Second Front in Harlem

"Shall we start, pilgrims . . . Yeah! Yeah! ... by taking the people of Harlem, pilgrims . . . Yeah! Yeah! ... up the long stairway to heaven, pilgrims. Yeah! Yeah! Preach that word brother!

"Now Harlem's no worse than any place else. You Bet! But you gotta get your mind out of Harlem into Heaven! Amen! You can do it by singing. And I've come to sing hell out of Harlem! Praise the Lord!

"Is everybody happy, pilgrims? Yeah! Yeah! If so, sing Hallelujah, pilgrims! Yeah! Yeah!"

Three thousand Negroes stirred restlessly on their wooden chairs in Harlem's huge Golden Gate Ballroom. The white-robed, white-gloved, white-carnationed Negro choir on the gold-&-blue velveted stage let go with Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The pianist took off. The congregation began to clap to. the beat. The clarinet rode away from the melody. A little old Negro woman, her wrinkled neck twitching like a cock's comb, sprang into the air and screamed. All over "the auditorium black heads bobbed ecstatically as if mounted on pogo sticks. From the stage rose the voice of the evangelist: "Let me hear them screams, pilgrims! Let me hear 'em!"

Thus, as he will every week for the next year, Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux took his famed Radio Church of God from its Washington, D.C., tabernacle to Manhattan "to open a second front against the Satanic kingdom." For singing the devil and hell out of a town, Elder Michaux—self-styled "General of the International Forces of Right against Wrong"—has at least one solid endorsement: successive police chiefs in Washington have declared his preaching reduces crime.

The Elder first felt the call to preach in 1917 while peddling fish near Norfolk. That very night he got some friends together, established a church. Ten years later he moved to Washington. Soon he was broadcasting regularly with his 156-voice chorus, which has been compared favorably with the virtuoso Hall Johnson Choir. For years he has taken over Washington's Griffith Stadium each Sunday night during the summer, drawn crowds of 10,000 to 40,000 with a heavy sprinkling of whites.

Michaux disciples must avoid "rum, rowdy women, slot machines and big talk." But excitement is provided them at the Elder's services. "That was a great mass meeting we had this morning, pilgrims," says the Elder when his congregation has really cut loose. "You can always tell when the Holy Ghost and fire come down. I got burnt this morning myself."

The Elder lives well on his followers' contributions, also runs housing projects, an employment agency, the Happy News Cafe. He denounces Father Divine as the "spirit of the devil incarnate," offers his followers no easy Divine-style heaven or sub-heavens. Instead, he warns them against being overoptimistic: "Some of you pilgrims think when you're buried that you'll wake up as white folks on Resurrection Day. Let me straighten you out on that right now. If you plant an Irish pertater, you don't get no sweet pertater vine. When God plants a colored boy, he ain't countin' on diggin' up a white feller."