While looking through the binder holding my father’s sermon notes I found these for Sunday, December 25, 1966. Some were written on a small donation envelope. There is also a bulletin and two pages of sermon notes that are for the same Sunday. Although page 2 and a possible page 4 are missing, I think that there is enough here to give the gist of the sermon.
A Christ To Carol Go tell it on the Mountain Jesus Christ is Born
II. Christmas Spirituals = Carols written by slaves = “Good News”?= Glory Manger Po’ Little Jesus Boy Jesus first came first to down trodden and oppressed. “Tell John…”
I. Child waiting for Christmas thinks only of Santa Claus = Child for whom Christmas means most – not one who receives most in terms of material gifts –
III. “Gospel” was the Good News of the possibilities in human life – Slaves may have been closer to realizing possibilities than many of us today.
We tend to judge everything today in terms of materialistic value – EVEN CHRISTMAS – Commercialized (How much we can give)
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 inthe 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.
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.
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
The two photographs below were taken in 1918 and feature my father, two of his younger brothers and a family friend. The water in the background of the second photo made me think they were taken on Belle Isle or perhaps across the Detroit River in Canada. I thought that I would be able to place the photos by using the cannon in the second picture. I was able to find several cannons in the Detroit area, unfortunately none looked like the one in the photo. The presence of a family friend makes me think it was taken in Detroit and not on a family trip to another state. At least it was labeled with names and dates.
Henry Cleage, Cornelius Henderson, Louis Cleage, Albert Cleage. 1918 Detroit.
Louis Cleage, Cornelius Henderson, Albert Cleage, Henry Cleage.
My father standing across the street from the market. Courtesy Paul Lee, Best Efforts, Inc.
In 1965 the idea of the Black Star Co-op was born at Central United Church of Christ. In 1968, the year after the Detroit riot, a grocery store was opened a block from the church. Due to a variety of reasons – inexperience of management and staff, costs of keeping enough stock, high prices – the store did not last long. Later the church operated a long running food co-op. Several people would go down to Eastern Market early Saturday morning and buy produce which was shared by everybody who paid $5 that week. There was no overhead and no paid staff. Later the church had a farm in Belleville, Michigan and the food for the co-op came off of that farm. Below is a short photographic story of the Black Star Market.
Sign on window.
Edward Vaughn and Norman Burton with the information and sign up table for the cooperative set up after church service. The photograph in the background is of the 1963 ‘Walk to Freedom’ in Detroit. Over 100,000 people marched down Woodward Ave.
Flyer for church members hand cut by my father on one of those blue stencils and run off on the church mimeograph machine.
Future home of the Black Star Market. Misty church steeple in the background.
Renovated store, ready for business. Courtesy Paul Lee, Best Efforts, Inc.
My father with women who worked in the store and a customer soon after the opening. Courtesy Paul Lee, Best Efforts, Inc.
The block where the store stood is now vacant land. The church is still there.
Click on this and other photos to enlarge. Scenes from Cleage Printers – 1960s. Most of these photographs were developed in the plant dark room. I wish I’d learned more about photography while there was that great dark room available and all those wonderful cameras.
My uncles, Henry and Hugh Cleage owned and operated Cleage Printers for about a decade, from the late 1950s until the late 1960s. It’s difficult to pinpoint the time they started printing. They published a newspaper called The Metro in 1956. I’m not sure if they printed that themselves or put it together and had it printed elsewhere. On the March, 1960 marriage license for Henry and my mother, he listed his occupation as Printer/Lawyer. The plant, as we called it, was located behind Cleage Clinic at 5385 Lovett, near McGraw on Detroit’s Old West Side. Henry was an attorney and Hugh worked at the Post Office before they started printing. I don’t know if either of them had any experience printing before that. I asked my husband, who was also a printer for a number of year without much prior experience. He said it’s not that hard to learn while doing. Maybe armed with “In business with a 1250 Multilith” they were able to set up shop and learn on the job. I still have the book. Uncle Louis, the doctor, put in the start up money for the press. Later when they had to upgrade Henry said that family friend, Atty. Milton Henry, contributed that money.
According to the memories of family friend, Billy Smith and my aunt Anna, they went into business for themselves because they wanted the independence of being their own boss and Henry had always been interested in printing. They had several long term employees and a number of young people who worked there for a short period of time. My aunt Barbara worked there for awhile. My sister and I worked there the summer I was 16. I learned to run the small press and use the Varityper described below. I remember Ronald Latham keeping up a running story about being a Venusian now living on Earth. Henry kept our first weeks wages of $10 to make it like a real job. He was supposed to give it to us at the end of the summer, when we stopped work but we never saw that $10 and we didn’t bring it up. If we had, I’m pretty sure we would have been paid.
They made their money by printing handbills for neighborhood markets. In addition to that they printed up flyers, newsletters, magazines for various radical black groups, materials for the Socialist Workers Party and the Detroit Artist’s Workshop. The printing plant was a place where people came to find discussion of the issues of the day and in the 1960s there were plenty of issues to discuss. My Uncle Henry loved to hold forth on a variety of topics and his arguments were always well thought out and convincing. Hugh didn’t talk a lot but he would have something to put in, maybe just a quiet shake of his head over what Henry was saying. If Louis came back he would join in with his sarcastic comments and distinctive laugh.
Various flyers printed at Cleage PrintersFour pages from the October 6, 1962 issue of The Illustrated News. They printed it on pink newsprint left over from the market handbills so it was often called the “pink sheet”. My uncles published it from 1961 to 1964. It started off as a weekly and eventually went to bi-weekly and consisted of 8 pages of commentary about local and national events of concern to the black community. My father wrote many of the article. My uncle Louis had a biting, humor column called “Smoke Rings” on the back page.In addition to grocery store circulars and race literature, Cleage Printers printed a variety of other alternative materials, such as a series of poetry books for the Artist’s Workshop in Detroit, headed by John and Leni Sinclair.
I found this at The Ann Arbor Library. You can see that Cleage Printers is mentioned as a part of the Trans-Love Engeries Unlimited co-operative in the 2nd line of the 3rd column, of this April 1967 copy of “The Sun”. I wonder that I never heard about that.
Sometimes there would be things that had to be collated in the evening and all of us cousins and our mother’s would be down there at night putting whatever it was together. After the 1967 Detroit riot so many stores went out of business that they couldn’t make enough to keep going. Henry went back to law and worked with Neighborhood Legal Services. Hugh held on for another few years, printing for the church and teaching young people how to run the small press. Finally, he too left. I wish in all those photographs that were taken, one or two had been of Cleage Printers in it’s prime. All I have is a photograph I took in 2004 of the way it looks now, deserted and overgrown. I wish I had interviewed and taped Henry and Hugh talking about their experiences.
The building that housed Cleage Printers as it looked around 2007.
This was written as part of the 120 Carnival of Genealogy hosted by Jasia at CREATIVEGENE.
I have posted this photograph before as part of my discovery of the numbers on photographs as a means of sorting and dating them. My father’s cousin, Theodore Page, is ready at the bat while my father, “Toddy” seems oblivious to the fact that he could have his head knocked off when Theodore goes to hit the ball. The photograph was taken in the summer of 1922, probably at Belle Isle, an island park in Detroit. The day was an outing for the extended Cleage family.
My uncle Henry loved baseball and often described the game in terms that made it seem like a work of art or a piece of music. My mother’s mother used to listen to games on the radio. I never liked playing the game – I could not hit the ball. I didn’t like watching it, compared to basketball, baseball games seem so long and slow moving.
Another photograph from the same outing. Starting from the left, are two headless women and I don’t know who they are. The little girl is my Aunt Barbara, next to her is my Uncle Hugh, Uncle Louis, Uncle Henry, Theodore Page (who looks like he has a double), my uncle Henry’s daughter, Ruth, who is holding the same ball the catcher is holding in the action shot. Behind them are, an unknown man, my great grandmother Celia Rice Cleage Sherman, her son Jacob, my father Albert “Toddy”, three people I don’t know then my grandfather Albert B. Cleage Sr. In the background are some other people. I don’t know who they are.
This post continues a series using the Alphabet to go through streets that were significant in my life as part of the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge. Click on the link to see links to posts by other participants in this challenge. It’s too bad the streets in my life weren’t alphabetically and chronologically coordinated because the years are all out of order. Here we go back to the beginning and my first home – 210 King Street.
Past over present. My mother, Doris Graham Cleage, is standing on the proch.
My father became pastor of St. John’s Congregational Church in Springfield Massachusetts in the fall of 1945. The parsonage at 210 King Street is pictured above. This is the house I came home to when I was born in 1946. I was the first child of Rev. Albert B. Cleage and Doris Graham Cleage. We moved from King street before my sister Pearl was born in December of 1948. I was 2 years old and I don’t have clear memories of the house. I found the description below online.
I was born around 10 PM during a thunderstorm. That’s what I heard.
Me and my mother. Photo by my father.
1947 – on the steps with my mother. What is she holding that I am so excited about?
1948 – I spent a lot of time cooking. This is from the crumpling pages of an album my father kept. He wrote captions on most of the photographs. I have scanned the pages that are left. The photographs are fine but the pages are not.
My father and his congregation were involved in a church fight at this point. A former Minister had separated most of the churches property from the control of the church when he retired. My father and members of the church were trying to get it back or get the church compensated. Before my sister was born, they did sell the Parsonage and we moved into the Parish house. It was right next to the church and we lived in 4 room (plus bathroom) on the first floor, along with church offices, a big meeting room and I don’t know what else. There were roomers on the second floor. In 1948 they were trying to get $7,500 for the house. Today it is selling for $47,000. From reviews the neighborhood is crime ridden and drug infested so I don’t know if they will get that or if that is a low price for a 100+ year old house in that neighborhood of Springfield.
My parents spent $8 a week for ice before they, with help from my grandparents, were able to purchase a refrigerator.
My mother describes the purchase of the new GE refrigerator in a letter to her in-laws below. She says that I am completely recovered. In an earlier letter she described my bout with roseola.
I don’t know if these are the refrigerators my mother and I saw that day in 1948 but they were both 1948 models. The one I remember had one door, like the Philco.
The refrigerator was still working fine in 1962. My mother standing in front of it 14 years later.
My grandfather, Dr. Albert B. Cleage Sr, Uncle Atty. Henry Cleage and my father, Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr. (aka Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman)
Here is a photograph that has quite a bit of damage but still, it is one of my favorite pictures of my father. It was taken on the front porch of my grandparents house at 2270 Atkinson. Today would have been my father’s 101 birthday. He has been gone for 12 years.
