God, Harlem U.S.A.

God, Harlem U.S.A. PDF Author: Jill Watts
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520201728
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Unearthing rare, scarce, and previously unknown original sources, Watts spells out a comprehensive, even definitive account of Father's controversial life and charismatic ministry. In addition to the fascinating biography, this is solid social and intellectual history as well."—American Academy of Religion

God, Harlem U.S.A.

God, Harlem U.S.A. PDF Author: Jill Watts
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520201728
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Unearthing rare, scarce, and previously unknown original sources, Watts spells out a comprehensive, even definitive account of Father's controversial life and charismatic ministry. In addition to the fascinating biography, this is solid social and intellectual history as well."—American Academy of Religion

God, Harlem U.S.A.

God, Harlem U.S.A. PDF Author: Jill Watts
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780520074552
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
Recounts the life of the controversial Father Divine, who claimed to be God, traces the development of his Peace Mission movement, and examines Father Divine's theological teachings

Promised Land

Promised Land PDF Author: Carleton Mabee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781930098930
Category : African American clergy
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description


Celibacies

Celibacies PDF Author: Benjamin Kahan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377187
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this innovative study, Benjamin Kahan traces the elusive history of modern celibacy. Arguing that celibacy is a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures, Kahan shows it to be much more than the renunciation of sex or a cover for homosexuality. Celibacies focuses on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance's Father Divine to Andy Warhol. This array of figures reveals the many varieties of celibacy that have until now escaped scholars of literary modernism and sexuality. Ultimately, this book wrests the discussion of celibacy and sexual restraint away from social and religious conservatism, resituating celibacy within a history of political protest and artistic experimentation. Celibacies offers an entirely new perspective on this little-understood sexual identity and initiates a profound reconsideration of the nature and constitution of sexuality.

Living in the Future

Living in the Future PDF Author: Victoria W. Wolcott
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022681727X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Living in the Future reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement. Utopian thinking is often dismissed as unrealistic, overly idealized, and flat-out impractical—in short, wholly divorced from the urgent conditions of daily life. This is perhaps especially true when the utopian ideal in question is reforming and repairing the United States’ bitter history of racial injustice. But as Victoria W. Wolcott provocatively argues, utopianism is actually the foundation of a rich and visionary worldview, one that specifically inspired the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement in ways that haven’t yet been fully understood or appreciated. Wolcott makes clear that the idealism and pragmatism of the Civil Rights Movement were grounded in nothing less than an intensely utopian yearning. Key figures of the time, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray to Father Divine and Howard Thurman, all shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was both specifically utopian and deeply engaged in changing the current conditions of the existing world. Living in the Future recasts the various strains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in a utopian light, revealing the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today.

Daddy Grace

Daddy Grace PDF Author: Marie W. Dallam
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814720374
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace founded the United House of Prayer for All People in Wareham, Massachusetts, in 1919. This charismatic church has been regarded as one of the most extreme Pentecostal sects in the country. In addition to attention-getting maneuvers such as wearing purple suits with glitzy jewelry, purchasing high profile real estate, and conducting baptisms in city streets with a fire hose, the flamboyant Grace reputedly accepted massive donations from his poverty-stricken followers and used the money to live lavishly. It was assumed by many that Grace was the charismatic glue that held his church together, and that once he was gone the institution would disintegrate. Instead, following his 1960 death there was a period of confusion, restructuring, and streamlining. Today the House of Prayer remains an active church with a national membership in the tens of thousands. Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer seriously examines the religious nature of the House of Prayer, the dimensions of Grace’s leadership strategies, and the connections between his often ostentatious acts and the intentional infrastructure of the House of Prayer. Furthermore, woven through the text are analyses of the race, class, and gender issues manifest in the House of Prayer structure under Grace’s aegis. Marie W. Dallam here offers both a religious history of the House of Prayer as an institution and an intellectual history of its colorful and enigmatic leader.

The Black Cabinet

The Black Cabinet PDF Author: Jill Watts
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 0802146929
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 640

Get Book Here

Book Description
An in-depth history exploring the evolution, impact, and ultimate demise of what was known in the 1930s and ‘40s as FDR’s Black Cabinet. In 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the help of key African American defectors from the Republican Party. At the time, most African Americans lived in poverty, denied citizenship rights and terrorized by white violence. As the New Deal began, a “black Brain Trust” joined the administration and began documenting and addressing the economic hardship and systemic inequalities African Americans faced. They became known as the Black Cabinet, but the environment they faced was reluctant, often hostile, to change. “Will the New Deal be a square deal for the Negro?” The black press wondered. The Black Cabinet set out to devise solutions to the widespread exclusion of black people from its programs, whether by inventing tools to measure discrimination or by calling attention to the administration’s failures. Led by Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, they were instrumental to Roosevelt’s continued success with black voters. Operating mostly behind the scenes, they helped push Roosevelt to sign an executive order that outlawed discrimination in the defense industry. They saw victories?jobs and collective agriculture programs that lifted many from poverty?and defeats?the bulldozing of black neighborhoods to build public housing reserved only for whites; Roosevelt’s refusal to get behind federal anti-lynching legislation. The Black Cabinet never won official recognition from the president, and with his death, it disappeared from view. But it had changed history. Eventually, one of its members would go on to be the first African American Cabinet secretary; another, the first African American federal judge and mentor to Thurgood Marshall. Masterfully researched and dramatically told, The Black Cabinet brings to life a forgotten generation of leaders who fought post-Reconstruction racial apartheid and whose work served as a bridge that Civil Rights activists traveled to achieve the victories of the 1950s and ’60s. Praise for The Black Cabinet “A dramatic piece of nonfiction that recovers the history of a generation of leaders that helped create the environment for the civil rights battles in decades that followed Roosevelt’s death.” —Library Journal “Fascinating . . . revealing the hidden figures of a ‘brain trust’ that lobbied, hectored and strong-armed President Franklin Roosevelt to cut African Americans in on the New Deal. . . . Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The Black Cabinet is sprawling and epic, and Watts deftly re-creates whole scenes from archival material.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

Still Life in Harlem

Still Life in Harlem PDF Author: Eddy L. Harris
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
ISBN: 1466885726
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book A deeply affecting memoir, Still Life in Harlem is Eddy L. Harris's insightful look at a neighborhood - both real and metaphorical. He reveals the magic of Harlem, as it becomes home and spirit in his masterful hands. Through his keen perceptions we enter the images and passions Harlem has always conjured, coming to understand its significance to those who live there and to those who only yearn to come to it. Unforgettably moving, this book chronicles how the world we know as Harlem came to be - from its pastoral days as a New York suburb to its days as the mecca of the black universe to its decline into a symbol of urban despair. Harris is torn over what this community has become and remorseful for having abandoned it. Lured back by Harlem's enchanting whispers in the ear of his imaginings, he returns in reverie. With amazing emotional depth and candor, he explores issues of identity through Harlem's sturdy people - folks with eyes dimmed from too few chances and with life worries burdensome enough to bend backs. He also examines his taut relationship with his father, juxtaposing a generation that aspired to do everything in its power to ensure that their sons and daughters would enjoy a better life against a recent generation cornered by resignation and surrender. Through it all, in what can be seen as only a stretch toward grace, Harris discovers his need for Harlem and Harlem's need for him, locating the life in this rich community that still harbors the embers of hope.

Mae West

Mae West PDF Author: Jill Watts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195347678
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Why don't you come up and see me sometime?" Mae West invited and promptly captured the imagination of generations. Even today, years after her death, the actress and author is still regarded as the pop archetype of sexual wantonness and ribald humor. But who was this saucy starlet, a woman who was controversial enough to be jailed, pursued by film censors and banned from the airwaves for the revolutionary content of her work, and yet would ascend to the status of film legend? Sifting through previously untapped sources, author Jill Watts unravels the enigmatic life of Mae West, tracing her early years spent in the Brooklyn subculture of boxers and underworld figures, and follows her journey through burlesque, vaudeville, Broadway and, finally, Hollywood, where she quickly became one of the big screen's most popular--and colorful--stars. Exploring West's penchant for contradiction and her carefully perpetuated paradoxes, Watts convincingly argues that Mae West borrowed heavily from African American culture, music, dance and humor, creating a subversive voice for herself by which she artfully challenged society and its assumptions regarding race, class and gender. Viewing West as a trickster, Watts demonstrates that by appropriating for her character the black tradition of double-speak and "signifying," West also may have hinted at her own African-American ancestry and the phenomenon of a black woman passing for white. This absolutely fascinating study is the first comprehensive, interpretive account of Mae West's life and work. It reveals a beloved icon as a radically subversive artist consciously creating her own complex image.

New World A-Coming

New World A-Coming PDF Author: Judith Weisenfeld
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479865850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Get Book Here

Book Description
"When Joseph Nathaniel Beckles registered for the draft in the 1942, he rejected the racial categories presented to him and persuaded the registrar to cross out the check mark she had placed next to Negro and substitute "Ethiopian Hebrew." "God did not make us Negroes," declared religious leaders in black communities of the early twentieth-century urban North. They insisted that so-called Negroes are, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or raceless children of God. Rejecting conventional American racial classification, many black southern migrants and immigrants from the Caribbean embraced these alternative visions of black history, racial identity, and collective future, thereby reshaping the black religious and racial landscape. Focusing on the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, and a number of congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews, Judith Weisenfeld argues that the appeal of these groups lay not only in the new religious opportunities membership provided, but also in the novel ways they formulated a religio-racial identity. Arguing that members of these groups understood their religious and racial identities as divinely-ordained and inseparable, the book examines how this sense of self shaped their conceptions of their bodies, families, religious and social communities, space and place, and political sensibilities. Weisenfeld draws on extensive archival research and incorporates a rich array of sources to highlight the experiences of average members."--Publisher's description.