What Does Utopia Look Like for Black Americans?

Aaron Robertson’s grandparents had a farm in Promise Land, Tenn. In a new book, he explores the history and meaning of such utopian communities for African Americans.

By John Jeremiah Sullivan, New York Times Book Review

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and the author of the forthcoming book “The Prime Minister of Paradise,” about an 18th-century utopian experiment on the Southern frontier.

THE BLACK UTOPIANS: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, by Aaron Robertson

Looked at from a certain surface-level perspective, the whole notion of Black utopianism can seem to entail a paradox. As the literary scholar Charles Scruggs put it more than 30 years ago in “Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel,” “Given what we know about the position of Black Americans within a racist society, the idea of a Black utopian city may seem absurd on the face of it.”

Yet the opposite observation seems equally true. 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. To quote Aaron Robertson, in his interesting and idiosyncratic new book, “The Black Utopians,” “The apparent persistence of abysmal realities for Black people, and the certainty that there exists much more besides, is the soil from which Black utopianism emerges.”

This book is a formal hybrid that oscillates between a personal history and a more scholarly one. Plenty of pages perform, in a relatively straightforward way, the work one might come to the book expecting — that is, they discuss “the diverse dreams, migrations and collective social experiments of African Americans.” Other chapters are more impressionistic. Several consist of letters written to the author by his father, which describe the elder man’s hardships (among them a decade-long prison stint for armed robbery) and his fascination with a Kentucky preacher named Stephen Darby, who sermonized online about an 18th-century Black utopia known as Negroland.

Some readers may find this eccentric structure bemusing, but Robertson comes by it honestly. He grew up in Detroit (of all American cities, perhaps the one most often called a “dystopia,” he notes with irony), but his youth was marked by memorable “pilgrimages” to his grandparents’ farm in a place called Promise Land, about 40 miles west of Nashville. Founded soon after the Civil War by newly freed African American families who had been enslaved at a nearby ironworks, the settlement — which exists today, though barely — fits into a tradition of Reconstruction-era Black townships born in a frontier-utopian spirit. The slavocracy was dead. New ways of living and being briefly seemed possible in the ruins. Robertson was fascinated by the traces of these energies, as preserved in his grandparents’ memories. He beautifully reconstructs the history of their town, as it ran through the lives of his ancestors:

Promise Landers built the school benches and the chimneys. They created everything but the tattered books and newspapers that came to the schoolhouse from Charlotte when white children or their parents no longer needed them. They built the school’s elevated stage, on which Papa performed James Weldon Johnson’s poems from “God’s Trombones” as a child. This included the one in which the heavenly Father admits to feeling lonely and finds joy in a new activity: “I’ll make me a world.”

Those Southern experiences sensitized Robertson to a utopia closer to home, namely, Black Christian Nationalism, a major urban social-reform movement established in Detroit by the Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr. The Black Christian Nationalists, in turn, bought a 4,000-acre farm down in South Carolina, and called it Beulah Land. They dreamed of working it collectively and exporting the fresh produce to inner-city neighborhoods across America.

The book thus shuttles back and forth from North to South, like its author, imparting a sort of regional warp and woof to the narrative. One of the letters from his father shows that Robertson inherited this pattern or had it in his bones. “Being happy in Tennessee,” his father writes, “made me realize that I hated Detroit. Whenever we left to return north, I would enter my first stage of depression. The depression would deepen in Kentucky. By the time we were in Toledo, Ohio, I was bracing for the disappointments of my daily life.”

Robertson’s most forceful stretches of attention are given to Cleage and the Black Christian Nationalists. Cleage “disliked the word utopian,” Robertson tells us, preferring the term “Black realist.” Even so, he was “well-versed in many of the thinkers, groups and movements that are now regularly identified as part of a broader utopian tradition.” These ranged from “the spiritual practices of gurus and mystics” to “the rebellions of Haitian slaves and maroons who lived in the swamplands of the American South.”

In tracing the organization and evolution of the “Black kibbutzniks” around “the Shrine,” as members called the group — in reference to the Shrine of the Black Madonna, Cleage’s church, where in 1967, on a wall that had once featured a stained-glass window depicting a white pilgrim, the Detroit artist Glanton Dowdell painted a large portrait of a dark-skinned Virgin Mary — Robertson gives us a picture of a utopian movement in all of the classic phases: an early, ecstatic revolutionary idealism, followed by increased radicalization (with a focus on control of members’ behavior), leading to isolation and political marginalization, and, finally, a drastic falling off in membership and influence.

As Robertson reminds us, though, the movement is not completely dead. The Beulah Land farm continues to operate. And many of the movement’s ideas were admirable. Cleage’s Black Christian Nationalism was not a Black version of white Christian nationalism. It was interested not in excluding but in gathering, to create zones of shelter from the violence and “constrictive rhythms” of white-supremacist capitalism, “counterinstitutions” where visions of more sustainable lifeways could be developed and taught.

The cover of “The Black Utopians” is white with the title and author’s name in gold letters framing a portrait in black, brown and gold of a young Black woman with an afro. The edges of the book cover are decorated with a delicate gilt floral motif. 

That said, I was surprised at times by the arbitrariness of what Robertson includes and leaves out. He lingers long over Promise Land in Tennessee but makes no mention of arguably more significant Southern Black utopias such as Kingdom of the Happy Land in North Carolina. Barbara Arneil’s chapter on “African-American Utopian Colonies” (in her 2017 monograph “Domestic Colonies”) gets name-checked, but Robertson’s failure to take account of a source as foundational as William and Jane Pease’s 1963 volume “Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America” is a serious oversight. He touches more than once on utopian traditions in African American fiction but strangely says not a word about maybe the most important work in that genre, Toni Morrison’s “Paradise” — set largely in a Black utopian village in Oklahoma — nor about the literary scholar Amber Foster’s valuable 2013 essay in Utopian Studies, “Nancy Prince’s Utopias: Reimagining the African American Utopian Tradition,” nor about the scholar Maria Giulia Fabi’s 2001 book “Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel,” which features a brilliant debunking of the once commonplace assumption among utopia scholars that (as she quotes two of them) “Afro-American literature has never had any significant utopian dimension.”

Almost any book can be nitpicked this way. And the thing Robertson does set out most emphatically to do — to consider the question, “What does utopia look like in Black?” — he does in an original and compelling way. The letters from his father are among the most effective and affecting parts of the book.

He seems to have realized that he possessed, in his old man’s words, a living specimen of the subject that really calls to him in “The Black Utopians,” not the history of Black utopias so much as the psychology of Black utopianism, a pain that can make utopian spaces not just tempting or inspiring but vitally necessary. At the book’s strongest moments, we sense in the eccentricity of its design not a ramshackle structure but the quality that, according to Robertson, utopia “always describes”: “a perpetual opening.”