Religion: Disorderly Heaven

Yellow lights glowed from all four floors of an abandoned cigar factory in Newark, N. J. one night last week. A sickle moon hung in the sky. From the upper windows came susurrous sounds, growing louder and louder, a whisper repeated a hundredfold, until finally the whole neighborhood rang and rang with the cries: “Isn’t it wonderful! Peace! Peace! Peace! Ain’t it wonderful! OOooh! Peace! Peace!”

The Fourth Precinct desk sergeant’s telephone tinkled. Those Negroes over on School Street, someone said, were at it again. It had been going on three months. Everyone else who lived around there was sick of it. A John Doe warrant was filled out and soon School Street was clanging with police patrols from six precincts. The police entered and found the old factory clean enough. There was a refectory with more than a dozen long tables and a kitchen whose iceboxes burst with pork chops, chickens, choice cuts of beef. There was a large nursery where some pickaninnies slept, incredibly, for upstairs 300 dusky adults were shouting their evangelical fervor. They were in Heaven, a real Heaven of free food and no work promised and produced by Major J. Divine, a black, benign, inexplicable little cultist.

“Father” Divine was not present. He and his big old yellow wife, “Mother” Divine, were said to be in Richmond, Va. In charge was John F. Selkridge, Father Divine’s Bishop. The Newark police promptly declared the Divine Heaven a disorderly house, although the resident blackamoors of the cult slept in segregated dormitories and there was no question of moral turpitude. All the cultists were turned out. Black Bishop Selkridge and four others were taken to the station house, held in bond.

For ten years Father Divine held lavish “tables” (free feasts) at Sayville, a Long Island summer resort. He fed all comers as much as they wanted and as often. He had three big houses to shelter his following, some of them whites. No one knew precisely where the $30,000 yearly overhead came from except Father Divine, who explained that it came from Divine Providence. But many a Manhattan cook had sent him small contributions, and from Negroes for whom he found work a tithe was forthcoming. He was run out of Sayville last year, fined $500 and sentenced to a year in jail for maintaining a nuisance (TIME, June 6, 1932).

Puzzled over the difficulty of maintaining even a pork chop Heaven on earth, Bishop Selkridge and his four followers rocked quietly back and forth in the Newark jail last week, still muttering their chant, “Peace . . . Peace . . . Isn’t it wonderful! Peace. . . .”