Harlem, and What Arrived After 1965

The Great Migration moved southern black churches north, and Harlem became their capital. Abyssinian Baptist grew into one of the largest Protestant congregations in the country and sent its minister to Congress; storefront churches filled the side streets; and the gospel music that developed in these buildings reshaped American religious singing. Father Divine's Peace Mission ran banquets and businesses on a theology that identified its leader with God and an insistence on integrated membership that was extraordinary for the 1930s.

The Nation of Islam's Temple Number Seven in Harlem became the base of Malcolm X, its minister from the mid 1950s and the reason the movement grew from hundreds to tens of thousands. He broke with it in 1964, made the pilgrimage to Mecca, wrote that seeing Muslims of every colour worshipping together had changed his view of race, and was murdered in February 1965 at a meeting hall in Washington Heights.

That same year Congress removed the national origins quotas, and the religious map of the city was redrawn within a generation. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada arrived in 1965, chanted in a park on the Lower East Side and opened the first Hare Krishna temple in the West in a storefront on Second Avenue. Hindu temples were built in Queens from the 1970s, Chinese Buddhist temples in Chinatown and Flushing, and mosques serving South Asian, Arab, West African and African American congregations across all five boroughs.