Category Archives: Cleages

Henry Cleage – Christmas on Scotten

Henry Cleage Christmas
This photo was taken the same year and from the same place as my Grandfather Cleage’s photograph.

My uncle Henry. If it was during WW2 he had come in from the farm while Hugh stayed out there to take care of the chickens and cows.  They alternated holidays. One of the last stories I remember Henry telling was how he was coming back from Christmas in Detroit. There had been a heavy snow storm and the roads were un-plowed.  He was walking out to the farm when he passed a man walking into town and realized it was Hugh.

Warren’s Christmas Birthday Party, 1958

cleage_cousins
Front row: Jan and Dale Evans  Middle: Pearl Cleage, Warren Evans, Ernest Martin  Back: Me (Kristin Cleage) If only Ernie had stepped a bit to the right you would be able to see both of our faces.  Why is Dale making that face? Must be because he’s 8.

My cousin Warren always had a party on his December 30th birthday. All of the Cleage cousins gathered at his house where his mother, my aunt Gladys, made a punch of Vernor’s ginger ale with orange sherbert floating on top. There was ice cream, chips, party favors and of course, cake. His cake, shown below, looks like a product of Detroit Awrey’s Bakery.  My cousin Jan corrected me and said it was probably a Sanders cake. Sanders also made cakes and the best chocolate miniatures ever. But I digress.

warren_party_strip

Because I count 11 candles on the cake, I’m going to say it was his 10th birthday which would make it 1958.  The 11th candle would be 1 to grow on.  There is no sign of his youngest brother who wasn’t born until July of 1959.

Unlike the Sepia Saturday prompt, there is no bus and no Santa in my photo but the people are sitting facing each other and it was taken during the 1950s.

2012.12W.07
To see more Christmas Sepia Saturday offerings, CLICK!

 

Accountability – Article by Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman/Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr.

The following article on accountability was written by the late Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, formerly the Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr., the founder of the Shrines of the Black Madonna of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church, for his weekly column, “Message to the Black Nation.”   It was published in the Oct. 14, 1967, issue of  “The Michigan Chronicle,” Detroit’s oldest black newspaper.

His column began informally with two articles that he wrote in the wake of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, which were published in the Aug. 12 and Aug. 19, 1967, issues.   The first was headlined “The Message’/We Must Control Our Community” and the second was headlined “Transfer Power To End Violence.” The following week, on Aug. 26, his column formally began under the “Message to the Black Nation” title, but the “Black” was omitted in the Oct. 14 column, apparently due to a typographical error. It ran for the next two years, with only occasional breaks, such as when he vacationed in Mexico in December 1967.   It was usually published on p. A-12, but sometimes on p. A-16.

In the beginning of this column, he refers to the Citywide Citizens Action Committee (CCAC), which was a broadly-based coalition of black organizations and individuals that was formed at a public meeting held in the 13th-floor auditorium of the former Detroit City-County Building, now the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, on Aug. 9, 1967.   CCAC was disbanded the following year. — Paul Lee.

MESSAGE TO THE NATION

 Explains Principle Of Accountability
      By REV. ALBERT B. CLEAGE, JR.

CCAC flier urging black people to “Fight to Win Self-Determination for the Detroit Black Community” by joining one of its 12 committees.  At least 12 of the chairs or co-chairs were members of or closely associated with Jaramogi Agyeman’s church, including attorneys Russell S. Brown, Jr., Milton R. Henry and Andrew W. Perdue; bookseller Edward Vaughn; artist Glanton Dowdell; street speaker Jackie Wilson (later Amen Ra Heru); publicist William M. Bell; physician Dr. Horace F. Bradfield; William Flowers; Marion Burton; United Auto Workers (UAW) organizer Nadine Brown; and Loretta Smith.

Black people in the city of Detroit have a new kind of unity born out of the July  [1967] rebellion.   Our new unity is the unity born of conflict and confrontation.   It is a unity that was made possible by our realization that in a moment of crisis the total white community came together in opposition to us in our struggle for freedom, justice and self-determination.

 This is the first time in the city of Detroit that we have had this kind of unity and out of this unity has come a new kind of organization, the Citywide Citizens Action Committee (CCAC).

 Historically black organizations have not been born out of conflict or the will to self-determination but rather out of a fruitless seeking after integration.   Our old organizations expressed our conviction that it was possible for us to integrate into the white man’s society and that some day there would come a great getting-up morning on which black and white would walk hand in hand in love for one another.

That was the basic dream which brought all of our black organizations into existence.   That was essentially the message of the black Christian church.  Now we realize that it was this dream which thwarted and frustrated all our efforts to secure freedom and justice.

Today’s unity was born out of the realization that our survival means a continual conflict and confrontation which can only be restored through the transfer of power and self-determination for the black community.

 What Self-Determination Means

Self-determination means black control of the black community.  This is the purpose which has brought us together.  Self-determination means control of the police department in our community.   It means controls in our community.   It means that we must control everything that touches the black community.

FREEDOM MARKET: The Black Star Co-op Market, 7525 Linwood, the first economic cooperative venture of the Citywide Citizens Action Committee (CCAC), Aug. 12, 1968. Formerly Rashid’s Market, it was a stock corporation inspired by Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Steamship Corporation in the 1920s. The old stock certificates are now collector’s items. BENYAS-KAUFMAN PHOTO, COURTESY PAUL LEE, BEST EFFORTS, INC.

Self-determination is not something vague and abstract.   It means that we must control all of the stores on all the streets in our community.   It means control of the housing in our community.   It means that we cannot tolerate one huge white real estate concern operating 60 percent of the apartment houses in our community.

 As the days pass and we begin the complicated task of translating these objectives into concrete programs, there is going to be a lot of double-talk and confusion.   Very few black people will publicly deny that they support self-determination even though many will refuse to do the things necessary to achieve it.

 That is why we must have one citywide organization interpreting day in and day out the simple facts involved in black control of the black community.   CCAC must help people understand what is involved.

We do NOT mean that we are going to turn the black community over to the self-seeking black capitalists.   There would be no great improvement for us if individualistic black businessmen controlled the business in our community for their personal benefit.   We are not exchanging one kind of economic slavery for another.

We are far beyond the days when we would proudly point to Brother So-and-So who had gotten rich from exploiting us and was driving around in a Cadillac.   If a black businessman is going to operate in our community, he must contribute to it and be accountable to it.

This is the first principle of black control of the black community:   the principle of accountability.   Everyone who is going to do anything in the black community must be accountable to the black community.

This will be something entirely new for us.   No black leader has ever considered himself accountable to the black community before — in politics, in business, in labor, in the church, or in education.   So-called black leaders have considered themselves accountable only to the white man.

We were supposed to be happy and content because they were successful and could dress up and live in big houses and walk around acting like white men.   Today, if a black man is exploiting the black community, he must be dealt with.   We have no room for selfish individualists in politics, in business, in labor, in the church or in the professions.

CCAC also opened the 24-hour Black Star Shell Service  Station at Linwood and Clairmount, several blocks west of where the Rebellion began.  BENYAS-KAUFMAN PHOTO, COURTESY PAUL LEE, BEST EFFORTS, INC.,

That Slavery Softness Has Got to Go

We must be willing to accept the implications of this position.   We have certain so-called leaders who disappear or have nothing to say when a crucial issue faces the black community.   We must have one answer for this disappearing act.   When election times come around, these so-called leaders must be put out to pasture.

This is more difficult than you imagine.   When election time comes, a lot of us will hesitate.    People will argue that it is better to have a weak black man in office than to risk no black man in office.

They will say that he is still some help just because he is black.   This is not true.   If a black politician does not recognize his accountability to the black community, then he is worse than nothing.   It would be better to have someone in office whom we can recognize as an enemy than to have an enemy in office who appears to be our friend.

Legislators, judges, councilmen, congressmen, every black man who holds a political office must take orders from us.   The moment he begins to think his job is bigger than we are, there is nothing for us to do but take him out.

We intend to demand that everybody who works in the black community recognize his accountability to us.   When he strays from the straight and narrow path, we are going to talk to him.   We will take a group of brothers and we will sit down and talk over his weaknesses and shortcomings.

We are going to do just what it says in the Bible.   “If a brother strays, go sit down and talk to him.   If he won’t listen to reason, take some more brothers to talk to him.    If he still won’t listen, then treat him like a Gentile.”

In the Bible the Gentile is the white man.   That means that if he will not accept his accountability to the black community, we have no alternative but to treat him like a white man — and put him out of the [Black] Nation.   That is the Bible.

A lot of you are not really ready for this.   You have still got a lot of that soft slavery weakness in you.   This is because you don’t take seriously the simple fact that we are fighting for survival.   If a brother is betraying the Nation, he must be put out of the Nation.

We are holding everybody accountable because we are getting ready for confrontation.   We can’t afford any halfway people messing us up.   We are preparing for all kinds of conflict.

Don’t think we had a bad summer and everything is going to be pleasant from now on.  Get yourselves ready.   That old slave psychology, that softness, has got to go.   We must know that if we are going to move, it is going to be by confrontation.

 _______________________________

For more about the Black Star Co-op, click.

For more about the CCAC and my father in the year following the 1967 Detroit riot, follow the links below.

Prophet of possibility Pt. 1 – The Michigan Citizen by Paul Lee.

Profit of possibility Pt 2 – also from the Michigan Citizen by Paul Lee.

‘Rocco, Smitty – Getting a ticket for fishing!

This photograph was taken at “The Meadows” in Sinclair County Michigan in 1939. Evidently “Rocco and Smitty were fishing without a license in the river that ran through.

Here are other posts about the Meadows

Little Boys Wearing Dresses 1916 & 1919.

Theresa Pearl, mother Blanch, and Thomas Perry. Names based on birth dates and the other photo.
Hugh Marion b. 1910. Thomas Perry b. 1916. Theresa Pearl b. 1914. Anna Roberta b. 1908.

Recently I received a scan of the photograph on the left from my cousin Jan. The reverse side of the postcard type photo says “Theresa Pearl’s Birthday   March 10, 1919”  The handwriting looks as though the same person who wrote on the back of this photo Christmas card of Theresa Pearl.  I am not sure that the woman in the photo is their mother, Blanch. I am checking.  I hope I am right because I have no other photos of her.

Note: Yes, that is Blanch Celeste Reed Averette, the mother. I was able to confirm it with some of her descendants.

Below is a photograph of my father Albert at about 3 years old in a little dress.  Younger brother Louis is sitting on the chair in a long gown. It was taken in Kalamazoo Michigan about 1916.

A pattern for a boys dress from that era.
Click for other Sepia Saturday posts.

Newspaper Clipping of My Parents in San Francisco – 1944

My parents were married November  17 1943, at Plymouth Congregational Church in Detroit. They left immediately for Lexington Kentucky, where my father was pastor of Chandler Memorial Church until he accepted the position above as co-pastor of the interracial Fellowship Church in San Francisco.  I had never seen this photograph before my cousin scanned it for me yesterday. There is no newspaper name or date on the clipping.  Perhaps it appeared in The Sun, a black newspaper, founded in San Fransisco in 1944.

A photograph of Fellowship Church in San Francisco from my father’s album.

How Many Monsters Did You Create Today?

Rev. Cleage/Jaramogi

My friend, historian Paul Lee, asked me to publish the following article after a rash of violence in Detroit by young black men. The original articles were written by my father, Albert B. Cleage Jr/Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, in 1968. It is depressing how the more time passes, the worse things seem to get.  All photographs, aside from the first, are from The Illustrated News and were taken by photographer Billy Smith during the early 1960s. KCW

Following the call made by the Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr. (later Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman), students commemorate Malcolm X Day in front of the old Northwestern High School, Detroit, Feb. 21, 1969.  (Detroit Free Press Photo/Courtesy Paul Lee)

The following article is excerpted from a report on two columns by Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, then known as the Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr., which were originally published in The Michigan Chronicle on May 4 and June 29, 1968, respectively.

Jaramogi Agyeman was the charismatic founder and pastor of the Shrines of the Black Madonna of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church (PAOCC) and the father of Black Christian Nationalism (BCN), its sacred-secular creed of Black Power, or self-determination, which was proclaimed on Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967.

The Shrine sought to reclaim the African roots of Christianity and, at least until the passing of its founder on Feb. 20, 2000, to restore the historic sovereignty of black people, who were considered the scattered “Black Nation, Israel,” by forming a “black nation within a nation,” which included governing majority-black communities.

During his half-century in the black liberation struggle, he was called the “Apostle of Youth” because of his deep concern for and involvement with the education of young black persons, particularly with regard to addressing their inculcated sense of self-hatred, or “Acceptance of Black Inferiority” (ABI).   From the 1960s to the 1990s, he was aided in this concern by the substantial percentage of Shrine members who were teachers.

The report and two of his weekly “Message to the Black Nation” columns dealt with ideas that he presented at “Project Salvation,” a Black Ministers-Teachers Conference sponsored by the Black Teachers Workshop at the University of Detroit-Mercy on April 27, 1968.   It was attended by 300 conferees from across the country.

While much has changed in the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) since then, much has remained the same, or gotten worse, including the anti-democratic takeover of DPS by a black Emergency Manager imposed by Michigan’s white, racist, right-wing governor, who’s doing the bidding of corporations.

In light of the deplorable state of our schools and the dangers posed by young “monsters” here and across the country, many of Jaramogi Agyeman’s insights and prescriptions remain relevant. — Paul Lee

How many monsters did you create today?

A message to black ministers and educators

By Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman
(Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr.)

[Monsters are persons who prey on others because they have no sense of social or human identity.]   Both the schools and churches have created these monsters.   They have taught black children to hate black people and therefore to hate themselves.

Now that they have seen what white people are like, they also hate white people and have abandoned the integration dream which sustained the older generation.   With nothing to attach themselves to, a whole generation of lonely, vicious youth is now running up and down the streets, grabbing pocketbooks, knocking down old women, taking anything they can lay their hands on, concerned only with their own individual selves.

Unless the black church can give these young people a positive self-image and something to attach themselves to, they will destroy not only themselves but all of us.

* * *

…black churches do not play any important part in the education of black children other than the destructive one of handing down the white supremacy power symbols of a white Jesus and a white God.

The school is a white institution which perpetuates and hands down the white man’s interpretation and conception of the world.   We clean up our little children, tell them to study hard and send them off to school where almost everything they learn is a distortion of the truth.

White-dominated schools teach white supremacy. …   In school libraries the books are predominantly white supremacy books.   In every book about Africa, “the native” has a bone in his nose.   They say that they are changing the books but you stop and look.   The bone is shorter, that’s all.

The books and the personnel are still teaching the same point of view:   white people have done everything in the world that was worth doing and poor primitive black people have been the kindly white man’s burden.    This destroys our children.

The problem is with us

[Many teachers and preachers] are overly optimistic about black parents.   They seem to think that black parents are fed up and want a basic change.   I do not think that black parents are fed up.   If they were, they would keep their children out of school until the schools are changed.   We can change the schools any day that we decide that black children are important enough.

Perhaps the most pitiful thing is the fact that many black parents still believe that white folks know best how to educate black children.   When they see too many black teachers in a school, they are upset.   “This school is entirely black,” they say and begin looking for a place to move where they can get their children into an integrated school.   It is pathetic.

Basically the problem is with us.   We cannot expect white folks to be seriously concerned about educating black children.   Why should we expect them to be?   We know how they treat us in employment — keeping us in the poorly paid jobs at the bottom.

We know how they treat us when it comes to selling a house — charging $19,000 for a house they would sell a white person for $15,000.   Why should they be any more democratic when it comes to education?    I am not surprised at them but I am surprised that it takes us so long to wake up and do something to change an educational system that our tax dollars support.

Our children are being destroyed by the schools and we are doing nothing to prevent it.   Some of you will say, “Our children are not so bad.”   But you know as well as I do that our black children will knock an old black woman down, rape her and take her purse containing 50 cents.

These are not just “bad kids.”   These are children in a white civilization who do not have any sense of identification with anything and who do not believe in anything.   These are black children who have been destroyed by the black church and the white[-dominated] school.

Do you know what saved some of you older people when you were growing up?   You had a dream.   Your mother told you that if you studied hard, you could rise above other black folks.   She told you that if you washed your face, stood up tall and walked proud, white folks would accept you.

So you spent your time trying not to be like black folks and trying to be like white folks.   In a sense that saved you.   As asinine and ridiculous as it now sounds, that is what saved a lot of older black people.   It was a foolish dream but it was a dream.    It was something to hang on to.

We hated ourselves.   We did all we could to escape from ourselves.    In church on Sunday we tried to shout our way right out of our black skins.

What dream do our children have?

Now let me ask you, What dreams do our children have?   They know that the old integration dream is dead.   They know that the white man does not want them and they do not want the white man.

Those who belong to the Nation and attend the Shrine of the Black Madonna reject the old integration dream just as black children do.   But we have something to put in its place. We are working to build a black community that we can be proud of.   We have a new dream to take the place of the old dream that is dead.

But most of our young people don’t have anything.    They hate themselves.   They hate white people.   They hate everybody.   They have been psychologically murdered by the black church and the white[-dominated] school.

Look at the black community.    What does a black child have to identify with?   When he goes to church, he sees white folks in Sunday School lessons, white folks in the stained glass windows, and a white Jesus up front over the altar.

When he rejected the integration dream and white folks, he rejected all of them, and he is not going to come into a black church and make an exception for a white Jesus.    So you don’t see our young people in churches.   The church doesn’t have anything to offer so young people stay away.

Our children are mad, evil, lonesome.   They feel cheated and left out.   They strike out at the world in anger and frustration.   This is the basic task of the Black Nation.

The only thing that can save a black child is a Black Nation that they can come into.  For a black child it is the difference between life and death.   For a black child this is the only thing that he can come into that will give him a sense of identity.

Out there on the street, he has nothing to believe in and having nothing to believe in is psychological death for any child.

* * *

We feel that most ghetto schools today destroy children rather than educate them.  The teachers and administrators serve as power symbols and kill a black child’s self-image. Their influence, their lack of concern, and in many instances their contempt make it impossible for a black child to learn.

So, we are insisting more and more that in a school for black children … its curriculum be reoriented to cover the culture of black people; that the present textbooks, which are essentially lies, particularly in the area of social science and history, be thrown out and that textbooks explaining the history and cultural background of black people be substituted.   We are not insisting that white schools teach the truth, but we do insist that schools in black ghettos teach the truth.

______________________________

This column was edited by Highland Park scholar and Michigan Citizen historical features writer Paul Lee, who indicated omissions with ellipsis (…) and paraphrases and clarifications with [brackets] and separated the Michigan Chronicle report and columns with asterisks (* * *).   The subheadings are the Chronicle’s.

I’d like to thank Sala Andaiye (Adams) and Peter Goldman for their helpful proofreading,  and Baba Malik Yakini for his sage counsel. — Paul Lee

Editorial Matter Copyright © 2012 by Paul Lee