I’ve been preoccupied with thinking through future dreaming and conceptions of utopia for a while now. All the ways we imagine other ways of being … Ways that we try or fail to imagine the future … Alternative futurisms. It’s a broad subject. This book is my first encounter with Black (US, African American) utopian visions in the context of Black Christian Nationalism.

The Black Utopians is about two things: the history of Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna and the movement that formed around it, as well as Aaron Robertson’s father’s utopian visions for himself and his family. (Robertson’s father was imprisoned for ten years. After his release, he wrote letters to his son about those dreams.) Founded by Albert Cleage Jr., a man who came from privilege (Detroit’s high society—his father was Detroit’s first Black city doctor), and changing names over the course of its history (as did the founder himself and many of the Shrine’s members), the Shrine bought a building in Detroit and built a community there, founded a school for its children—Mtoto House—where they taught their life principles, raised their children communally, and eventually bought a farm they named Beulah Land, 4,000 acres in South Carolina. Their aim was independence, socially and economically, from a world and country that didn’t want them.

Says Robertson:
“Here, in the mirror of my father’s life and the lives of many others that, in some ways, resembled mine, I sought variations on a theme. Who were the dreamers who always wanted more than they had? How did the disillusioned, the betrayed, the confined, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty?”
“How much can be repaired in the aftermath of damage? What if all our spiritual, emotional, and physical injuries were mended, our familial land and relationships restored? What if time’s rifts could be sewn back together?
Above all, what would it mean to live as though all of this were possible even if we suspect it is not?”

Black fugitivity: All the ways that Black people make a life outside of the placed on them. It’s something that Robertson says he discussed with his father during the pandemic and in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery … : Flight, like so many Black Americans to Europe and Africa throughout the 20th century. Places of refuge. Places they made in the US too, from marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, and “blacktowns” (Negro or freedom colonies, freedmen’s villages) like Promise Land and Promised Land (there’s a Biblical theme to the naming), to communities like this one, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, and the farm they bought.

“I couldn’t imagine a reality in which people like Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery wouldn’t be killed …
The world, no matter how beautiful, would have certain brutal constants. … The apparent persistence of abysmal realities for black people, and the certainty that there exists much more besides, is the soil from which black utopianism emerges.”

Roberston also tells us in the book about other Black utopian communities—like Promise Land, his own ancestral one where his grandparents had land, formed in 1870; Soul City; MOVE, in Philadelphia; and the Nation of Islam’s Salaam Agricultural System.

Cleage did not apparently like the term utopian, considering himself a realist—which he arguable wasn’t. In the aftermath of the ructions of the 1960s and Detroit’s hot summer of 1967, this is what Cleage thought would happen:
“Cleage described Black Christian Nationalism as an apocalyptic movement; he vaguely outlined a coming “Pan-African revolt,” which, if successful, could bring about universal justice on earth.”

The Shrine of the Black Madonna was a place of “strange” ideas—ideas like how Jesus was Black, and a syncretic belief system called KUA. Cleage, now renamed Jaramogi, would say things like this:
“Out of a mystical explosion of divine energy, the cosmos and everything in it was created. This act of creation provided an orderly unification of the four fundamental forces of nature in a Unified Field controlling the functions and interactions of all things.”

But maybe that’s what utopian thinking is about: reaching far beyond what’s known and understood to find ideas for new ways of being.
Utopia is future dreaming, wanting an alternative to the society that has created the painful now. It’s about survival. It’s an imagining of a more just and more equal world. For some who dream, action follows imagination: the members of the Shrine of the Black Madonna strove to create a pocket of heaven (or paradise) in a hostile United States. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether they failed or not: what matters is the attempt, the reaching towards, and how they dared to believe.

The dreams didn’t end: The Shrine established outposts, three of which still exist today in the US.
“[The Shrine] has provided disaster relief for every major hurricane that has affected the Southwest since Hurricane Katrina. The Shrines in each of the three regions host frequent food giveaways, a custom the church has been engaged in for the last fifty years.”

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for early access.

The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson is a thoughtful look at Black communities in America who have sought to build their own visions of freedom and safety. Blending history with personal stories, Robertson explores places like Promise Land, Tennessee, and movements like Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna. It’s a powerful reflection on resilience, hope, and the ongoing search for a better world.

The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America (Hardcover)
by Aaron Robertson
The history of the people and social network in the area of three islands of black culture after the American Civil war. The story shows how they maintained their culture, and developed environment.

The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson is a beautiful meditation on what utopia could be for Black Americans, drawing on Robertson's family and other research and stories.

While I learned a lot reading this book, I do not think it was organized and structured as well as it could have been. Robertson introduces the topic with his personal history, including his family history with a Black town, Promise Land, in a southern state - Tennessee, I think but do not remember specifically - as well as his complicated relationship with his father, a man who spent a decade in prison for a

violent crime (again, I do not remember the specific crime and do not want to misspeak). Letters from his father also alternate with the historical text describing men and institutions who attempted to carve out a place in a country that for centuries has hated them. This bouncing between different types of text (the letters and the historical narrative) forms my main issue with the text. It's nearly impossible to determine whether this book is a memoir or if it is historical nonfiction, especially since the more personal portions have little to no connection with most of the historical portion. By the end of the narrative, the threads nearly come together and I understand Robertson's overall goal with this narrative. However, he did not quite bring everything together. Thus, this is a fascinating aspect of history with stories that need to be told, I just wish it had been done better.

Very much enjoyed this well written book, authentic and with clear, engaging, and insightful text.
I learned many things about this aspect of Black history and realize that these types of communities played an outsize role in local organizations, with results that were felt across the nation. I was especially gratified to learn the actual history behind the National school lunch program. I will definitely look for other titles by this author.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a reading copy in exchange for this honest review.

Black communities started springing up in the South after slavery ended. At one time there may had been close to two thousand settlements. One community, Promise Land, was founded in 1870, in Tennessee. Among the founding fathers were Aaron Robertson’s ancestors. When Robertson was a child, growing up in Michigan, he spent summers in Promise Land. While a child, his father was imprisoned. During his incarceration, he wrote letters to his son. Robertson uses the letters from his father to preface each chapter of this book, reflecting on desired forms of freedom for Black people in the USA.

Central to Robertson’s book, is the growth of Black Nationalism after the urban race riots, touching on the destruction and reconstruction of Black spaces by redlining and government sanctioned police intervention, evidenced later against the MOVE commune in Philadelphia.

Of the Black Nationalist movements that came into fruition during the late 1960s and early 1970s, most prominent at the time, in Detroit, was a Black theology, established by Reverend Albert Cleage, Jr, in a house of worship known as the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Today the name Cleage is more recognized associated with the playwright, Pearl Cleage, one of the reverend’s two daughters.

Sharing a memoir of his father, Robertson delves into the history of Cleage’s Black Christian Nationalism and the rise of a Black community, an eco-village up to the present day as an example of what he means by Black utopia. As megachurches grow and embrace social justice and outreach programs, while creating communities for their congregations, more histories, like Cleage’s Shrine, are important in showing how religions in the United States are being reshaped in order to survive.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux