In a new book out this month, writer, editor, translator and Michigan native Aaron Robertson discusses Black thinkers and the realizations of Black utopias amid repression in the United States.
Robertson says Black folks in America have been “creating good places from the varied nowheres they have been consigned for centuries.” He mentions reform schools, segregated churches, former plantation sites and more. In their place, Robertson says people have made homes out of churches, opened co-ops, created their own communities and sources of income.
Those Black utopias are the subject of the new book - where Robertson explores utopias throughout American history through the lens of Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna and his family’s ancestral home in Promise Land, Tennessee. He also focuses on two men that are central to the legacy of the Shrine of the Black Madonna - Pastor Albert Cleage Jr. and the artist Glanton Dowdell who painted the shrine.
This book blends memoir, letters from Robertson’s father, history and his own reflections into a compelling story about Black people’s fight for liberation.
“People may disagree about whether the Black liberation movements of that period were successful but many people in the Shrine said that I, ya know, came away feeling that I was worth something,” Robertson told Stateside.
Robertson grew up near the fabled church on Detroit’s West Side, the Shrine of the Black Madonna. But still he and many other Detroiters don’t know the full story of the church and it’s place in history.
“I wanted to write about the Shrine of the Black Madonna in part because so many of the most popular narratives about Detroit have been associated with the idea that this is a ruined city,” Robertson said. “That life here is somehow stalled and that there aren't sort of these ongoing creative experiments. And that's, that's just not true. It's never been true.”
Robertson doesn’t want anyone - but especially Detroiter’s to forget the Shrine’s history. A lot of what he wants people to remember is connected to the legacy work Cleage did at the Shrine during the 1950’s and 1960’s.
“He advocated for the establishment of Black-led institutions and Black-led businesses. He believed that so much of what was happening at that time in the country, so many of the policies around, you know, housing and education were trying to reinforce this sense that black people were somehow inferior,” Robertson said. “And so every part of his his mission, every aspect of his work was meant to show black people that, no, you are actually worthy of dignity and you can completely reimagine the foundations of life to create a world that you want to see.”
