News highlights
December 21, 2024, ELLE
The Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
“Visions of utopia sustain and empower us in a world veering more dystopian by the minute. Although many of those visions are relegated to the work of fantasy and science fiction, there are those throughout history who have sought to build real-life utopias (or the closest possible thing) in their communities. Aaron Robertson’s The Black Utopians, then, honors and tracks the Black Americans who galvanized this mission—such as the reverend Albert B. Cleage Jr., who founded the Shrine of the Black Madonna Church in Detroit—and weaves together personal history with extensive research to do so. The result is a compelling volume that emphasizes not only the dream of utopia but the necessary pursuit of it.” — Lauren Puckett-Pope
December 20, 2024, Literary Hub
Lit Hub’s 50 Noteworthy Nonfiction Books of 2024
“This meditation on the meaning of utopia for Black Americans is a lush history couched in a stirring memoir. Aaron Robertson sprouts his book on personal earth, framing an account of the radical Detroit preacher Albert Cleage and his Afrocentric parish, the Shrine, with stories of his own family’s roots in Promise Land, Tennessee. But he’s so elegant in braiding personal history and research that both distant events and bright futures feel tangible and alive.”
December 18, 2024, The Baffler
We Owe Each Other Everything: The Long Arc of Black Utopianism
“Black Christian Nationalism emerged from the marriage of two twentieth-century experiments in mass self-reinvention. The first is well known: the counterculture movements of the 1960s, through which a new generation sought to diverge from middle-class values preached by the Silent Generation. The other kicked off earlier in the century, when Black migrants began embracing new, niche religious offshoots from the major Abrahamic religions, what African American studies scholar Judith Weisenfeld called ‘religio-racial movements.’” — Kaila Philo
December 16, 2024, The New Yorker
“In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, liberation theology—which holds that ‘holiness starts from below, in the experiences and aspirations of the disinherited’—inspired Black Christian nationalists to find ‘new frameworks’ for living. [The Black Utopians] focuses on one such experiment: Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna church, led by Albert Cleage, Jr., a visionary preacher. Cleage believed that Black churches had to be ‘actively engaged in social struggle’; to that end, the Shrine attempted to empower Black communities with innovations including a communal-child-rearing movement and a national food-distribution network. As the congregation sought to ‘re-create’ God ‘in their own image,’ its members strove to create a world that was meant for them.”
December 13, 2024, The Boston Globe
“In telling the story of the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a Detroit Afrocentric Christian community, Robertson (a native of Detroit and a translator of Italian literature) explores the enduring impulse to create communities of care and love within an indifferent and often violent nation.” — Kate Tuttle
December 11, 2024, Code Switch (NPR)
Dreaming of a Black Utopia in Trump’s America
“[The Black Utopians] tells the story of how Black folks have created many different versions of utopian communities throughout history—and why those communities tend to be especially meaningful during times of political tension and racial unrest.”
November 27, 2024, The Presbyterian Outlook
“Robertson overlays his family’s story with the stories of Black liberation movements . . . By choosing varied examples, Robertson demonstrates the diversity of Black visions; by lifting up these stories, he offers hope for new ways of living in community.” — Amy Pagliarella
November 26, 2024, The New York Times
“The farm Robertson’s grandparents owned in Promise Land, Tenn., a town founded by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, serves as the springboard for this sensitive, often deeply personal exploration of utopianism in Black American thought and life.”
November 26, 2024, New York Public Library
November 21, 2024, The Washington Post
50 Notable Works of Nonfiction From 2024
“This extraordinary work of history and memoir uses the author’s family history as an entry point to the broader idea of Black utopias. Unlike many other sweeping narratives of Black life in America, Robertson’s is concerned with life on the fringes, the less-explored but no less important avenues of survival.”
November 19, 2024, The Southern Bookseller Review
Review of The Black Utopians
“A book that feels groundbreaking: ambitious in scope and deeply felt.” — Johanna Hynes, bookseller at Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky
November 18, 2024, Chicago Public Library
November 13, 2024, TIME
The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024
“Using his ancestors as his guide, Robertson lays out a path toward survival and prosperity for all Black Americans.” — Shannon Carlin
November 4, 2024, Chapter 16
“Aaron Robertson’s exacting, poetic The Black Utopians tracks the rise of Black nationalism, skeptical to its core, through a cadre of Detroit activists, knitting their creative and often militant ideas with memoir and his formerly incarcerated father’s letters, centering the question: ‘What does utopia look like in black?’ The book is a marvel of storytelling.” — Hamilton Cain
October 29, 2024, Oprah Daily
10 New Books to Talk About This November
“The personal and the collective are seamlessly blended in this sweeping yet intricate book that excavates the past and imagines a different future.” — Francesca Billington
October 18, 2024, Essence
Let’s Get Lit: Essence’s Top 20 Book Picks for Fall 2024
“The Black Utopians provides a refreshing and in depth reinterpretation of the Civil Rights and Black Power periods, centering 'Black utopian communities, spaces, and movements in the U.S. The narrative pulls in examples such as the Shrine’s own Beulah Land Farm Project; the Republic of New Afrika; Soul City; Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association; Father Divine’s International Peace Mission Movement; the Nation of Islam; MOVE, and more.” — Lynnette Nicholas
October 17, 2024, The New Republic
October 11, 2024, The Washington Post
The Black Utopians is an extraordinary work of history and memoir
“These travelers passing one another, looking in opposite directions for paradise, is a perfect allegory for the 20th-century Black American experience: migration followed by disillusionment followed by more migration, some hope, occasional improvements, the looming threat of White America.” — Gabriel Bump
October 10, 2024, Commonweal
Detroit’s Black Christian Utopia
“The Trump campaign has made us all too familiar with the ideology of Christian Nationalism, with its violent rhetoric and racist undertones. Far less well-known, though, is the tradition of Black Christian Nationalism, a radical social and religious movement founded by Rev. Albert Cleage, Jr., in civil-rights-era Detroit.”
October 8, 2024, The New York Times
What Does Utopia Look Like for Black Americans?
“Those with the least to lose, socially and economically speaking, are often the most receptive to radical thinking on how to reorder human society, and the most fluent in wielding it, at least in the imaginative realm.” — John Jeremiah Sullivan
October 8, 2024, Fare Forward
There’s No Place Like No Place
“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.” — James E. Cherry
October 3, 2024, ABC News Live
Author of The Black Utopians on the quest for a better Black existence
“ABC News’ Linsey Davis speaks with author Aaron Robertson, who shares Black stories through a utopian lens.”
October 2, 2024, Stateside (Michigan Public Radio)
The search for “Black Utopia” in Michigan
“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.”
October 1, 2024, The Metro (WDET 101.9 FM)
New book takes historical look at how Black Americans envisioned utopia
“For many Black Americans, the idea of religion intersects with freedom in a complicated way. Enslaved Africans came to this country with religions and traditions, most of which were stripped upon arrival and replaced with new forms of worship. Once the freedoms of Black Americans were slowly granted after the Civil War, the ideas for what the future could look like and how to achieve that future were beginning to take root. Black-led cities, towns and small communities began to flourish — many short-lived — but their ideas of a paradise on earth persisted.” — John Filbrandt
October 1, 2024, Poets & Writers
Ten Questions for Aaron Robertson
“Back in 2016 I met and reported on some of the counter-narrators who are, I think, architects of Detroit’s creative future. These kinds of creators and designers have always been in Detroit. There’s some kind of continuity between their countercultural work today and the work of their spiritual forebears in the 1960s, and even the 1860s.”
September 28, 2024, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Bourgeois Dreams, Black Rebellions (excerpt from The Black Utopians)
“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.”
September 26, 2024, Religion News Service
How yesterday’s Black Christian nationalists planted the seeds for a Black utopia
“Robertson stumbled upon the Shrine, founded in the 1950s, while doing research for a novel. He learned of the Shrine’s radical children’s community, modeled after Israel’s kibbutzim and Soviet Union kindergartens. He read the sermons of the Shrine’s leader, Albert Cleage Jr., who talked of the Black Messiah. His research promptly took a detour into the Shrine, and Black utopias across the country.” — Kathryn Post
September 25, 2024, The Minnesota Star Tribune
Expect this history of trail-blazing Black communities to be in the hunt for big prizes
“Robertson walks a tightrope here: His heart belongs to the white-hot entropy of the movement while his skeptic’s head questions the efficacy of separatism.” — Hamilton Cain
September 3, 2024, The Paris Review
The Black Madonna (excerpt from The Black Utopians)
“By 1967, Rose Waldon had been in Detroit for a few years, but she still could not afford to buy herself a washing machine and dryer. She would often take her three-year-old son to the laundromat with her. A man approached them one day by the laundromat entrance as they were walking in. Was he some kook? What did he want? The man introduced himself as the assistant at an artist’s gallery. He made a claim that Rose would start to hear more often in the North: he told her that she had a memorable face.”
August 2, 2024, Publishers Weekly
Writers to Watch: 10 Noteworthy Nonfiction Debuts, Fall 2024
“Robertson hopes the book might change the way people think about his hometown. ‘This is at its heart a story about people, most of them from Detroit or Michigan, who saw this city as a real locus of social change and transformation,’ he says. ‘I would love for people to have a sense that the people in Detroit have been envisioning and creating better worlds for a very long time.’” — Carliann Rittman
July 10, 2024, Literary Hub