Father divine biography summary

Moving the mission's headquarters to Harlem, Divine continued to attract national attention on two fronts: by his lavish lifestyle and rumors of his sexual adventures, and by the progressive social ideas his believers practiced. The Mission's services were scrupulously integrated racially, and the movement led the way in pressing for anti-lynching laws and for public facilities to be open to all races.

In a time of economic disaster it rejected relief and welfare and bought hotels, which it termed "heavens," where its members could live modest, mutually supportive lives free of alcohol, tobacco and reliance on credit. In Divine was again in the headlines when he married one of his young followers, a white Canadian woman named Edna Rose Hitchings, also known as Sweet Angel.

By the s, however, he was in deteriorating health. His public profile dwindled alongside the importance of his movement as other, less outrageous, African-American leaders rose to prominence. Father Divine died in at his Philadelphia estate, where his wife, known as Mother Divine, was still presiding over the remains of the Universal Peace Mission Movement in the late s.

Burnham, Kenneth E. Boston, Lambeth Press, Watts, Jill. God, Harlem, U. Los AngelesUniversity of California Press, Weisbrot, Father. Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, Page Talk. Read Change Change source View history. Tools Tools. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. Father Divine George Baker Jr.

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About 85 percent of Peace Mission disciples were black, and at least 75 percent of the followers were female, many drawn as much by the electrifying person of Father Divine as by his social or theological message. By all accounts, he did so honestly and skillfully, helping his followers to find jobs, start innumerable small businesses, and after settle on farmland purchased by the Mission in upstate New York — all of this in the midst of the worst depression in the history of the United States.

Father Divine never advocated the virtues of poverty: his followers had all too much of that as it was. In his preaching, Divine combined an almost fanatical faith with strict adherence to the ethics of American life, urging his followers to rise from poverty by old-fashioned thrift, hard work, and scrupulous honesty. To work, in his eyes, was to serve God.

The flaunting of large amounts of money naturally drew the attention of the Internal Revenue Service, which never found any irregularities in the dealings of Father Divine or the Peace Mission. On the contrary, on many occasions his disciples startled former employers or tradesmen by repaying long forgotten debts; in one instance, this involved the sum of 66 cents for a train ride taken 40 years before.

Father Divine saw economic independence as a stepping stone toward his overall goal of racial equality. He was unequivocally opposed to any form of racial discrimination, or even to the recognition of racial difference. For Divine, all human beings partook of the divine essence, and all Americans were due the rights granted them by the Constitution.

Father divine biography summary

He therefore purposely bought many pieces of property in all-white areas, including most notably an estate on the Hudson River opposite the home of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as a beachfront hotel near Atlantic CityNew Jerseyand extensive tracts of farmland in upstate New York. The end of the Depression also witnessed the gradual retirement of Father Divine.

Already in his sixties, Divine was shaken by a lawsuit filed in by a former disciple who sought repayment of money she had given to the Peace Mission over the years. Of greater fundamental importance to the Peace Mission was the advent of war inwhen the American economy snapped out of its long depression and jobs became plentiful.

In Divine married his second wife, a year-old white disciple named Edna Rose Ritchings — a move that required all of his rhetorical skill to explain as the act of a celibate divinity. Father Divine lived untillittle seen and not active in the few remaining Mission projects. However, he did remain a powerful symbol of hope for racial unity and a role model for later generations of people of color.

Divine is probably best remembered as a man who, in his own peculiar way, acted in his own interest while skillfully advancing the cause of thousands of inner city African Americans. Logan and Michael R. Winston, Norton, New York TimesSeptember 11,p. Spoken Word Peace Mission publicationvarious issues, Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

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Father Divine c. He served as its director from to The founder of a cultish religious movement whose members regarded him as God, Father Divine was also an untiring champion of equal rights for all Americans regardless of color or creed, as well as a very practical businessman whose many retail and farming establishments flourished in the midst of the Great Depression.

The early biography of the man who later called himself Father Divine is little more than a patchwork of guesses: Divine was apparently unwilling to discuss his life except in its "spiritual" aspects. At an early age, Baker escaped the drudgery of farm work by becoming a traveling preacher, gradually working his way north to Baltimore, Maryland, in the year In Baltimore, Baker worked as a gardener, restricting his preaching to an occasional turn at the Baptist church's Wednesday night prayer meeting, where his powerful speaking style was father divine biography summary encouraged by his fellow churchgoers.

Such a crusade was not likely to meet with much success—indeed, Baker was fortunate not to be lynched—yet it reflected a concern for social issues that would remain constant throughout the long career of Father Divine. Morris had been thrown out of numerous churches for proclaiming himself to be God, a belief he derived from a passage in St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians which asks, "Know ye not that … the spirit of God dwelleth in you?

Baker became Morris's staunch supporter and disciple. Morris took to calling himself "Father Jehovia," while his prophet Baker adopted the appropriate title of "The Messenger. Such a claim was naturally alarming to the pastors of the churches where Baker stopped to preach, and in he was arrested in Valdosta, Georgia, as a public nuisance who was possibly "insane.

Though Baker's theology was no doubt peculiar, he impressed most people as a man of sound mind and deep moral commitment. With these followers, Baker set up a communal household in which income was shared and a life of chastity and abstinence was encouraged, all under the direction of "Major J. Devine," as Baker was then styling himself. Major Devine preached the doctrine of God within each individual, but there was never any doubt among his followers as to who was the actual incarnation of the deity—only Devine, or "Divine," as the name inevitably came to be spelled, could claim that honor.

Divine helped his disciples find work, and they in turn entrusted him with the management of the group's finances as well as its spiritual well-being. By living simply and pooling their resources, Divine's movement was able to purchase a house in suburban Sayville, New York, inby which time Divine had also taken as his wife a disciple named Pinninnah.

In contrast to his earlier, public preaching, which had often expressed the need for racial equality and justice, Divine's spiritual work was now confined to the salvation of his followers and was based on harmony within and between individuals. As his church grew by leaps and bounds, the preacher—also a shrewd businessman—not only found work for his disciples but oversaw the investment of their common earnings with the talent of a natural entrepreneur.

Divine taught his followers the virtues of hard work, honesty, and service in their business dealings, exhorting them to achieve economic father divine biography summary in this world as preparation for salvation in the next. Under the guidance of Divine's leadership, his disciples gained a reputation as excellent employees and the operators of honest, efficient businesses.

Divine's "Peace Mission," as he called his following, remained relatively unknown until the start of the Great Depression in With the advent of the Depression, however, desperate economic conditions made the Peace Mission's generosity all the more striking. Each Sunday at the Sayville residence was set aside for an all-day banquet, free of charge and open to anyone who cared to attend.

Word quickly spread of Divine's "miraculous" bounty, and by the early s his Sunday dinners were attracting hundreds of hungry poor people—mostly black but not exclusively so—to the house in Sayville. When the judge promptly died three days later, Divine's reputation as a divine Christian being was enhanced: like Jesus, he had been wrongly accused, and now his persecutor was paid back in full.