There’s No Place Like No Place
In recounting the stories of black Americans who have sought to build utopias, Robertson reveals their absence of a true refuge in this world.
Review by James E Cherry
From Merriam-Webster.com: Did you know?
There’s quite literally no place like utopia. In 1516, English humanist Sir Thomas More published a book titled Utopia, which compared social and economic conditions in Europe with those of an ideal society on an imaginary island located off the coast of the Americas. More wanted to imply that the perfect conditions on his fictional island could never really exist, so he called it “Utopia,” a name he created by combining the Greek words ou (“not, no”) and topos (“place”).
No place. Long after finishing the final page of Aaron Robertson’s The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and The Promise Land in America, those words simply reaffirmed what I had learned long ago. No Place.
There is no Paradise or Promised Land for a black man in America. Never has been, and the future portends that there never will be. This is brilliantly laid bare in Robertson’s magnificent work that explores the ways in which black people have contended with this diasporic identity, particularly examining an all-black community in Tennessee and the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit, and how it has impacted his growth and development.
All-black towns or communities were established by former slaves, and more than 1,200 existed between the late 18th century and the early 20th century, according to the Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance. About 30 remain today, including Mound Bayou, Mississippi; Eatonville, Florida; Langston, Oklahoma; and Promise Land, Tennessee. As a lifelong Tennessean, I had no idea such a place existed, and upon reading the opening chapter of The Black Utopians, I’ve already made plans to visit. But this is not a historical discovery or cultural footnote for Robertson. This middle Tennessee town is where his family’s dreams are planted and where hope for a better tomorrow sprang from the soil, if only for a short duration. Promise Land, Tennessee, is a testament to his family’s courage and self-determination to create a better world and allow their progeny to step into it. Robertson’s return visit to his ancestral land is affirmation that you can go home again, emotionally, spiritually, and physically, and in the process discover new perspectives and appreciation for one’s own journey to understanding. He writes:
What animates every story that follows is my interest in the ways black people have tried to stave off loneliness and alienation by finding common causes in the world or carving out private inner sanctums. How have black people, together and alone, created good places from the various nowhere to which they have been consigned for centuries—the darky town, the ghetto, the reform school, the itinerant camp, the segregated church, the former plantation site, the riot-scarred street, and, as in father’s case, the prison?
For if you believe the Son of God is white, then naturally God is white, and if God is white, what does that make the white man?
Robertson examines this idea through a black preacher in Detroit who unveiled a mural in his church of a Black Madonna and Child. The Church was the Shrine of the Black Madonna, which exists in the Pan-African Orthodox Christian tradition, and the clergyman Albert Cleage, Jr. Cleage’s theology, Black Christian Nationalism, mirrored that of the Black Power Movement, espousing the idea that Jesus not only identified with black people, but that Jesus himself was a “black revolutionary zealot.” And why wouldn’t he be? Cleage understood the damage that the blue-eyed, blonde hair Christ had done to the black psyche. For if you believe the Son of God is white, then naturally God is white, and if God is white, what does that make the white man? For Cleage, liberation was inseparable from separation from a society that enslaved black folk mentally, spiritually, financially, and physically. His solution was that black folk establish their own utopia where they could excise self-determination, a love for community and themselves. As Robertson puts it,
Cleage’s interpretation of black separatism was one that encouraged black people to use the ways they had been alienated to their advantage. If white Christians loved a God that upheld cruel hierarchies, black utopians would denounce that god and re-create it in their own image. If whites wanted to ensure that black people were crowded in dense cities, black utopians would use these places as their social laboratories.
To Cleage’s credit, he walked the utopian walk as he talked it. By 2005, his Shrine of the Black Madonna had amassed 4000 acres of land—Beulah Land—in South Carolina. Eventually, outside pressures, namely surmounting debt, made the promised land unsustainable. As politically astute and culturally conscious as Cleage was, I imagine he saw the writing on the wall long before anyone else. What government would allow descendants of former slaves to set up an independent state within that government’s boundaries? And if not an independent state, then a utopia or promised land would still be subjected to the systemic racism upon which that government was established. That being said, a debt of gratitude is owed to Aaron Robertson for his meticulous research on an important American figure in Albert Cleage, Jr., later Jaramogi Abebe, whom the history books have forgotten or conveniently ignored. Robertson has created a document that historians and scholars will reference for years to come. If nothing else, his research will inspire others to discover or revisit Cleage’s seminal work, The Black Messiah.
The question goes begging: Is there anywhere that a black man can feel at home?
Initially, I stated that there is no paradise or promised land for a black man in America. That was only a half-truth. The honest truth is that there is no paradise or promised land anywhere in the world for a black man. Robertson masterfully displays this through the narrative of Glanton Dowdell, the Detroit-born painter of the Black Madonna and Child in Cleage’s church. While this brought him national and international acclaim, Dowdell, a suspect in a homicide, fled to Sweden. Sweden, though, was far from a Promised Land or Utopia for Dowdell and his family:
Although Glanton had once praised the Swedish school system, his American-born children were mercilessly bullied for being black. Gary and Keith, teenagers when they arrived in Sweden, refused to be pushed around by their harassers and obeyed their father’s command to fight back when provoked. Stacy, who was six years old when the family moved, and her brother Lance had such a hard time dealing with racist slurs and emotional abuse from adults and children that they were temporarily enrolled in a school for the children of foreign diplomats.
It could have been Sweden, Japan, or Venezuela. Dowdell would have caught hell no matter where he sought refuge. Even if he’d chosen a country on the African continent that was parceled out to European powers by European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884 and has not recovered 141 years later. White supremacy is America’s original sin that has neither been confessed nor turned away from. Consequently, some of its black citizens have tried to establish a utopia or promised land in Africa, requested the government give them their own land in America, or simply become ex-patriots abroad. The question goes begging: Is there anywhere that a black man can feel at home?
Black Utopians is a welcomed addition to other studies on black religious thought such as James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation and Abebe’s aforementioned The Black Messiah. But more importantly than that, Black Utopians is a case study of the human condition and the fact that black people in America want the same things that all Americans want: dignity, self-determination, respect, love, and the acknowledgement that they too are made in the image of God.
James E Cherry is poet and fiction writer from Tennessee. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and Kimbilio for Black Fiction. His latest collection of poetry, Between Chance and Mercy, was published in 2024 from Willow Books and his novel, Edge of the Wind, was re-issued by Stephen F Austin University Press in 2022. Cherry has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award, a Lillian Smith Book Award and was a Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Finalist for Fiction. Visit: jamesEcherry.com.
The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and The Promise Land in America was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 1, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy to our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
