Black Gods of the Metropolis by Arthur Huff Fauset

I want readers to come away with an understanding of the complexity with which religion and racial identity have been intertwined for people of African descent in the United States. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? Like Fauset, I was interested in how migration and urbanization shaped the religious worlds of African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, but questions about the intersection of religion and racial identity frame my project.

I chose to focus on the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine’s Peace Mission, and congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews, all early 20th-century urban Black religious movements in which founders, leaders and members embraced new ways of thinking about the relationship of religion to racial identity. I thought the time was right to do a comparative study like his and revisit the period in which he conducted his ethnographic work, thinking across the groups about commonalities and differences. There has been a renewed scholarly interest in many of the groups he profiled that had emerged or expanded in the early 20th-century urban North - Black Jews, the Moorish Science Temple, Holiness and Pentecostal churches, and Father Divine’s Peace Mission, for example - and attention to other groups he did not include in his study, such as the Nation of Islam. I have been fascinated by the Black new religious movements of the Great Migration era since I read Arthur Huff Fauset’s 1944 “Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North” as an undergraduate. What inspired you to write “New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration”?

Black Gods of the Metropolis by Arthur Huff Fauset