Queering Growth in Mid-20th Century Philadelphia

Introduction

Beginning in the 1940s, men like chief city planner Edmund Bacon and influential architects such as Oscar Stonorov and Louis Kahn gained political ascendancy in Philadelphia. Their rise was the intellectual culmination of the city’s six-decade tradition of housing reform and poverty work as well as the international modernist tradition. In this period, their efforts gained the support of federal power and finances with the postwar transformation in urban political economy and governance (Bauman, 1987; Countryman, 2006). Newly endowed with unprecedented technocratic power, these men began to implement a vision of the city’s future wherein social, economic, and geographic stability could be achieved through growth—the perpetual extension of markets in housing and commodities (Hunter, 2013). They reasoned that through the careful calculations of urban planning, as opposed to the speculative development characterizing Philadelphia’s historical trajectory up to that period, they could permanently resolve capitalism’s consistent problems with overproduction, redundancy, and poverty (Bauman, 1987).

Given the historical relationship between the expansion of capitalist markets and the increase of and exacerbation of vulnerability and inequality, their errand to normalize and stabilize the relations of production and consumption was failed from the outset (Baran, 1957; Newton, 2009). To resolve the contradictions inherent in growth as a formula for long-term stability, these men drew on the racialism and racism of Progressive and post-Progressive thought, despite their own pretentions of liberal non- or antiracism. In particular, Philadelphia’s nascent class of dominant urbanists reified the post-1880s construction of the “Negro slum”—a conceptual and material repository of the ill effects of capitalist relations including crumbling infrastructures, concentrated poverty, criminality, sickness, and death (Muhammad, 2011). The fallowed territories of disinvestment, economic abandonment, and underdevelopment constituting these segments of the cityscape provided the vital material and conceptual space of nonvalue within the market economy and its attendant bourgeois social-cartographic ideology (Barrett, 2009; Warren, 2018). This designation of racialized territoriality hid in plain sight a fundamental feature of capitalist geographies—the role of disaccumulation in the overall production of value (Gilmore, 2002, 2007). As Juan De Lara (2018) argues in a different context, “[c]reative destruction is . . . woven into the fabric of capitalist development” providing a “solution to the devaluation of fixed capital by reconfiguring spatial-temporal relationships to create new investment options”. Although mid-century urbanists theorized that planning could mitigate redundancy, glut, and inequality, the designation of the opaque territory of the “Negro slum” created a conceptual blind spot wherein they misinterpreted deindustrialization as a temporal and limited function of markets in land and misattributed the ill effects of capitalist relations to the lives and cultures of Black migrant communities rather than as a fundamental function within racial capitalist geography.

Transformed by the Great Migrations of the 1920s and the 1940s, the City’s core neighborhoods experienced a radical demographic transition. Foremost the transformation of white ethnic neighborhoods in South, West, and North Philadelphia into racialized slums was an effect of the violent erection of the Jim Crow North (Countryman, 2006; Purnell & Theoharris, 2019). Planners and architects gave intellectual credence to efforts by politicians, the police, and ordinary White Philadelphians to collapse racial blackness into sinister forms of darkness and to sequester them along with the ill effects of capitalist relations in increasingly isolated sections of the city. In particular, planners and architects helped to mark these neighborhoods as sites of exception—the no-man’s geographies inhabited by “DEAD” subjects—those more prone to physical debilitation and death but also marked as beyond the fabrics of collective reciprocity defining the social world (Agamben, 1995/1998; McKittrick & Woods, 2007; Puar, 2017; Wynter, 2003).

In this context, Black southern migrant communities articulated and partially realized alternative, often heterodox visions for their communities and the future of the city itself. Within a host of novel institutions and religious communities, Black people otherwise sequestered at the margins, proposed radically different futures outside standard formulations of capitalist growth. The city’s Black communities expressed what I term in my larger project, various forms of Black queer urbanism. Describing both quiet and confrontational challenges to the normative logics and practices of dominant urbanists, Black queer urbanism refers to a critical approach that views non-normative forms of Black social-geographic life as a key conceptual resource, and a foundation for charting alternative visions for and of the city. ¹ Black queer urbanism names a latent and under-historicized tradition of Black life, Black intellectual thought, and Black culture that was vital to urban transformation between 1940 and 2000. Emerging alongside, and in tension with, reformers’ and planners’ efforts to modulate and control growth across the City’s transformation through industrialization, deindustrialization, and gentrification from a “workshop of the world” into a postindustrial site of capital disaccumulation, and finally into the center within a nodal geography of hyper investment and consumption, Black migrant communities and the queer urbanism they forwarded provide an alternative basis for analyzing the modern city, urban reform efforts, and Black cultural and intellectual production within the historical and geographic contexts of Philadelphia.

Although we do not often consider Black religious communities progenitors of Black queer thought or practice, and indeed often (rightfully) view these spaces as antagonistic to queer individuals and communities, these organizations, ranging from store front churches to “cults,” were primary progenitors of urban futurity disarticulated from heteronormative reproduction, racial segregation, and market growth in 20th century U.S. cities (Fauset 1944/2001; Weisenfeld, 2017). During the same era that the city’s dominant urbanists ascended to political power, the followers of Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement cultivated a body of those embracing an esoteric and heterodox belief set that included racial integration, radical asexuality, and an ecstatic-miraculous healing tradition centered in the sensuousness of touch (Campt, 2012, 2017). Recusing themselves from the bonds of matrimonial expectation and sex, devotees of Divine joined one another as sisters and brothers, distilling sensual energy into consistent work, enraptured worship, abundant communion, and deeply felt intimacy organized spatially and socially beyond the bonds of nuclear family and the attendant model of social, economic, and geographic reproduction it anchored within orthodox urbanist thought. This sets them apart as progenitors of Black queer urbanism, defined not simply through non-normative expressions of sex and sexuality (although their asexuality indeed qualifies them here) but rather as a body of critical, sometimes heterodox knowledge about the city as well as projections for its future not dependent on visions of growth through nuclear monogamy and sexual reproduction based in the home.

In this essay, I draw on my larger project to highlight a critical, if under-examined, dialectic between dominant urbanism and Black queer urbanism. First, I demonstrate the ways that dominant urbanists drew on a sedimented historical imaginary of the slum as a racialized site of debilitation and death in their articulation of and support for new urban infrastructures designed to support long-term stability through capitalist growth. Anti-blackness formed a fundamental aspect of the syntax and grammar of urban renewal and redevelopment. Next, I examine the efforts of the adherents of Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement to build a world centered in spiritually appropriated, communal architectures wherein their disruptive forms of social-geographic life challenged heteronormative futurity (or the vision of reproducing society through familial life stabilized through compulsory monogamy and heterosexuality and centering the future child as the concern of the present) and segregation through the haptic politics of touch and what I term ecstatic consecration.

Dominant Urbanism and the Cartography of the Slum

Younger and more vivacious than their politically elected counterparts on Philadelphia’s conservative city council and in the mayor’s office in the early 1940s, the so-called “Young Turks” set about to “fix” their city—that is to remake it outside the images of corruption and machine politics that had dominated the City’s development since the post–Civil War era. Walter Phillips, who would later serve as the director of the Philadelphia Public Housing Authority, first organized the City Policy Committee in an effort to reform the city charter to provide municipal power for urban planning. Although the Committee’s attempts to reform the charter crashed on the shoals of the city’s machine politics in 1939, the Committee redoubled in its resolve to improve Philadelphia and began advocating for the revitalization and recapitalization of the City Planning Commission. By 1940, the City Policy Committee had merged with other organizations to form the Joint Committee on City Planning. The Joint Committee galvanized more than 150 citywide organizations, including the city’s charitable and housing reform organizations, as well as leading businessmen like Edward Hopkins, to pressure Republican Mayor Bernard Samuel in 1942 to adopt an ordinance revitalizing the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. Subsequently, the renewed City Planning Commission which had fallen into disuse following its 1915 founding, included nine mayor-appointed committee members as well as a city-supported technical staff who could carry out the research program generated by the appointees (Pace, 1976).

Across their specific backgrounds, ranging from newly minted architects to time-vetted housing reformers, men like Phillips, housing reformer Bernard J. Newman, future chief city planner Edmund Bacon, European trained architect Oscar Stonorov, and jurist Abraham Freedman shared a vision of municipal statecraft through sustained capitalist growth (Adams, 1976; Scott, 1969). Through their varied expertise, they sought to manage the city as a vast network of interconnected infrastructures and buildings to be surveyed, enhanced, redesigned, and perfected. Through technical knowledge matched with increasing commitments of municipal, state, and federal power, they sought to excise and replace what they understood as debilitative infrastructures and the attendant social-geographic formations they considered ill-fitted to the modern city while also preserving and remodeling the “historically significant” structures they deemed worthy of preservation. ² These efforts were rewarded especially in the aftermath of Pennsylvania’s nationally precedent setting 1945 Urban Redevelopment Law as well as the federal 1949 and 1954 housing legislation. ³ These statutes garnered for local planner’s new sources of fund allocation and explicitly sanctioned the Planning Commission and the Redevelopment Authority with the power of eminent domain.

The goal of this nascent class of unelected dominant urbanists was the transformation of the cityscape to mitigate against the destructiveness of deindustrialization. Through the practice of planning—combining architectural practice and theory, sociological investigation, economic analysis, and technocratic policy craft—this nascent class worked to remake the city and resuscitate the urban tax base. Their efforts to these ends, as well as their intellectual writing, reveal a historically specific yet universalized vision for the social reproduction of the city critical in their formula for growth and fundamentally shaping mid-20th century Keynesian-Fordist governance in Philadelphia. “Standard living,” or the implementation of regularized social-spatial relations through the (re)construction of infrastructures, justified major outlays in economic and political capital by aligning and allying planning with the social and economic replication of normative citizens—idealized white, able, subjects anchored in the nuclear family within postwar breadwinner ideology (Stewart-Winter, 2016). Through the rubrics of standard living and growth, mid-century Philadelphia reformers, planners, and architects centered the redevelopment of commercial districts, the construction of modern housing, the preservation of institutional churches and other similar normalizing institutions of civil society, as well as the construction of parks and green spaces considered vital to generative recreation (Birch, n.d.; Christensen, 1977; Lubove, 1962). These elements were held to reproduce “normal” forms of life and living that could in turn stabilize real estate values by attracting and retaining normal white homeowners/taxpayers.

Dominant urbanists viewed the long-term insurance of real estate value and social values as a combined project necessitating the seamless social-spatial reproduction of productive workers, effective housewives, and normal children (future breadwinners and wives), to mitigate the effects of market fluctuation, idleness, and social dissolution. Through the careful organization of infrastructures, ranging up in scale from the individual housing unit, to the neighborhood, the city, and the region, they sought to promote sustained long-term growth. The implicit biological-political-social-spatial subjects of these men’s vision of the city remade in the era between 1940 and 1965 were white. The laborer and the white-collar worker formed a broad class of white, neo-patriarchal subjects defined their engagement in remunerative wage work outside the home. Within postwar breadwinner ideology, these subjects were joined by their dependents: primarily housewives, or the uncompensated or undercompensated laborers whose job was to manage the home as the central site of consumption in a Fordist circuitry of production and consumption. Finally, key to the city as an engine of long-term stability and growth were their children (future breadwinners and wives) requiring training in the habitus of American citizenship through regular labor and steady consumption. Urban planners, a nascent class of powerbrokers, reimagined nuclear familial life as the primary locus of social existence in the postwar city, viewing it as insurance against subversive anti-social forms.

Critical within their cartographic imaginary of the City was the role of the redundant infrastructures of capitalist overdevelopment increasingly racialized in the era of the Great Migration. The city’s core neighborhoods, increasingly concentrated Black migrant communities due to racist real estate practices as well as Black communities efforts to build their own institutions and communities, served as the backdrop onto which the “normal” social relations capable of insuring a bright future were projected and imagined (Countryman, 2006; Hunter, 2013). Anti-Blackness, though muted in the writing of formally non- and antiracist urban reformers and planners, was a key aspect of the cartographic grammar of redevelopment and growth. As the designated places where basic functions within capitalist markets like credit were available only in scarcity, where rent was higher for less, where life expectancy was consistently and predictably low, negro slums provided the contrastive relief for the geographies of the citizen, denoting sites of exception within the Keynesian-Fordist state’s demography-cartography (Connolly, 2014; Taylor, 2019). This had devastating effects on Black communities who reformers along with police and politicians as well as ordinary White City residents viewed as detriments to long-term stability and growth and who they excluded and violently policed into ever-more concentrated segments defined by racial singularity, poverty, and failing infrastructures.

Dominant urban reformers imagined that they could save the city from blight, redefining normative urban citizenship through an embrace of technical expertise, planning, and more subtly policing. In 1944, architects Oscar Stonorov and Louis Kahn published You and Your Neighborhood: A Primer for Neighborhood Planning with the financial support of Revere Brass and Copper Incorporated. The primer is a remarkable testament to the efforts of planners to shape a vision for urban citizenship and governance. Stonorov and Kahn envisioned a novel mode of citizenly responsibility that drew on earlier Progressive intellectual thought, architectural theory, and social reformism but which also signaled the consolidation of a novel affective structure reinforcing state power in the context of post–New Deal Keynesian-Fordist urban governance. Stonorov and Kahn hailed citizens as people dutifully concerned and engaging in action to ensure the “the continuing value and future” of their neighborhoods. As opposed to “mere residents”—that is people holding physical space but not enhancing their homes, blocks, neighborhoods, communities, and the larger cities—Stonorov and Kahn hailed citizens through a call for them to “assume responsibility for [the neighborhood’s] defense from decay.” To prevent “the good parts” of the neighborhood from being “contaminated by the bad,” Stonorov and Kahn’s primer took up a pedagogy of citizenship whereby they walked residents through the processes of forming a community planning committee, assessing the conditions of their neighborhood, and galvanizing behind municipal planning commissions and politicians to achieve the task of “saving” the city from blight. The primer included sample materials that residents turned activated citizens could take up in the quest to enhance their neighborhood, community, and city (Stonorov & Kahn, 1944).

Essential to the vision of urban citizenship that Stonorov and Kahn promoted in the Primer was the cartographic relief provided by the dark spaces of the racialized slum. Before moving into their discussion about how to build and plan a functional community to achieve “standard” and “stable” living, Stonorov and Kahn distinguished the audience the Primer as the people living “neighborhoods that are ALIVE” rather than those simply inhabiting “neighborhoods that are DEAD.” ⁴ For Stonorov and Kahn, these “DEAD” areas were parts of the city where “[d]ecay has gone too far.” Although Philadelphia is never mentioned by the primer’s authors, the image accompanying the description of “DEAD” neighborhoods is a sketch that depicts three faceless children standing beside an antiquated gas lamp in “an alley court,” a dense form of housing reviled by reformers and planners and characteristic of Philadelphia’s core neighborhoods in many instances through the 1960s. Although Stonorov and Kahn never use racial signifiers in their primer, the overall descriptive thrust as well as the development through images projects normal citizenship against the backdrop of slum life which in their home city Philadelphia became racialized with the mass movement of Black migrants from the American South and the Caribbean between the 1910s and 1945. The images they mobilized in sketch resonated with a consistent local tradition of documenting poverty that often captured poor Black children paying amid the rubble of capitalist abandonment and redundancy. Stonorov and Kahn, as the leading architects in Philadelphia’s public housing projects and in rehabilitation and redevelopment projects took this imaginary with them into their work, justifying the work of the Planning Commission to destroy Black neighborhoods indiscriminately as insalubrious, dangerous, and dead.

Without naming the DEAD zone as Black, Stonorov and Kahn express racial Blackness as part of a spatial idiom and grammar of darkness whereby life, “standard living,” and a stable and productive futures came into sharp relief over and against darkness and Blackness conflated with death. In their cartographic imaginary, the dark slum was marked as a space of exception that ensured the sovereignty of the citizen under nascent modes of Keynesian-Fordist governance. Operating within a vision for citizenship linked intimately with business, the slums for Stonorov and Kahn were too decrepit, too far gone to be saved by “private enterprise.” Rather the slums were “blemish[es]” that required “public responsibility” and “cooperation” from federal, state, and municipal authorities for their full “extinction.” For Stonorov and Kahn, the darkened slum represented the ultimate proving ground for the Keynesian citizen as it tested the limits of the urban “public” which in the Primer is constituted partly though the democratized power to eradicate the threats posed by dark slums to normal life and standard living (Stonorov & Kahn, 1944).

In their assessment of the dark slum as encapsulating death, these thinkers drew on a Progressive and post-Progressive social-spatial imaginary wherein Blackness and death were co-constitutive categories of analysis and intervention. Beginning in the 1880s, the “slum” was increasingly understood as a distinctive entity characterized not only by insalubrious housing but also by degraded forms of biological, familial, and communal life. At the same time, the United States witnessed the rise of the statistical imagination in American statecraft, defined from the outset by racialist thinking and forming social scientists outlook on the disintegration of postindustrial landscapes not as functions of (racial) capitalist glut but rather as part of the social or biological peculiarity of those inhabiting the slum. In the years preceding the recapitalization of the City Planning Commission, Bernard J. Newman, the Philadelphia Housing Association (later the Housing Association of the Delaware Valley), drew together a network of more than 40 charitable and reformist organizations in the City in the name of relieving the worst conditions of slum life, advocated for the recapitalization of the City Planning Commission, and worked with the City’s various agencies to enforce the City’s housing code violations, setting the ground for the 1940s. Their efforts concentrated in what Newman (1932) referred to, in a rehearsal of Kahn and Stornov’s “DEAD” zone as a “forgotten city” within the larger plant of Philadelphia:

It is in the area of greatest population loss, that is, from Poplar Street to Washington Avenue, between the two rivers, that the greatest amount of insanitation and substandard living conditions exist. It is here that the provisions of the Housing Code are most flagrantly violated and the greater part of the inspection work of the Housing Association is done. Structurally unsafe or badly dilapidated houses are crowded in small lot areas without street frontage; uneven or broken paving causes pools of stagnant water; garbage and waste are calessly disposed of on the sidewalk and in alleys’ filth abounds inside and out and the water supply is wholly inadequate in most dwellings.

According to Newman, this forgotten City, the core residential neighborhoods directly adjoining Center City, was dangerous to the physical and social well-being of adults but most significantly children—the embodiments of the City’s future. According to Newman, “the structural defects with faulty maintenance creates conditions which are dangerous to life and limb” exacerbated by the lack of planning and new construction that might provide systematic relief and “rehabilitate families” (Newman, 1932).

Newman’s primary metaphors for the negative effects of housing the City’s poorest residents in in the “forgotten city” were those of disability and debilitation. Unlike the eugenicists who reached the zenith of their influence a decade prior, but who also engaged in similar investigations of living conditions, Newman did not view the relationship between economic, social, and physical degradation as a permanent feature of inheritance (Estabrook, Davenport). Rather drawing from the other end of the Progressive intellectual and reform tradition, he advocated housing as a technology to “recover” and “rehabilitate” normative families to insure the reproduction of the city along the contours outlined by growth and progress. However, Newman and the network of reformers he helped amass were committed, like the eugenicists before them to the eradication of forms of life viewed as incommensurate with normative futures couched in stable development and growth in capitalist markets.

Between the 1920s and the 1940s, the Philadelphia Housing Association served as a key organization in the rise of urban planning in Philadelphia because of its efforts first in relation to advocacy for private homeownership and later its embrace of public housing in the remaking of the cityscape. Throughout the 1930s, The Philadelphia Housing Association sought to replace the poorly designed bandbox and alley court, increasingly understood as forms of “Negro housing” with the reformulated individual home built by independent, for-profit contractors and situated in a plant with space for orderly and productive leisure. The intent of these reimagined spaces was the reorganization of working class social life, particularly among Black migrants, in the normative family and home.

Central to Newman’s notion of “normal” life was an interpretation of normative gender roles and sexual roles that in his view certain kinds of slum housing threatened. According to Newman, certain styles of bandbox or subdivided row house and apartment living of the city’s slums threatened the reproduction of normal life, defined by labor, cleanliness, and proper social-spatialization. Newman moved beyond just the visual signifiers of slum life and invoked “the flare of the radios, the neighbors ‘making whoopee’, which in the reverberating echoes of the walled-in courts” he lamented, were “the despair of the tired and sleepy” (Newman, 1928). Newman invoked uncontained sexuality, echoing off of walls, and the rowdiness of music to index the demoralizing effects of the types of accommodation that made these communities dangerous. Generated out of the sensuality of poor Black communities, and indexed through the promiscuous sounds in the cramped arrangement of the apartment, were the looming threats of social disorder in pre-federal visions of urban futurity that in turn formed the ground for the postwar efforts to radically edit the city.

Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement and Black Queer Futurity

In this context of the derision of Black migrants and their association with uncontained sexuality, decrepit housing, disease, debilitation, and death, the Rev. Major Jealous Divine, better known as Father Divine, shifted the operation of his organization the Peace Mission Movement from Harlem to Philadelphia, creating a competing architecture of the urban future. The organization, which began to coalesce through the racially subversive teachings of Divine in the South, Brooklyn, and then Long Island in the 1920s, ballooned during the Depression and began a long steady decline in the immediate postwar era (Watts, 1992). Building out from the esoteric teachings of Divine, the Peace Mission articulated a future of collective peace and prosperity up and out from the urban core. Here, the Peace Mission departed from the primary means and ends of dominant urbanists. Rather than individual property organized around a breadwinner, adherents of Divine’s teachings collectivized resources. They purchased significant holdings in property that included gender segregated collective housing, luxury hotels, beach resorts, defunct YMCA’s, abandoned institutional church buildings, businesses, and restaurants that constituted an alternative to the racially and class segregated spaces ordained by reformers and planners, identifying inequality as the perpetrator of conflict and war. The followers of Divine countered the bifurcated space of the city embedded within plans centered on (racial) capitalist growth, instead seeking a vision of widespread prosperity wherein not only misery and redundancy might be eradicated but which also promised for believers the banishment of death itself. The Peace Mission embraced a queer form of Black urban futurity through their concomitant rejection of heteronormative reproduction and the nuclear family which dominant urbanist viewed as the primary spatial-social technologies of stability in capitalist growth. Members seeking prosperity and vitality in the present, rather than in a displaced future understood in orthodox American Christianity as heaven, required that they adopt radical asexuality, reject the bonds of heterosexual sex and marriage, and adopt a vision of community wherein all forms of human to human connection were recast on the basis of the nonhierarchical relations of siblings.

Within the space that reformers and regional planners began as part of the metropolitan centering in Philadelphia, the Peace Mission bought and remade twelve or more major properties between 1939 and 1952. The Peace Mission collectively purchased dilapidated, damaged, and abandoned properties and used their skills as carpenters and masons to create spaces that observers remarked on as “such a place where no one can be ashamed to enter.” In addition, the Peace Mission bought properties in exclusive sections of these metropolitan regions, opening what had once been exclusive and segregated hotels into ones accessible to working class and Black beach goers, vacationers, and worshipers. Alongside churches or missions, housing, and businesses, it is clear that the Peace Mission bought a sizable portion of real estate. In 1937, Divine’s followers exceeded 50,000 and the Peace Mission Movement’s real estate holdings reached the millions in value, with over 150 missions (Weisbrot, 1983). Taken together, the Peace Mission Movement had amassed US$885,000 in taxable assets by 1957. In Philadelphia, adherents of the Peace Mission Movement bought and transformed a network of churches and training schools in North, South, and West Philadelphia, the Divine Lorraine Hotel at Broad and Fairmont, the Divine Tracy Hotel near the University of Pennsylvania, twelve gender-specific live-in spaces, and various small businesses.

For example, in December 1943, the Unity Mission, Inc. purchased property owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad which had been used primarily as a YMCA at Forty-first street and Westminster Avenue in West Philadelphia. The property was in a dilapidated state and had been “badly vandalized.” Although the property was apparently in disrepair, the newly formed Unity Mission Church, Home and Training School, incorporated to inhabit and make use of the space under the auspices of the Peace Mission, employed a group of its members, trained in various trades, to restore the building. The community in which the building stood had in an earlier era been a relatively prosperous working class ethnic White community. By the middle of the 1940s, however, it had been taken up primarily by recent Black immigrants primarily from below the old Mason-Dixon. As Marcus Hunter illustrates, West Philadelphia and North Philadelphia were appropriated by what he calls Black citymakers extending new communities rather than simply being displaced (Hunter, 2013). On March 20, 1945, Celestine Fulchon, a resident, teacher, and activist in the West Philadelphia community surrounding the Unity Mission Church at Forty-first Street and Westminister Avenue attended the weekly Righteous Government Banquet to honor Divine and the Peace Mission for their efforts in restoring a key resource in what the city had come to see as simply a deteriorating neighborhood and community. Fulchon noted that she had “worked in this community for twenty years” during which time, residents repeatedly “told them down at the City Hall, that in this community we need a building like this for all Americans.” Prior to the efforts of the Peace Mission’s cadre of men who restored the building, as Fulchon explained, the community’s 20,000 school aged children had no “place between the Schuylkill River and 47th Street and the railroad and Market Street to play and exercise themselves.” Furthermore, she had helped to organize “several thousand names while this building stood idle” which the community presented to the Chairman of the City’s Finance Committee, but all to no avail. Furthermore, as she noted, the district had been noted as having the highest level of juvenile crime and yet the city, which told the community members who approached them about remaking it, that it could not be reconditioned for use. ⁵ The Peace Mission had restored the building to full use and opened it to people irrespective of their racial identities, substituting community institutions in the wake of social and economic abandonment and after a line of direct political mobilization directed at the city failed to produce results.

Critically at the edge of disinvestment, a border region erected in the city, where social malaise and economic hardship created a necrotic zone, the Peace Mission revitalized a structure and appropriated the edifice as an alternative infrastructure of community. This was a common practice of various kinds of Black social and religious institutions in Philadelphia and beyond (Crumbley, 2012; Fauset 1944/2001; Weisenfeld, 2017). Communities who planners and other urban futurists defined as beyond boundary of the social, created congregation. Here, congregation represents a key form of insurgent Black social life as a kind of untamed vivaciousness and life force emerging in spaces where nothing is expected but death (Williamson, 2017). The Peace Mission’s property engendered a sense of communal living that destabilized the edict of segregation as a way of maintaining value that the governing property regime forwarded.

The Peace Mission recreated a number of spaces and this was a means by which they intended not only to transform the community and the buildings, some which were luxurious and others they bought in disrepair, as well as a process of total human transformation. As folklorist Leonard Norman Primiano (2014) posits, it

is especially significant about the Peace Mission’s expression of perfection is that they did not seek perfection by building environments of their own creation, but instead, in the words of Father Divine, they sought to’[bring] perfection’ to structures already constructed. The movement created a unique religious vernacular architecture not by architectural design, but by a spiritualized appropriation of existing spaces.

This spiritualized appropriation laid the foundations for transformative relationships and the reengineering of the basic infrastructure of human sociality, which had incalculable effects on the deep cultural practices of the members and which expressed a rather queer and heterodox vision of urban futurity. Importantly, these spiritually reimagined spaces challenged the government sanctioned practices of segregation undergirding and governing Philadelphia’s spatial economy and sought to revitalize tattered communities through the collective efforts of members. In the process, these recreated and reimagined spaces of human habitation and belonging articulated the basic infrastructure in which reimagined human relations organized around expanded notions of belonging flourished in the name of peace.

The repair and rehabilitation of the building was not simply a matter of repairing the neighborhood but served the Peace Mission’s wider mission of transformative community out from the city block to the wider universe. At the consecration of the new Unity Mission Church on December 20, 1944, a year after it was purchased, Divine delivered a sermon that demonstrated the ways that this type of work to reclaim neighborhood spaces was to echo in ways that would shake the foundations of the unjust world that the disrepair signaled. Divine preached,

I am changing not only the tides of governmental affairs, but changing the hearts and minds and characteristics and the dispositions of the children of men, bringing them into subjection to a supernatural presence that cometh not with observation! By this we shall have a Righteous Government and every adverse and undesirable system of men shall eventually be completely wiped out! I do not come representing races, creeds, nor colors, for every such expression of divisibility will eventually bring you misery, disappointment and failure. But as you hear ME say my composition and my inspiration in the actuated words of expression, “UNITY MISSION” this church in its name is bearing witness of itself in its characteristics, in disposition, in the very actuated words of expression. In this HOLY COMMUNION HALL where we are standing and sitting we expressing the MISSION’S name characteristically! Aren’t you glad! ⁶

Critically, Peace Mission adherents sought proximity to Divine and this required their extrication from the normative boundaries of the nuclear, conjugal family. The rearrangement of the potential affective ties and their suturing in alternative formulations represented the wellspring out of which the organizations disruptive or queer potential drew, by organizing a quite different circuit over, around, and despite difference, and similar in function to what Audre Lorde famously named the erotic. As Lorde puts it poetically, “[t]he erotic is a resource within each of us” which is “firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” Furthermore, after juxtaposing the erotic with the pornographic—“the direct denial of power of the erotic” and “the suppression of true feeling”—Lorde elaborates the ways that the erotic functions to “for a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference” (Gill, 2014; Lorde, 2020b [1984]). Furthermore, after juxtaposing the erotic with the pornographic—“the direct denial of power of the erotic,” and “the suppression of true feeling”—Lorde elaborates the ways that the erotic functions to “for a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference” (Lorde, 2020b [1984]). Difference for Lorde (2020a [1984]), under an alternative regime of interdependence and mutuality, might be seen as “a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”

Re-territorialization of social connections at the basis of socialized belonging, the “family” was indeed disruptive for many of the adherents of the Peace Mission and helped to precipitate novel and lasting formulations of belonging. As scholar Jill Watts described, as early as 1913 and 1914, Divine found himself in trouble following a mission trip to the U.S. South. After a few months in Valdosta, Georgia, he created a stir among women who gave up sex with their husbands and pushed them to share equally in caring for the home, until the Black men of the area charged him with lunacy. Watts (1992) explains regarding Divine’s first efforts in New York:

Within his Brooklyn colony, he reconstructed familial relationships and provided his followers with the ideal substitute family. Before joining his flock, many disciples had suffered through divorces, abuse, and homes wrecked by social and economic hardships. The Brooklyn colony was a happy alternative, a financially sound and stable family guided by a stern but loving father and a compassionate and dependable mother. As children, the followers relinquished a certain degree of control over their lives but gained security and tranquility. (p. 36)

Again, this departed from the model of stable urban social life defined through the attachments of blood and property prescribed through reformer’s, planner’s, and architects, designs supporting through spatial means breadwinner ideology.

In 1933, nearly a decade into their marriage, Lillian Roberts decided to leave her husband, Charles, a tailor in Baltimore, and to pursue a life, along with her children Elliot, Abner, and Enos in New York with the Peace Mission Movement. She had joined the Peace Mission Movement in 1932, no doubt in response to the growing efficacy attributed to Divine following the publicity of his miraculous abilities in the early 1930s. Although Charles Roberts had desired to prevent Lillian from taking their three sons with her to join the “cult,” he was unsuccessful. However, after a month or so in New York, Lillian contacted Charles to let her know of the children’s whereabouts. Charles retrieved not only the three boys, but Lillian as well. Immediately, however, Lillian refused to continue conjugal relations with her husband, moved into a separate room, and eventually left completely to live with another woman who was also an adherent of the Peace Mission Movement. Vernon Caldaira also of Baltimore testified in court that Lillian had told him that her devotion to Divine would not permit her to continue marital relations but rather to reincorporate her relationship with her husband as one organized horizontally along the lines of “sister” and “brother.” Caldaira quoted Lillian as having told him that she got “everything she wanted for Father Divine in natural desire.” ⁷ In September 1934, Jean Goldsmith filed for a full divorce in a Los Angeles court. Her husband, a chiropractor, had “abandoned” her and their young child, hitch-hiking to New York City to join the proximate orbit of the Peace Mission Movement around Divine. According to Goldsmith, she had attended a meeting of the local mission in Los Angeles to the great excitement of her husband. However, after he grabbed her in glee, another adherent warned him not to kiss her. According to Goldsmith, from that point forward, her husband had stopped kissing her and engaging in the conjugal aspects of their marriage. In July 1935, Samuel Green, Jr., a post office clerk, forced his estranged wife, Madeline Green, to appear before New York judge Samuel D. Levy. The court had subpoenaed Madeline several times to face the court for having “abandoned” her husband and seven children. As reported in the Baltimore Afro-American, Madeline had chosen to leave her children and husband for a life in the Peace Mission Movement and in the tread of Father Divine. Although she had attempted to convert her children to Divine’s teachings, against the “prayers they learned at the Bethel AME Church,” her husband’s refusal to transition into a life as prescribed by Divine eventually led her to take flight to the Mission house located at 21 W. 117th Street in Harlem, NY. As Madeline recounted,

I had been attending the meetings of Father Divine and learning more and more each day about his teachings. I desired to live like that— to live a life of sacrifice. Everything else must fade before sacrifice. Nothing else matters. I couldn’t live with my husband; that would be living in the flesh and living in the flesh is sin. ⁸

In the end, the Samuel Green decided to give his children to the Children’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

The Peace Mission in effect revised small-scale belonging and intimacy and created queer and antinormative modes of belonging in their wake. These served as the basis for alternatives to the compulsory nuclear family embedded within dominant urbanists visions of urban futures dependent on the conscription of individuals to the nuclear family and its large-scale analog, the race. By reformulating the lines of human to human connection and by spiritually appropriating the city’s infrastructures of living and community, adherents of Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement expressed a queer horizon for the City’s future, wherein peace would ensue from the reimagined social relations remade from hierarchical ones to the flattened, asexual, and queer “siblings.” The Peace Mission Movement, though not explicitly in embrace of same-sex desire, nevertheless contributed to a peculiarly Black queer vision of the City and its future, radically afield of the state’s investments in reproductive futurity, growth, and market stability.

In part due to their prohibitions against touching one another in the carnal sense, they elaborated new affective architectures, those of ecstatic consecration wherein in the name of devotion to Divine they created healing spaces defined by abundance and collective well-being (Abdur-Rahman, 2018; Roane, 2018). Through touch—that is being touched by Divine’s words, or through being compelled by an extension of hapticity, emotion, and memory through correspondence with one another—devotees of Father Divine’s Peace Mission created death defying spaces in the City wherein they could ward off the vulnerability of debilitation and physical mortality as well as the condemnation to scarcity imposed on blackness by reformers, dominant urbanists, politicians, landlords, and police. They worked to partially refashion the city’s future horizon defining the aims of their efforts through universal well-being and peace, rather than distinction, separation, exception, racism, and war.

Conclusion

By disarticulating Black migrants from the vision by dominant reformers under urban renewal which held the (White) nuclear family and its social reproduction as the primary insurers of long-term stability and growth, Father Divine’s Peace Mission proposed an alternative future on the basis of a Black queer horizon defined by asexuality and the rejection of normative conceptions of the family, the home, and the social-spatial organization of kinship and community. Although their vision for nonreproductive futures, defined by the absence of death and sickness, have faded with the organization’s aging membership, the organization opened the path to explicitly Black queer political organizing in the decades to follow in Philadelphia, ironically birthing such activists as Jon Paul Hammond who the organization’s adherents could not have predicted but who nevertheless drew on their visions of remade social life and queer futurity in his efforts as one of the city’s harm reduction leaders (Roane, 2016). Although the Peace Mission did not embrace queer sex in the specific sense of same gender-loving identities, the organization did seek to transform sexual-social relations in ways that we should interpret as part of the wider operation of the queerness of blackness—its disruptive and eruptive possibilities for a new future horizon, what Ashon Crawley terms a world otherwise (Crawley, 2017). The Peace Mission disrupted the normative reproduction of biological and social life under the bourgeois model of the family city planners implied within their designs for housing and other infrastructures of living, setting the ground for the emergence of other queer social formations in confrontation with growth in the late 20th century including the radical naturalist organization MOVE and the city’s frontline queer harm reductionist organization Prevention Point. Although the connections between heterodox Black religious organizations and explicit queer politics are not easily anticipated given our straight-laced historical and social-scientific methods that often silo queer social worlds from the wider experiences of Black urban life and politics, these connections, especially as I expand on them in the larger project, demonstrate the ways in which the Black radical tradition recreated itself across the 20th century, not in the straightforward manner characteristic of lineage, but rather through a rather queer and circuitous route of futurism, failure, and the emergence of previously unthinkable possibilities in the wake of collapse.