New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (2016) uncovers the way different Black populations came to encounter each other during the early twentieth-century and spurred the creation of religious movements and congregations like the Moorish Science Temple, Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, the Nation of Islam, and Ethiopian Hebrew congregations. Image courtesy of New York University Press.
NEH funding has helped Judith Weisenfeld research African American religious history, uncovering new perspectives on American religious life in the nineteenth- and twentieth- centuries. Over the course of more than twenty years, this research has broadened Americans’ understanding of African American religious communities and the roles of ordinary people in shaping them.
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NEH funding has supported research toward two of Weisenfeld’s three books. Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (2007) explores how movies represented African American religion for popular audiences during the industry’s early years. Weisenfeld’s more recent book New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (2016) uncovers the way different Black populations—from the South, the Caribbean, and northern American cities—came to encounter each other during the early twentieth-century and spurred the creation of religious movements and congregations like the Moorish Science Temple, Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, the Nation of Islam, and Ethiopian Hebrew congregations. By looking at these religious institutions through the perspectives of the ordinary people who encountered them, rather than their more well-known leaders, Weisenfeld offers new ways to understand both everyday Black lives in the United States and the ways these movements ultimately shaped Black American culture more broadly.
Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (2007) explores how movies represented African American religion for popular audiences during the industry’s early years. Image courtesy of University of California Press.
In addition to offering new perspectives on African American religious history, Weisenfeld’s work joins that of scholars like Anna Everett and Jacqueline Stewart in surfacing underused resources for researching African American history. With Hollywood Be Thy Name, Weisenfeld uncovered reviews by Black film critics writing for Black newspapers to the fore—these critics had largely been forgotten about, and Weisenfeld’s work ensures that they are recognized as pioneers in American film criticism. With New World A-Coming, Weisenfeld relied heavily on under-researched local newspaper collections digitized through the NEH’s Chronicling America initiative, for instance using them to understand the religious life of communities like Trenton, New Jersey. And Weisenfeld’s work has reached audiences beyond the academy. Upon the publication of New World A-Coming, Weisenfeld was interviewed by Religion Dispatches, Religion & Politics, the Indianapolis Recorder, and public radio stations like KPFA and WHYY. She has written for Black Perspectives, Public Books, and Sacred Matters and is featured in the 2017 documentary Father’s Kingdom.
