The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America [Hardcover]

One ofThe New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024
One of theWashington Post's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
A Finalist for theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize for History
Finalist for the Zora Award | Hooks National Book Award

A New York Public Library Top Ten Book of 2024 | ABoston GlobeBest Book of 2024
ANew RepublicBest Book of the Fall| ATimeMust-Read Book of the Year
Named a Best Book of the Year byThe New Yorker|Literary Hub|Essence|Elle| Chicago Public Library
A 2025 Michigan Notable Book | ABooklistBest History Book of 2025
Winner of the 2025 Bridge Book Award

[An] extraordinary new work of history and memoir . . . Unforgettable. Gabriel Bump,The Washington Post

A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopiaand sought to transform their lives.

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

These questions animate Aaron Robertsons exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroitthe city where he was born, and where one of the countrys most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members. Central to this endeavor was the Shrines chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism. Tlƒ&