New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration

New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration is a groundbreaking book that challenges traditional narratives of African American history, religion, and racial identity.

Drawing on extensive archival research and incorporating a rich array of sources, Judith Weisenfeld offers an exemplary study of how early 20th-century resistance to conventional racial categorization contributed to broader discussions in black America about the nature of racial identity and the collective future of black people that still resonate today. Through meticulous research, provocative writing, and beautifully detailed stories of devoted participants in the Moorish Science Temple, Ethiopian Hebrews, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, and other prophetic religious movements, Weisenfeld gives readers a new picture of the lives of African Americans who rejected categories given to them and sought to redefine their own lives and reinvent their own identities. This book is a must-read for scholars and general readers interested in religion, U.S.

history, and Africana studies, offering a richly informative and analytically sharp social history that resurrects worlds of black American new religious movements in the interwar years.

With particularly adept use of bureaucratic records, Weisenfeld gives us a new picture of the lives of African Americans who rejected categories given to them and sought to redefine their own lives and reinvent their own identities. New World A-Coming is exquisitely researched, theoretically rich, and well-executed work that has much to teach scholars of American history and the history of religion about the ways that black people in the twentieth century engaged in far-reaching reconstruction of their own racial, as well as religious, identities.