Albert Buford Cleage, Jr.

Activist, religious leader, and educator

• Born: June 13, 1911
• Birthplace: Indianapolis, Indiana
• Died: February 20, 2000
• Place of death: Calhoun Falls, South Carolina

Cleage is best known as the father of the Black Messiah movement and founder of the Black Christian Nationalist Church. His radical political publications and organized activism reached and influenced a national audience during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s. He worked relentlessly to rectify social, political, and economic injustices on matters within and beyond Detroit’s city limits.

Early Life

Albert Buford Cleage, Jr. (klehg) was born on June 13, 1911, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was the first of seven children born to Albert, Sr., and Pearl Reed Cleage. Several years later, the family settled in Detroit, where Cleage’s father became the first African American medical doctor to work for the city. His mother, Pearl, is credited as Cleage’s inspiration for his career as a religious leader and political activist. She instilled in him a deep spiritual faith, racial pride, and the certainty that Jesus was black.

From an early age, Cleage displayed a remarkable talent for speaking on subjects that captured his attention. While he and his family were middle-class, relatively light-skinned African Americans, it appears certain that Cleage shared the experiences of nearly all African American children of that period: discrimination, segregation, and intimations of racial inferiority. While he was pained by the discrimination he experienced in the public school system, it did not hinder his drive for knowledge.

Cleage graduated with a B.A. in psychology from Wayne State University, where he also studied sociology, in 1938. He found employment with the Department of Welfare but quickly became disheartened by social work. Cleage came to believe that the church was the crux of the African American community and therefore its vehicle of liberation. In 1943, he earned an advanced degree in divinity from Oberlin Graduate School of Theology and was ordained as a minister in the Congregational Church. That same year, he married schoolteacher Doris Graham, with whom he had two children (Kristin and Pearl) before their divorce in 1955.

Cleage served as a pastor in both African American and racially integrated churches in Kentucky, San Francisco, and Springfield, Massachusetts. However, he returned home to Detroit in 1950 disillusioned with his earlier notion of racial integration in the church or in any other existing social structure because of the power imbalance between black and white Americans. In 1953, after three years of frustration as pastor of St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church in Detroit, Cleage founded Central Congregational Church, later known as the Shrine of the Black Madonna.

Life’s Work

Once he established his own congregation in Detroit, Cleage became dedicated to programs for youths and the impoverished in the surrounding community. His activism focused on issues of poverty, segregation in housing, discrimination in public schools, police brutality, and unfair political practices within Detroit’s white power structure. He was tireless in his work for African American self-determination, clashing with fellow African American civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Cleage perceived pacifist or gradual attempts at inclusion as idealistic, demeaning, and self-defeating. He believed that racism had to be faced with realism, which meant that African Americans had to accept that whites continued to view them as inferior and would never share power without some degree of force. Given this reality, Cleage believed the world was not ready for integration; a united “black nation” first had to gain power through organized action.

Cleage spread his views through his newspaper, The Illustrated News, which reached thousands of readers from 1961 to 1965. He established, joined, and engaged with many advocacy groups and hosted meetings in his church. He organized boycotts, took on the school board, and fought for the preservation of the Thirteenth Congressional District. While he was unsuccessful in campaigns for several political seats with the Freedom Now Party, his activism led to the Black Slate, areas in which African American majorities would “Vote Black,” as well as coalition politics. In a sense, Cleage found a middle ground between Malcolm X’s militant politics and King’s spiritual rhetoric to empower a people to act on issues of self-determination.

In 1968, Cleage changed the lens through which Americans viewed integration and introduced the concepts of the Christianization of slavery, the slave identity, and black power in his seminal book of sermons, The Black Messiah. The book was published in the wake of the 1967 Detroit riot and eventually translated into more than a dozen languages. In his second book, Black Christian Nationalism: New Directions for the Black Church (1972), he clearly defined the black nation and set out an aggressive program to acquire control of the socioeconomic, educational, and political institutions that had subjugated African Americans for generations.

Near the close of the century, Cleage established Beulah Land Farms, where he initiated programs for youths, held summer retreats, and grew food for the members of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church that had grown out of his Black Christian Nationalist Church. Cleage, who by then had adopted the Swahili name Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, spent his final days at Beulah Land Farms, where he died in 2000 at the age of eighty-eight.

Significance

Along with his zealous activism, Cleage’s teaching that freedom was an urgent and spiritual calling likely increased the speed at which the process of the Civil Rights movement progressed. His call for self-acceptance and political change invigorated a generation of African Americans and instilled in them spiritual and racial pride as well as the responsibility for creating change rather than awaiting it. This sense of empowerment spilled over to the next generation with significant improvements to institutional structures at a national level and a growing number of African Americans entering government offices as elected officials.

Bibliography

Cleage, Albert B., Jr. Black Christian Nationalism: New Directions for the Black Church. New York: William Morrow, 1972. A definitive description of the Black Christian Nationalist Church, including Cleage’s philosophy of fighting “power with power.”

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Black Messiah. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1968. Cleage’s collection of sermons introduces the concepts of slave identity, the Christianization of slavery, and the religious basis of black power that inspired the Black Messiah movement.

Dillard, Angela D. “Black Faith.” In Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Discusses Cleage’s importance in the context of the Civil Rights movement in Detroit.

Ward, Hiley. Prophet of the Black Nation. Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969. The first definitive biography of Cleage. Ward draws on his experiences following Cleage’s movement and interviews with Cleage, his family, associates, and members of his congregation.