Word: harlem
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Through the streets of Manhattan's dusky Harlem last week trundled a procession of black noise and magnificence, led by a sleek touring car on whose back perched a fattish, blinking, middle-aged Negro in a brown tweed suit whose peculiarity is that he recognizes himself as God. Behind Major J. ("Father") Divine rode a squadron of his women cultists straddling big brewery horses. Humbler worshipers followed in cars, trucks and afoot, in a line that stretched back through the hot streets almost a mile. "PEACE IS WONDERFUL!" shouted bright placards. "PEACE! PEACE!" Occasion for this celebration...
Father Divine's cultists live in noisy, overcrowded "Heavens" which the Father has lately been moving, away from Harlem and its rival evangelists, to farms, where working "Angels" can feed and support themselves. Pardonably proud was Father Divine to announce last week that he had bought a new Heaven, an estate in an exclusive neighborhood. The estate: 500-acre "Krum Elbow" near Highland-on-the-Hudson, N. Y. Most exclusive neighbor (1,800 ft. directly across the river): Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The seller: eccentric, Roosevelt-hating Socialite Howland Spencer...
Died. Sufi Abdul Hamid (Eugene Brown), circa 45, onetime "Black Hitler," who as Bishop of the Universal Order of Tranquility was Harlem's No. 2 Cult Leader (see p. 7); when his nine-year-old monoplane ran out of fuel and crashed; near Wantagh, L. I. The plane's pilot also was killed, Hamid's secretary injured...
Washington Avenue is a residential street that cuts due north and south through the low rolling hills of The Bronx. It begins north of the Harlem River where the Third Avenue Elevated slices off on the bias, and it ends, some 40 blocks beyond, at the campus of Fordham University. In its most populous stretch, between Claremont and Tremont, it is a cheerful, neighborly street, where on the summer evenings Jewish housewives lean from their windows or sit in chairs drawn out on the sidewalks, where kids on roller skates coast down the slight slope and where the tumult...
...Peace!" is also the greeting of little Father Divine's darky sect in Harlem...