“Jesus was a revolutionary black leader, a Zealot, seeking to lead a Black Nation to freedom.”
Lest we forget, the race war is also a religious war. For more than five centuries, the attacks by the white West on Africans, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and Asians have also been presented as a clash of the religion of the “civilized” against the beliefs of the “savage,” christianity against dark paganism, and the church against the irreligious heathens and hoards.
It is also true that Black folk and other folks have founded their own heavens and found their own Gods — Gods who resemble them, and whose divine mission is to deliver us from 500 years of earthly inferno and satanic rule. There is, as the Reverend Albert Cleage, Jr. told us, a Black Messiah — a Black Christ of the slaves, the poor, the dispossessed and downtrodden, the redeemer of the wretched of the earth.
Reverend Cleage (June 1911 – February 20, 2000) was the militant founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna Church in Detroit. In The Black Messiah, a 1971 collection of sermons, he provided a radical revision of Christology, influenced by Garveyism and the emerging Black nationalism of the late 1960s. Cleage argued that not only was Jesus Christ Black, but the Holy land, including Israel — historic Israel, not the vehicle for genocide and ethnic cleansing that has appropriated its name — was “a mixture of Chaldeans, Egyptians, Midianites, Ethiopians, Kushites, Babylonians and other dark peoples, all of whom were already mixed with the black people of Central Africa.” But most importantly, Cleage understood that Christ was a radical, a Zealot — an individual who would be crucified twice over by today’s latter-day Romans. He understood that the Church of the oppressed should be a temple of deliverance, and that the return of the Black Messiah means the banishment of whitesupremacy to the whitest corners of hell.
We reprint the introduction to Albert B. Cleage, Jr.’s The Black Messiah below.
The Black Messiah
Albert B. Cleage, Jr.
For nearly 500 years the illusion that Jesus was white dominated the world only because white Europeans dominated the world. Now, with the emergence of the nationalist movements of the world’s colored majority, the historic truth is finally beginning to emerge—that Jesus was the non-white leader of a non-white people struggling for national liberation against the rule of a white nation, Rome. The intermingling of the races in Africa and the Mediterranean area is an established fact. The Nation Israel was a mixture of Chaldeans, Egyptians, Midianites, Ethiopians, Kushities, Babyonians and other dark peoples, all of whom were already mixed with the black people of Central Africa.
That white Americans continue to insist upon a white Christ in the face of all historical evidence to the contrary and despite the hundred of shrines to Black Madonnas all over the world, is the crowning demonstration of their white supremacist conviction that all things good and valuable must be white. On the other hand, black Christians are ready to challenge this lie, they have not freed themselves from their spiritual bondage to the white man nor established in their own minds their right to first-class citizenship in Christ’s kingdom on earth. Black people cannot build dignity on their knees worshipping a white Christ. We must put down this white Jesus which the white man gave us in slavery and which has been tearing us to pieces.
Black Americans need to know that the historic Jesus was a leader who went about among the people of Israel, seeking to root out the individualism and the identification with their oppressor which had corrupted them, and to give them faith in their own power to rebuild the Nation. This was the real Jesus whose life is most accurately reported in the first three Gospels of the New Testament. On the other hand, there is the spiritualized Jesus, reconstructed many years later by the Apostle Paul who never knew Jesus and who modified his teachings to conform to the pagan philosophies of the white gentiles. Considering himself an apostle to the gentiles, Paul preached individual salvation and life after death. We, as black Chistians suffering oppression in a white man’s land, do not need the individualistic and otherworldly doctrines of Paul and the white man. We need to recapture the faith in our power as a people and the concept of Nation, which are the foundation of the Old Testament and the prophets, and upon which Jesus built all of his teachings 2,000 years ago.
Jesus was a revolutionary black leader, a Zealot, seeking to lead a Black Nation to freedom, so the Black Church must carefully define the nature of the revolution.
What do we mean when we speak of the Black Revolution? I can remember an incident at the beginning of the Harlem Rebellion only a few short years ago when a news reporter snapped an unforgettable picture of a black girl who was present when a black boy was brutally killed by a white apartment house caretaker. She stood there on the sidewalk, her face contorted with anger and frustration, tears streaming down her cheeks, and she screamed at the cops who had rushed to the scene to keep their kind of law and order, “Kill me too! Kill me too!”
This was the absolute in frustration. “The problem of being black in a white man’s world is just too big. I don’t know what to do with it. So just kill me too and get it over with.” That was what she was saying.
Black brothers and sisters all over the country felt a spontaneous identification with that girl because every black person has felt just this kind of frustration. We feel it every day. At every meeting some young black man jumps to his feet screaming. “I can’t stand it any longer. Let’s take to the streets and get it over with!” We all know how he feels and why he feels that way. Sometimes we go home and say it was a very “nervous” meeting, and everyone knows what we are talking about because each of us has felt that same sense of powerlessness that makes us ache with helplessness and hopelessness and drives us to seek death as an easy way out. Those of us who cry out think of ourselves as revolutionists and participants in the Black Revolution. But a revolution seeks to change conditions. So each day we must decide. Either we are trying to achieve the power to change conditions or we have turned from the struggle and are seeking an heroic moment when we can die in the streets.
As black people, we have entered a revolution rather than the evolution or gradual change which white folks would like us to accept. We want to move fast enough to be able to see that we are moving. And four hundred years of standing still is a long time. We are trying to make the world over so that our children and our children’s children can have power and live like human beings. We look at the world in which we live today and we are determined to turn the world upside down.
But when I hear cries of “Kill me too!” I know that that individual no longer has any hope. When he screams, “Let’s get together and die in the streets,” I know that in his desperate hopelessness this individual has put aside the revolution. Dying in the streets is not a revolution. This is escapism. This is suicide. But it is not revolution. As long as there is the slightest possibility of victory, we are still engaged in a revolution. But when an individual sees no way to achieve power to change conditions, then the revolution is over. It doesn’t make any difference how he spends his remaining time, singing hymns, getting drunk or buying guns. For him the revolution is over.
The Black Church has not always been revolutionary, but it has always been relevant to the everyday needs of black people. The old down-home black preacher who “shouted” his congregation on Sunday morning was realistically ministering to the needs of a black people who could not yet conceive of changing the conditions which oppressed them. If you can’t solve your problems, you can at least escape from them! So we had Saturday night to escape in one way, and Sunday morning to pray for repentance and to escape in another way. The Church was performing a valuable and real function. However uneducated the old-time preacher was, he was relevant and significant. What he offered was an ingenious interpretation of a slave Christianity to meet the needs of an oppressed and suffering people. He took it and used it so that black people could go to church on Sunday morning and find the strength to endure white folks for another six days. You could go to church and “shout” and feel that God was just, even though the world in which you lived was unjust. Implicit in every ignorant black preacher’s sermon was the faith that God must eventually shake white people over hell-fire, and that after death black people were going to heaven. White people were the oppressor. They were the sinners, they were guilty. Black people were innocent and suffered oppression through no fault of their own. Therefore, they were going to heaven and walk on golden streets, and white people were going to hell. There is still profound truth in this simple message of the primitive Black Church.
But today the Church must reinterpret its message in terms of the needs of a Black Revolution. We no longer feel helpless as black people. We do not feel that we must sit and wait for God to intervene and settle our problems for us. We waited for four hundred and he didn’t do much of anything, so for the next four hundred years we’re going to be fighting to change conditions ourselves. This is merely a new theological position. We have come to understand how God works in the world. Now we know that God is going to give us strength in our struggle. As black preachers we must tell our people that we are God’s chosen people and that God is fighting with us as we fight. When we march, when we take it to the streets in open conflict, we must understand that in the stamping feet and the thunder of violence we can hear the voice of God. When the Black Church accepts its role in the Black Revolution, it is able to understand and interpret revolutionary Christianity, and the revolution becomes a part of our Christian faith. Every Sunday morning when we preach from the Old Testament, or when we preach about Jesus, we seek to help black people understand that the struggle in which we are engaged is a cosmic struggle, that the very universe struggles with us when we fight to throw off the oppression of white people. We want black people to understand that they are coming to church to get the strength and direction to go out and fight oppression all week. We don’t pray for the strength to endure any more. We pray for the strength to fight heroically.
Basic to our struggle and the revitalization of the Black Church is the simple fact that we are building a totally new self-image. Our rediscovery of the Black Messiah is a part of our rediscovery of ourselves. We should not worship a Black Jesus until we had thrown off these shackles of self-hate. We could not follow a Black Messiah in the task of building a Black Nation until we had found the courage to look back beyond the slave block and the slave whip without shame.
In recent years the contraction inherent in the worship of a white Christ by black people oppressed by whites has become increasingly acute. In the Negro Renaissance after World War I the anguish of the contradiction was voiced by poet Countee Cullen in his famous lines:
… My conversion came high-priced;
I belong to Jesus Christ,…
Lamb of God, although I speak
With my mouth thus, in my heart
Do I play a double part….
Wishing he I served were black….?
The widespread repudiation by many black Americans of a white Christ has added to the attractiveness of the Black Muslim movement. But many more black Americans, race conscious enough to reject a white Christ, have been reluctant to embrace Islam in view of the role played by the Arabs in fostering and carrying on the slave trade in Africa. The result has been the self-exclusion of most black militants from any religious affiliations whatsoever.
The only black leader in this country to meet this problem head-on was Marcus Garvey who organized the African Orthodox Church with a black hierarchy, including a Black God, a Black Jesus, a Black Madonna, and black angels. Forty years ago Black Americans apparently were not yet ready for Garvey’s religious ideas, although to this day, in every major city, individual Garveyites continue to circulate portraits of a Black Jesus. In Africa, however, Garvey’s religious ideas played a key role in Founding the African Independent Churches which in many countries acted as the center of the liberation movement. As Roosevelt University professor and writer, St. Clair Drake, has pointed out, the Kenya Africans invited one of Garvey’s bishops to train and ordain their preachers and to help form the African independent schools and churches out of which the Mau Mau eventually grew.
The Black Church in America has served as the heart and center of the life of black communities everywhere, but, for the most part, without a consciousness of its responsiblity and potential power to give a lost people a sense of earthly purpose and direction. During The Black Revolt following the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision, the Southern Black Church found that involvement in the struggle of black people for freedom was inescapable. Without a theology to support its actions (actions almost in contraction to its otherworldly preachings), it provided spokesmen and served as a meeting place and source of emotional inspiration. In the North, where the black man’s problems at one time seemed less pressing, the Black Church has failed miserably to relate itself to the seething ghetto rebellions and therefore has practically cut itself off from the vast segments of the black community. The Northern Church has been black on the outside only, borrowing its theology, its orientation and its social ideology largely form the white Church and the white power structure.
The present crisis, involving as it does the black man’s struggle for survival in America, demands the resurrection of a Black Church with its own Black Messiah. Only this kind of a Black Christian Church can serve as the unifying center for the totality of the black man’s life and struggle. Only this kind of a Black Christian Church can force each individual black man to decide where he will stand—united with his own people and laboring and sacrificing in the spirit of the Black Messiah, or individualistically seeking his own advancement and maintaining his slave identification with the white oppressor.
Albert Cleage, Jr., Introduction to The Black Messiah, (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968)
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