The Gary American

Friday, November 19, 1937

Black
Gods
Versus
White

By WILLIAM PICKENS for A. N. P.

Some blonde girl of California, 20 years of age, ran off east with a busload of other pilgrims white and colored, to join one of Father Divine's New York "Heavens." Her parents came east and, naturally, had much difficulty in persuading this girl to leave heaven. For months and months this soul had been contended for between god and the others! The daily papers have made it "news on earth" but not very "good" news.

Why is it so much more sensational for a white gal to go for a black god than for black gals to go for a white god? For thousands of years the white devotees have boosted their gods to all the rest of mankind,--and now they back up, frown, freeze and turn whiter when a few of their color begin to find satisfaction and salvation in the grace of a black god. If black and kinky hair may worship blonde and straight hair for nearly a hundred generations, just why cannot red-haired whites bow to kinky-haired blacks for a few months in "Peace?" As usual, the whites have had the advantage in the trade all along, in length of time and number of followers.

We notice also that after this blonde gal from California had come east with the other wise ones and had spent only a few months in a black heaven, behold, she had risen from the simple estate of "Angel" to that of "Archangel." Rats! that's a heap more generous on the part of the black divinities than we ever find on the side of white divinities: we have yet to hear a black and kinky-headed girl [rise to] supernal realm of "archangel."

To our merely mundane mind it seems that gods, both black and white, ought to be at least good sports; if there has been no outcry against the idea of black gals worshipping white gods for a thousand years, then the white gods ought not to be drawing their thunderbolts simply because for a few years a few white gals have been bowing before the throne of a black god. Otherwise we must conclude that the white gods are no better than white men; these mortals, of course, demand a different pattern of conduct as between white and black women from that which they sanction as between black men and white women.

But--shucks and Sheol!--men are men. But gods--Hades and Hell--gods should be gods. If these gods and angels, white and black, cannot govern or control themselves, we American mortals will have to invoke the religious tolerance guarantee of our Constitution and make them respect it.