Albert Cleage

Albert Buford Cleage Jr. was born on the thirteenth of June 1911 at Indianapolis, the son of Albert B. Cleage Sr. — one of the very few Black physicians in early-twentieth-century Indianapolis — and Pearl Reed Cleage, a schoolteacher. The family moved north to Detroit in 1916 in the early Great Migration. He was educated at Northwestern High School in Detroit, took his undergraduate degree at Wayne State in 1937, completed a master's in social work at Wayne State in 1938, and was ordained a Congregational minister at the Oberlin School of Theology in 1943.

He served pastorates at Lexington, Kentucky from 1943 to 1944, at the Painter Memorial Congregational Church in San Francisco from 1944 to 1946 — where his thorough integrationism brought him into conflict with the white denominational hierarchy — and at the Saint Mark's Community Church in Detroit from 1953. In March 1967 — at the meeting commemorating the anniversary of the March on Washington — he unveiled at his Detroit congregation an eighteen-foot mural of a Black Madonna and child by the artist Glanton Dowdell and renamed the congregation the Shrine of the Black Madonna. The unveiling marks the formal founding moment of Black Christian Nationalism as an organised theological movement.

He published in 1968 The Black Messiah — the volume of sermons that constitutes the founding text of Black Christian Nationalism — and in 1972 Black Christian Nationalism: New Directions for the Black Church. The first book argued, on combined evidence from Egyptology, Pauline letters and the iconography of the early Coptic Church, that Jesus of Nazareth had been a Black revolutionary anti-colonial Jew whose teaching had been deliberately distorted by Pauline accommodation to Rome.

He founded in 1972 the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church — a denominational body of which the Shrine of the Black Madonna at Detroit was the founding congregation. He took at the same year the religious name Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman — Holy Father Restorer of the Nation. The PAOCC operated under his leadership and continues under his successors a network of urban-mission congregations in Detroit, Atlanta and Houston.

He died at the Beulah Land Farms agricultural co-operative he had founded in South Carolina on the twentieth of February 2000, at eighty-eight.

He is honored here as the founder of Black Christian Nationalism.