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judith weisenfeld.
harlem is heaven

role. project director

project. Harlem is Heaven: The Kingdom of Father Divine in 1940 Harlem

location. New York City, NY

medium. exhibit

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​​Edwin Rosskam, New York, New York. Entrance to one of Father Divine's "Heavens" on the East Side, 1941. Library of Congress. 
https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsa.8b14863/

note 1

In 1938, thirty-seven-year-old Trophena Hodge’s petition for naturalized U.S. citizenship was granted. An immigrant from Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, she had been in the United States since 1919. Living with her aunt and cousins in Harlem, Hodge worked as a domestic laborer and had begun the process of applying for citizenship in 1933.[1] In this, she was like many Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the early twentieth century who had joined African American migrants from the South in settling in New York City and making Harlem a burgeoning center of Black life.

Trophena Hodge Declaration Photo.jpg

The photograph Trophena Hodge submitted with her “Declaration of Intention” form in 1933.

By the time she became a citizen, however, Hodge had undergone a radical life change in response to the appearance on the New York scene of Father Divine, a man who declared himself God in the body of a Black man and who had attracted an enthusiastic interracial group of followers in his International Peace Mission Movement. For his followers, commitment to Father Divine afforded entrance to heaven on earth and they renounced many things of conventional “mortal life” – their birth names, families, sex – in favor of communal living and the promise of health, abundance, and eternal life in the kingdom of Father Divine.

New Day June 25 1936.jpg

The cover of a 1936 issue of the Peace Mission’s periodical, The New Day, featuring a photograph of Father Divine.
Note that the year is 1936 A.D.F.D (Anno Domini Father Divine).

Peace Mission members discarded their “mortal” names in favor of spiritual names that reflected values they wished to embody. Most did this without recourse to a legal process, particularly if they were natural-born U.S. citizens, but Hodge took the opportunity that naturalization afforded to become a U.S. citizen under her spiritual name of Glorious Hope.

Glorious Hope Naturalization.jpg

The naturalization paperwork contained an option for petitioners to request that their names be changed if admitted as citizens.
This section of Trophena Hodge’s form shows her request to become a naturalized citizen as Glorious Hope.

note 2

When Glorious Hope became a U.S. citizen in 1938, she was living in a sex-segregated communal residence on 115th Street, next door to Father Divine’s residence and the Peace Mission headquarters at the time, and above a grocery store run by members of the movement. At the time of the 1940 Census, she may have been the Glorious Hope living with fifty other female followers of Father Divine, mostly African American and Afro-Caribbean, in a communal Peace Mission residence on West 123rd Street, on the same block as the movement’s new headquarters. [2]
 

Although she had moved just a few blocks within Harlem from where her aunt and cousins lived and continued to work as a domestic laborer in a private home as she had before she joined the movement, Glorious Hope had entered the kingdom of Father Divine’s Peace Mission movement. She, along with other members, mapped its geography through their presence in the communal residences, through establishing and patronizing a range of businesses that served the movement and the broader Harlem community, and through participation in religious and political parades and other public events.

This StoryMap illuminates the Peace Mission’s religious work of place-making through mapping almost 1000 of Father Divine’s followers in Harlem, drawing on the 1940 Federal Census and information from the group’s periodical The New Day. It is a companion to my book, New World A-Coming Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, that examines several early twentieth-century religio-racial movements in which African American migrants to northern cities and Afro-Caribbean immigrants proposed new ways of thinking about Black racial identity and the relationship of religion to race. This project highlights and extends arguments in the book that emerged from a comparative discussion of the religio-racial movements, especially in considering how members helped to create these new religions through individual embodied and collective social practices like Glorious Hope’s name change and her decision to live in a communal Peace Mission residence. It also builds on the book’s examination of the politics of religion, race, and place in the early twentieth-century urban North. In focusing on the Peace Mission Movement, the project offers the opportunity to explore the creative spatial practices and the alternative geographies of religious meaning the group’s members produced as they worked to inhabit the kingdom of Father Divine in Harlem.

notes.

[1] Trophena Hodge, Petition for Naturalization, Petition No. 258876, January 31, 1938; 1925 New York State Census, Assembly District 19, Election District 32, p. 13; Trophena Hodge, Declaration of Intention, No. 25537, April 7, 1933.

[2] 1940 U.S. Federal Census, New York State, New York City, Manhattan, Enumeration District 31-1707B, Sheet 82B.

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Citation: Weisenfeld, Judith. “Harlem is Heaven: The Kingdom of Father Divine in 1940 Harlem." SPIRIT HOUSE: A Crossroads Project. July 2024. Date Accessed. https://www.crossroads-spirithouse.org/weisenfeld.

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Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University. She is also Associated Faculty in the Departments of African American Studies and History, and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She also serves on the Executive Committee of the Effron Center for the Study of America. Weisenfeld’s research focuses on a variety of topics in early twentieth-century African American religious history, including the relation of religion to constructions of race, the impact on black religious life of migration, immigration, and urbanization, African American women’s religious history, and religion in film and popular culture. She is the author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU 2016), which won the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions, of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (California, 2007), and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Harvard 1997), as well as many articles and book chapters. Her current book, Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake, will be published by New York University Press in 2025. She is the Director of The Crossroads Project.

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