Judith Weisenfeld’s exhaustively researched and analytically brilliant new book, New World A-Coming, offers a compelling reinterpretation of several new religious movements that took shape among African Americans in the early twentieth century, mostly in the urban north. Weisenfeld designates these movements — the Moorish Science Temple, the Ethiopian Hebrew congregations, the early Nation of Islam, and Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement — as “religio-racial” to highlight the distinctive ways in which they redefined their racial and religious identities. She excavates census and draft registration records, local newspapers, and an array of archival materials to develop a textured picture of the religious lives and practices of their members. Weisenfeld rejects the typical historiographical preoccupations with their religious heterodoxies as Muslims, Jews, or Christians and instead situates these movements as an integral part of African American cultural and social history.
Racial and religious identities have long been intertwined, Weisenfeld explains, and can sometimes be difficult to distinguish. Indeed, race and religion were arguably differentiated as categories of identity throughout the colonial encounters of the early modern world, and have never been entirely separated in practice. The movements Weisenfeld profiles were unusual, however, in the way they uniquely marshaled religious resources to transform racial identities. They rejected the racial identities of Negro, Afro-American, or colored in favor of alternative identities such as Moorish American, Ethiopian Hebrew, Asiatic, or simply human, “race-less angels” and children of the one true God. Weisenfeld rightly insists that we cannot simply dismiss these reconstructed identities as imagined, as if the racial location they refused were self-evident or essentially true. Rather, she challenges us to see how adherents sought to relocate themselves and their communities within the social fabric of the United States.
Weisenfeld’s religio-racial movements joined a wider set of African American conversations around communal identity in which nation and nationality figured just as much as race and religion. The Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam used the language of nation to rearticulate the communal identity of Black people in the US, making them not only religio-racial movements but black nationalists as well. They built on the foundations of earlier black nationalists such as the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which emerged alongside and in dialogue with other anti-colonial and anti-racist nationalisms. Marcus Garvey, the UNIA’s founder, modeled his movement after Irish, Jewish, and other diasporic nationalisms that aimed to call a nation-state into being and so re-envisioned the future of an oppressed people.