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one ⭈ Fauset’s (Missing) Pentecostals: Church Mothers, Remaking Respectability, and Religious Modernism CLARENCE E. HARDY III In the final version of Black Gods of the Metropolis, Arthur Hu√ Fauset excluded the story of a ‘‘Mrs. W,’’ a Pentecostal, ‘‘middle aged colored woman’’ who had moved to Philadelphia, like so many other African Americans, as part of the Great Migration. It is a telling exclusion since Mrs. W was likely more representative of fellow migrants than many of the African Americans Fauset chose to include. The rising popularity of urban Pentecostal churches such as the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), which had its beginnings in the rural Mississippi Delta but increasingly became an urban church through migration and focused city evangelism, demonstrates that Mrs. W’s story must have been the story of many. In Virginia she had been a Baptist, but when confronted with one of the most notable vices the city made visible, she joined a local Pentecostal congregation for help and comfort. As Mrs. W explained: ‘‘I had come to Philadelphia from Virginia. I knew I needed something, but I didn’t know just what. I looked outside my house one day and there were some men gambling on the doorstep. I never had seen anything like that before and I couldn’t get over it. I said to myself, ‘Oh, if only I had more power, I could keep men from gambling like that!’ ’’ After a dream in which a voice from heaven spoke to her and deepened her sense of restless anxiety, she went in search of divine power to a congregation where ‘‘some sanctified people’’ worshipped. Her faith, which had seemed adequate to her before, now was not. ‘‘When I walked in I felt the spirit,’’ she 16 New Religious Movement(s) of the Great Migration Era remembered. ‘‘I said, ‘I’m converted. I know I am. I’m leading a clean life in these times. But I need more power.’ ’’1 While modest numbers of migrants found religious alternatives beyond traditional Christianity in these early decades of the twentieth century, this period marks the emergence of a Pentecostalism that would become the dominant religious expression within black Protestantism and black America by century’s end. When Fauset recorded Mrs. W’s memories before World War II, he knew that this increasingly intense wave of black migrants from the South had sparked an ‘‘adjustment of mental attitudes to new mores’’ and inaugurated a ‘‘transformation in the basic religious life’’ of black Americans.2 Early in his classic text, Fauset approvingly notes sociologist Ira Reid’s assessment that an ‘‘inordinate rise of religious cults and sects,’’ including ‘‘Father Divine, Daddy Grace, Moslem sects, congregations of Black Jews and the Coptic Church,’’ had come to define the black religious landscape. And Fauset’s text served to present evocative portraits of these novel expressions of black religious life, which had adapted to the ‘‘sensationalism’’ of urban life and the ‘‘arduousness and bitter realities of race’’ even while established Baptist and Methodist churches with their ‘‘prayerful procrastinations,’’ in Reid’s estimation, had not.3 In recent years, scholars have questioned the hold social scientists and particularly Chicago-trained sociologists have had on these initial interpretations of black religious culture during the interwar period.4 In place of the ‘‘cults,’’ historian Milton Sernett and others have emphasized the role Baptist and Methodist churches had as the principal institutional context for the religious expression of African Americans in those years.5 Rather than focus on the established churches or those at its outer margins among black Jews and Muslims, this chapter will explore instead those black Pentecostals that appear within or, like Mrs. W, hover just beyond the scope of Fauset’s published text and consider how they helped remake the very contours of black religious life. In so doing, it recasts the history of black religious culture in the early decades of the twentieth century with Pentecostals at its center—bridging the proper forms of institutional religion with those new forms just emerging. While Judith Weisenfeld has argued that recent work on the interwar period has ‘‘tend[ed] to downplay or eradicate’’ the links new religious traditions had with established cultural forms, my focus on Fauset’s (missing) Pentecostals represents one attempt to consider what she has called the unexamined ‘‘connection between the urban ‘sects’ and ‘cults’ and African American Protestant traditions.’’6 By categorizing religious groups di√erently than most of his contemporaries, Fauset manages to...

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