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As the good times of the twenties faded into the dismal days of the Great Depression, Walker’s fortune diminished, and she had to sell Villa Lewaro, her huge estate outside the city in Irvington, New York. However, she continued to dine well. Champagne was her signature drink, and she quaffed it until the end. In 1931, as the Harlem Renaissance waned, the woman that poet Langston Hughes had referred to as the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920’s” died at the age of forty-six following a dinner of lobster, chocolate cake, and champagne. Her death signaled the end of an era and the incipient end of the glory days of Harlem.

Prohibition lasted until 1933, but the gilded age of Harlem ended with the stock market crash of 1929. The Great Depression changed Harlem; the days of rent parties, cabarets, and clubs were gone, replaced by job losses and even harder economic struggles for the already strapped Harlem residents and for all those throughout the country. Blacks, who were in many cases only a generation or two from enslavement, knew that when the economy went bad in the United States, African Americans were the first to feel its tightening grip. By 1934, the jobless rate among black American men was at 40 percent in Chicago and 48 percent in Harlem. In the South it was worse, with 80 percent of black workers applying for public assistance. The tenuous footholds that had been gained in the boom years were rapidly eroded, and workers found themselves competing with newly unemployed whites for jobs previously considered “negro jobs.” It was time for prayer and reorganization.

If the Harlem of the 1920s placed its emphasis on the Saturday-night rent parties and celebrations of the secular world, the Harlem of the 1930s turned to the church. Just as the churches north and south had been prime movers in the migration northward for so many, in the bad times of the deepening Depression they offered blacks north and south a way to band together. During these hard times, many former Saturday-night sinners joined the ranks of the Sunday saints. There were many denominations to choose from: African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, Christian Methodist Episcopal, National Baptist Convention Incorporated, National Baptist Convention of America Unincorporated, Progressive National Baptist Convention, and the Church of God in Christ, as well as smaller localized groups. One of the most important institutions of the 1930s, though, was outside the usual Christian denominations: Father Divine’s Peace Mission movement. It was founded by a charismatic leader, used food and feasting as a focal point of worship, and insisted on self-help and entrepreneur-ship. It was a perfect faith for its era.

Father Major Jealous Divine was born somewhere in the South around 1876. His early life is unrecorded and shrouded in mystery and confusion; he traveled as an itinerant preacher in the South and the West. He began to come to national attention when he established himself in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn around 1914 with a few of his disciples and opened his apartments to the nonaffiliated for meetings and meals. These banquets were lavish and free. He also provided shelter to any who asked and respected his doctrines at low cost or for an extremely nominal fee. He preached a doctrine of sobriety and hard work, honesty, racial equality, and sexual abstinence. By 1919, Divine had moved to Sayville, Long Island, and recruited more members, some of them black servants of wealthy white families and some whites as well. Major Divine became Father Divine, self-proclaimed god. His flock grew, and people traveled to hear him speak and to hear his notions of racial equality. (His second wife, Sister Penny, was white.) Though they came by the hundreds to hear his speeches, in the depths of the Depression, many came to participate in the sharing of food at the banquets, which became one of the defining practices of the religion. Sara Harris, a former social worker who wrote about Father Divine in the 1950s, recalled attending one of the