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Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 131-178
Wallace Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005). xxi + 256 pp., 12 halftones, 3 line illus., 3 tables., $39.95, cloth.
Students and scholars of African American history and religion will appreciate Wallace Best’s Passionately Human, No Less Divine, an eloquently rendered, panoramic examination of the dramatic and lasting transformation of Chicago’s black religious community during the Great Migration.
Chapter 1 establishes Chicago as the epicenter of black migration out of the U.S. south. Lacey Kirk Williams, a native southerner, president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, and pastor of Olivet Baptist Church, challenged Baptist church leaders to view migra- tion as a “golden opportunity” (15) to meet the spiritual and social needs of Chicago’s burgeoning black community. In so doing, Williams implemented a decisive shift in the modus operandi of Chicago’s religious community, which was divided along class lines when black southerners began their sustained and concentrated ascent to “the Mecca of the Migrant Mob” (13).
Chapter 2 affirms that black southern migrants eventually surpassed native black Chica- goans in number. Migrants had left the south in such dramatic numbers that some pastors followed their congregations on their journeys to better treatment and economic opportu- nity. Many migrants joined established churches in Chicago while others established indepen- dent churches in storefronts, with some eventually purchasing and relocating to traditional church structures. T ough storefronts were often depicted as bastions of lower-class black congregants, they were a direct and creative response to urbanization and its impact on black migrant communities.
Chapter 3 posits that southern migration engendered a “New Sacred Order” (71) unique for its emphasis on social and economic concerns. In a manner unprecedented and with varying degrees of success, churches established relationships with social organizations, businesses, and fraternal organizations in a comprehensive attempt to meet migrants’ needs. The larger and wealthier the church, the more sophisticated the social outreach programs provided. Black southern migration was so critical that churches “rose and fell according to their stance on the migration and on black southerners” (93).
Chapter 4 examines migration and its impact on the liturgical practices of black churches in Chicago. The “mixed preaching style” emerged among black preachers as pastors attempted to satisfy the intellectual and emotional expectations of their congregations. Erudite messages were eventually brought “down home” to an emotional closure that welcomed myriad responses. The pronounced variation in preaching styles was paralleled by an equally radical transformation in black sacred music and its function, with T omas Dorsey (Baptist) and Sally Martin (Pentecostal) initiating the professionalization of gospel music.
Chapter 5 examines the AME church and its complex response to the Great Migration. As the bulk of AME churches were located in the south, “southern AME ministers sought to forestall the migration” while “northern AME ministers reacted . . . with varying mea- sures of enthusiasm” (126). Different from Baptist, Pentecostal, and Spiritualist cases, AME church membership declined because “[m]any migrants found the Episcopal structure of
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/157007407X178364
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Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 131-178
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the AME Church distasteful and restricting” (128). Rigid controls pushed others to join the Community Church Movement in the early 1920s. Still others disliked the “reserved worship” characteristic of the AME church in Chicago during the period studied. The AME was essentially slow to establish a systematic policy to address the many questions that migration engendered.
The sixth and final chapter juxtaposes the ministries of AME pastor Mary G. Evans, pas- tor of Cosmopolitan Community Church, and Lucy Smith, founder of All Nations Pente- costal Church. Best argues that while Evans and Smith were often presented as diametric opposites in terms of their education, social standing, and even phenotypic characteristics, both “provided new models for female urban religious leadership and extended the accepted borders of black women’s church work” (149). Evans and Smith both “mothered” their congregations, but both were nontraditional in their approach to family life in the private sphere. Evans never married and was rumored to be lesbian, and Smith rejected being char- acterized as “Mrs. William Smith.”
Evans’s and Smith’s contributions to the transformation of Chicago’s black religious com- munity, along with those of the myriad individuals and congregations showcased in Best’s work, collectively reaffirm just how momentous the Great Migration was, especially for Chicago’s black religious community. Given the work’s decided focus on black southern migration to Chicago, it sets the stage for similar treatments of migration and black reli- gious culture in other key urban spaces.
Karen Kossie-Chernyshev
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