Urban African-American Religions
African Americans migrating from the rural South to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest to escape economic hardship and racial discrimination found more of both. They sought personal wholeness, collective spiritual identity, and economic mobility through a range of religious responses to the alienating circumstances of urban life.
Most looked to Christianity, especially its evangelical and ecstatic forms. The black Baptist, Methodist, Holiness, and Pentecostal denominations flourished in urban storefronts, and sometimes encouraged racial pride and militancy by postulating a black God and advocating emigration to the sacred homeland of Africa. Another movement connected to Christianity was the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded in Jamaica by Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) in 1914 and relocated to Harlem after Garvey emigrated there in 1916. Attracting African Americans amid the urban racial violence of the late 1910s, the UNIA had grown in the United States to more than 2 million members in thirty chapters—mostly in California and the Eastern half of the nation—by 1919. Through meetings, rituals, small businesses, a newspaper, ties with black churches, a proposed Black Star steamship line, and an anthem (“Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers”), its members pursued economic and cultural separatism and an eventual return to Africa. The UNIA also supported the African Orthodox Church, founded in 1921 in New York City by Antiguan immigrant, militant Anglican priest, and UNIA chaplain George A. McGuire (1886–1934). The UNIA faltered after Garvey’s Black Star venture led to his imprisonment and deportation to Jamaica in 1927, and collapsed when Harlem leaders resisted Garvey’s attempt to move its headquarters to Kingston. But its ideology greatly influenced subsequent black militancy in America.
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The most militant religious movements rejected Christianity in favor of other traditions considered more suitable to African-American identity.
Some urban blacks considered ancient Hebrews their ancestors and—finding support in the existence of Ethiopia’s “Falasha” Jews—viewed Judaism as their true religion. UNIA choirmaster Arnold J. Ford (1890?—1935?) founded Beth B’nai Abraham in Harlem in 1924 and in 1930 emigrated to Ethiopia. He passed the organization to Wentworth A. Matthew (1892–1973), who had already established the Commandment Keepers Congregation of the Living God in Harlem in 1919. Another group, the Original Hebrew Israelite Nation, combined Orthodox Judaism and black nationalism. A Chicago Israelite group emigrated to Israel in 1970, and while many returned to America after the Israeli government refused to recognize their Judaism, some remained in a Negev settlement. Least Judaic is the Church of God and Saints of Christ, established in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1896. Combining Christianity, Judaism, and black nationalism, it moved first to Philadelphia (1900) and then to Belleville, Virginia, its current home, where it grew into the largest black Hebrew sect. Historically strongest in Chicago, black Hebrew groups experienced a growth spurt amid the black consciousness movements of the early 1970s but have declined in membership since.
Far more important in the development of black religious identity in the 20th century have been Islamic movements. The first was Moorish Science, founded by Noble Drew Ali (1866—1929). Born Timothy Drew in North Carolina, he migrated to Newark, New Jersey, where he founded the Moorish Holy Temple of Science in 1913. He taught that blacks were Asiatics and therefore Moors, or Muslims, and that his followers were to pray facing Mecca. Moorish Science differs from traditional Islam: its “Holy Koran,” unlike the Qu’ran, combines Christianity, Islam, and Spiritualism, and its worship includes several Christian features.
Still, Ali’s point was that African-Americans seeking spiritual identity needed to look beyond Christianity. The movement spread from the cities of the Northeast to those of the Midwest and upper South, and temples appeared in Harlem, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and several Southern cities. The movement was strongest in Chicago, where Ali established headquarters in 1925. At its height in the late 1920s, the movement encompassed nearly 30,000 members, with temples in at least fourteen cities. But it splintered after Drew’s death, and only the Chicago and Hartford, Connecticut, temples remain active.Many of Drew’s followers in Detroit joined the Nation of Islam, founded there in 1929 by Wallace D. Fard (?–1934?), or Wali Farad Muhammad, whose problack and antiwhite variety of Islam, like Drew’s, diverged from Muslim orthodoxy. Fard opened a temple in 1931, but he disappeared in 1934. The ensuing internal tensions drove to Chicago his chief follower, Elijah Muhammad (1897—1975), the son of a sharecropper and Baptist minister who had migrated to Detroit from Georgia in 1923. Muhammad established Temple Number 2 in 1936, and by 1950 assumed control of the movement. He attracted followers with a message that whites were inherently evil, that Christianity was an instrument of white oppression, and that moral discipline would allow blacks to achieve economic independence and control of their destiny. He also presided over the movement’s rise to national prominence; it experienced spectacular growth as black militancy heightened in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reaching perhaps 500,000 members by 1963, and there were a hundred temples by the time of Muhammad’s death. Particularly important to the Nation’s success was Malcolm X (1925—65), born Malcolm Little, who became its national spokesman and established temples in Harlem (of which he became minister), Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta, and on the West Coast. But by 1964 he had broken with the Nation, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, converted to Orthodox Islam, and renounced racial separatism.
These moves triggered his 1965 assassination.Ironically, Elijah Muhammad’s son, Wallace (later Warith) Deen Muhammad (b. 1933), moved the Nation and most of its membership toward traditional Islam after his father’s death, changing its name to the American Muslim Mission in 1980 and then dissolving it into the international Islamic community in 1985. A smaller faction led by Louis Farrakhan (b. 1933) retained the Nation’s original name and message, but he has recently moderated his aggressive racial posture in such nationally publicized events as the Million Man March of 1995, and in his approach to rapprochement with Warith Deen Muhammad. The viability of this latter development remains unclear, but the permanence of African-American Islam—which accounted by the mid-1990s for some 3 million of America’s 8 million Muslims—appears assured.
