“John Doe”, Alias God
On September 13, 1936, a man who called himself God led a parade of three thousand “angels” over ninety blocks south from the Kingdom of Heaven at 20 West 115th Street in Harlem.
God sat in a vintage automobile while young ladies in jodhpurs, derby hats and vivid green sashes danced and chanted to the music of kazoo-players and upright piano. God later made a speech in Madison Square Park.
God went by the name Father Divine, who ran the Peace Mission Movement from a five-story headquarters where today stands the Martin Luther King, Jr. Towers. A sign outside declared: “The abundance of the fullness occupies the entire area of this office; therefore, there can be no loitering.”
Father Divine was a rousing preacher, owned vast real estate, forbade smoking, drinking and sex, and evaded several attempts at criminal conviction by white authorities. He arose from an errant root-and-branch pulpiteer living in the Pigtown waterfront ghetto of Baltimore, to buying a mansion in Hyde Park across the Hudson River from President FDR.
Harlem in the roaring twenties was a scene of artistic revolution, where Fats Waller smashed thirds and Claude McKay heard “the halting footsteps of a lass,” but in the 1930s the neighborhood was a theater of political awakening, where Communists, union bosses, black intellectuals and cult preachers vied for a voice on the squawk tub. Father Divine acknowledged support from the Communists, but with the caveat that “just what the Communists have been trying to get you to see and do and be, I have accomplished.”
God was born George Baker, Jr. in 1879, in Rockville, Maryland. His family shared a small cabin of fourteen people, including the family of Luther Snowden, the only black landowner in the county. White religion in the area was chiefly Catholic, Jim Crow laws were brutal, and the local black neighborhood was called Monkey Run. When Baker was 18, his mother Nancy, a former slave to a tobacco planter, died. She was five feet tall and weighed 480 pounds.
Baker set out for the big city where he worked as a gardener in white middle-class blocks and taught Sunday school at storefront churches on Baltimore’s east side. Soon he took off South to walk the land and preach. His ideas about Man and Spirit were influenced by “New Thought,” a philosophy that God was a being inside the mind and flesh of all Man and Woman. New Thought had originated in the work of Phineas P. Quimby, a blueblooded clockmaker and doctor of mesmerism in Portland, Maine in the early 1800s. All could know God by self-mastery of the journey within.
Baker ventured to Los Angeles in 1906, where he participated in the Azusa Street Revival and first spoke in tongues. In L.A. he discovered his divine identity and cast off the personhood of “George Baker.” He began to call himself The Messenger and walked back South to craft a traveling ministry.
In Valdosta, Georgia, the Messenger held worship in his house and invited followers to a cooperative and holy living environment where they would leave their former homes, give up matrimony and pool all wages. “God will provide,” spake the Messenger.
The bulk of early congregations was made up of working black women, who found little self-liberation in the prejudiced demands of house-wife and child-bearer. As a result the Messenger incurred the anger of husbands who had him arrested and charged with insanity. He did not provide a given name so court records show the signature of “John Doe, alias God,” who secured release after white lawyers and townsfolk feared how it might look in the supremacist public eye to defend a group of black men. God agreed to leave town for good and take the message elsewhere.
By the late 1910s he was in New York City, setting up on West 41st Street in the old black neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen before establishing a co-op housing group and employment agency on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. Here he changed names a final time, assuming the full title Reverend Major Jealous Divine, after a passage in Exodus 34:14. Devout followers shortened it to “Father Divine.”
He found opportunity to buy a house for the Peace Mission in Sayville, Long Island, from a German resident seeking to aggravate a rival neighbor by deliberately advertising cheap rates for a “colored” buyer. As Father Divine had assumed a new identity, congregants too changed names to Beautiful Sweet, Faith Love, Holiness Love, Light Child, Beauty S. Love, Victory Luke and Onward Universe.
The speeches of Father Divine brimmed with invented words like “tangeblated” and “physicalating” to express new awareness. “God rematerialates and repersonifitizes!” When he was arrested in connection to an angel who stabbed a New Jersey process-server with an ice-pick, cops found Father Divine hiding behind the furnace in his Connecticut abode, trying to “invisibilize.”
Father Divine often invested happenstance with the moral strike of divine intervention. A clash with Savannah ministers once resulted in sixty days spent on a chain gang, after which the prison inspectors suffered a very bad car accident. When Father Divine and his flock were denied access to a beach in Long Island, a week later the ocean was wracked with an unknown black tar substance and the beach shut down for the season. When Judge Smith of Nassau County sentenced Father Divine to a year in prison for disturbing the peace and fostering white and black cohabitation at his jampacked free Sunday dinners, two weeks later Judge Smith died. Said Father Divine, “he sentenced God to prison and God sentenced him to death.”
Father Divine acquired substantial property in Harlem and moved his base to West 128th Street. He owned restaurants, laundries, barbershops, gas stations, huckster trucks and two newspapers. He ran a coal business which the District Attorney once abjectly investigated for a connection to bootlegged anthracite in Pennsylvania. During WWII the Peace Mission bought a 1929 hotel south of Atlantic City as a haven for war refugees and paid $3,500 in the property back taxes with $10 bills in a brown paper bag.
Newspapers exploited as novelty the legal troubles of a charismatic black businessman and gospel-shark claiming to be God. The New York Age, a Harlem daily, compared the Research Bureau of the Peace Mission to Russian secret police. Bellevue Hospital conducted a psychiatric evaluation of followers and determined that 16 out of 18 had “well-defined psychoses.” Because Father Divine saw sickness and death as a punishment to the weak-souled, followers who departed were often abandoned to the potter’s field.
At the 1936 Democratic National Convention, a Mission disciple called John the Revelator delivered the Divine Righteous Government Platform, which rejected the New Deal, labor unions, medical science and the insurance industry, but espoused laws against firearms, lynching and segregation. On Election Day Father Divine affected 50,000 followers to boycott the polls in defiance of real estate development taxes. “My duty,” he preached, “is to bring into the political field the very consciousness of God’s presence on earth as a living reality.”
In 1937 the IRS bugged him for $54,000 in tax liens while in 1938 he bought Hudson Valley property in the President’s neighborhood, where old New York has long stook family. Father Divine was humble. “I’m not God, but millions of people think I am… lots say I am the devil.”
Railed by the New York press and chased by lynch-mobs, Father Divine tracked a record that was chaste, magnanimous, shrewd and shazam. He might seem to have run a “vast collectivization experiment,” but built Heaven by the old-fashioned American gumption of land rights and evangelism.
The Ghost of Father Divine left his earthly body in 1965, and the last of the Harlem property was sold in 1984. Mother Divine, his white widow, continued to operate the Mission from an historic estate in Gladwyne, PA., where at dinner engagements and meetings with lawyers an empty chair was left open for the seating of Father Divine. Here the hexagonal marble crypt called “The Shrine to Life” holds the remains of George Baker, Jr. with gilt doors and crowned with a glass pyramid.
by Andy McCarthy