Introduction: But Sometime Between—Living Archives and the Power of Black Agency

In the opening pages of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, Judith Weisenfeld tells a memorable story about Alec Brown Bey, a South Carolina native who appeared before the Philadelphia draft board to register during the Second World War.¹ Brown Bey’s story was that of millions of other Black southerners who headed north during the Great Migration, and one of nearly thirteen million men who answered the call to register.

Weisenfeld paints a picture of a man who, before his arrival in Philadelphia, would likely have been as content being categorized as “Negro” by the draft registrar (George Richman) as he would have been satisfied with being registered as Alec Brown. “But sometime between settling in Philadelphia [probably in the late 1930s] and appearing before the draft board in 1942, Brown had become a member of the Moorish Science Temple of America.”² This meant that Alec Brown could no longer be satisfied with the title “Negro” because his faith commanded that he deny that designation and accept the truth of his racial and religious identity. As such, he asked Richman to properly represent him as Alec Brown Bey, Moorish American.

Brown Bey’s story simultaneously evokes a picture of the mundane lives of everyday Black people and the distinctiveness of Black religiosity at the turn of the twentieth century: like Alec Brown Bey, Black folks who migrated from the South just after 1900 navigated complex religious spaces where religious transformations meant intentionally wrestling with who they were racially as much as with who they were religiously.

Set against the backdrop of the Great Migration, Weisenfeld effectively transforms a rich array of archival materials, such as a two-page draft registration, from sterile documents into living, breathing religious bodies that we can feel on the pages. In a nearly four-hundred-page text, Weisenfeld nimbly moves among three parts (“Narratives,” “Selfhood,” and “Community”), teaching us about the religious leaders of Ethiopian Hebrew congregations, the Nation of Islam (NOI), the Moorish Science Temple (MST), and Father Divine’s Peace Mission (PM), among them Noble Drew Ali, Father Divine, and Wallace D. Fard. But as Weisenfeld astutely notes, the archives illuminate the stories of the people who occupy less prominent spaces, or the sometime between, and reveal the narratives of much less prominent but no less important keepers of local religious and community formation, including Carrie Peoples, Joseph Nathaniel Beckles, Faithful Mary, J. Pearsall Bey, Squire Bryant Bey, Reuben Frazier Bey, and Happy S. Love.

Weisenfeld’s illumination of the spaces and places sometime between makes New World A-Coming so noteworthy. The monograph is impeccably researched and paints a colorful picture of religious diversity among Black people. In so doing, she further dismantles what William D. Hart aptly characterizes as the standard narrative of Black religion as the Black (Christian) church.³ She also successfully constructs a narrative that traverses the sometime between during which the repudiation of Negro identity and of unquestioning assimilation to an American national norm resulted in nuanced and complicated racial construction during a migratory era. Weisenfeld dismantles the idea that racemaking lies solely or predominantly in the hands of whites. Agency, she contends, has always been the work of Black religious subjects, and especially so in regard to how they construct, revise, or reject racial categories.

The following essays that engage New World A-Coming take seriously the ways that Weisenfeld’s archival dwellings tell the stories of Black religious agency anew. Danielle Brune Sigler reminds us of just how important having access to original archival records can be and encourages the careful use of said sources. In “A New World [of Research] A-Coming,” she lauds Weisenfeld’s methodological depth and breadth with attention to the vast array of federal, state, and archival records as well as online databases (including death certificates, naturalization forms, marriage census records, and even Ancestry. com) that range from the popular to the mundane. The wealth of information Weisenfeld unearths effectively fills archival gaps and, in so doing, gives...