THE BLACK UTOPIANS

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.