Musician Dizzy Gillespie embraced the Baha’i faith and its belief in universal humanity — a concept he saw reflected in jazz, which he viewed as a blending of musical elements from Africa and Europe.
Activist Angela Davis, faced with the horror of bombings by white supremacists as a youth in Birmingham, Alabama, took part in interracial discussion groups at her church.
Singer Tina Turner practiced both recitations of the Lord’s Prayer and chants of Buddhist Scripture.
The religion and resiliency of Black Americans are featured in “Spirit in the Dark: Religion in Black Music, Activism and Popular Culture,” a new exhibition of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“Spirit in the Dark,” is the first special exhibition to focus specifically on religion since the museum opened in 2016.
Photos and artifacts are accompanied by quotes of famous African American singers, clergy and writers from the pages of Ebony,Jet and Negro Digest (later known as Black World), all publications of the Johnson Publishing Company that, from its founding in 1942, sought to capture African American culture.
The exhibition, a presentation of the museum’s Center for the Study of African American Religious Life, is divided into three sections, including one called “Blurred Lines,” which notes the merging of the holy and profane in the lives of many well-known Black Americans.
Eric Lewis Williams, the museum’s curator of religion, points to a 1974 photo of Marvin Gaye, drawn from the Johnson Publishing Company Archive, as a highlight for him in the exhibition.
In the image, you see him with his hands uplifted,” he said of the pink-jacketed man, adding that Gaye’s “high fashion” head adornment “signifies that the person wearing it is under God.”
“We know he comes from the Hebrew Pentecostal tradition. You don’t know if he’s on the altar or he’s at a disco,” Williams told RNS.
All 37 of the framed photographs in the exhibition are drawn from the Johnson Publishing Company Archive, which the museum and the Getty Research Institute jointly acquired in July.
Williams, the son of a Pentecostal minister, said as he looked through the archive that he realized it was full of faith.
“I just was so amazed by how religion was everywhere. And not just Christianity. You had Hebraic traditions, you had Buddhism, you had Judaism,” he said.
The exhibition’s title, “Spirit in the Dark,” is also the name of an Aretha Franklin 1970 album, highlighting a song she sang in a period of national and personal tumult after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Among the artifacts in the museum’s collection that are on view for the first time is a Bible heavily underlined by Little Richard, placed beneath an album cover titled “Swingin’, Shoutin, Really Movin’ Gospel” that features Little Richard with blues and gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
“What I like about his Bible is you could see his wrestling with God, the scribbles and his markings,” said Williams of the singer, who grew up in a Pentecostal tradition. “He wrestled with God and wrestled with Scripture because his community of origin did not affirm his sexuality. And so we see him raising those kind of questions in the margins of his Bible.”
The most imposing artifact is a mannequin bearing a splashy outfit worn by Rev. Ike (the name used by the Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter), who preached prosperity via TV and radio and encouraged his mostly poor urban audience to aspire to wealthy lives.
Among the civil rights leaders cited in the “Bearing Witness” section that focuses on protest and praise are the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King and grassroots civil rights leaders Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, who grew up attending rural Baptist churches.
The exhibition, which also features an online dimension, is scheduled to be on view through November 2023.
