Bourgeois Dreams, Black Rebellion

In an excerpt from “The Black Utopians,” Aaron Robertson writes on the early years of Albert Cleage Jr. and Detroit’s Black bourgeoisie.

By Aaron RobertsonSeptember 28, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Cultural Studies

• History

THERE IS NO single narrative about Black utopia. One story could begin in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, where the Union Army enabled thousands of Blacks to organize their own free labor communities on former plantations during the Civil War; another might depart from the émigré settlements of Kansas and the Oklahoma Territory, or among the free colored communities of New Orleans and Baltimore. It is a story told from the many margins around a mythical center, a tale of those who must leave their place of origin and those who have no choice but to stay.

Within the mosaic of communities that shaped the development of Black utopian thought, the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit has usually gone unnoticed. Founded by Rev. Albert Cleage Jr., this Protestant church has served as a beacon of Black nationalism and cultural transformation for almost 60 years. The Mother Church in Detroit—Shrine No. 1—is a 10-minute drive from the house my father’s parents once lived in on the city’s west side. The Shrine’s origins and evolution offer a compelling lens through which to explore the varied dimensions of Black communal aspirations. Under a different name, the Shrine began as a church in the 1950s that catered mostly to middle-class Black Detroiters. It later found a permanent home in an area of the city where Black residents moved as Detroit was undergoing the nation’s first major urban renewal program. The resulting dispossession of Black Detroiters on the city’s east side pushed many to the neighborhoods around the Shrine. This would eventually place the church at the geographical and ideological center of the 1967 summer uprising in the city.

Cleage’s leadership during and after the Detroit Rebellion—one of the most destructive urban uprisings of the 1960s—elevated his profile. He became one of the most famous representatives of Black nationalism in the United States, and the Shrine was thereafter regarded as a Black countercultural mecca. For decades to come, its members and collaborators would include mold-breaking Black artists, historians, and politicians; territorial separatists who wanted to create an independent Black republic within the borders of the United States; Black Hebrew Israelites who searched for new Zions abroad; New Age theosophists; and many others who challenged familiar structures of authority.

For nearly 30 years, Cleage would lead a group of dedicated Pan-Africanists who established Shrines throughout the country, three of which survive today, in Detroit, Atlanta, and Houston. Among the Shrine’s members were small cadres that traveled across America and raised millions of dollars to support the mission of their movement, which Cleage called Black Christian Nationalism. He envisioned Black Christian Nationalists as a prophetic vanguard that would secure the psychological liberation and material well-being of Black people. First they would need to separate themselves from the values of white society by establishing other communes and Shrines in cities around the world. They planned to recruit millions of Black people to sustain their movement.

Cleage was one of the most consequential figures associated with the 20th century’s Black freedom movements and, for a time in the late 1960s, the best-known Black nationalist pastor in the United States. He and the members of his church attempted to merge heaven and earth—Paradise and the Promised Land—for Black people everywhere by invoking the dreamworlds of social visionaries from the past and present. Although Cleage disliked the word utopian—he preferred to be called a “Black realist”—he was well versed in many of the thinkers, groups, and movements that are now regularly identified as part of a broader utopian tradition. Black Christian Nationalists learned about the histories of ancient Jewish monastic communities, the spiritual practices of gurus and mystics, the rebellions of Haitian slaves and maroons who lived in the swamplands of the American South, experiments in socialism and communism, and much more.

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In July 1911, while traveling in Detroit, Albert Cleage Sr. dashed off a fawning note to his newborn son, “Master A.B. Cleage, Jr.,” who loved ones would call Toddy: “Did not forget you were 4 weeks old yesterday and tomorrow you will be one month. My, but you are getting old fast.” Albert Cleage Jr., the first child of an eventual seven, was born on June 13, 1911, at his family’s home in Indianapolis. By the time his son turned one, Albert Sr. was still writing letters home to Indiana as he traveled elsewhere in the Midwest. Then a fortuitous bit of news came from Kalamazoo, Michigan. There was an opening for a town doctor.

Kalamazoo had a small Black population and had been receptive to abolitionist sentiment—all reasons, perhaps, for its reputedly peaceful character. The Cleages relocated to Kalamazoo in 1912, where Albert Sr. opened his first private practice. He quickly became one of Kalamazoo’s most prominent Black professionals. He was made honorary vice president of the local Freedmen’s Progress Commission by 1915, a Jubilee year that marked five decades since Emancipation. It was a year of plenty. A family friend, a dentist, encouraged the Cleages to take up where there were greater opportunities for Black people of their stature, at the spinning heart of the modern world.

And so the Cleages arrived in Detroit the year before its Urban League opened in 1916. The city was about to undergo an enormous population boom that culminated in Detroit becoming one of the country’s top manufacturing centers. Henry Ford’s River Rouge complex, which opened west of downtown in 1917, was not the city’s only architectural marvel. Some of its theaters, shopping centers, banks, and hotels, as well as its towering central train station, were hailed as world wonders. The Cleages hadn’t been in the city four years before Albert Sr. and 29 other Black doctors bought a three-story house on the east side that they converted into Detroit’s first Black hospital, Dunbar Memorial.

Overextended and prone to heart flurries as he was, Albert Sr. belonged to the emergent class of Black leaders who chartered institutions to secure housing, job training, and other services for newly arrived migrants from the South. The essential work of Black professionals would make many of them, including Albert Sr., mainstays in the Detroit Tribune’s Society & Woman’s Page. They constituted the rarefied group that dined at fine restaurants such as Le Plaisir et Culture, played bridge at the Frogs’ Club, and threw sumptuous dinners in one another’s honor. Like many Black leaders of his economic and social standing, Albert Sr. was a practitioner of race work, an approach to social welfare that promoted the virtues of self-help and mutual aid within Black communities (many progressive settlement houses, welfare agencies, and social work training institutes barred Blacks from entry).

What did it matter in this new age that a co-founder of a hospital was the son of slaves? With the proper education and moral upbringing, any child of former bondspersons could now earn their keep and drink from delicate glassware. The Cleages’ spacious home on Detroit’s west side looked like a watchtower. It was in the Tireman neighborhood, where members of the Black middle class were starting to find much better housing than what was available on the east side, where poor Blacks, European Jews, and other immigrants lived in inhospitable conditions. Albert Sr.’s wife, Pearl, worried over her husband’s demanding schedule. Albert Jr. sometimes joined him on assorted house calls. His father liked to prod him about political subjects, hoping to spark debate. When this happened, Pearl, along with Albert Jr.’s younger siblings—Louis, Henry, Hugh, Barbara, Gladys, and tiniest Anna—listened raptly or disappeared into the house.

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Albert Jr. was a serious-minded lover of art, music, and books, with his mother’s light complexion. He wore white blouses and trousers. When he opened his mouth, he tended to speak at length. The mama’s boy adopted Pearl’s sense of piety. He took great pride in his family and would later defend his father against accusations from some corners of the Black community that he was a typical race man, hardworking but overly comfortable. Some were disturbed by Albert Sr.’s affiliation with Charles Bowles, who briefly served as Detroit’s mayor in 1930 and had once received political support from the Ku Klux Klan.

Bowles had offered Albert Sr. the position of police surgeon, but white resistance compelled the mayor to assign him the role of city physician instead. Albert Sr.’s appointment as Detroit’s first Black city doctor was a minor scandal. Recently fired white garbage workers accused the mayor and his public works commissioner of trying to replace white city workers with Blacks. It was not personal, Bowles assured them, but most of the city’s welfare cases were colored. Who better to serve in a public health role than a Black man who had proven his ability to point other members of his race to jobs?

The position gave Albert Sr. a handsome salary and a car just as the Great Depression was beginning. It also cemented the Cleages’ status as socialites. The Cleages would be flattered by a series of white mayors. Pearl and Albert Sr. appeared at Sigma Gamma Rho debutante balls and Iota Boule events. They were renowned hosts, especially of Albert Sr.’s friends from Knoxville College, itself representative of the New Negro ethos that had been shaping Black middle-class notions of success since the Reconstruction period. It was not unusual to spot a visitor’s Studebaker outside the Cleage residence. At meetings of the West Side Human Relations Council, a civic club, Albert Sr. and Pearl lectured on the importance of good home environments. They spoke in support of nurseries for Black children and gave speeches on the problem of juvenile delinquency.

This was life for Albert Jr., who was raised knowing how to smile and dress like other moneyed Black people. From 1915 on, one could often find high-society Blacks like the Cleages vacationing in Idlewild—Michigan’s “Black Eden”—one of the largest resorts for Black people in the country before the heydays of Oak Bluffs and Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard or Sag Harbor in Long Island. Albert Jr. had been going since he was a boy. His family was beautiful in Idlewild’s light. They broke the surface of Lake Idlewild with oars that frightened the minnows and baby bass. Horses grazed near stables owned by a blind veteran of the Spanish-American War. Rowboats and cottages had names, and in the winter, one could ski over the frozen lake or trek to the peaks of nearby Caberfae. The Cleages rented a cottage here until the Second World War, at which point one of Albert Jr.’s brothers purchased a lot and built a house.

Albert Jr. could enjoy his family’s scenic Idlewild get-togethers only to a point. Years before the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier wrote about the “black bourgeoisie” in his 1957 book of the same name—a text that would become a touchstone for Albert Jr.—Cleage fils had expressed wariness about his own upbringing. He did not ignore the blatant tension between his privileged life and the misfortunes that many other Blacks in Detroit faced. In this way, Albert Jr. took after his spiritual leader at the family church, Plymouth Congregational.

Reverend Horace White, who became Plymouth’s pastor in 1938, was an Oberlin graduate and member of the National Negro Congress (NNC), a workers’ organization founded during the Depression by leaders who had progressive, socialist, and communist leanings. The NNC was one of the few militant organizations of the period that advocated for organized labor movements among the Black working class, along with the civil liberties that groups such as the NAACP and Urban League were calling for. The NNC arose in part to compensate for the shortcomings of New Deal policies whose advantages did not always reach the most vulnerable Black populations.

In his sermons, White drew on the headlines of the day and books other than the Bible, including novels such as Richard Wright’s Native Son. In the 1930s, he became known for criticizing Henry Ford’s relationship with some of Detroit’s Black pastors in the pages of the liberal magazine Christian Century. According to Ford’s patronage system, those pastors who wanted their parishioners to obtain decent jobs at Ford Motor Co. would need to limit their criticisms of the industrialist. White blamed these pastors for letting themselves become tools in the hands of “King Ford.” He accused Ford of owning Detroit’s Black churches as surely as he owned any factory, diluting whatever salvific power they had left in an age marked by corporate greed, economic devastation, and the chronic suffering of the poor and oppressed.

In later years, White’s tenure as a Michigan state representative and head of the Detroit NAACP’s housing commission gave Albert Jr. one of his early models of a leader in the Social Gospel tradition. He was no Sundays-only Christian who off-loaded the worldly concerns of his parishioners onto a higher power. What clear-eyed man of God in industrial Detroit could truly believe that progress was inevitable? One only had to look to the Black Bottom neighborhood on the east side for proof to the contrary.

Depression-era Detroit did not resemble the City on a Hill that its architects wanted it to be as much as it did a Promised Land that had failed to live up to its potential. By virtue of his father’s station, Albert Jr. had been insulated from the east-side ghettoes for most of his life. After studying sociology at Fisk University in Nashville and then at Detroit City College, he was exposed to the living conditions of impoverished Blacks as a caseworker. In July 1938, Albert Jr. passed a civil service exam for a position in Detroit’s overburdened welfare department. Firehouses were serving as supplementary welfare stations since the city’s eight benefits offices couldn’t handle everything on their own.

When Albert Jr. joined the department, there were almost 12,000 Black people on the city’s welfare rolls. Most of them were laid-off autoworkers. The welfare department had been disgraced because of accusations that the police were given illegal access to confidential client records. There were also reports of dole chiselers defrauding the department of its dwindling money. The director of the Works Progress Administration and Welfare Department of the UAW-CIO predicted that further reductions in funding would lead to an acute crisis for the poor in Detroit.

Albert Jr. soon quit his job. It became clear that piecemeal reforms would not ultimately bring about the kingdom of God on earth. He was more likely to accomplish something as president of Plymouth Congregational’s Junior League, then one of Detroit’s most socially active church youth organizations. Under Albert Jr.’s supervision, young men and women learned about the realities of unemployment and the rising tide of fascism in Europe. They heard their mentor call for the city’s Blacks to support unionization efforts at Ford Motor Co.

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. 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. Albert Jr. saw his own face in the mirror of the high-society colored papers. Who was worse off? The poor in their ghetto enclaves or the spiritually dead Black ghosts arrayed in tassels and silk, pursuing their own individual fortunes? The lines between these groups were thin, the boundaries more porous than perhaps they first appeared. As dapper as he was, Albert Jr. was still the grandson of slaves.

Years later, during the early years of his radical pastorate, Albert Jr. would ask himself in the margins of a scrap of paper whether he and all Black people should be called aliens or the lost and the damned or snakes in the garden of Eden. He would wonder whether Black people were alienable at all, which would assume they were not already at the far edges of social life. He considered himself an alienist—one who studies the lives of those who felt themselves apart. If the United States was in some ways an unfriendly foreign country for Blacks who had been forced to engineer their own institutions and folkways to survive, was it more accurate to call them American strangers, dwellers, or merely inhabitants?

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This is an excerpt from Aaron Robertson’s The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, which will be published on October 1 by FSG.