Philadelphia is a city of churches and mosques, bursting with Black religious thought as rich as its history of revolutionary struggle, art, and music. Arthur Huff Fauset’s 1944 Black Gods of the Metropolis is a landmark study that presents Black religious groups in Philadelphia — considered “cults” — which all arose in the early 20th century amidst the Great Migration. His study included Father Major Jealous Divine’s International Peace Mission Movement, Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple of America, Sweet Daddy Grace’s United House of Prayer for All People, and Prophet Frank Cherry’s Church of the Living God, the Pillar Ground of Truth for All Nations. To this we add the Nation of Islam under the leadership of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
Unlike many at that time, Fauset takes the Black gods of the urban North very seriously as vanguard communities of knowledge, philosophy, and struggle. He demands that we take seriously what the Black proletariat were searching for when they fled the hellish betrayal of Reconstruction’s defeat and migrated to the North in droves. Fleeing white terrorism in the Jim Crow South only to find new forms of violence, discrimination, poverty, and hardship in the Northern cities like Philadelphia, these Black migrants proclaimed new gods who represented stronger ideals of Justice, Freedom, Equality, and Beauty. These new gods gave meaning to the resistance of Black folk in the face of daily acts of white supremacy and an unjust social system.
Following in Fauset’s footsteps, we believe the Black gods have produced revolutionary knowledge that can transform human beings in America. We insist these Black religious groups cannot be dismissed as eccentric ideas on the margins. Black gods must be understood as the crystallization of an oppressed people’s search for meaning in an unfulfilled struggle for freedom, evolving into a radical assertion of selfhood and human dignity against the great dehumanization of white supremacy. In a time when Western civilization and whiteness have lost legitimacy, the Black gods are significant as a revolutionary movement of modern ideas of an oppressed people who knew they were not free, and who crafted philosophies, knowledge, and a worldview which imbued meaning in both their suffering and resistance. Instead of quietly accepting defeat, these Black religious groups created theology that matched their strivings for a better life.
Today, young Americans like us are disappointed in our future and ask ourselves: was my education worth it, did I learn anything? We are no longer satisfied with the existing systems, values, and identities of white civilization. We grope for revolutionary options. In the face of Whiteness, a social system on its deathbed, the liberatory ideas of the Black worker give us the foundation for an alternative civilization. In the Black gods, we find a Black Proletarian Imaginary which affirms all humanity.
Written by Samir Butt, Sambarta Chatterjee, Neha Chivukula, Emily Dong, Kathie Jiang, Jeremiah Kim, Blaise Laramee, Albert Tung.
Credo
We believe in God who is Love and Truth. God is not of whiteness nor of the wicked, but of the dispossessed and the peacemakers.
We believe in mankind, whose common destiny is to recognize the divinity and kinship of one another. We believe in Black men and women, who through their consciousness and resistance shared their treasures of Beauty and Freedom with the world.
We believe in the existence of Evil and the agents of Evil, who work to manufacture whiteness, violence, and oppression amongst the human family.
We believe in the Coming of the Lord, and that the faithful shall work for Man to know Man — to build, repair, and usher in the Promised Land of Peace and Brotherhood.
Sociology of Civilization: Fauset, Frazier, and Du Bois
“A nation’s religion is its life, and as such white Christianity is a miserable failure.”
— W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Souls of White Folk’ in Darkwater
Conventional social theory tends to view consciousness as a product of material conditions or structural reality. In our view this is incomplete. We assert that consciousness can shape and determine social structure. As such, the flowering of the Black gods institutions of the North is best understood as a part of the history of consciousness of Black folk.
It is along these lines that Arthur Fauset asserts in Black Gods of the Metropolis that the “American Negro church represents the one institution among Negroes in the United States where we are privileged to observe the seeds of revolt.” He sees the emergence of a Prophet Cherry, a Father Divine, or a Daddy Grace as part of this revolutionary inheritance of the Black church.
Fauset’s contribution lies in the discovery of where these new religious movements came from, and who composed them. Starting in the 1910s, the Great Migration carried waves of Black migrants from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North. It was a new situation. “In the North,” Fauset writes, “much of the old accustomed way of life has been shattered.” They had escaped the worst of Jim Crow. For the first time, these recent Southerners could conceive of challenging a white man face to face. Yet the North also presented a more “complicated and nerve-wracking” life-world. They faced white supremacy of a different type, overlaid with the careening velocity and alienation of modern industrial society.
In Philadelphia, many of these migrants initially joined the churches of the city’s long-established Black community. Yet they were dissatisfied. For the Southern migrants carried something with them: the fiery experience of Emancipation and its subsequent defeat. This consciousness collided with the intense reality of the North, awakening in the migrants a spiritual and social hunger that mainstream denominations could not answer. So they sought out new leaders, new worldviews, new modes of worship and social organization — new ways of finding God in the wilderness of America. And the face of God, they said, is Black.
Fauset argues for a functionalist understanding of the new Black gods institutions; an approach that explains cultural practices by the social need or function they fulfill. In his words, the United House of Prayer, the Nation of Islam, and the Peace Mission Movement all provide a place where the most imaginative and dynamic among Black people “may experiment without hindrance in activities such as business, politics, social reform, and social expression.” He concludes, “The original revolutionary potential of the American Negro church may again be in evidence in these phenomena.”
As the inventor of modern sociology, W.E.B. Du Bois was the first world thinker to consider civilization as a central category for social theory in the struggle against white supremacy. His concept of civilization profoundly shapes our understanding of the Black gods movements; indeed many of Fauset’s arguments find greater clarity through Du Bois. In essence Du Bois ushers in a philosophical rupture in thought; a break with the European way of knowing. He presents the world with a revolutionary idea: that a nation can contain within it, two civilizations. He demonstrates how after Emancipation, the mass of Black people did not seek to become white but instead created an alternative Black civilization, at times touching the white world yet not determined by it. The formation of the Black church in general, and of the Black gods movements in particular, provides evidence of this remarkable creation.
Crucial to all this is Du Bois’s account of how the enslaved saw Emancipation in 1863 as the “coming of the Lord.” It was “the fulfillment of prophecy and legend. It was the Golden Dawn, after chains of a thousand years.” Freedom, to them, was God made flesh. And so although he did not study the Black gods movements directly, Du Bois’s work anticipates their arrival. In fiction and poetry, he imagines Christ as a Black man in the Jim Crow South; a symbol for all crucified darker humanity.
Why is this significant? We turn now to the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who represents the predominant strain of American social theory. A contemporary of Fauset and Du Bois, he too seeks to explain the social world of Black folk in America and their future. Frazier argues that enslaved Africans lost all trace of their religions when they were brought to American shores, their worldviews replaced entirely by the Christian faith. The conversion to Christianity, for Frazier, marks the beginning of Black people’s entrance into “modern civilization.” Invariably Frazier sees only one civilization in America: Western civilization. White society defines the baseline of modernity. As such Frazier measures the progress of Black people by their assimilation into the “mainstream of American life.” Moving through the 20th century he locates the Black church as, increasingly, a refuge for “lower-class Negroes” cast adrift from the mainstream; an institution for those who stand outside the domain of modern civilization.
By contrast, Du Bois bears witness to the Black church as a “government of men,” something far greater than a mere religious body. He sees its origins as African; and yet also traces its emergence as a distinctly new phenomenon of democratic self-organization, especially in cities like Philadelphia. The Preacher is “the most unusual personality developed by the Negro on American soil” — a healer, a philosopher, and a leader with intimate knowledge of his people’s lives. The final pillar of Black religion is what Du Bois calls the Frenzy — the passionate, original, and truthful human witness to the divine spirit that brought forth a capacity to sacrifice and struggle. This spirit, this burst of revelation, still lives in places like the United House of Prayer. It reverberates with a music that forever follows the path of freedom.
It may be true that material reality often shapes consciousness. But, following the logic of Du Bois, we argue that at certain decisive moments in history, the oppressed are capable of reaching for concepts that transcend the conditions of the world around them. Such ideas can, in fact, change reality. The Black gods movements represent one such spectacular moment in the life of the United States. This creative outpouring of consciousness in the 20th century forever changed the social development of Black people and the American people writ large. It marks a critical leap forward toward a colored modernity.
It is not enough to point to functional or structural factors and say they explain the totality of these institutions. We must take seriously the actual beliefs, the consciousness, of those members who make up various congregations and movements, whether in the Nation of Islam or the United House of Prayer. What motivates people to nurture a shout band, to organize study groups every week, to go out among the most destitute streets of our stranded cities and work for peace? In the end, it is an incalculable sense of faith and an overflowing love; it is an idea about the divinity of mankind, and a total dedication to seeing that divinity unveiled in the soul of humanity.
Right: Sweet Daddy Grace leads a street baptism in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s.
Unlike Frazier, we herald Black civilization in America as a bridge that connects us to colored humanity. In this light the Black gods movements may represent processes of historical development and modernity that are being worked out by the oppressed all over the earth. In Black America, these processes have unfolded at an exponential pace. This story, then, carries a message that all humanity can know.
We look to the civilization begun by Black folk as the way out for all Americans. Here lies a path for the American people, otherwise stunted in their moral development by a criminally apathetic society, to achieve their maturity. To become a part of this world house will require white people to finally abandon that which holds them in thrall: the gods of white supremacy and war.
One Nation Under Two Gods
“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. … We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement. We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God’s name. This, then, is the best that God (the white God) can do. If that is so, then it is time to replace Him.”
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
There are Black gods of Freedom and gods of the Oppressor. They are distinct from each other in ideals and never reconciled, reflecting the two battling civilizations in one nation divided by the Color Line. In Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman, one of the most significant theologians of the modern epoch, asks: How can a so-called Christian nation such as America fail to resolve the glaring injustice of racism? How can it wage war today and shamelessly slaughter the innocent, women, and children of the world? This blatant hypocrisy, Thurman says, “reveals to what extent a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples.”
Thurman asserts that there are two Jesus Christs in white supremacist America: Jesus of the oppressor, and Jesus of the oppressed. A universal Jesus is impossible in a white supremacist society, where not only are systems and structures shaped by white supremacy but also social relations, individual aspiration and identity, and human values. To white people who have yet to challenge the basis of their identity and reconcile the hollowing of their own humanity for whiteness, Jesus becomes an abstract idea demanding little sacrifice and responsibility for now.
However, for Thurman, born in Florida in 1899 after Reconstruction’s defeat, there is a Jesus of the oppressed, the poor, and the disinherited — of people who find themselves with “their backs against a wall.” For Thurman, who grew up reading the Bible to his formerly enslaved grandmother, there is but one true Jesus, He of the oppressed and poor. It is the Jesus of the disinherited who embodies revolutionary ideals and collective struggle, and who emerges from Jesus’s historical reality as a poor Jew living under the Roman Empire searching for the freedom of his people.
Thus, the gods which the Black poor worship are not the same as the gods that white folk claim to worship. One god reflects the oppressor’s unbothered complacency to accept the unjust status quo. The other is inherently intertwined with an unfinished battle for freedom. The Black gods that emerge in the dawn of the 20th century with Father Divine, Sweet Daddy Grace, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Prophet Frank Cherry, and Noble Drew Ali are gods of the Black Poor — gods of Freedom.
At the heart of these new religions are revolutionary ideas which negate the deeply embedded white supremacist assumption of American society that Black people are an inferior people incapable of governance, knowledge, and civilization. With the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson codifying in law that whiteness was property, the Black gods triumphantly and defiantly proclaimed Black men and women as Divine, a people chosen by God. In the Nation of Islam, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches that the Black Man is God. Sisters in the Nation of Islam are emblems of the highest forms of Civilization. These ideas are weapons of liberation against white supremacy. They imbue Black folk with a worldview of resistance when in battle with white supremacist society every day: African Americans are not inferior people, but rather the Original People according to the Nation of Islam, Moorish Americans descended from Moabite civilization for the Moorish Science Temple of America, Jews or Israelites for Prophet Cherry, and the real Americans for Father Divine.
In the cauldron of white people’s dehumanization of Black folk (and themselves in the process), the Black gods declare that man is Divine. Dissatisfied with existing theological explanations in the white and Black Church in light of the unfreedom of Black folk, the migrants from the South took to a higher, more concrete level what Thurman defined as man’s unyielding purpose: his search for completeness with God, his search to make man Divine. If man is Divine, what does that make people who allow white supremacy to ravage humanity? The theology of Black gods seeks to provide explanations for how white people could act with so much unprovoked hatred and how whiteness has become the extremely violent, material force behind imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. Prophet Frank Cherry and the Nation of Islam both define whiteness as evil personified in this world: the White Man is the devil. Father Divine’s Peace Mission explains that universal man has fallen to evils manifested as Jim Crow, segregation, lynching, war, and division.
At the same time, the Black gods announce prophecies that assume the central role of Black folk in resolving the great contradictions of Black people’s and world humanity’s unfreedom. They give divine meaning to the long democratic struggle of the Black Worker in America. The coming of Elijah Muhammad, Father Divine, and Daddy Grace is evidence that Black people are agents of history with the power to overcome and eradicate the evils of war, racism, and poverty — to make the Kingdom of God real on Earth.
In fact, the Black gods institutions declare that God chose to give His message to Black folk in this unfolding period of modern history. Thurman, like Du Bois, also makes a fundamental break in white and Western epistemology and theology by proposing that Jesus’s divine place in history did not merely come from being the son of God, but that God chose to come to humanity as one of the oppressed in that time. James Lawson, a leader in the Black Freedom Movement, explains that while white people talked about Jesus, Black people saw themselves as Jesus: “…an uprooted people who spontaneously identified their lot with the suffering and dying of Jesus.” Unlike Afrocentrists who reject Jesus, many of the Black gods institutions embrace and build on Jesus, claiming that the Second Coming has arrived as, or will appear to, Black people in America.
For the International Peace Mission, Father Divine is God. It is profoundly meaningful for Father Divine’s Peace Mission to declare that God came to humanity once again as the oppressed of America — as a dark-complexioned man named Father Divine — in the midst of calamity and world war where man had reached the extremes of his physical, mental, and spiritual distress and was finally seeking a Divine Reality:
“Why is it that GOD comes in the most insignificant, the most illiterate, the most underprivileged, the most downtrodden among the children of men? HE comes among them that HE might lift them and bring down the loftiness of the mighty, the great and the self-exalted. Pharaoh, in his haughtiness and mightiness, could not stand against the Power of the Almighty transmitted; although it came in the most insignificant, yet he could not stand against it. In this advanced Spiritual civilization, the most ‘slaveric’ people, the recent ‘slaveric’ people were those of the Afro-American, those of the Afro-British subjects and others who were enslaved. When and wheresoever there is much oppression and much hardship, there is where GOD will appear.”
It was a Black man named Elijah Poole “from the cotton fields of Georgia, and only went to the fourth grade of school,” whom Master Fard Muhammad, the Mahdi from the Holy City of Mecca, sought out and to whom he gave the teachings. Master Fard Muhammad came to the impoverished Black Bottom of Detroit to “raise us up from a dead level and make us rulers over those who once ruled us—not by guns and sticks, but by giving us a superior knowledge.” The United House of Prayer for All People also declares that “the same God that sent Daddy Grace is the one that was in Isaiah.”
By asserting that they were the Original People, or “the true Americans” because they lived the founding principle that “all men are created equal,” the theology and revolutionary imaginary of Black gods gave Black folk not only an origin story but also a divine purpose — to know and transform the world they live in. By transforming human potential through discipline, opportunity, and service, these institutions became a huge revolutionary force in the remaking of human beings and their consciousness, of human relations poisoned by white supremacy, and of democracy. They not only shaped the consciousness of masses of Black and non-Black people but also created educational, economic, and political programs. By acting as serious co-creators with God, the ordinary people of the Black gods institutions brought democratic ideals and humanistic values closer to material reality than ever before in this country.
Father Divine’s Righteous Government: Vanguard for a New Society and New Democracy
The Righteous Government programs of Father Divine’s Peace Mission serve as a concrete example of how Black men and women, equipped with the theology of Black gods, transformed the social conditions and ideological relationships between Americans to forge the beginnings of a new democratic society. Stating that “heaven is a state of consciousness” which can be materialized on Earth, the Peace Mission’s mandate was to make the attributes of God and Christ “re-producible, re-personifiable, and realizable” in the followers of Father Divine. By establishing a group of “interracial, international, inter-religious, interdenominational and non-partisan co-workers” to form the Department of Righteous Government, they sought to make this vision concrete.
The Peace Mission’s activities produced a living glimpse into what a humanistic and democratic society would look like — one that made the poor and the dispossessed the center of its vision and ensured that they could live dignified and complete lives. Buildings like the iconic Divine Lorraine Hotel in Philadelphia, once exclusively for the white wealthy elite of the urban North, were consecrated with a new distinctly egalitarian and divine spirit of serving humanity through the Peace Mission ministries. Across America’s cities, the Peace Mission purchased, refurbished, and repurposed a range of neglected monumental architecture — hotels, mansions, churches — into some of the nation’s first racially integrated public institutions that provided dignified and clean lodging for all patrons. Full course meals, complete with china, silverware, and cloth napkins in dining rooms decked with chandeliers, were served to all patrons, especially the Black working class and poor. All these services were made available for just a few cents and were never denied to anyone for the lack of funds. The Peace Mission’s banquets and hotels were fully racially integrated at a time when segregation was widely practiced in either law or deed, South and North.
Right: A Peace Mission-owned grocery store and delicatessen in Harlem, 1936.
Father Divine unabashedly proclaimed that America, ruled by white supremacy, was not a democracy. With the establishment of Jim Crow laws, segregation was not only enforced by law but by daily, unjustified acts of violence, terror, and lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan and other ordinary white people. At the peak of the Great Depression, Black unemployment reached 50 to 60 percent in Northern cities. Competition for jobs led to racial tensions between white and Black workers. Father Divine’s Righteous Government took on this crisis and organized campaigns in the 1930s against lynchings, segregation, unemployment, and war while calling for universal education and employment. The Peace Mission campaigned for the release of the Scottsboro Boys wrongly accused of accosting a white woman, and also collected 250,000 signatures to petition the passing of an Anti-Lynching Bill in Congress. Father Divine declared, “Every man in a lynch mob should be convicted as a murderer — not one alone but every one.”
The Peace Mission did not just challenge unjust laws and social practices of racism by creating and operating businesses that served everyone, across class and race. Their Righteous Government also took on the responsibility of confronting the white supremacist American State to bend its existing programs and institutions towards a more inclusive and equitable distribution of services. During the Great Depression, the Peace Mission operated a public employment agency, free of cost to the workers, where employees were ensured to get a minimum wage scale. It demanded from the State that all idle plants and equipment that were not run on full capacity to be made available to workers on a cooperative, non-profit basis under the supervision of government experts, with temporary provision for materials.
At the same time, the Peace Mission created an alternative system of governance that could independently work to ensure Black men and women had opportunities to participate in society and exercise their talents, creating a new system of ideals and meaning. The Righteous Government organized democratic forums where delegates from many denominations, parties, and government organizations like the WPA Education Program were invited to speak as part of public discussions on the political, economic and educational policies most affecting ordinary people during the post-world war period of crisis and change. Children were also a part of the Righteous Government Platform and were called “little angels” who presented their programs as song recitals and skits. In Harlem in 1936, Father Divine founded the All People’s Party, composed of 89 groups including five religious groups. This party had an 11-point platform aimed at improving conditions of people living in Harlem including employment, wages, and school facilities for youth. The educational program ensured masses of people were made literate either through evening schools in New York or through private schools established within the Peace Mission with regular teachers.
The Peace Mission’s Righteous Government offers a window into what a non-white society in America could look like — shaped by the democratic leadership of Black men and women, together with white believers — where all human beings are divine, equal, and sacred. It exemplifies how a true democratic relationship can be won between Black and white workers through visionary Black leadership. Such a union can achieve an alternative system of values and a new society beyond white supremacy that makes freedom real for all human beings.
Testimonies
One of the greatest pieces of evidence we can put forward for the transformative power of the institutions of Black gods is the effect it has had on our own thought and soul. We offer our honest experience as proof, and assert that we represent, in our experience, not only a searching few but a large and growing number of the great hungering mass of American people. We offer these testimonies as witness.
Art and Beauty of the Peace Mission
As young people seeking a definitive resolution to America’s present crisis of meaning and knowledge, we have been drawn to Father Divine’s International Peace Mission — not only for its social programs uplifting the Black proletariat, but also for its concrete belief that the poor deserve beauty, dignity, and art in the quest for Christ-consciousness; and that in their struggle for freedom and a better world, the poor are the greatest architects of that which ennobles humankind. This search led us to make a pilgrimage in October 2025 to the estate of Father Divine, known as Woodmont. Located in Gladwyne outside of Philadelphia, Father Divine acquired this French Gothic chateau in 1953 and transformed it from a decadent Gilded Age manor of a white Pennsylvanian steel baron to the Peace Mission headquarters.
We were greeted by Seraphim, one of the remaining followers of Father Divine who has dedicated her life to this movement. As she led us through the mahogany interior and Queen Anne turrets, she explained how Father Divine made Woodmont the “Mount of the House of the LORD” for a movement believing in a “darker-complected” God, serving the hungry and poor across America’s cities.
After touring the manor, Seraphim led us down stone steps to the Shrine of Life which houses the bodies of Father and Mother Divine on the estate’s grounds. At the Shrine entrance, we paused before the great bronze doors — a striking composition of sculptural figures and celestial embellishments. Seeing our interest captivated, Seraphim guided us through this cosmological map of Father Divine’s theology: twenty-four allegorical figures depicting the triumph of good and beauty over evil, injustice, segregation, and poverty in America.
Hearing Seraphim’s vivid description of the door’s breathtaking composition, we recognized a distinct quality in all the bronze figures: they embodied concrete, moral ways for people to acknowledge shared humanity and common strivings. From the top’s meridian sun, a fallen man reaches upward, his hands met by God’s outstretched arms — symbolizing the story of Father Divine’s coming to the oppressed of America. Beside God stands a resurrected man with raised hands and a loincloth, evoking Jesus and the Christ-consciousness central to the Peace Mission. One ensemble among the many stood out: two embracing brothers. Seraphim asked if we could identify any differences between them, to which we could only respond that there were subtle differences in their hair texture that marked one white and one Black, but otherwise they were identical in build and height. Seraphim replied that this was exactly the pure representation of Father Divine’s message of universal brotherhood and one unified humanity transcending racial segregation.
Inside the shrine, we stood before the monumental rose marble coffins of Father and Mother Divine, guarded by angels beneath a skylight and a gold mosaic ceiling from which seven bells were suspended. That experience in the Shrine sparked a stirring conversation about the Peace Mission’s century-long role in reshaping consciousness across all races. It led one of us to ask Seraphim if, as her name implied, she considered herself an angel? Seraphim’s response, after taking just a moment to ponder, was that she aspired to be one, as part of the journey towards perfecting the human soul that Father Divine believed was possible and imperative for all people. It was awe-inspiring to realize in that moment that here was living proof of a divine beauty that can be expressed through the kind of human beings who believe in Black gods.
Right: Seraphim points out the cosmological composition of the bronze figures embellishing the Shrine Door.
By the end of our visit, we believed that engaging with the Mission’s history, values, and people like Seraphim had expanded our sense of moral possibility; in Seraphim, we found a kindred spirit in the battle to transcend the harshness and limitations of American society. Reflecting upon our moment today, even when the number of Peace Mission followers has dwindled to an aging handful, we can say that Father Divine’s message speaks more than ever amid America’s crisis of values. In a landscape of rampant nihilism, disconnection, and anti-human forces all across mainstream American culture and society, what would it mean to take the institutions of Black gods seriously? What would it mean to adopt their sense of beauty as the embodiment of alternate values, alternate spiritual and moral possibilities for the American people? And how might knowing these institutions inspire us to go beyond our decadent, dysfunctional systems of governance and broken social relationships, and finally build a more beautiful, human, and truly democratic society, united under a Black ideal of God? Shall we not all aspire to become angelic beings to make heaven real on earth?
Music of the United House of Prayer
The music at the United House of Prayer for All People is further human evidence of this commitment to beauty, truth, freedom, justice, and love. The music is not commercialized, and the members of the shout band, though supremely talented, do not seek fame or money, but the edification of the minds and hearts of the people. The special quality of the music at the House of Prayer is in the social experience of the worship, and in the striving of the musicians and the congregation together to elevate the consciousness of the people into a more perfect expression of God’s deliverance and love.
You experience this striving in the shining brass of the trombone, the trumpet, the tuba, and the sousaphone, in the mass of beautiful men moving in complete unity, in the individual rising up out of the band to give a cry of joy through the trombone’s gold mouth, in the bright clap of the women’s tambourines keeping time, and in the young men with the old men playing together. The music breaks and lifts and swells like a great healing wave. It is a democratic worship; hours and hours of disciplined practice prepare the musicians, but in the moment of the service it is the spirit of all that leads. When I hear it, I think that this must be what the angelic choir sounds like — not a choir sequestered away in heaven but a heavenly choir on Earth, of ordinary men and women who sweat and lean and cry out in pursuit of Truth.
This music has special importance for the youth and children who hear and produce it. Young men are given trombones of their own and their creative expression encouraged. They are made an integral part of the production of beauty. Taking responsibility for the raising of principled and beautiful children is evidence for an alternative moral system, one sorely needed in a modern American culture that inundates children with the distractions of materialism and celebrity over truth, beauty, and the struggle for freedom. The child who takes part in the creation of beautiful music meant to elevate the human being, to make love, truth, and freedom real, is spiritually armed against a hostile world. This is the full armor of God, forged by men and women with the mighty hammers of voice and trumpet on the anvil of worship. Walking to work the morning after the service I remembered the beauty of this music and of the musicians, and the memory fortified me for the day and gave all my work a truer heading.
Right: A young player at the United House of Prayer for All People. Credit: NPR
What is the effect of this music and such an earnest striving for beauty? It is the transformation of the human being. It develops a personality incompatible with poverty, racism, and war. It builds mighty muscles of human creativity and positive expression. It expands the capacity of people to struggle, and gives the people a fighting chance at creating the kind of world worthy of humanity’s children.
This music and the values which it expresses are not just the past or present, but the future. For a moment a prophetic vision, a flash of future sight, passes before your eyes, and you can see a civilization built from these foundation stones which seeks to elevate the human being and not to degrade him, to free him and not to enslave him, to truly create a beloved community and a world house for all people.
Conclusion
On such a basis do we argue that the Black gods movements are part of the vanguard of what can become a new society, a vanguard of thought and spirit. To arrive at this conclusion, we must assume that the path to progress is not assimilation into white modernity. America at its deepest structure is confounded today by the presence of two civilizations, in battle with each other. In saying this we do not anticipate race war or any other artificial division. We only recognize the wretched failures of white civilization, its violence and immiseration; its inability to provide a sense of meaning, resulting so often in despair that poisons the hearts of the people.
In these times of deep moral crisis in American society, the Black gods represent a body of revolutionary knowledge produced by Black folk, as a gift to the American people in becoming. This knowledge, produced through an active struggle against the dehumanizing values of white supremacy, has created new human beings who give themselves wholly to a greater vision of democracy and social life. This civilization, which centers its vision on the poor and the dispossessed, was forged by the Black worker — the most advanced revolutionary agent in American society, whose consciousness pushes deeper roots within the wilderness of America today. By making the moral choice to reject whiteness and inherit this civilization, we can transform ourselves into citizens of a nation yet to be born, one that recognizes the divinity of all who live on this earth.
We extend our deepest gratitude to the members of the institutions we have visited and come to know. The journey we have begun does not end here. In closing we repeat the words of Martin Luther King Jr., who paraphrased Saint Augustine in saying: “Man is made for God, and will be restless until he finds rest in Him.”
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