The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America by Aaron Robertson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages. 2024.
Every conversation I had about Trump’s reelection struck a contemplative tone. A friend, in quiet fury, vowed to focus only on local politics moving forward. A roommate told me she’d learned what it meant to accept what she couldn’t change, before taking a distraught friend to a post-election vigil. I went to bed early as the results rolled in and woke up with a tacit internal agreement that I wouldn’t care so much about the president anymore.
A few weeks later, I caught up with an ex while he was visiting from Philly. He shared a similar reaction, one of resigned acceptance rather than indignation. Then he said he’d been reading The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. “It’s got me thinking about how to build a revolution without politics,” he said. That sentiment seemed to have become the goal of most I’d encountered in the weeks after the election. No matter where they stood, they’d quietly detached from the dream of a presidency that could save us, and instead had begun to invest their hopes in local affairs more likely to enact tangible change.
Later I checked out The Undercommons for myself. In the first essay, “Politics Surrounded,” Harvey and Moten write that politics doesn’t organize social life but encloses it, and this enclosure creates a mirage in which self-defense from those within it is characterized as aggressive. Democracy, they write, is foisted upon us, not created by us, and promises an eventuality in which we’ll become “more than what we are” that has yet to materialize. “But we already are. We’re already here, moving,” they write. “We’ve been around. We’re more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic.”
This is the spirit that animates Black utopianism, a hodgepodge of racial, religious, and political movements forged in response to the structural racism of the United States. While their contemporaries fought for further integration into the system, Black utopians sought to work around—or beyond—it, often creating their alternative systems or organizations, like interracial communes or pro-Black capitalist mini-metropolises. The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, a new book by Aaron Robertson, charts the rise, fall, and afterlife of one such movement: Black Christian Nationalism.
Black Christian Nationalism (BCN) arose in the 1960s as the brainchild of Albert Cleage Jr., a wayward pastor and well-known Black separatist who sought to, in the words of Robertson, “secure the psychological liberation and material well-being of black people.” Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1911, Cleage was brought up on the values of the ascendant Black middle class, “knowing how to smile and dress like other monied black people.” After studying sociology at Fisk University and Detroit City College, he worked as a case worker for Detroit’s welfare department, which had become embroiled in controversy after they were accused of giving the police illegal access to patient records. Soon enough, he quit the job, shaken by the reality of poor Black life.
He got a master’s degree in divinity from Oberlin in 1943 and spent the next few decades working as a minister, all the while growing increasingly frustrated with the status quo. The political tumult of the next few decades—Jim Crow legislation, the sit-ins, bus boycotts, desegregation efforts, and unchecked police violence against nonviolent protesters—radicalized him alongside a new generation of Black activists. By the time he published The Black Messiah, a seminal text in Black liberation theology and the work that established him as a national political leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. had been dead for less than a year. “It was unclear what a new better world might look like after this,” Robertson writes, “but even the blurriest vision revealed a reality much more desirable than the one they had.”
In 1975, Cleage founded the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a “laboratory for social experiments, open to all who supported black liberation,” under the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church. It was here that his most radical dreams blossomed, becoming the home of ambitious political “counterstructures” aimed at liberating Black people from poverty, stigma, and anti-Black programming. “Having been denied equitable institutional support in all areas of life because of their race, black utopians were those who sought to address such neglect with counterinstitutions and protected spaces of their own,” Robertson writes. “Most crucially, black utopians believed that worldly deprivation was not the only possible fate awaiting them.” Cleage sought to maintain ideological cohesion, and he realized early on that he couldn’t do so by appealing to the rising Black bourgeoisie, who were more likely to oppose communism and consider the interracial vision of the civil rights movement too “subversive.” Fully aware of the forces against them, they didn’t want to lose what they’d worked so hard and so long to gain. And as they climbed the ranks, they began to look at the Black poor in a new, unflattering light.
“In another life, had he not seen it with his own eyes, perhaps Albert Jr. would have believed what white progressive reformers said about Detroit’s black– and immigrant-inhabited east side: that it was a godless Land of Nod, full of brothels and licentiousness,” Robertson writes. “But from the vantage of his social class, he saw how easily such elitist narratives had enabled the black bourgeoisie (a good many of them churchgoing) to turn away from the suffering of their downtrodden brethren.” Dissatisfied Cleage came to see his peers as “spiritually dead black ghosts arrayed in tassels and silk, pursuing their own individual fortunes,” and he swiftly began advocating for all-Black economic and political organizations to build power “without the distorting effects of self-hate.” By the time BCN became a reality, he’d detached himself from the Black American Dream to pursue something more transcendent: utopia.
I’ll admit I felt a twinge of nervousness as Cleage’s vision evolved. I even muttered “Uh oh” when I got to the part where Robertson charts how Cleage developed an interest in behavioral psychology, using B.F. Skinner’s concept of “operant conditioning” to describe the ways white society “kept black people mentally enslaved by punishing any attempts to break free and rewarding acquiescence.” BCN rhetoric, at times, could veer toward the apocalyptic, with followers engaging in what could be described as both consciousness-raising and psychological reinvention. Within the Shrine there was, for example, a de facto Black sorority called the Holy Order of Nzinga; to join, draftees were “asked to search the contents of her mind and soul to excise the myth that had been promising to kill her since she was born,” Robertson writes, “the declaration of black inferiority.” Cleage had also begun to conflate Blackness with godhood (I don’t disagree!) while arguing that Jesus Christ himself was Black. Not metaphorically Black, but literally of African descent; the argument had become popularized by both Cleage and civil rights-era theologian James Cone, and it even reached mainstream TV in an episode of the 1970s sitcom Good Times on CBS.
But Cleage’s public image was not unblemished, particularly when he became linked with unfortunate company. In 1969, members of Jim Jones’s infamous Peoples Temple wrote to Cleage to express their approval of the BCN’s mission—roughly a decade before over nine hundred of their spiritual family died in the Jonestown massacre. And Cleage later took inspiration for a commune from Israel’s kibbutzniks, despite his distaste for Israeli Zionism. “For [Cleage], the creation of the kibbutzim exemplified a nation’s successful pursuit of power,” Robertson writes, describing the pastor’s “coolly utilitarian outlook” to the project. Whether Cleage was ever able to reconcile the ethical implications of the kibbutz’s endurance with aggressive and ongoing Arab displacement—conditions as inseparable as light and shadow—remains unclear. It wasn’t exactly his problem to solve.
Robertson writes that Cleage was careful to avoid turning his congregation into any kind of cult. He dispersed power throughout the group—diverse in age, gender, and skill—and discouraged attempts to sanctify him as larger-than-life. “He was one black man among many people, he assured his followers in the church, and vulnerable to the same diseases of the soul.” The Shrine’s persistent battle had to do with its core mission: How do you build a space within a space that isn’t hospitable to its growth?
Black Christian Nationalism emerged from the marriage of two twentieth-century experiments in mass self-reinvention. The first is well known: the counterculture movements of the 1960s, through which a new generation sought to diverge from middle-class values preached by the Silent Generation. The other kicked off earlier in the century, when Black migrants began embracing new, niche religious offshoots from the major Abrahamic religions, what African American studies scholar Judith Weisenfeld called “religio-racial movements.” Amid a racial order designed to suppress Blackness in all areas of life, Blacks from within and outside of the country’s borders sought new means of self-identification. “In rejecting Negro racial identity, leaders and members of these groups did not repudiate blackness or dark skin but, rather, endowed it with meaning derived from histories other than those of enslavement and oppression,” Weisenfeld writes in her 2017 book New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration.
Members of one such group, the Nation of Islam, claimed to be “Asiatic Muslims,” while those of the Moorish Science Temple of America identified as “Moorish American Muslims.” The International Peace Mission, a spiritual movement overseen by Black utopian preacher—and unofficial mentor of Jim Jones—Father Divine, rejected race entirely as “the creation of the devil.” Naturally, this spirit of reinvention touched the Shrine of the Black Madonna. It began in the 1960s with Cleage’s reimagining of Jesus Christ as a Black man leading an uprising against his Roman oppressors, but also by bringing Blacks relegated to the margins of their community toward the center. He made these intentions clear in his sermons: “We are fighting for little boys who don’t dress nicely, who don’t know how to talk, who don’t know what manners are,” he said from the pulpit in 1967. “Little boys who are nasty, who steal, who are darting around in the slums, learning the hard way, who don’t have any opportunity.” This radical recentering made up the bulk of the Black liberation theology that Cleage was pioneering. The central tenet, Robertson writes, was that “holiness starts from below, in the experiences and aspirations of the disinherited.”
Cleage was moving in the spirit of what theologian Gary Dorrien defines as the “Black social gospel,” a philosophical offshoot of the Progressive-era Social Gospel of American Protestantism. Social Gospel sought to manifest the kingdom of God in society through charity and morality; Black social gospel tailored this school of thought for Black needs. Black Protestants were maligned within the mainstream gospel due to the prevailing politics, so they took the word to their own pulpits and bred a generation of justice-minded preachers, including Dr. King. “The black social gospel arose from churches where preaching about the cross was not optional, because black Americans experienced it every day as a persecuted, crucified people,” Dorrien wrote in 2015. “Here, the belief in a divine ground of human selfhood powered struggles for black self-determination and campaigns of resistance to white oppression.”
The Shrine of the Black Madonna had also taken as its galvanizing image a literal “Black Madonna,” painted by fellow revolutionary Glanton Dowdell and modeled after a young Black mother named Rose Waldon. “For different utopian thinkers from the 1960s,” Robertson writes, “the Black Madonna was understood as an enemy of capitalism, militarism, nuclearism, environmental degradation, white Christianity, and white supremacy.” This Madonna became another way for Shrine members, casual churchgoers, and curious onlookers alike to see divinity in their own image.
In the early 1970s, loyal churchgoers were rechristened with new African-derived names: Shelley Elaine Miller became Monifa Dara Omowale; Donnie Nelson became Menelik Kimathi; and Cleage himself became Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman. Throughout the decade the church incorporated New Age practices like meditation and yoga into their teachings. They’d also adopted more conspicuously Afrocentric matters of dress and reading habits. But Cleage/Jaramogi wanted to bring Black separatism to its full potential, and the hippie lifestyle wasn’t enough. “What they needed to form a true black counterculture were ‘counterstructures,’” Robertson writes, “independent institutions that would protect black people from a slave mentality.” So in 1999, the Shrine bought a four-thousand-acre ranch called Beulah Land Farms in Calhoun Falls, South Carolina. The project began as an agricultural, technical, and manufacturing program but soon morphed into an ambitious co-op that would provide housing, training, employment, and homegrown food to congregants. The goals of Beulah Land were sufficiently radical: “Could there be a place where evictions did not happen, where there were few worries . . . and no predetermined sense of what the future could be?” Robertson writes. The answer was yes—for a while.
Cleage died on February 20, 2000, leaving behind “a few pieces of art, some furniture, and miscellany,” alongside Beulah Land itself. His passing briefly revived the movement, inspiring Black Christian Nationalists to raise money for more infrastructure—roads, ponds, fencing, buildings, livestock. But the coming of the financial crisis in 2008 drew oxygen from the Shrine the way it did everywhere else: donations dwindled, profits from their farm shrunk. The Shrine’s national projects, which helped keep both the church and Beulah Land afloat, began shuttering. But even before the recession, the movement seemed as though it might be losing steam. Younger generations raised on the farm got curious about the outside world while older members began to doubt the project’s future. By 2002, less than twenty paying residents remained in apartment complexes run by the Shrine’s Atlanta chapter, for example, and they were eventually sold to invest back into Beulah Land. The main farm project still stands to this day as a cooperative agricultural project, but the wider movement has been diminished. Where it will go from here is unclear.
Beulah Land epitomized the tensions inherent in trying to bring one’s imagination to reality. How can a utopian project survive in a country that’s, at best, stingy with its resources and, at worst, hostile toward those trying to undermine it? Cleage’s work enabled a limited but mighty cadre of Black families, for a brief moment in history, to not worry about microaggressions, racist violence, or how to keep food on the table. “For many in the Shrine, the communal budget created a life virtually free of debt,” Robertson writes, “in which they did not worry about paying bills, buying food, or slipping into economic ruin.”
All things considered, Beulah Land fared better than many other contemporary Black utopian projects. In the 1970s, civil rights activist and lawyer Floyd McKissick Jr. tried to launch Soul City, a mixed-use community in Warren County, North Carolina, rooted in the vision of a Black capitalist utopia. He managed to secure a $14 million bond from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, $1.7 million from the state of North Carolina, and another million from private donors to break ground on the community, but accusations of corruption and nepotism, which prompted an investigation by the General Accounting Office, led to the project’s downfall. Father Divine’s Peace Mission, meanwhile, still stands, though it’s now widely regarded as a bona fide cult—largely because his followers considered Divine to be the literal Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Still, the movement managed to feed tens of thousands of Americans during the Great Depression, and provided a pacifist refuge from a nation mired in racial violence.
The connecting line between all these projects is that Black utopians sought to build nations within a nation that didn’t welcome them. They illustrated what Harvey and Moten explained in The Undercommons, the condition that we’re “more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic.” And they embodied the writers’ call to action decades before it was written: “We owe each other everything.” The goal of Black utopianism remains to find new forms of life in the modern day. Toward the end of the book, Robertson notes that another generation of race-conscious “intentional communities”—ecovillages, communes, co-ops, and more—have popped up across the country, particularly since the George Floyd protests of 2020. Though Beulah Land’s survival remains in flux, its existence shows that small revolutions matter too.