At 3 o'clock one morning last week in Manhattan, Negroes of all sizes, shapes and shades began gathering at an uptown pier on the Hudson River. Unmolested by police, the blackamoors shouted, stomped, sang, strummed. By 6 o'clock there were 2,000 of them. Then up rolled a big, blue Rolls-Royce out of which popped a little brown man clad in grey suit, panama hat, white shirt and honey-colored tie in which gleamed a $5 gold piece. "Here comes the Body!" bellowed followers of Rev. Major J. ("Father") Divine. The little man boarded one of two excursion boats moored at the pier. "We got the Body!" shouted Negroes hanging over her rails. Then Father Divine boarded the other boat whose passengers cried: "Now WE got the Body!" At a quiet signal from Harlem's benign cult leader the two boats churned out, headed up the Hudson.
Seven hours later the excursion arrived at Kingston, N. Y. where Father Divine has lately acquired a "Promised Land," some 1,000 acres of farmland worth $160,000. Plan is to settle the Promised Land with Divine disciples who do not mind field work. While Kingstonites gawped, the Divine excursionists debarked, formed a parade in which one of Father Divine's touring cars, with a stuffed white dove on the radiator cap, was preceded by mounted Negroes in berets and riding togs, followed by female "angels" in green and white satin, wearing banners blazoned "Father Divine is God." Pennons and banners carried by marchers showed that Father Divine has a POLITICAL DEPARTMENT, a RESEARCH DEPARTMENT by which "The Eyes of the Lord Runneth To and Fro Throughout the Whole Earth." Swinging music for all this was furnished by a band which included not only the usual brasses and wood winds but also violins, harmonicas, accordions, ukuleles, guitars, banjos and a portable xylophone.
Watching the Kingston parade, an American Legionary named Harry Whitney stiffened in patriotic anger when he beheld the announcement, "Peace, Father Divine Is God" stitched on a U. S. flag. He summoned police, who stopped the bearer, a white woman called Fair Angel, directed her to take the flag back to the boat. Later, on the premises of the "Promised Land" where Father Divine was watching a few of his followers swim in a pool whose outhouses were marked for SISTERS and BROTHERS, the police .asked for the flag, got only the little cultist's soft reply: "I am bringing peace to everyone, even if they don't want it."
Out next day was the first full-length biography of Father Divine, God in a Rolls-Royce,* by John Hoshor, 37, a white Manhattanite, onetime stockbroker, now a free-lance adman and investment counsel. Impressed by Father Divine as a self-advertiser, Biographer Hoshor claims to have spent six months in & out of a Divine "heaven" in Harlem, pretending to be a convert and, he says, almost becoming one.