That De Laurence’s books were enthusiastically read, adopted, adapted, and appropriated by Black religious practitioners is a well-known fact. Yet, we still know little about how De Laurence’s texts and products circulated in Black communities in the first half of the twentieth century. How and where did people encounter these books? Archival evidence points to several sites, such as newspaper advertisements, flyers, and brochures. Other sites may include Black colleges and universities and places of worship, when people visited a palm reader, fortune teller, or psychic, or through fraternal organizations, literary circles, book fairs, and reading clubs. People may have also simply encountered these books when they visited friends and family, when they came upon a book cart, peddler, or sidewalk book vendor on the street, or in fiction, for example Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) or the work of Zora Neale Hurston. 

A second set of questions pertains: how and when did people obtain these books? Did they acquire them through mail order? Buy them from street vendors? In bookstores, drug stores, pharmacies, religious stores, candle shops, or stores specifically dedicated to selling occult products? From spiritual merchants operating from their private homes? Did they borrow them through informal, itinerant, public, school, or university libraries? A third set of questions revolves around how, precisely, people use these books: how did they adopt, adapt, and appropriate the practices and ideas? Who intensively engaged these books, and who used them (only) for display? What kind of social, literary, and ritual practices developed around reading and working with these books? A fourth set of questions pertains to regulation: to what extent were these books outlawed, demonized, and ridiculed—and by whom? What ideologies shaped efforts at demonization and criminalization?

And if we know little about how, when, and where his books circulated precisely, we know even less about the extent to which De Laurence himself may have travelled in Black (religious) communities. Newfound evidence, which I present as part of the StoryMap exhibition, puts De Laurence on stage with the aforementioned Father Divine in New York City in 1932. This would suggest that De Laurence also engaged with the “black gods of the metropolis” (Fauset 1944) beyond selling his books. It further suggests a relationship between Father Divine and De Laurence that goes beyond a shared interest in New Thought belief in the immanence of God, power of positive thinking, and the realization of the kingdom of God on Earth. This raises important questions about influence, interaction, and exchange: if De Laurence was indeed on stage with Father Divine, what was the extent of this relationship? Could it be possible, for example, that De Laurence joined one of Divine’s famous Holy Communion Banquets? And, with whom else did he engage? What was the nature of these relationships and how may they have shaped his thinking, views, and politics—and vice versa? These are difficult questions to answer definitively, but asking these, I hope, already reorients our focus away from unilateral influence (from De Laurence’s books to Black religious practitioners) to multidirectional exchange, relations, interactions, and networks.

This project has been developed with these questions in mind. Using maps, newspaper articles, letters, and government records, I seek to trace and elucidate moments that suggest or indicate De Laurence’s presence in or engagement with Black American communities. This narrative proceeds in three parts, which, moving from De Laurence’s well-documented efforts to sell the occult to his presence on stage with Father Divine in Chester Dance Palace, become increasingly more speculative. De Laurence and his books show up in the archives time and again, but the evidence is frequently scarce, scattered, and thin. It is difficult to draw big or definitive conclusions about De Laurence’s involvement in Black esoteric religion. The tentative hypotheses and suggestions we can arrive at are, moreover, complicated and frequently uneasy. They are also much needed, however: homing in on De Laurence and his books allows us new insight into the production and circulation of esoteric practices and discourses in African American religious communities during the Great Migration. Specifically, following De Laurence allows us a particular entry point to map and study the infrastructure of (book)stores, dancehalls, and newspapers that shaped Black esoteric religion in the twentieth century.