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| 83 5 Church Mothers and Pentecostals in the Modern Age Clarence E. Hardy III What would it mean to place Pentecostals at the center of histories of black religious culture in the modern era? And what would it mean to place women’s leadership at the center of our accounts of black Pentecostalism ’s evolution into an urban religion three decades after the black poet Frances Harper declared in 1893 the “threshold of [a] woman’s era”?1 From the testimonies of women he gathered for his seminal Black Gods of the Metropolis, Arthur Fauset provides an avenue for us to consider these questions . By comparing the testimony of two Philadelphia women, one prominent and the other not, Fauset helps illuminate the early contours of a black Pentecostalism in the 1930s and ’40s that would come to dominate black Protestant piety by century’s end. In Virginia, a “middle-aged colored woman” Fauset calls Mrs. W had been a Baptist, but now when gambling threatened to overrun her neighborhood in Philadelphia she joined a local Pentecostal congregation for help and comfort in a world seemingly awash in sin. As Mrs. W explains: 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!”2 After a dream where a voice from heaven spoke to her and deepened her sense of restless anxiety, she went in search of divine power and was directed 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 remembered. “I said, ‘I’m converted. I know I am. I’m leading a clean life in these times. But I need more power.’”3 84 | Gender and Culture In 1924 Ida Robinson, another migrant to Philadelphia who had been born in Georgia and reared in Florida, established a new confederation of churches, in part to preserve women’s right to ordination. By including a portrait of Robinson’s new Pentecostal group, Mount Sinai, among the five in his study, Fauset connects Pentecostalism to nontraditional religious groups and offers a broader map of the new religious terrain was then emerging in the early decades of the twentieth century. While Mount Sinai “deviated” from the “orthodox evangelical pattern” with its emphasis on glossolalia and music, what most distinguished Ida Robinson from the mainstream was her followers’ singular devotion to her as a “charismatic leader.”4 The vibrant presence of women in both the pews and the pulpit was an arresting image for Fauset. As he writes in his portrait of Robinson’s Philadelphia congregation : “Mt. Sinai is distinctive among the cults considered here in the extent and degree of female participation. Many of the elders are women, as are also a larger number of the preachers.”5 When Mrs. W’s story is viewed against Fauset’s portrait of Robinson it is apparent that black women became increasingly visible as religious leaders in the early decades of the twentieth century. More and more black women began to assert their own rights to spiritual authority as black migrants, unsatisfied with the choices immediately available to them, began to create new kinds of religious communities. The two religious communities represented by Mrs. W and Mount Sinai provide a context for understanding the contours of an emerging black religious culture that challenged older claims of Victorian respectability and reconceived the very nature of (religious ) community. While Mrs. W (apparently) never entered the ministry, Robinson was a woman who openly exercised spiritual power as a minister in the public square. Rooted in black Holiness and Pentecostal traditions, she was a “church mother” who represented, initiated, and participated in broad changes in black religious culture. While many studies in recent years have focused on black Pentecostal women as gospel singers and prominent church workers, planters, and builders, Fauset’s work suggests that it is black women’s emergence into the public square that best defines black Pentecostalism’s flowering in those early years.6 Just as the story of Pentecostals is at the center of the evolution of black religious culture in the interwar period, the story...

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