BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Tuesday, February 18 @ 7PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend and RSVP WITH BOOK to purchase your book and support Non Fiction Book Club!

ABOUT THE BLACK UTOPIANS

How did the disillusioned, the betrayed, the confined, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What does utopia look like in black?

When preacher Albert Cleage, Jr., founded the innovative church known as the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit, he had an audacious goal: to combine Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members. The Shrine’s members opened bookstores and co-ops, created a self-defense force, raised their children communally, and eventually established the country’s largest black-owned farm, where attempts to create an earthly paradise for black people continue today.

Aaron Robertson sets the Shrine’s story alongside a diverse array of black utopian visions, from the Reconstruction era through the countercultural fervor of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present day. He also traces his own family’s journey from the historic blacktown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit.

The Black Utopians offers a nuanced portrait of the struggle for spaces where black dignity, protection, and nourishment are paramount. This book is the story of a movement and of a world still in the making—one that points the way toward radical alternatives for the future.