Hamilton Cain | (TNS) The Minnesota Star Tribune
Painter Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) chronicled the Black Migration out of the South in a series of 60 panels whose tempera colors and spiked diagonals depict fear and resolve. Aaron Robertson revisits that demographic surge in his elegant, vigorous debut, “The Black Utopians.”
Tackling the challenges of racial empowerment from the angle of Black communities that withdrew from the burdens of integration, weaving memoir with accounts of both self-determination and political machinations, showcasing obscure figures and celebrating their legacies, Robertson’s work arrives just in time for book prize season!
Robertson’s linchpin is the hamlet of Promise Land, Tenn., founded amid the hopeful upswell of Reconstruction. As a child he joined his grandparents on summer vacations there, driving from Detroit for a couple of weeks with extended relations, a pocket of black tranquility somehow beyond the wingspan of white America.
From personal recollections, he segues to the history of other utopias, from Beulah Land in South Carolina to activist congregations in Detroit and Houston. He bridges his chapters with tender letters from his father, Doe, a former ex-con who was often walled off (literally) from his son. Raw yet poetic, these letters evoke the plights and alienation of the incarcerated. The author dodges the pitfalls of nostalgia and sentimentality; his anecdotes crackle with immediacy.
His eye on pacing and detail, he charts the intellectual odysseys of his cast, upending our expectations. The fiery scion of a prominent African American family in Detroit, Albert Cleage Jr. took a more militant stance than his elders, building the Shrine of the Black Madonna and expanding into bookstores and various businesses with the flair of a born entrepreneur. He eventually changed his name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman in the 1970s, a dash of radical chic that fuels the middle of “Utopians.” We glimpse the rise of Islamism within urban neighborhoods, as Malcolm X demands bloody confrontation.
Artist Glanton Dowdell, another Detroit native, slogged through early poverty and prison, living by street smarts.
“He and the other black boys watched the hustlers at Eastern Market ply their trade and became their informal apprentices,” Robertson writes. “They carried grocery bags, cleaned around the stands, loaded produce and scrapped with immigrant boys over turf..” A manslaughter charge sent him to the big house, where he funneled his despair into art that lent gravitas to his people’s suffering. Robinson’s portrait of Dowdell is a revelation unto itself.
Jaramogi (as Robertson calls him) recognized that Black Nationalism was fomenting its own institutions and hierarchies, taking on the contours of an industry. He embraced the shift, investing in Beulah Land, an idyllic farm. 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, such as the Shrine’s communal mandates.
“In the Shrine, renegade desires always flowered,” he opines. “The safeguarding of the individual was sacred and necessary, too. It was the individual who stood discretely on the riverbank, watching the baptism of others from afar.”
It’s easy to imagine the author as that riverbank observer, of the flow but not in it. Layered and probing, studded with germane autobiography, “The Black Utopians” is an extraordinary achievement in narrative nonfiction.
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The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America
By: Aaron Robertson.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 382 pages, $30.
©2024 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
