Black Messiah: Reverend Albert B. Cleage, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, and the Capitalization of Diaspora

On Easter Sunday, 1967, the Rev. Albert B. Cleage of Detroit’s Central Congregational Church unveiled an eighteen-foot-high painting, “The Black Madonna and Child,” and inaugurated his Black Christian Nationalist movement. Insisting that the acknowledgment of a Black Messiah was a predicate to the resurrection of the Black Nation and the galvanization of a Black revolutionary consciousness, Cleage and his followers launched a national recruitment effort, and broadened their cultural and economic footprint in Detroit by pursuing a series of business ventures: a bookstore and cultural center, a cooperative market, a farm, and a school. The ecclesiastical pan-Africanism practiced by members of Cleage’s church—renamed the Shrine of the Black Madonna—drew on a long tradition of independent black church building in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa that merged elements of faith, diasporic identity, entrepreneurship, and liberationist politics. Boasting a rich, extensive, and well-cataloged archive, Cleage’s Black Christian Nationalism offers a useful vantage point from which to explore these connections. This paper will pay particular attention to the capitalization of diaspora in Cleage’s church, and to the consumption of popular pan-Africanism—prophetic, affective, locally rendered and negotiated—more widely considered.