Chapter one, Pt 2
"...and Churches"
Perhaps the most startling religious movement of the period to arise in the colored community was that established by Noble Drew Ali, born Timothy Drew in North Carolina. Self-styled Prophet of Islam, Drew founded in 1925 the Moorish American Science Temple. Negroes were informed by Drew that in reality they were of Moorish descent and therefore Asiatics. The semi-literate but persuasive Prophet managed after a slow beginning to attract many disciples to his banner, the Moorish star and cresent on a field of red. He offered his followers pride of race and dignity. Drew Ali had written and published his "Koran", a slim pamphlet consisting of a curious mixture of the Mohammedan holy book of the same name, the Christian Bible, and anecdotes of the life of Jesus, the whole bound together with the Prophet's own pronouncements and interpretations. The Prophet began to do a profitable business in various nostrums and charms he had concocted, among them Old Moorish Healing Oil, Moorish Blood Purifier Bath Compound, and Moorish Herb Tea for Human Ailments.
More and more "Asiatics" flocked to the star and crescent standard. They flaunted their fezzes on the street and treated the white man with undistinguished contempt. The Prophet announced that each devote Moorish American must carry a card bearing his credentials and his real (or Asiatic) name, signed by the Prophet with his seal. Often enough "slave" names were transformed into "real" ones by the simple addition of "El" or "Bey", these being titles signifying Moorish dignity. The membership card and button, when displayed to Europeans, would convince them that the bearer was enlightened and a member of an organization to be feared and respected.
To the Prophet this theory of new-found independence had been a more or less purely ethical or theoretical point, and he had not reckoned on its practical effects among his zealous followers. Alarming reports of street brawls, threats, insults, and minor violence centering around Moorish Americas were brought to his notice. Members were accosting the white enemy on the streets, showing their membership cards and buttons, and proclaiming in the name of their Prophet, Noble Drew Ali, that they had been freed of European domination.
Recalling the downfall of the militant Abyssinians and contemplating the current difficulties of the Garvey movement, Drew Ali issued an order that his followers were to desist from challenging the master race in such indiscriminate fashion. But Drew Ali's troubles were just beginning. His leadership was contested, in 1929, by Claude Greene, politician and former butler of Julius Rosenwald. A civil war ensued, each faction enlisting support from temples in other cities. Greene was shot and stabbed to death on the night of March 15, and Drew Ali was arrested as the leading suspect while he sat with his wife and a group of followers celebrating, so authorities charged, the murder of his rival. Released on bond shortly thereafter, the Prophet died from injuries inflicted by unknown assailants.
Further troubles plagued the church following Drew's demise, resulting in the arrest of sixty-three Moors after a gun battle in which two policemen and one Moor were slain. One of the leading contestants for the Prophet's vacant throne, John Givens El, formerly Drew's chauffeur, after a couple of years sojourn in the insane asylum, returned to civil life to set about reorganizing the faithful. In 1941 he was heading a Chicago temple on East 40th St. and still asserting his claim to the title of Grand Sheik of all Moorish American Science Temples. Givens was one of six contestants, each one a temple leader and each one designating his own temple as Temple No. 1.
Services in each temple observe (with minor deviations) the pattern established by Drew Ali. First, a minor sheik, a shiekess or the chairman reads and explains Drew Ali's verion of the Koran. Then follows a more elaborate discourse by the Grand Sheik (in some temples called the Governor), the whole ceremony being punctuated at intervals by Christian hymns with the words Allah, Drew Ali, and Moslem substituted for God, Christ, and Christian.
The leader of each of the bickering factions has striven in vain to build up an organization as powerful (and as lucrative) as the parent body. The Prophet's church, on good authority, had in one year amassed a fortune of $36,000 and commanded a membership of 12,000. Politicians respected and courted him, and Congressman Oscar DePriest was said to have joined the cult.
Another uncoventional sect that invaded Chicago, during the early thirties, also purporting to establish the Asiatic derivation of the Negro, was founded by a former peddler, W.D. Fard, who claimed to hail from the holy city of Mecca. He proclaimed that his mission was to secure "freedom, justice and equality" for his race in North America.
Temple of Islam Number Two was established in Chicago about the end of 1933, following the creation of temple number one in Detroit three years earlier.
Like the Moorish American Science Temple, the Temple of Islam has been torn by internal dissension, a rival group having been established in 1935 by one of the original Temple ministers shortly after the first Chicago prophet, Elijah Mohammed, departed to spread the gospel of Islam in other localities. Like the Moors, the Moslems have on occasion done battle with police.
Their services are based upon manuals prepared by Prophet Fard; the writings, largely symbolical, are practically unintelligible to outsiders.
Temple members are emphatic in their denunciations of Roosevelt and the New Deal. In their opinion, the WPA and all other alphabetical agencies are subtle efforts on the part of the white man to save what is left of their dying civilization by getting the black man to sign up with them and be given a number. Their daily living habits are austere, and their church ceremonies are marked by calm and simplicity. There is no "talking in tongues", no shouting, moaning, leaping, clapping -- none of the violent activity associated with Negro "storefront" and "holy roller" churches.
Numerous minor cults have sprung up in Chicago, but most of them have been short-lived. There are also branches of national or international organizations, such as the I Am Movement which conducts a Negro section in a South Side storeroom. Father Divine's "Angels" have set up half a dozen or more heavens. The Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam maintains a Chicago mosque, and, unlike the other two non-Christian cults noted, entertains no enmity toward the white man. A spokesman has said: "We have all races as members here: American white men, Turks, Italians, Negroes, and all nations. It is ignorant to say we have a religion that a white man cannot join or one a Negro can't join."
One more major group of churches, considered another form of cult, is the Pentecostal denomination. Perhaps the most famous preacher of the order is Elder Lucy Smith, a huge black woman who boasts of being the only member of her sex in Chicago ever to have built a church from the ground up; unlike most other church edifices of the race in her district, her's was not purchased from whites. Human sympathies of preachers were typified by Elder Smith in 1932 when she setup a soup kitchen to feed hundreds of unemployed workers. For six months, over ninety persons daily were fed in her kitchen. Both races were seated at the tables, the beneficent elder insisting that no difference be made because of color. Described as a simple, ignorant, untrained but deeply sympathetic woman who believes absolutely in her power to help and heal others, her congregation consists largely of new arrivals from the South and those Negroes who have not and probably never will become urbanized. They are persons of little or no formal education, mostly day laborers, domestic servants, WPA workers, and relief clients. Elder Smith's church for a time broadcast on the air an hour of its Sunday night's service.
As has been stated, although the cults attract a good deal of notice because of their striking unconventionality and hectic vicissitudes, the old line churches and denominations are still dominate in the religious field. But in contrast to both the latter and the sects, or cults, is a third classification, the independent churches, a number of which were established in the period in protest against what the dissenters considered outmoded forms and unprogressive leadership. The movement was crystallized definitely with the revolt of Dr. D. W. Cook from the African Methodist Episcopal Church to found a community church. On the first Sunday of its existence, the new church attracted a hundred persons. Now at 41st Street and South Parkway, Dr. Cook's organization boasts one of the best known choirs in the world, called the "radio and prize wining choir," under the direction of Wesley Jones. Officers of the church are a group of intelligent, vigorous men; and the Sunday night forum is outstanding.
Today there are about a dozen independent churches in the colored district of Chicago, the leading ones pastored by Dr. J. C. Winters and by Dr. J. Russell Harvey. This independent movement is a terror to established churches, according to Harold M. Kingsley, head of Good Shepherd Church, a notable member of that group. The leading churches of the new movement, states Kingsley, are St. Thomas P.E., St. Edmunds P.E., Grace Presbyterian and Hope Presbyterian, Lincoln Memorial Congregation and Michigan Avenue Congregational.
The Good Shepherd Church and its pastor are good examples of modern independent trend. A practical, positive and aggressive churchman, Kingsley's emphasis is on the virtue and value of labor and character. "He is not a religious genius," says Herbert Morrison Smith; "instead he strikes one as a social engineer. His sermons do not discuss the golden streets of the New Jerusalem. He is more concerned with the challenge of the slums and dives of Chicago. The fact that men of this type and temper are so few and far apart in the religious history of Black America makes them all the more valuable and significant when they do appear." Kingsley serves, mainly a congregation of professional and upper class people. Good Shepherd Church has been criticized by Negroes who assert the color line is drawn within the congregation, because the great majority of the members are fair skinned, as is the pastor, and they control and direct the activities of the church.
An interesting classification of Negro churches has been outlined by Reverend Kingsley; although the groupings are arbitrary, they are clear cut. Each of the types mentioned has played a role in the life of the colored community.
1. The old line churches; the established Methodist and Baptist churches of the traditional type, all of which have permanent church buildings.
2. The storefront and house-front churches, of which there are 178 out of the 278 churches in Chicago. These churches are usually transitory and without deep root in the community, a case of the blind leading the blind.
3. Liturgical churches: the Roman Catholic, the Lutheran, and the Protestant Episcopal.
4. The fringe churches: Holiness, Spiritualist, and various Eastern cults such as: the Mohammedan Temple, Moorish Cult, and others. Most of this group are thinly camouflaged with religion for exploitation purposes.
5. So-called "intellectual" churches: those which have a rationally expressed application of Christianity, of which the Congregational and Presbyterians are types.
The standard churches of the Negro community have engaged in numerous activities besides ministering to the spiritual needs of the race in Chicago. They have played a leading part in forwarding social and political movements. Two of the many projects sponsored by them are the Young Men's and Woman's Christian Association, which furnished healthful recreation and residence to thousands of young Negro men and women arriving in Chicago from the South during the Great Migration and later.
Numerous churches interested themselves in politics and candidates during the early twenties, when the Negro's political power was increasing rapidly. Certain ministers in return for services received appointments to state and local offices paying handsome salaries, or dictated appointments of loyal followers. Many churches frankly used their pulpits as forums for rival candidates to plead their causes. The minister frequently played one candidate against the other and endorsed the one making the best bargain. Negroes followed the judgement of their pastors in such matters without question. In several notable instances whole blocks of votes were directly controlled by ministers. In certain mayoralty elections these votes determined the victor.
Other activities of the church were noted by the Chicago Daily News, July 12, 1929: "Institutional Negro churches are an important factor in aiding the Negro to take his adjustments to Chicago life. There are several such congregations outstanding and equally meritorious. "Possibly the Olivet Baptist Church affords as good an illustration as any of their gradual development not from a theory but a condition. "This church literally ministers to the material needs of its parishioners from the cradle to the grave, nothing less. It maintains prenatal classes for the instruction of expectant mothers. It has established an undertaking service to reduce the high cost of Christian burial. "One form of service has led to another. The Pastor, the Reverend L. K. Williams, came to Chicago for studies at the University of Chicago and to write a book. He remained to carry the burden of a parish into which flowed the tide of northward migration. First he set about finding suitable lodging for the newcomers, who were mostly men. That they might pay for their lodging he established an employment bureau, helping them to get jobs. That accomplished, the Negro man brought their families, who ultimately required co-operative apartments. Their daughters needed jobs and that they might fill them well a training school was launched. To establish the new Chicago financially, that they might pay for the homes found for them, thrift was preached and the financing of Anthony Overton's new famous bank. "Don't think that from all this we neglect worship," says the pastor. "We have plenty of `rousement' and I think at one of our services even one who believes as little as our good Clarence Darrow would be `roused'."
The depression, which began in 1929, found great numbers of the race turning to other agencies for aid, however. Reverend Kingsley has asserted that, "The state of a man's soul has some relationship to the kind of living standards, the kind of opportunity that he and his children have. The aesthetic, the political, the social, the economic have a very vital and inseparable connection with the religious. The religious expression of a group's life is not going to be much higher than these other expressions." The church, largely unprepared for the unprecedented catastrophe that followed the market crash, stood helplessly by while other organizations lured away a sizable portion of its membership.
Although economic conditions have propelled masses of Negroes toward civic organizations, political groupings, social service agencies, and labor organizations, the colored community yet maintains approximately five hundred churches, half of them storefronts. About seventy-five thousand Negroes attend one or another of the vast variety of religious institutions. The Baptists lead the field, with the Methodists second, and the Holiness churches embracing the third largest number of communicants. As has been shown, Protestant orders vie with Catholic, Independents with Cults, and edifices range from white stone fronts to storefronts, while staidly sophisticate congregations contrast with wildly emotional. Both the independent churches and the cults are an expression of the religious seeking of masses of Negroes whose spiritual needs and daily problems are unsatisfied by the standard denominations. As enumerated by Kingsley, the "fringe" movement comprises esoteric theosophical, Cultural Unity and New Thought, elevated Baha'ism, yearning Christian Science and Holly Roller, non-descript store-frontiers, Primitive Baptist (once in Christ never out); and there may be added to these many semi-social, semi-economic, semi-political religious organizations, and burial, fraternal, and uplift societies, as well as Eastern mystical cults, genuine Mohammedanism and denatured Oriental philosophy thinly disguised for exploitation purposes. And in addition there are the Jogi [Yogi] and Swami.
Recognizing the weakened position of the conventional church in Negro life, the Chicago Defender, leading race organ, in an editorial published September 6, 1941, reviewed its history, stated the conditions in which it finds itself currently, and indicated the role it must assume to regain its former influence. "The Negro church has played a memorable role in the cultural development of the Negro race in the United States. Out of meager resources, schools of various categories and grades have been built and maintained with a view of securing better economic opportunities for the masses. Our early church leaders did not limit their activities to spiritual redemption. They were equally concerned with economic salvation of their people. They fought in an doubt of the church for the observance of the political tenants for which sacrifice in blood was made by the founders of this republic. No one, therefore, who is familiar with this phase of our evolution would cast aspersions on the past leadership of the Negro church. The present state of muddled world affairs, the titanic conflict of forces with divergent concepts, the attacks upon democracy and the confusion of aims and purpose that grows out of a Fascist challenge, lead us to advance the thinking of its followers and channel their action. Here and there isolated ministers with courage and intelligence have plunged into the stream of social action, often without the support of their congregations. Such individual acts, however laudable, are not enough. The moment calls for collective, unified action by the Negro church as a whole. With its splendid tradition and moral prestige born of the battles it has won in behalf of the Race, our church should be able and willing to grasp the hour, and produce a dynamic, progressive leadership capable of bringing order out of chaos. The church should not be content to follow. It should lead."
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