This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here .
Digging through the basement of the Bishop Payne Library last year, I came across a book titled Black Christian Nationalism.
I laughed, snapped a photo to send it to my friend and co-editor Josiah, and kept on looking for the book I had meant to find. Josiah and I joked about how the book might confound this era of liberal Christians who are obsessed with rooting out “white Christian nationalism” — whatever that may be — but I couldn’t stop thinking about the book. Written by Albert B. Cleage, Jr., a pastor from Detroit, it is a provocative proposal that drew from separatist politics and liberation theology in the quest for the freedom of Black people.
Now, I’m no separatist, but I’m attuned to the criticism of those who asked: “What advantage is there in being integrated into a burning house.” The more I read about Cleage, the more intrigued I became. If, as Cleage believed, “Nothing is more sacred than the liberation of Black people,” then maybe I was a Black Christian nationalist, I said to myself — mostly in jest.
So, when I learned about Aaron Robertson’s The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, which tells the story of Cleage and his church, Shrine of the Black Madonna, I needed to know more. What I found in the book was significantly more than just the history of Cleage and Black utopian visions. Despite its simple title and clear focus, the book refuses any kind of essentialization.
Instead, he narrates the questions of Black utopias through the kaleidoscope of stories from his father; his family heritage in Promise Land, Tenn.; Cleage’s family; and even the artist Glanton Dowdell, who painted the Shrine’s title piece, “Black Madonna.” The Black Utopians is a stunning work of literature.
In our interview, I asked Robertson to tell me more about where he first grew interested in the questions of “utopias,” the ideology of Cleage, tensions present in Black utopian thinking, and resisting race essentialization.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: What is Promise Land, and what do you love about it?
Aaron Robertson: Promise Land is this historic Black town in middle Tennessee, where my family is from. My paternal grandfather was born there. And it was founded in 1870 by a group of freed persons who had been in the region. There were people who had fought in the Civil War and used part of their pensions to buy land.
Promise Land was located about an hour west of Nashville. Other founders had worked on one of the iron plantations that dotted this region of middle Tennessee. The town really reached its height in terms of population in the 1910s and 1920s. It was really active until the 1970s when the last families moved away.
In many ways, Promise Land was representative of the many Black towns that existed throughout the country. There were certainly hundreds — probably even thousands of communities like this — that were established in the shadow of the Civil War but also were intended to be havens, to an extent, to protect African Americans from Jim Crow and racialized violence.
I grew up going to Promise Land as a kid. I would often be down there to see extended family. As a city kid who grew up in and around Detroit, Promise Land was a way to get away from that tumult. And more importantly, it was where I experienced the greatest sense of cohesion with my family, the greatest sense of community that I had in my own life.
When did you realize that utopianism was something you might want to write about?
It’s a great question because it’s really hard — there’s so many places where I feel like the rough idea of utopia came up in my own life.
Most foundationally, I grew up in the Christian tradition; I grew up, Baptist. Even though, as a young child, I didn’t know what utopia was or where the idea came from, the concept of the Garden of Eden was very front of mind. I was always aware when I went south — even though Promise Land was not the Garden of Eden — it was this place of calm and peace.
More directly for the book, I began to think about utopianism in part when I encountered the work of the author Harriette Simpson Arnow. She was a writer from Kentucky, a white Appalachian writer who is best known for her 1954 book, The Dollmaker. That was a book about a white, Appalachian family that moves to industrial Detroit. And it’s about industrialization and the deleterious effects it has on a family.
Arnow had also written two nonfiction books about the Cumberland region of Kentucky and Tennessee — Seedtime on the Cumberland and Flowering of the Cumberland — where both of our families essentially came from. The books were about the first pioneers to move west of the Appalachian Mountains. Some of these pioneers were the people who established what is now known as Tennessee. One of the most important pioneers was a man named James Robertson, who is known as the kind of founding father of Nashville. In my own family, we assume that some of my ancestors had been enslaved by some of James Robertson’s descendants.
These were two books about these frontier dreams that were rooted in the customs and habits and lives of the pioneers. The books made very fleeting references to the enslaved people that these pioneers owned. I was interested in the lack of information about the enslaved people here. I was curious: As the country was experiencing this foundational period of westward expansion, what were the dreams of the enslaved people who are on the outskirts of these narratives? That question motivated my broader interest in the idea of utopian dreaming.
You also narrate the life of Albert B. Cleage Jr. and his movement of Black Christian nationalism. What is Black Christian nationalism? How was it different than other Black freedom movements of the ’60s and ’70s?
One way to understand Black Christian nationalism is as a political theology, established by Albert Cleage Jr.,who was guided essentially by the notion that true Christianity was a religion that sympathized chiefly with those who had been disinherited, downtrodden — more specifically with Black people. The kind of motto of the Black Christian nationalist movement was, “Nothing is more sacred than the liberation of Black people.”
That belief was really what fueled Cleage’s engagement, not only with Black people and institutional religion, but also politics, education, land ownership, et cetera. The goal of the movement was to create Black-led institutions and spaces that ultimately reinforced that fundamental dignity of Black people. At the root of the movement is [the question], “What are the sort of conditions that we have to create in the world to enable more Black people to fully believe that they are not inferior or lesser,” in the ways that society has so often emphasized.
It differed from a lot of other Black social movements at the time for its very explicit rootedness in both Christianity and Black nationalism. That mix of traditions was a pretty rare thing. You had, of course, the Nation of Islam, which was a Black nationalist movement that, in part, resisted Christianity because so many people viewed it as religion of the enslaver or as a plantation religion.
On the other side, you had many Black social movements that were inspired by Christianity, but the vast majority did not explicitly identify as separatists or Black nationalists.
Cleage seems to be caught in a tension between the past and future of the Black church. For most of U.S. history it had been a sanctuary, a place of respite, a place of comfort and support, but not a place of social movement, a liberation movement, or a place of opposition. And he sees more potential there. Is that right?
Yes, that’s exactly right. Those who know about Cleage sometimes unfairly conclude that Cleage had no regard at all for the historic foundations of the Black church — he was known as a really outspoken critic of a kind of church that was removed from political involvement, or what I call a “Sundays-only church.”
He was very disgruntled by the charismatic, prosperity preachers that he saw. He knew of people like Bishop Charles Manuel Grace — known as “Sweet Daddy”— religious leaders who Cleage essentially believed were conmen. He also knew that, historically, the Black church had been a really fundamental site for community formation and group mobilization.
By the time Cleage established the Shrine of the Black Madonna, he believed that the church had become a moribund organization, but not a dead one. Black Christian nationalism was conceived, in part, to revitalize the Black church. And that involved turning away from the ideal of integration that he had seen when he worked at the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco. This being one of the most prominent examples of an integrated church; Howard Thurman was one of the leaders of this church.
As Cleage began to find fault with the kind of mainstream, Civil Rights movement, he also began to wonder what ways the church needed to transform to speak more directly to the needs of Black Americans.
There also seems to be frustration with the Black middle class, specifically. The quote that I wrote down, which related to Glanton Dowdell (who we will come back to), was “It appeared that the more money blacks acquired, the more likely they were to oppose communism and side with those who dismissed an interracial movement for economic self-determination, social inclusiveness, and civil rights as ‘subversive.’”
How did the Black middle class see it at the time, how do you see it?
A part of why I’m so fascinated by the Shrine of the Black Madonna as an institution is because I did not grow up going to Black nationalist churches. I grew up in a family that really had a kind of church that emphasized respectability politics. My maternal grandfather's mom went to Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago, whose pastor, Rev. Joseph Jackson, was one of the main critics of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He thought King was a rabble rouser.
That emphasis and mentality found its way to my grandfather and to the way I was raised —that you behave and act and live within the confines of respectability of the law, striving to be a good Christian, well-educated, materially successful but not indulgent person. There was this sense of operating within and not being too disruptive. It was a value system. Why would you sacrifice, or throw to the wind, these opportunities that — maybe a couple of generations ago — would have been unimaginable for other African Americans?
That way of looking at life was something that disturbed Cleage, in part because he grew up in a very materially successful kind of family. He saw the kind of lifestyle one could get with money, with education, et cetera. But he thought that way of thinking too often resulted in a kind of selfish, acquisitive form of individualism that was opposed to group salvation or group liberation. He was also someone whose own grandfather had been enslaved. He was not that far removed from slavery. He was skeptical of African Americans, many of them middle-class, who were trying to establish some kind of clear distinctions between themselves and Black people who had not been as fortunate. He saw that as a kind of trap that people fell into too often.
OK, I want to return to Glanton Dowdell. His story, as the painter of the Black Madonna is the other way you narrate the shrine. I found it interesting because Dowdell didn’t show up in your essay about Cleage which preceded this book. So, why was the story of an artist an important way to interrogate and narrate Black utopianism
He’s my favorite character. There were multiple reasons why Dowdell interested me as a figure in the book. One, I knew that it was very important for me to explore the role of art and artistic creation in utopian movements. I didn’t just want this to be a book about politics or religion. I wanted to examine the real galvanizing role that art can play in social movements and in people’s individual lives.
The other reason he became such a large character in the book is because of the strange path that the latter half of his life took — he went to Sweden. One thing that I was aware of, even before I wrote that essay was that Americans would look to the Scandinavian countries, to a place like Sweden especially, and we would say, “Oh, man that’s the kind of European utopia that people in the States will never really experience.”
When I learned that Dowdell self-exiled to Sweden, where he lived for the rest of his life, I wanted to know: What was this experience of an African American man who grew up extremely poor during the depression, then became involved in all of these Black nationalist movements in the U.S.? What happens to his sense of purpose when he flees to this utopian ideal? What was it about Sweden that attracted him? What were the opportunities for him there? And the more I learned about that story, the more I realized it was an opportunity to talk about how Black American experiences overlapped with global ideas about utopia.
His life was a great stage to explore those questions.
Dowdell is my favorite character in the book too. I want to ask you a few questions about utopias and your read on them. In the introduction you write about how utopian thinking seems to be common in eras where there’s a lot of social upheaval or oppression. Why does utopian thinking show up most commonly when the future seems so uncertain?
I’m giving a lecture at Grinnell College later this month on modern and contemporary manifestations of Black utopianism. And I’ve been reflecting a lot on 2020. When all of the chaos of that year began to unfold, I had already been thinking about Black utopianism because I was working on the [Cleage] essay for The Point Magazine. So, I was looking for news stories about utopian responses to the tumult.
I think utopian activity tends to emerge when people are uncertain about the grasp they have on their own lives. There’s this wonderful philosopher, William M. Paris, who is one of the foremost thinkers about Black utopian tradition and thought. He writes about this idea of the “horizons of normative expectations” — essentially the idea is that most of us live our lives in a way where we assume we know what tomorrow looks like. The horizon is pretty clear, it’s not super clouded, and it allows us to act accordingly. When those horizons become blurry, which usually happens because of some kind of upheaval, whether war, financial or ecological collapse, or political revolution, people are compelled to cobble together new solutions and new ways of living.
In my reading of utopian experiments, there’s a tension between evangelizing or recruiting more members and maintaining the success or purity of the project. Is that also true to Black utopianism?
Yes. In the context of the Black Christian nationalist movement, that becomes a central tension in the aftermath of Cleage’s death in 2000. This somewhat oversimplifies it, but his movement splits along two ideological lines.
One is people who want to stick very strictly to the Black nationalist principles that informed the entire movement going back decades. They wanted to carry the ethos of Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism into the 21st century.
Then you had another side that was still very loyal to the movement and wanted the movement to survive in some way, but who said the times were changing. And it is no longer viable — for multiple reasons — to hew so closely to the principles of Black nationalism. The world is globalizing, our kids are not like us. Our kids grew up in a different world. This is a period of multiculturalism and pluralism. You have a movement that began as Black nationalists trying to figure out whether to be more inclusive.
That is a tension that comes up even today in certain ways. The Black Lives Matter movement is the clearest example of that. Yes, it is undeniably a transnational, multicultural movement; at the same time, it has very specific goals, many of which are focused on the life outcomes of Black, diasporic people.
On a micro level, this is something I experienced as an undergraduate student at Princeton from 2013 to 2017. You could see on campus people were trying to navigate, how do you participate in this multicultural movement but also negotiate who actually leads this movement?
What about the children of Black utopians? What is utopian living like for those who don’t choose it?
It’s such a great question because I think the short answer is that it’s complicated.
The people that I spoke to who grew up in the shrine — but this holds true for a lot of children who grew up in these kinds of restricted or specialized communities — many attest to feeling like they grew up in an environment that helped them feel a sense of self-worth, pride, and a real sense of community with people they would consider lifelong brothers and sisters.
In the Shrine specifically, these were kids who, in some cases, were learning about the distinctions between Democrats and Republicans when they were like 5-years old. They were canvassing as 6-year-olds. They were learning about the Haitian revolution and developments in group psychology as children. So, in some ways, they mentioned feeling preternaturally mature.
On the other hand, it could be a really emotionally trying experience. You might have wondered, why can’t I just spend my time with my parents all the time? Why can’t I just go home and be with my family? Some felt like it was difficult to interact with their peers, who saw them as strange outliers.
The main challenge mentioned by the people I spoke to was that they reached this point where they wanted to experience life on their own terms. That meant exploring who they were outside of the context of an intimate community. And they felt pressured, because the question was: Do you live life for yourself, or do you live life for the group? And that fundamental question caused a lot of problems for people.
It becomes very difficult when a communalist mindset is not something you choose out of seeing the failures of individualism or hierarchy, but a thing that kept you from playing sports with your friends.
In the book, you used first names for Albert B. [Cleage Jr.] and for Glanton [Dowdell]. Was there a thought process behind that?
It did feel a little more natural to me. I don’t like the cliché about wanting your nonfiction to read like a novel, because I don’t think it needs to — nonfiction has its own advantages. But I was caught up in the narratives of these people’s lives to an extent that it just felt easier, more natural, to use their first names. Before Cleage was, “Rev. Cleage” or, “Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman,” he was Albert, fundamentally. [In the 1970s, Cleage changed his name to “Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman,” which means “liberator, holy man, savior of the nation” in Swahili.]
I noticed also that you lowercased the B in “black,” and ever since reading Imani Perry’s South to America, I’ve been interested in how authors make that decision.
I’m wary of essentialism, I suppose. I was working at Literary Hub when these changes [to capitalizing the B in “Black”] were being instituted across media organizations.
I recall some of the conversations that we had about it in the office — and it’s like one day, the Associated Press says something, and you take this as the authority to apply to your own. And that was interesting to me because — the amount of reflection that some people were doing around this issue [pauses] it varied widely. I was personally a little resistant to that kind of change.
But I think it’s mostly about wanting to explore what it meant for this word “black” to be something a bit more disparate and a bit more difficult to essentialize.
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