Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit

6. BLACK FAITH

six BLACK FAITH The Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr., Black Christian Nationalism, and the Second Civil Rights Community in Detroit By the late 1960s, the Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr. had become a leading ‹gure in the movement to link African American religion and Black theology with Black nationalism and Black power. He was, notes theologian James H. Cone, “one of the few black ministers who has embraced Black Power as a religious concept and has sought to reorient the church-community on the basis of it.”1 He was also one of the most controversial religious activists to appear on the national scene in the midst of the “long hot summers.” For Cleage, who disputed nonviolence’s value as either a political strategy or a philosophy, the urban rebellions of the late 1960s were just a “dress rehearsal” for the real revolution yet to come. Violence was undesirable but necessary if rapid change was to be achieved. It was the duty and destiny of the Black church to serve as the cornerstone of the new Black nation that would emerge. In preparation , Cleage used his own church and congregation to inaugurate the Black Christian nationalist movement. “We reject the traditional concept of church,” Cleage explained in his 1972 book Black Christian Nationalism : New Directions for the Black Church. In its place we will build a Black Liberation movement which derives its basic religious insights from African spirituality, its character from African communalism, and its revolutionary direction from Jesus, the 237 Black Messiah. We will make Black Christian Nationalism the cornerstone of the Black man’s struggle for power and survival. We will build a Black communal society which can protect the minds and bodies of Black men, women and children everywhere.2 Cleage had not completely rejected the notion of racial integration early in his career during the 1950s. He began his clerical service as a local activist struggling to win converts, both religious and political. A minister, organizer, and ideologue, over time Cleage helped to de‹ne an emergent Black nationalist perspective within the city’s civil rights movement. Both inside and outside the movement, Cleage was commonly regarded as an enigma: a Christian minister who contended that almost everything about traditional Christianity was false; a Black nationalist who by outward appearances could “pass” for white; and a self-styled champion of the poor, the marginal, and the dispossessed with impeccable middle-class credentials. Few commentators and even fewer critics failed to mention Cleage’s light skin color in particular. Grace Lee Boggs, for example, describes Cleage as “[p]ink-complexioned , with blue eyes and light brown, almost blonde hair” (his eyes were in fact gray). His ‹rst biographer, journalist Hiley Ward, a religion writer for the Detroit Free Press in the 1960s, contends that Cleage’s light complection left him with “a lifelong identity crisis.”3 Ward, who seems obsessed with Cleage’s coloring, describes the reverend’s mother, Pearl Reed Cleage, as white in appearance with very thin features: “My grandmother was a Cherokee Indian,” he quotes her as explaining, “my father was a mulatto, and my mother was a very fair lady.” The rumors that Pearl Reed Cleage forbade her seven children to play with children who were visibly darker than they, and that the Cleage family was (as the Michigan Chronicle’s Louis Martin asserted) “the fair mulatto type, not too interested in unions,” seem to be the products of unjust presupposition and bias.4 Friends, family members, and associates at the Shrine of the Black Madonna have described the role of race, class, and family in Reverend Cleage’s life very differently. According to his sister, Barbara (Cleage) Martin, “we never passed. We never even tried to pass.” Martin recalls her mother giving lectures on Black history at nearby Wingert Elementary School; other sources cite Pearl Cleage’s efforts to get the Detroit Board of Education to hire Black teachers and provide a decent education to Black children. Similarly, their father, Dr. Albert Cleage Sr., is described by his children and family friends as a dedicated “race man,” who, though not a member of the UNIA, was sympathetic to Garveyism. 238 FAITH IN THE CITY According to an of‹cial publication of the shrine, these “early impressions of racial pride and civic duty in›uenced young Cleage’s thinking and shaped his outlook on life.” Both versions of the early raw...