The Black Utopians

August 1, 2024

NEA grantee Robertson's book shows that formerly enslaved people established 200 to 1,200 settlements in the U.S. and Canada between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, and their frameworks for self-ruled and safe spaces for Black people bear emotional and tangible links to the Black nationalism of the 1960s and '70s and the 21st-century Black Lives Matter movement. Unfolding a broad, nuanced narrative of personal reflection and familial connection, Robertson explores individual and collective ideas and efforts among Black people striving to realize the security of independence. The narrative moves between the author's hometown of Detroit and his ancestral home in Promise Land, a middle Tennessee village founded by Black people during the Reconstruction era. He focuses on Detroit minister Albert Cleage Jr. (1911-2000), his Shrine of the Black Madonna church, the Black Christian Nationalism it symbolized, and Beulah Land, the 4,000 church-owned acres in South Carolina that were envisioned as a haven to physically and psychologically liberate Black people. VERDICT This enticing mix of personal and general history of Black utopian safe spaces promises to engage readers interested in reckoning with the past and present of Black American experiences and milestones.--Thomas J. Davis

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Starred review from September 2, 2024
Translator Robertson (Beyond Babylon) debuts with an ambitious and captivating group portrait of African American visionaries who sought to escape the “persistence of abysmal realities for black people” by setting up self-sustaining communities. Opening the narrative with a visit to his ancestral home in Promise Land, Tenn.—“one of the oldest-known settlements founded by formerly enslaved people”—Robertson then delves into the history of the migration of freedmen and their descendants (including Robertson’s grandparents) from Tennessee to Detroit, and the founding of Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna church, a “countercultural mecca” that gained momentum in the 1960s when Black Detroiters displaced by gentrification were pushed into the surrounding neighborhood. Headed in the 1960s by “firebrand” pastor and Black Nationalist leader Albert Cleage Jr. (later known as Jaramogi Abebe), the church became a hub for utopian experimentation, such as Mtoto House, a “communal child-rearing” experiment based on socialist kindergartens in the Soviet Union and kibbutzim in Israel. Speaking to and researching former Mtoto House residents and other participants in Black utopian projects, as well as reflecting on his family’s “sacred” relationship with Promise Land, Robertson paints a vivid and beguiling picture of the indomitable human yearning for a safe and nurturing home. It’s a must-read.

September 1, 2024
Inventing an ideal. Translator, editor, and essayist Robertson makes his book debut with an informative history of Black Christian Nationalism, an ambitious utopian experiment begun in 1967 by radical activist pastor Albert Cleage Jr. Predicated on "the historic truth that Jesus was the Black Messiah," Cleage called his church The Shrine of the Black Madonna; its central image was a startling mural of a Black Madonna, painted by iconoclastic artist Glanton Dowdell. Under Cleage's leadership, the shrine served as a cultural center and the launching place for a larger mission for Blacks to take control of institutions that had been oppressing them. By 1971, Robertson reports, "the Shrine's agricultural, technical, and manufacturing (ATM) program was conceived so that the Black Christian Nationalists could one day grow and can their own food, train their own corps of construction, electrical, and plumbing specialists, and provide resources to meet whatever unforeseen needs would one day arise." Interwoven with the eventful life stories of Cleage and Dowdell are nine letters written by Robertson's father, Dorian, who had been in prison for robbery for ten years as his son grew up. As he reflects on the circumstances that led to his imprisonment, and on God, freedom, and family, Dorian exemplifies a man "born into a land of evil and violence," depressed and alienated. He was precisely the kind of man to benefit from Cleage's vision of a New Black World, "where evictions did not happen, where there were few worries, no social disorganization, no isolation, no abuse of women, no abandonment of children, no bad schools, no diseased spirits." Those ideals, Robertson finds, continue to inform many recently established intentional communities that prioritize the care and dignity of people of color. A fresh perspective on Black history.

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Starred review from October 1, 2024
While the concept of utopia often involves naive idealism, Black American utopians have focused on "providing safe havens where their families could work, study and worship without fear of racist interference." Such was the goal of Albert Cleage, a minister who broke from traditional Christianity to establish the Black Christian Nationalist movement. Frustrated by the slow pace of the civil rights movement and disgusted by the complicity of white churches in continued Black oppression, Cleage re-created his Black Detroit church, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, as a base for revolution, ""a countercultural mecca," and "a prophetic vanguard that would secure the psychological liberation and material well-being of black people." Drawing on the Garveyite movement and the Nation of Islam, which both emphasized Black economic independence, and the Israeli kibbutz movement's socialist lifestyle, Cleage was unique in insisting that Black revolutionary thought could exist within Christianity, given that the church was "the epicenter of black American life." Robertson ties this story to reflections on his family inheritance in the all-Black Tennessee town of Promise Land, his father's letters from prison, and the life of painter Glanton Dowdell, the visionary creator of the shrine's mural of a Black Madonna and child. This fascinating and resonant history has been hidden far too long.

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