New World A-Coming by Judith Weisenfeld

Author:Judith Weisenfeld [Weisenfeld, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL000000 Religion / General
Publisher: NYU Press

Figure 5.1. Noble Drew Ali (center) and Pearl Drew Ali to his right, 1929. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Published accounts of wedding ceremonies highlight the distinctive MST wedding culture and the community’s enjoyment of the festivities. Following the language of Drew Ali’s marriage laws, members sometimes employed the term “obligated” to describe the Moorish ceremony itself, which one reporter described as brief, “occup[ying] about thirty minutes, . . . followed by an all day celebration.”33 In 1944 Sister L. Cocrane Bey, correspondent to the Moorish Voice from the Mount Clemens, Michigan, Temple, described the events of January 15, the date on which the MST celebrated the Moorish New Year. “Long tables were beautifully decorated for this occasion and everything the heart could wish in the line of food was on it.” She continued, “On this night three couples were obligated: Brother and Sister Washington El, Brother and Sister E. Thomas El and Brother and Sister Cochrane Bey all of Temple No. 43.”34 This account gives some sense of the power and significance of the MST obligation ceremony for members, for the North Carolina-born Cochrane Beys, Houston and Laura, had been married according to the state for more than twenty years. Tennessee natives Herschel Washington El, a laborer at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant and a grand sheik of the Mount Clemens Temple, and Martha Washington El had been married for eight years. On this occasion, they submitted to the ritual as proscribed by their prophet to obligate themselves to one another as Moorish Americans.35

Black press coverage of “Moorish nuptials” in the 1940s highlighted distinctive dress, diet, and ritual but, like coverage of Ethiopian Hebrew ceremonies, also cast them as much like other American weddings. In 1948 the Chicago Defender covered the ceremony joining together twenty-two-year-old Marilyn Garrett Bey and twenty-four-year-old Edward McClinton El, at which Brother Sidney Rosson El, a Mississippi native, early member of the MST, and Moorish minister, presided.36 Although Marilyn and Edward appear to have been the only MST members in their families, their parents and siblings participated in the large wedding celebration that took place at the MST Temple on East 40th Street.37 Defender reporter Rose E. Vaughn described a brief ceremony that began with the traditional “Wedding March” and featured readings from the Holy Koran. She found the distinctive Moorish dress striking, noting that the bride “was attired in a white brocaded satin blouse, rose colored pants, bloused at the ankle and a white satin sash. From her white turban-like headdress hung a cape of fuchsia trimmed in white fringes.” The groom “wore a multi-colored Oriental blouse, green velvet pants bloused at the ankle, a sash of the same material and color and a red fez.”38 Vaughn further noted the “unusual” wedding feast, at which no meat was served in accord with MST dietary practices, but “several kinds of fish and vegetables and ice cream, cakes and pies.” Press coverage of MST

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