Winner of the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for the Best Book
in Africana Religions
Shows how early
20th-century resistance to conventional racial categorization
contributed to broader discussions in black America that still
resonate today
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. The book
demonstrates that the efforts by members of these movements to
contest conventional racial categorization contributed to broader
discussions in black America about the nature of racial identity and
the collective future of black people that still resonate today.