The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America

NEA grantee Robertson’s book shows that formerly enslaved people established 200 to 1,200 settlements in the U.S. and Canada between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, and their frameworks for self-ruled and safe spaces for Black people bear emotional and tangible links to the Black nationalism of the 1960s and ’70s and the 21st-century Black Lives Matter movement. Unfolding a broad, nuanced narrative of personal reflection and familial connection, Robertson explores individual and collective ideas and efforts among Black people striving to realize the security of independence. The narrative moves between the author’s hometown of Detroit and his ancestral home in Promise Land, a middle Tennessee village founded by Black people during the Reconstruction era. He focuses on Detroit minister Albert Cleage Jr. (1911–2000), his Shrine of the Black Madonna church, the Black Christian Nationalism it symbolized, and Beulah Land, the 4,000 church-owned acres in South Carolina that were envisioned as a haven to physically and psychologically liberate Black people.