I was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and lived there until I was almost 5. We moved in April of 1951 when my father got a church in Detroit, Michigan. Here we are on moving day, my sister and I, with two little girls I knew then but I don’t remember their names. I have a photo of the oldest girl, my sister and myself, standing on the parsonage porch. I also have a memory of the oldest girl pouring milk in my dinner, which I wasn’t going to eat anyway, but still… we were sitting at the little table in our room eating. My mother said if I’d eaten it in a timely fashion it wouldn’t have happened. No sympathy there. I remember another time when this little girl hit me and my mother told me if I didn’t hit her back, my mother was going to hit me. I hit her back. Don’t remember that she ever hit me again.
Me, sisters I cannot remember the names of, my sister Pearl
I saw them one more time, after we moved to Detroit. In the winter of 1967 my father returned to Springfield to preach for the Men’s Club. I went with him. We also went to New York on this trip where I bought my first pair of bell bottom jeans. My grandmother was so disappointed that I didn’t get a nice dress. But that isn’t this story. I remember the living quarters in the parsonage seemed so small on this trip. Nobody was living in them at the time. I’m sure the next minister got the congregation to move him back into separate quarters. We stayed with the family of these two girls. I was 20 so they were probably 20 and 18. The oldest one was going to a party. Well, actually she wasn’t going to the party, she was going to meet her boyfriend there and they were going elsewhere. Her father had forbidden her to see this boy. I was never a big party person and I sure didn’t want to be left at a strange party with a bunch of strangers. Needless to say, I didn’t go. The adults tried to persuade me that it would be “fun”. Ha. I didn’t give away her plan but I didn’t go. Wish I could remember her name, I’d look her up on facebook and see what she remembers about any of this.
In 2009 Alan Burnett and Kate Mortensen founded Sepia Saturday. This week we celebrate it’s 100th week of existence. I contributed my first post to Sepia Saturday #48 on November 7, 2010. Since then I have usually been a “themer” and enjoy coming up with something from my family photograph collection related to whatever theme Alan comes up with each week. I also enjoy seeing what others come up with. I have chosen to celebrate the occasion by posting 100 photographs of my father, who would have been 100 years old this year.
Albert Cleage is Dead at 88; Led Black Nationalist Church
Published February 27, 2000
Bishop Albert B. Cleage, who after the urban riots of the 1960’s built his Detroit church, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, into an important center for black theology and political power, died on Feb. 20 in Calhoun Falls, S.C. He was 88.
Bishop Cleage died while visiting Beulah Land, his church’s new farm, where he planned to raise food for the needy and give city youths peaceful summer vacations.
The bishop, who changed his name in the early 1970’s to Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, presided for more than three decades at the Shrine of the Black Madonna, originally a Congregational church. The change came in the late 1960’s.
There were other black secessionist churches but Bishop Cleage’s became one of the biggest and most influential emphasizing black interpretations but retaining some traditional Protestant teachings.
Bishop Cleage was also drawn to politics. in 1973, Black Slate Inc., his political organization, helped Coleman A. Young become the first black mayor of Detroit, and the bishop was important in the careers of United States Representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, Democrat of Michigan; former United States Representative Barbara-Rose Collins; and blacks who ran for smaller offices.
“He taught me the importance of organizing,” Ms. Kilpatrick said, “and he created networks of political activists that continue to have a profound impact on Detroit’s political landscape.”
Bishop Cleage became a focus of national attention during the 1968 Detroit riot, when 43 people were killed, and in the turbulent years afterward. Splitting with both the white power structure and more moderate black leaders, he emphasized black separatism in economics, politics and religion.
“The basic problem facing black people is their powerlessness,” he said. “You can’t integrate power and powerlessness.”
Trying to counter what he saw as white domination of religion, Mr. Cleage espoused a gospel of black nationalism. He installed a larger-than-life painting of a black Madonna holding a black baby Jesus, radical for its time, and preached that Jesus was a black revolutionary whose identity as such had been obscured by whites.
“That was the beginning of a whole new religious iconography” said Menelik Kimathi, chief executive officer of the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Mr. Kimathi, who joined a shrine youth group 30 years ago, added, “I think his legacy will be that he founded black liberation theology, the idea that the church could be more relevant to the day-to-day concerns of the community.”
The Rev. Jim Holley, pastor of Little Rock Baptist Church in Detroit, said: “He brought a black consciousness to the church community like it never had been brought before. And it translated into politics.”
In 1968, Life magazine called Bishop Cleage one of “the men who are speaking to black America,” along with Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, Eldridge Cleaver and Dick Gregory.
The bishop was national chairman of the Black Christian Nationalist Church, an umbrella organization for similar churches, and he wrote “The Black Messiah” (1969) and “Black Christian Nationalism”(1972).
Albert Cleage was born in Indianapolis on Jun 13, 1911. his physician father moved the family to Detroit, and in 1937 the son received a sociology degree from Wayne State University. He received a divinity degree from Oberlin College, then served churches in Lexington Ky.; San Francisco; and Springfield, Mass. In 1951, he became pastor of St. Mark’s Community Church in Detroit, and two years later he formed the Central United Church of Christ, which later became the shrine.
Though he had believed in integration — some of the churches he served were racially mixed — Bishop Cleage came to despair of the hope that whites would ever willingly help blacks advance. He also befriended Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, who had Michigan roots.
Bishop Cleage’s vision of a church reemphasized social service programs reached out to young people and marched for civil rights. He organized black-owned businesses like grocery stores and bookstores, and built hundreds of units of housing.
All this activity made him frightening to many whites.
“When we take over, don’t worry,” he once responded. “We’ll treat you like you treated us.”
He later founded other shrines, including major ones in Atlanta and Houston. Today, Mr. Kimathi said, the church has about 50,000 members nationally.
In the 1970’s, Bishop Cleage backed out of the national spotlight to concentrate more on church programs and working with young people. In the late 80’s and much of the 90’s, he lived in Houston, then returned to Detroit.
Bishop Cleage married Doris Graham in 1943; they divorced in 1955. His survivors include their two daughters, Pearl Cleage of Atlanta and Kristin Williams of Idlewild, Mich.; three sisters; a brother; six grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
Today I have posted a page from a small photo album that featured a page for each member of my father’s family, plus some family friends. The contact size photos were not very carefully pasted in and are not identified or dated. Judging by the ages of the people, I think they were taken about 1938. Which makes my father, Albert B. Cleage Jr (Also known as “Toddy” to family and friends), 27. The theme this week is a man sleeping while posing for a photograph.
To see another page from the album, click Grandmother Pearl Reed Cleage
To see Sleeping (and other) Sepia Saturday offerings, click HERE.
My friend, historian Paul Lee, put this short clip of an interview of my father, Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr. by Chet Huntley on You Tube. It is from late 1967 or early 1968, not long after the 1967 Detroit riot.
For a post about my experience of the Detroit riot click HERE. For an audio of my father’s sermon the Sunday after the riot click HERE.
Americans want and CAN HAVE PEACE. Many of us are shocked at the war hysteria evident in the President’s message to Congress on St. Patricks Day. We must not be swept into war. We will not flinch in our determination to save our traditional American freedom. The fight for democracy and for peace is not subversive – it is our American heritage.
Because our American tradition has made it possible for peoples of all creeds and opinions to live in peace within our borders, we know that Americans can live in peace with all peoples of the world no matter what their way of life. The United Nations must be supported and strengthened as the hope and prayer of all mankind for deliverance from the barbarism of atomic war.
We plead with Congress not to accept the President’s proposals on Universal Military Training and the draft as this program would militarize America and thereby lead to a police state and to war. We urge all like-minded people to make known their views. WRITE A LETTER TO YOUR CONGRESSMAN AND SENATORS TODAY.
Rev. F. B. Archibald Ben Wolf R.C. Weller, Jr.
Rev. James H. Hamer Dr. Carolyn Prowler Prof. Frank A. Warren
Rev. Glenn B. Glazier Robenia Anthony Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr.
Rev. Hadley B. Williams Maurice Kurn Rev. Hesakiah M. Hutchings
Rev. Emory Lincoln Wallace Richard M. Klein Rabbi Samuel Price
Leon Massa Rev. Howard L. Moore Sigmond Gomula
Abe Hoffman Rev. W.T. Teague Martin Griffin
Prof. Charles H. Hapgood Rabbi Naphthali Frischberg
The “Saturday Night Fun” assignment from Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings (along with some of the fine results) can be found here. It involved picking out a photograph to use in this challenge for August 16 by the Family Curator. For the original challenge you hold up an old photograph and match it up to the present day scene. This means you have to be in the area. Unfortunately, I live far from the sites of my past and that of my ancestors so I was am not able to do this exactly. I also was not able to just choose my photo and let it go at that. Here is what I did.
The parsonage now and us back in 1953.
In 2004 I spent a day driving around Detroit taking photographs of places where I used to live and of other houses family members lived in. The angle of this house fit almost perfectly with the photograph taken in 1953 of my father with my little sister Pearl and me. We are in front of the parsonage on Atkinson. My father was the minister of St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church, two blocks up the street on the corner of 12th Street and Atkinson.
My sister and I shared the bedroom on the upper left. We used to look out of the side window into the attic of Carol and Deborah. They were our age and lived next door and got to stay up much later then we did. They had a wonderful playroom in the attic. I taught Pearl to read by the streetlight shinning into our bedroom. I don’t know why we waited until we were supposed to be in the bed to teach and learn reading.
On our other side lived Eleanor Gross with her family. Eleanor was a teenager and babysat with us during the rare times our parents went out. My paternal grandparents lived down the street and I have a 2004 photograph of that house which I think I will mix with one from the 1950’s. I was trying to think of someone still in Detroit that I could get to take a photo from the proper angle of St. Mark’s. I like this assignment!
I wrote this after the Detroit riot in July of 1967. I was 20. I had been in Idlewild, MI at my Uncle Louis’ cottage with my Aunt Gladys and some of my cousins when it started. I ended up at my Grandmother Cleage’s house where my father, several uncles and cousins were also gathered. Her house was on Atkinson, about three blocks from the 12th street corner where the riot started. Aside from a little editing for clarity, these are my memories from 1967.
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The fire siren that night in Idlewild went on and on and on. Gladys got a phone call that a riot had started. We left that morning. The sky was pink with smoke as we drove into the city.
During the riot, when it got dark, we turned off the lights, put on black clothes and waited. The shots that had been going all day got louder, closer, smashed together. We sat on the porch and watched the tanks go up and down the street full of white boys wearing glasses, aiming their guns at us.
One during the day went by in a yellow telephone repair truck. He rode in the elevated stand, pointing his rifle. We looked back at him.
Lights from helicopters whirred over us. Troops went down 12th, down 14th. The street shook. Afraid to sleep because somebody might shoot through the window, we stayed up until the sky got light. My cousins cleared out the furniture in front of the windows, so they could shoot.
Should they let them get in or shoot before they reach the porch? They lay there on quilts, looking out the window. Seeing soldiers and armored trucks in flowerpots and dump trucks. Dale asked how the gun worked. Ernie shows him by the hall light.
The guns sounded like they were in the alley. I sat on the landing. Thorough the window it was dark and unreal outside. Blair came up, scared, so we went in the basement and turned on a program about Vietnam, but then off to a horror movie nobody watched.
Daddy came down, with a drink, to use the phone and dictate demands to the papers. Ernie showed us how to bolt doors if someone tried to come in the window.
They tried to get Grandmother down to watch TV, but she wouldn’t. She stayed upstairs, watched TV and came out only at times to turn lights on and silhouette everybody hiding guns as the soldiers were pulled back.
On the police radio: Fifty policemen wounded in one hour. They were run out of the Clairmont Square again. A woman turns in her sniper husband.
Dale was left on the porch when they flashed light on the porch and summer-salted in. Bullets were so close I was afraid and went back inside.
Grandmother turning on lights with armed flower pots aiming at us.
Turning Vietnamese guns up loud to drown out theirs. Jan and I, sleeping on the hard scratchy rug. Ernie wanting just a ring to show he was there. Dale taping, taking pictures to show his children. Jesus painted Black.
All that Sunday cars full of white folks went down Linwood past the Church. Windows rolled up. Sightseeing. Long, slow lines, car after car, windows shut tight. Troop Jeeps going by pointing guns.
My father, Albert B. Cleage, Jr (front row, second from left), with his 8th grade class at Wingert Elementary School in Detroit, Michigan. He was 12 years old. It was 1923.
Me, sisters I cannot remember the names of, my sister Pearl
