given to the Mission returned. The man was sent to the hospital with a near-fatal stab wound to the stomach, the New York Times reported. That same day, another high-ranking member named Faithful Mary argued with Divine over money. She later defected, taking over a Peace Mission “heaven” compound in her name. Faithful Mary, whose legal name was Viola Wilson, later published an expose called “God”: He’s Just a Natural Man, alleging that she and Divine had a sexual relationship and that his movement was a scam to support his lavish lifestyle. In May, a couple who had left the group over its gender-separation policy sued Divine after he refused to return the money they’d given him and the Mission upon joining. The couple won the lawsuit but never received their settlement money. When Divine moved the Peace Mission headquarters from Harlem to Philadelphia in 1942, a primary reason for the decision was the need to evade legal entanglements within New York City’s jurisdiction.

A Figure Too Controversial?

Despite his rejection of race as a concept, Divine remained committed to social justice causes and championed them from the dining table. In addition to promoting integration, he used the feasts to preach against lynching, along with drafting petitions and organizing marches in opposition to the practice. The height of the group’s activism began over 20 years before Martin Luther King’s rise to national prominence, which may explain why Divine’s role in the civil rights narrative has largely been forgotten.

The 2017 documentary Father’s Kingdom argues that Divine was the “link between Martin Luther King Jr. and Marcus Garvey,” citing Divine’s anti-lynching efforts, his vocal opposition to war, and his mandate for all Peace Mission followers to vote. Yet Garvey and King have remained marquee names while Divine has faded in the public’s memory, partly because Divine never embraced the title of “civil rights leader.” His rejection of race also made him difficult to categorize — how could he both fight for black Americans’ rights and preach that there was no such thing as a difference between black and white people?

“To the extent that people took him seriously as a social-political figure was because he actually had a political program that involved anti-lynching, racial integration, disarmament, peace, and things like that,” Weisenfeld said. But as the more organized civil rights movement gained momentum, Divine’s influence faded. “The rise of the modern civil rights movement, in some ways, can account for the declining prominence of Divine.”

Divine better fit the classic mold of a cult leader, from his enigmatic past to his compounds of zealous followers to his Messianic insinuations. Although the International Peace Mission did not collect offerings, and Divine claimed to own nothing, he often wore expensive suits and traveled in limousines. These luxuries were apparently paid for by the Mission or its members, and they were often cited in critical press coverage of Divine. Along with the Peace Mission’s social advocacy, the group pushed for peculiar policies like banning the word “hello” because it included the word “hell,” and requiring doctors to guarantee they could cure patients or else be held responsible for medical-related deaths. In 1946, three years after the death of his first wife, Divine married his blonde, 21-year-old Canadian secretary, Edna Rose Ritchings. He announced the relationship to followers only after a secret ceremony, introducing Ritchings as his virgin bride, the reincarnation of Mother Divine. The apparent inconsistencies between Divine’s behavior and his teaching kept outsiders from taking him seriously.

Yet much of Divine’s flock stayed faithful throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. They continued to attend weekly communion banquets and supported the Mission’s political advocacy. Thousands of Peace Mission devotees marched in parades, signed petitions, and picketed. When Divine died in 1965, however, the movement effectively died with him, even though a dwindling number of followers continued to believe that Father Divine’s presence never left them and chose to follow the second Mother Divine, who took over leadership of the group. Without its star, though, the movement lost its intrigue. “They were well-known because of the media,” Johnson said, adding that after Divine’s death, “basically, the novelty wore off.”

As membership dropped, the restaurants and most other properties were sold. The Keyflower Dining Room in Philadelphia, the last Peace Mission-owned restaurant, was closed in 2006. These days, the movement retains its headquarters at the Woodmont mansion, a historic landmark in suburban Philadelphia where roughly 20 members still live, as well as the Circle Mission in Philly proper, and a location in Sayville. The Woodmont campus offers public tours and is home to a museum and library to preserve Divine’s memory.

The communion banquets continue, though. Every Sunday, the small group of remaining devotees set a table at the Woodmont estate, with places for themselves, Father Divine, and Mother Divine. They serve Father Divine first, even though he died 53 years ago. They sing to him, pray to him, and speak to him as if he’s there, because they believe he is. Mother Divine attended the meals until her death in 2017. Nevertheless, the faithful, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s, carry out the ritual, serving and speaking to her, too.

Woodmont’s archivist, Christopher Stewart, who lives at the campus and curates the library and museum, said that Divine’s flock upholds these traditions as an act of faith. “Most followers feel that whatever happens, it’s God’s will,” he said, referring to Father Divine. “They’re not upset that there’s not hundreds of people here. They believe that whatever’s going on is what Father wants. ... So the spirit of it is definitely going to go on.”