Chicago: The Geographical Institute Press, 1939. First edition. Octavo, 6 x 9 in. 159pp. Blue cloth boards stamped in gold on spine and front panel; lacking the dust jacket, if issued with one. Signed and inscribed by Ford on the front free endpaper: "To my great little helper, Irene Watkins White." Fraying and crushing at crown of spine. Worn at corners; boards just peeking through. Dust soiling to textblock top. Light musty odor. Internally clean and unmarked, save for the ownership signature at base of front flyleaf of Dr. Loretta M. Butler, presumably the former professor of Education at Xavier University, a Black Catholic college in New Orleans, Louisiana. Altogether a good to very good copy.
Subtitle: An anthropological and geographical restoration of the lost history of the American Negro people, being in part a theological interpretation of Egyptian and Ethiopian backgrounds. Compiled from ancient and modern sources, with a special chapter of eight Negro Spirituals.
Inscribed first edition of this scarce work of revisionist Black history, which neatly prefigures many of the themes explored by the later Black Arts and Afrofuturist movements, and is notable for being an important influence on the aesthetic development of American jazz composer Sun Ra.
Ford begins by asserting that the omission of Black ethnologies from the American record has only worked to exacerbate the rampant problems of racism. The corrective he proposes, elucidated from various angles over the course of the book, involves drawing a line from the cultural, spiritual, and phenotypic traits of contemporary Black Americans to their ancient Egyptian and Ethiopian roots, with the goal of restoring to Black culture the "accumulated folk-wisdom and social experience of a hundred centuries of civilization." While Ford's methodology at times strains credulity—a fact which the book's few contemporary reviews were quick to point out—his attempt to reclaim Black identity represents a radical anti-racist gesture, one animated by deep compassion and intellectual verve.
With regards to Ford himself, the historical record is scant. We have concluded, based on cross-checked research from contemporary newspapers, that he was a Black Chicagoan born in 1906 (making him around thirty-three at the time God Wills the Negro was published), a graduate of the University of Chicago, and a Captain-Chaplain in the U.S. Army during World War II. A bigamy-related scandal earned him some press in 1949, and the 1950 federal census finds a 44-year old Ford living with his mother in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago and working as a clerk at the U.S. Post Office; beyond that the trail goes cold.
His book's legacy, however, continues to be buoyed through its association to Sun Ra. According to the biography Space Is The Place (Szwed, 1997), a young Ra, then still going by his birth name of Herman Poole Blount, was given a copy of God Wills the Negro sometime in the late 1940s. The book fueled his increasing fascination with the culture and dress of the ancient Egyptians, and in 1952 he legally changed his name to Le Sony'r Ra, itself a reference to the Egyptian sun god. God Wills continued to exert such an enduring effect on Ra's imagination that he was later to include it on the reading list for his 1971 UC Berkeley lecture series, Afro-American Studies 198: "The Black Man in the Cosmos."
Ford's book is also the basis for a musical adaptation of the same name by composer and clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid, which premiered in Chicago in August 2022.
