The Father Divine ProjectMain Menu"Inside the Kingdom": The Evolution of the Peace Mission"A Greater Picture of ME": The Peace Mission ArchiveSince the late 1930s, Father Divine and his followers oversaw the documentation of the Peace Mission's own history and public pronouncements in a weekly newspaper, with wire and tape recordings, film and photography."I Know You Are God": A Database Documentary by Will LuersAbout The Father Divine ProjectWill Luers2f0376b300f2ff7145f4f5c8f06d3ab51e0c730dLeonard Norman Primianob55769156974a9bf4a4c74973f47ef4191206d21
Father Divine and Mother Divine posing in front of flowers (1950s)
Theseweddinganniversaryphotographs from the archive of Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, express a unique religious belief system through the vernacular of American wedding photography.
Within an iconography of conservative American values and the stylistic codes of wealth, independence and success, the photographs perform a radical act that would have been shocking to most of the public in the 1940s and the 1950s. Marriage between the races was socially taboo and in many states illegal. The photographs "visualize" the social ideal of racial harmony through the celibate 1946 marriage between Father Divine, a 65 year-old African American man, and Mother Divine, a 21 year-old white Canadian woman.
