Father Divine

George Baker was born around 1876 — the year and place have remained disputed by his biographers — most probably on Hutchinson Island in the Savannah River of southern Georgia, the son of Nancy Smith Baker, a recently emancipated woman who had been enslaved on a Maryland plantation, and George Baker Sr., a sharecropper. He worked from his teens as a hedge-clipper and gardener in the rice country of South Carolina and Georgia. He became around 1906 the disciple of the white holiness preacher Samuel Morris of Baltimore — known to his followers as Father Jehovia — and adopted around 1912 the title The Messenger.

He moved north to Brooklyn in 1914 with the holiness preacher John Hickerson and there acquired the small congregation he would lead for the following fifty-one years. He took around 1917 the title Major J. Devine, and around 1932 the title Father Divine. He moved the centre of his ministry from Brooklyn to the suburb of Sayville on Long Island in 1919 and to Harlem in 1932. From the Harlem headquarters at 126th Street he built what would within five years become the largest interracial religious organisation in the United States — the International Peace Mission Movement.

The Peace Mission Movement operated from its peak in the mid-1930s a network of "heavens" — co-operative residential and commercial properties — across at least twenty states and three continents. The Movement ran restaurants serving meals at fifteen cents, employment exchanges, dry cleaners, garages, laundries and a hotel system that maintained an explicit non-discrimination policy on race a generation before federal civil-rights law. The Movement also taught the doctrine of celibacy among its members — including between husbands and wives — and the doctrine that Father Divine was the bodily incarnation of God. The latter doctrine, contentious then and now, was sustained throughout his life by Father Divine himself.

His followers numbered at the peak of the Movement an estimated two million; the verifiable figure is probably in the lower hundreds of thousands. He died at the Movement's Woodmont estate near Philadelphia on the tenth of September 1965, at an estimated eighty-nine. His widow Mother Divine continued the Movement until her own death in 2017.

He is honored here as the founder of the Peace Mission.