New World A-coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration

358 Pages·2016·12.121 MB·English

by  Judith Weisenfeld

New World A- Coming

New World A-C oming
Black Religion and Racial Identity
during the Great Migration
Judith Weisenfeld
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2016 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the
author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or
changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Weisenfeld, Judith, author.
Title: New world a-coming : Black religion and racial identity during the great migration /
Judith Weisenfeld.
Description: New York : New York University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016021211 | ISBN 9781479888801 (cl : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Religion—History—20th century. | African
Americans—Race identity—History—20th century. | United States—Race relations—
21st century. | Race relations—Religious aspects.
Classification: LCC BL625.2 .W45 2016 | DDC 200.8996073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021211
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Also available as an ebook
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Part I. Narratives 23
1. Geographies of Race and Religion 29
2. Sacred Time and Divine Histories 56
Part II. Selfhood 89
3. Religio- Racial Self- Fashioning 95
4. Maintaining the Religio- Racial Body 128
Part III. Community 167
5. Making the Religio- Racial Family 171
6. The Religio- Racial Politics of Space and Place 211
7. Community, Conflict, and the Boundaries of Black Religion 252
Conclusion 279
Notes 285
Select Bibliography 321
Index 333
About the Author 345
v

Acknowledgments
I am humbled by the support I have received from family, friends, and
colleagues in the course of writing this book. The project took shape
while teaching a graduate course on the subject, and I am grateful to
Rachel Lindsey, Harvey Stark, and James Young for their encourage-
ment and input at that early stage and beyond. Beth Stroud and Vaughn
Booker provided invaluable research assistance, and I received generous
feedback, leads on sources, and advice from many colleagues, includ-
ing Rebecca Alpert, Alda Balthrop- Lewis, Wendy Belcher, Courtney
Bender, Lee Bernstein, Keisha Blain, Annie Blazer, Daphne Brooks,
Randall Burkett, Christopher Cantwell, Lisa Gail Collins, Edward
Curtis, Jill Dolan, Bruce Dorsey, Martha Finch, Gillian Frank, David
Frankfurter, Kellen Funk, Alfredo Garcia, William Gleason, Rachel
Beth Gross, Joshua Guild, Brian Herrera, Martha Himmelfarb, Martha
Hodes, Tera Hunter, John L. Jackson, Sylvester Johnson, Jennifer Jones,
Alexander Kaye, Kathi Kern, Pamela Klassen, David Kyuman Kim,
Jenny Legath, Kathryn Lofton, Caleb Maskell, Naphtali Meshel, Rachel
Miller, Kelsey Moss, David Newheiser, Sally Promey, Leslie Ribovich,
Daniel Rivers, Noam Senna, Joseph Stuart, Moulie Vidas, Andrew
Walker- Cornetta, Heather White, Melissa Wilcox, Lauren Winner, and
Stacy Wolf.
DOPEsters Jessica Delgado, Nicole Kirk, and Kathryn Gin Lum kept
me on track throughout research and writing (it works!) and provided
much appreciated moral support and well- timed distractions. Won-
derful colleagues in the Princeton Department of Religion, especially
Leora Batnitzky, Jonathan Gold, AnneMarie Luijendijk, Elaine Pagels,
and Seth Perry, offered encouragement and advice. Department staff
members Mary Kay Bodnar, Pat Bogdziewicz, Lorraine Fuhrman, Jeff
Guest, and Kerry Smith were always generous with their time and as-
sistance. I am deeply grateful to Wallace Best, Lisa Gail Collins, Edward
Curtis, Laurie Maffly- Kipp, and Barbara Savage for writing in support
vii
viii | Acknowledgments
of grant applications and for their personal and professional support in
numerous other ways. Vaughn Booker, Anthea Butler, Jennifer Ham-
mer, Lerone Martin, Leslie Ribovich, and Timea Széll read the full
manuscript and provided challenging comments that shaped the final
version and made it a much better book. Jennifer Hammer, my editor
at NYU Press, has been unfailingly supportive of the project, and it has
been a pleasure to work with her and Constance Grady. I am also grate-
ful to Joseph Dahm for careful copyediting and to Thomas Hibbs for
preparing the index.
Comments from participants in Princeton’s Religion in the Americas
Workshop and Religion, Gender, and Sexuality Working Group helped
me define the scope of the project and refine my arguments, as did in-
vigorating discussions with colleagues and students in the Departments
of Religion at Bowdoin College, Northwestern University, the University
of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas at Austin, and Vassar College,
the Columbia University Seminar on Religion in America, New York
University’s American History Workshop, Princeton’s Davis Center for
Historical Studies and the Program in American Studies, Stanford Uni-
versity’s American Religions Workshop, and Yale’s Departments of Af-
rican American Studies and Religious Studies and Institute of Sacred
Music.
I am grateful for research support provided by an ACLS Fellowship
from the American Council of Learned Societies, a fellowship from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, and grants from Princeton
University’s Department of African American Studies, Committee on
Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Department of
Religion. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations ex-
pressed in this book do not necessarily reflect those of the National En-
dowment for the Humanities. Archivists and librarians at the American
Jewish Historical Society, the Brooklyn College Library, Emory Univer-
sity’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the University of
Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library were enormously helpful in the course
of my research.
I am fortunate to have had the support and distraction of a large fam-
ily and extended family throughout the research and writing process,
and am especially thankful for my sister Joan Bailey’s sympathetic ear,
Acknowledgments | ix
whatever the topic. The project benefited in countless ways from Timea
Széll’s incisive questions, unfaltering enthusiasm, endless patience as I
waxed poetic about the wonders of the Census and other sources, and
careful and critical reading. I will never be the writer she is, but am
grateful to have learned so much from her about writing and so many
other things in our life together.