Africana Studies Review - Spring 2021

AFRICANA STUDIES REVIEW

JOURNAL OF THE CENTER FOR AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY AT NEW ORLEANS

VOLUME 7

NUMBER 1

SPRING 2021

AFRICANA STUDIES REVIEW JOURNAL OF THE CENTER FOR AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY AT NEW ORLEANS

EDITORIAL BOARD Editor in Chief Dr. Clyde Robertson, Southern University at New Orleans Managing Editor Dr. Funlayo E. Wood-Menzies, Ase Ire Communiversity Editors Dr. Jose P. Bey, Brea College Dr. Ben Robertson, Southern University at New Orleans Editorial Advisory Board Dr. Lisa Beckley-Roberts, Jackson State University Dr. N. Fadeke Castor, Northeastern University Dr. Elana Jefferson-Tatum, Tufts University Dr. Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie, Coppin State University Acknowledgements Dr. James Ammons, Jr., Chancellor, Southern University at New Orleans Dr. Brenda Jackson, Vice-Chancellor-Research & Strategic Initiatives and Executive Director of Title III Programs, Southern University at New Orleans Dr. Evelyn Harrell, Dean, Arts and Sciences, Southern University at New Orleans Ms. Linda Hill and Ms. Darlene Holmes, CAAAS-SUNO Editorial Office Center for African and African American Studies 6400 Press Drive New Orleans, LA 70126 www.AfricanaStudiesReview.com

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ABOUT THE AFRICANA STUDIES REVIEW The Africana Studies Review (ASR) is an annual publication of the Center for African and African American Studies at Southern University at New Orleans (SUNO), in collaboration with the Office of Title III Program.

The journal solicits research across the entire range of topics encompassing the domain of African and African American Studies (broadly construed). ASR particularly welcomes manuscripts on critical issues in black history, politics, law, education, religion, social organization, economics, creative production, psychology, and sociology, as well as empirical and theoretical papers that advance social scientific research on the global experience of African people.

ASR is a methodologically, multidisciplinary journal that welcomes research on important issues that transcend the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines.

It therefore invites interdisciplinary scholarship and commentaries that challenge the paradigms of single traditional disciplines. Work may take the form of an article, essay, or book review. For book reviews, ASR seeks reviews that assess a manuscript’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as locating it within the current field of scholarship.

Submission Guidelines ASR only considers papers not under review or previously published elsewhere.

All works are subject to peer review and should conform to the latest Chicago Manual of Style. Full submission guidelines and submission form on our website at www.ASR.journals.publicknowledgeproject.com.

Disclaimer The views and opinions expressed in the Africana Studies Review are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Center for African and African American Studies, Southern University at New Orleans, or the editorial board.

All Rights Reserved © 2021 Africana Studies Review No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopy or digital retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher.

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AFRICANA STUDIES REVIEW JOURNAL OF THE CENTER FOR AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY AT NEW ORLEANS

VOLUME 7

NUMBER 1

SPRING 2021

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial Board .......................................................................................................ii About the Africana Studies Review ......................................................................iii Table of Contents .................................................................................................. iv Introduction to the Spring 2021 Issue .................................................................... 6 Funlayo E. Wood-Menzies ROUNDTABLE: Africa on Abernathy: Sacred Imaginaries of Identity and Place in Atlanta’s West End ............................................................................................ 9

James Manigault-Bryant The Black Atlanta Seekers: Making Sense of Dagara Ritual around Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard ........................................................................................... 23

Meredith Frances Coleman-Tobias “Today is Crossing Day!”: Ritual, Space, and Afrocentric Spirituality in Atlanta’s West End .............................................................................................. 40

Ashley Coleman Taylor Aesthetics of Resistance: Black Theology and the Visual Culture of The Shrine of the Black Madonna #9 ..................................................................................... 62

Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones Sovereignty & Self-Determination: Hebrew Israelite Proposals for Expanding the Conversation on Rights .................................................................................. 87

Diana Burnett Crossing the Kalunga Line: Caribbean Space-Time and the Living Dead in Juan de los Muertos .................................................................................................... 108

Khytie K. Brown

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Racial Vs. Religious Discrimination in Public Service Jobs: A Transnational Case Study ......................................................................................................... 124

Danielle N. Boaz Ori Worship and Care for Well-Being and Collective Liberation .................... 143

Verda Olayinka Contributors ....................................................................................................... 159

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INTRODUCTION TO THE SPRING 2021 ISSUE

W

FUNLAYO E. WOOD-MENZIES

elcome to the Spring 2021 issue of the Africana Studies Review.

When we entered 2020, none of us knew what the year would hold. We now find ourselves one year into a global pandemic, seeking to return to life “as usual” while, at the same time, questioning just what “usual” is and if it is truly a place to which we want to return. In this space, we find that the topic of Africana Studies is more salient than ever.

This issue includes perspectives from multiple disciplines within our field including sociology, literature and film studies, religious studies, legal studies, and history and considers topics from the meanings of place and space to ghosts, zombies, and ancestors. Each highlights an aspect of Africana lived existence—some joyous, some painful—and ultimately invites us to examine the “usual” with new eyes.

The issue opens with a look into a locale that has historically been and remains a Black Mecca: the city of Atlanta, Georgia. Zooming in further, our opening roundtable, Africa on Abernathy: Sacred Imaginaries of Identity and Place in Atlanta’s West End, examines the impact and legacy of human rights activist and minister Ralph Abernathy on the civil and spiritual landscape of the city’s historic West End neighborhood. James Manigault-Bryant opens the roundtable with an introduction that provides history and context, noting that the roundtable’s pieces come together to “document twenty-first century visions of Black religious nationalism” and to underscore the continued intertwining of Black religiosity and Africana freedom struggles.

In the Black Atlanta Seekers: Making Sense of Dagara Ritual around Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, Meredith Coleman-Tobias examines the experiences of the late Dagara healer, Mama Sobonfu Somé, in the West End, on Abernathy Boulevard. Through this story, she reflects on and theorizes the “emplaced religious instruction on Black power” Abernathy’s legacy continues to engender in the neighborhood. Ashley Coleman Taylor’s “Today is Crossing Day!”: Ritual, Space, and Afrocentric Spirituality in Atlanta’s West End continues the inquiry into concepts of space and spirituality via the narratives of two Black, queer women undergoing spiritual initiation. Ultimately, she highlights the role of

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ritual in establishing space and community even while navigating the oftharsh white, Christian, and heteronormative American landscape.

Turning to the power of aesthetics, in her Aesthetics of Resistance: Black Theology and the Visual Culture of The Shrine of the Black Madonna #9, Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones analyzes the impact of Glanton V. Dowdell’s painting of the Black Madonna—which AdkinsJones dubs “Our Lady of Abernathy”—on its original home in Detroit and, ultimately, on Atlanta’s West End. Through her adept analysis, AdkinsJones “speaks to both the limits and possibilities of the image of a Black woman as an emblem of faith.” Diana Burnett closes the circle with her piece, Sovereignty & Self-Determination: Hebrew Israelite Proposals for Expanding the Conversation on Rights. Through examination of the discourses and practices of the Hebrew Israelite community on the West End, she ultimately concludes that both help to “facilitate a critical analysis of the possibilities for freedom and equality and the most effective mediums for its articulation, recourses, and evaluation of its effects.”

Moving from the physical space of Atlanta to the ethereal space of Kalunga, Khytie Brown’s Crossing the Kalunga Line: Caribbean Space-Time and the Living Dead in Juan de los Muertos considers the trope of the zombie and its relationship to the ancestral dead.

Brown analyzes the trope, arguing for a re-reading of the zombies vis-à-vis the “geographical imaginary of the Caribbean” and asserting that in so doing, we work against the “process of deracialization which seeks to erase the influence of African descended people on [Caribbean] identity and culture.”

Attempted erasure and discrimination is something with which Africana peoples are, unfortunately, far too familiar. In her timely piece, Racial Vs. Religious Discrimination in Public Service Jobs: A Transnational Case, Study Danielle Boaz looks at the intersections of racial and religious bigotry across the world from England to North America.

Boaz’s exposition underscores the necessity for Critical Race Studies—now under threat in 20 states including Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina—as it underscores how one’s intersecting categories of being can influence their legal outcomes when suing for discrimination.

Hairstyles, like the locks in Boaz’s essay, are meaningful in many Africana societies and adornment of head common. This is because the head, known as ori in Yoruba language, is a sacred space, the seat of A FRICAN A S TUDIES R EVIEW | V OLU ME S EVEN | N U MBER O NE | S PRIN G 2021 | 7

conscience and consciousness. Verda Olayinka closes the issue with Ori Worship and Care for Well-Being and Collective Liberation, which exposits the concept of ori and highlights its important in the life of each person. She asserts that the care of ori is urgent for Africana peoples during this era of COVID-19 and renewed racial tension around the nation. Ori care, she argues, “can provide extremely powerful results for the liberation of individuals, families, and communities,” and there is nothing more pressing.

May the reading of this issue be one of many steps toward the cultivation of consciousness and collective liberation.

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ROUNDTABLE: AFRICA ON ABERNATHY: SACRED IMAGINARIES OF IDENTITY AND PLACE IN ATLANTA’S WEST END INTRODUCTION JAMES MANIGAULT-BRYANT

A

history of Atlanta’s West End is etched into the bricked sidewalk just outside the southern entrance to the neighborhood’s eponymously named shopping mall. The blocks of hardened red clay colorfully illustrate the West End’s founding in the late nineteenth century when its first homes were erected on either side of the Edgewood Trolley tracks. Take a few steps east towards Lee Street, and the sidewalk chronicles the beginnings of the community’s founding institutions, like St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, and Joseph E. Brown School. A few steps farther, and the pavement moves to the story of the “West End Restoration Project” that began in the 1970s, when city transportation planners introduced the MARTA rapid rail system to the West End, developers received contracts to renovate historical buildings, and city archivists began sketching stories that would become imprinted into the pavement. One of the final sidewalk scenes memorializes the renaming of Gordon Street—the thoroughfare that extends from the southern entrance of the West End Mall all the way to Interstate 285—to Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, an honor bestowed upon Abernathy shortly following his death in 1990. An organizer, along with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and of numerous civil rights demonstrations, Abernathy was Senior Pastor of West Hunter Street Baptist Church, which resides on the street that now bears his name.

The intricately drawn story archived on the Mall’s sidewalk, like much of Atlanta’s current public time-scape, is ordered around the A FRICAN A S TUDIES R EVIEW | V OLU ME S EVEN | N U MBER O NE | S PRIN G 2021 | 9

ascendance and fruits of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Tributes to Black activists of that era, like the street dedicated to Abernathy, appear throughout Atlanta, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in downtown holds a rich archive of the Movement for tourists to explore when visiting the city. Atlanta’s constructed identity as a home of Civil Rights activism that transformed the South’s Jim Crow regime also evinces its lasting image as the region’s “Mecca,” an urban sanctum within the US nation where Black folk hold the political and financial capital to acquire and sustain the fruits of Black middle-class life—educational opportunities and gainful employment, home ownership, and wider spaces for cultural expression and material consumption.

The West End neighborhood, as the essays in this issue of Africana Studies Review attest, is a Mecca of its own. A community of just over 4,000 people, 90% of whom are Black, the West End is home to numerous faiths that, taken together, form a sacred, geographic center of Blackness.

Along Abernathy Boulevard, which intersects with the neighborhood’s western boundary, Cascade Road, and its eastern line, Lee Street, are members of West Hunter Street Baptist Church, the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, the Nation of Islam, the Five Percent Nation, the Yoruba-Ifa movements, and the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church, for example [see Figure]. Until the latter half of the twentieth century, the West End was a predominantly white neighborhood, but its white residents began to relocate in the 1960s. By 1976, 86% of the community was Black, and by the end of the twentieth century the rate reached 90%, a percentage that has remained consistent to this day. In the 1970s, when the West End was designated a “historical district” during the West End Restoration Project, the population change was attributed to post-integration “white flight” from inner-cities, which is consistent with sociological accounts of Black urban areas at the time. 1 The change, however, was equally prompted

by Black professionals who intentionally migrated to be near the Atlanta University Center (AUC), home to the historically Black institutions of

William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1978) is most well-known of such studies.

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higher education—Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, and the Interdenominational Theological Center. As Black consciousness movements transformed AUC institutions, many faculty and administrators affiliated with them moved to the West End, who, along with AUC students, assembled diverse expressions of Black religious nationalism—religious meanings mobilized for nationalist aims of autonomy and sovereignty. Such expressions of nationalism remove blackness from the white gaze of capitalist culture, and fortifies blackness with theological meaning, in part, by imagining Africa as a blessed homeland. 2 Regardless of the sociological rationale, mid-twentieth century relocations to the West End were part of two, intersecting histories—of larger, post-Civil War Black migrations to Atlanta, and of how population movements spurred conjurings of sanctuaries of Black nationalism. After the Civil War, Atlanta was believed to be a refuge for Blacks leaving southern plantations. The presence of Union Troops after General Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea,” and the Freedmen’s Bureau, which established a series of social programs to support Blacks’ transition to post-slavery life, made Atlanta a desired site, so much so that it acquired the moniker, “Black Mecca.” 3 Atlanta was so distinct, and Georgia so central to twentieth-century Black modernity, that the famed sociologist, W. E. B. Du Bois believed the city deserving of a social science laboratory to systematically survey Black life. 4 Using innovative techniques of data collection and methodologies of analysis, Du Bois carefully measured

See, for instance, Tracey E. Hucks’s Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2012).

3 A history of the idea of Atlanta as “Black Mecca” is thoughtfully outlined in Maurice J. Hobson’s The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta (Chapel Hill, HC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

4 See, for example, Earl Wright’s The First American School of Sociology: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory (London: Routledge, 2016), Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2018).

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Blacks’ relationship to the shifting global economy, one that was transitioning from formal plantation slavery to an industrial capitalism with discernable vestiges of the plantation structure.

Because of the opportunities that Atlanta offered for building a solid Black middle class, Du Bois feared the impact of consumer culture on the city’s emerging bourgeoisie, believing consumption would lead upwardly mobile Black folk to defer “a fair far–off ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of bread– winning and the consequent deification of Bread.” 5 Du Bois directed his scholarship and activist organizing towards liberating Black folk from the global system of racial capitalism, the enmeshment of antiblack racist ideology in capitalism’s modes of labor, natural resource extraction, and commodity production. 6 From 1897 until 1910, his first of two extended residences in Atlanta, Du Bois mobilized local “insurgent intellectual networks” 7 to contest human inequities.

Realizing the global contours of white supremacy, he set his sights on the transnational organization of Black resistance. In 1900, he was part of the first Pan African Congress held in London. Among Black delegates from West Africa, Caribbean, and Canada, Du Bois wrote an address “To the Nations of the World,” in which he first asserted, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line,” a phrase he would invoke again in the “Forethought” to his most famous text, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Whereas in Souls the “color line” was thematically akin to the “veil” covering the “spiritual world” of Black life Du Bois sketched throughout the text’s thirteen essays, in his Congress address, he claimed the color line was “the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.” 8 Du Bois’s explorations of Pan African philosophy, a system

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1903 [1997]).

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

7 Taken from Morris’s The Scholar Denied (2017).

8 W. E. B. Du Bois, Pan-African Association. To the nations of the world, ca. 1900. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

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of ideas dedicated to Black peoples’ self-determined and revolutionary transformation of the European world system, would continue to evolve throughout his political career, eventually cohering into an African-centered socialism. 9 Imaginaries of Black nationalism circulated in and around Atlanta throughout the twentieth century. Take, for instance, the Congress of African People that met in Atlanta during Labor Day weekend of 1970.

Organized by poet and activist, Imamu Amiri Baraka, among others, the meeting was envisioned as part of the Pan African tradition dating back to the meetings Du Bois organized decades prior. “The exchange of varied blackness,” Baraka noted in his preface to the published remarks from the Congress, “the coupling of seemingly antithetical approaches to national and international African liberation—these are the kinds of dynamic that are set up at such a meeting as the 1970 Congress, just as this spirit has been kept moving at each of the great Pan African Congresses of the past.” 10 The convening was, in a more immediate sense, an extension of Baraka’s network of Black political organizing in Newark, where his Committee for a Unified NewArk (CFUN) had been instrumental in the successful election of the city’s first Black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, in May 1970. In eleven workshops, which addressed economics, law and justice, technology, and education, the 1970 Congress emphasized the development of institutions that could unify and sustain Black communities across the diaspora in the face of new, emerging forms of colonialism.

On the surface, the Congress was centered on secular political and economic change, but the diversity of faiths represented at the conference was remarkable. The theologian, Dr. James Cone, who had published his first book, Black Power and Black Theology the previous year, gave resolutions with Reverend Bill Land about reconnecting Black people to the

See, for instance, Walter Rucker’s “‘A Negro Nation Within the Nation’: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Creation of a Revolutionary Pan-Africanist Tradition, 1903-1947,” in The Black Scholar 32(3/4): 37-46 (Fall/Winter 2002).

10 African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress, edited and with an Introduction by Imamu Amiri Baraka (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1972), p. viii.

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physical land of Africa through spirituality, food, and economic development; Louis Farrakhan, then National Spokesman of the Nation of Islam and Minister of its Mosque No. 125 in the Bronx, used the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad to imagine the Congress as an opportunity to cultivate Black leadership; Reverend Jesse Jackson, National Director of Operation Breadbasket, asked the audience to meditate silently on the sacrifices of those who had lost their lives in the struggle—Malcolm X, members of the Black Panther Party, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.— before acknowledging, and then minimizing, the Congress’s religious diversity: “And I think that we ought to stop at this point before we go any further and whether your God is Allah, Yawa, or Buddha or Zen, or God Jehovah—it really doesn’t matter—at least you can be respectful to the creative power that has brought forth these powers that have heightened our consciousness.” 11 Also in attendance was Reverend Abernathy, who in his remarks, echoed Jackson’s reverence for a Black ecumenical “creative power” that transcended faith traditions but invoked his own Christian commitment in his framing of Black suffering. “[B]lack people who have chopped the cotton, tilled the soil and suffered injustice, intimidation and assassination,” he sermonized, “will be the new and creative leadership in the vanguard of America’s salvation…” For Abernathy, the history of Black misery in the US was filled with sacred meaning that would eventually redeem the nation of its sins. The wave of Black Power politics, like that embodied in Kenneth Gibson’s triumphant mayoral campaign, 12 possessed religious meaning that transcended faith traditions. Abernathy proclaimed, “We must build a new movement that encompasses black Baptists as well as Black Panthers.

Black preachers as well as black teachers. And then we must move beyond these shores.” 13 The metaphor of “shores” in his remarks rang multiple meanings, gesturing both to another, physical world that would shift

African Congress, p. 11.

Notably, Abernathy attended CFUN supported rallies for Gibson in Atlanta. See Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 148.

13 African Congress, p. 10.

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national and international geographic boundaries, and to a symbolic marking of the limits of the global economic system. 14 By interpreting Black suffering as signifying Christ’s challenge to the US nation’s ethical order, and as a necessary passage to a new world, Abernathy summoned the power of Black religious nationalism.

The essays in this issue document twenty-first century visions of Black religious nationalism that have settled along the freeway that bears Abernathy’s name. Seizing upon Tracey Hucks’s framing of Yoruba religions as an expression of Black religious nationalism, the essays highlight the Black sacred spaces, and Afrocentric businesses along Abernathy Boulevard with nationalist visions that might be obscured by illusions of commercialized freedom campaigns. Using ethnographic methods practiced in Africana Studies, Religious Studies, and Anthropology, the essays draw from discourses currently circulating in the fields of Africana Religious Studies and New Atlanta Studies. 15 Moving through the thick, liminal discursive space manifested in ethnographic excavation, the studies follow how Black faith practitioners imagine Africa through theologies and ritual that make Abernathy Boulevard distinctively meaningful to Atlanta’s centrality in African-diasporic spatial mythologies.

Under the gazes of these four Black women, the West End’s religious nationalism shines through; even more, their descriptions critique the heteropatriarchal character of Black nationalisms, religious or otherwise, that have taken root in Atlanta.

In some ways, the collection of writings resembles Arthur Huff Faucet’s classic 1944 Philadelphia-based study, Black Gods of the

The tension between more traditional nationalist visions of liberal economic development and Abernathy’s seeming antipathy towards capitalism would reach a head within the Congress when, four years later, the organization would adopt an avowed Maoist position. See Robeson Taj P. Frazier, “The Congress of African People: Baraka, Brother Mao, and the Year of ’74,” in Souls 8 (3): 142-159 (2006).

15 Africana Religious Studies is a field that refines, from transdisciplinary perspectives, the examination of the religious lives of people of African descent. See Dianne Stewart and Tracey Hucks, “Africana Religious Studies: Toward a Transdisciplinary Agenda in an Emerging Field,” in Journal of Africana Religions 1(1): 28-77 (2013); emblematic of the “New Atlanta Studies” is Hobson’s The Legend of the Black Mecca (2017).

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Metropolis, which examined a number of Black religious organizations— the United House of Prayer for All People, Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, and the Moorish Science Temple among others. Faucet’s hypothesis, borrowed from Benjamin Mays’s, was that as Blacks moved from the South to the North during the Great Migration they attempted to recreate their southern, rural church experiences in the industrialized North, and had to venture outside Protestant denominational boundaries to do so.

Faucet detailed each community’s theology, and their emergence given that the vast majority of Black people in the US at the time were Baptists and Methodists.

But the essays herein begin from a different vantage point. Not from Faucet’s interest in the remaking of southern Black religions in a northern urban space, but in how devotees across diasporically-oriented religious collectivities engender multiple senses of religious belonging and cohere into a Pan-African spirituality that reimagines blackness across dynamic spiritual landscapes marked by rituals, food, iconography, and spiritual commodities. Taken together, the essays present a new vision of the Black nation, one that draws from Black Atlantic Religious rituals and symbols to find African-centered identities and kin ties, to redeem blackness from heteropatriarchy, and to fashion sense objects that move Black subjects, physically and psychically, from the restrictions of the US nation.

In “The Black Atlanta Seekers: Making Sense of ‘Dagara’ Talk and Ritual on Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard,” Meredith Coleman-Tobias offers a rich ethnographic description of the West End’s religious landscape. The array of spiritual spaces, and the sacred objects made available for purchase, pulls pilgrims from across the Diaspora to the West End. Coleman-Tobias establishes this context to explain how media objects and ritual practices of Sobonfu Somé, the recently deceased Burkinabé spiritual teacher, are readily consumed on Abernathy. Much of Somé’s following tends to be white middle-class women, but Coleman-Tobias explains why Somé’s work particularly appeals to Black folk who journey through the West End. Ashley Coleman Taylor’s essay, “‘Today is Crossing Day!’: Ritual, Space, and Afrocentric Spirituality in Atlanta’s West End,” resonates strongly with the ritual work described by Coleman-Tobias. Drawing from

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years of research on Afrocentric Southern Spiritual Community (ASSC), a group founded at Clark Atlanta University, Coleman Taylor considers how ASSC uses “pedagogies of crossing” to challenge normative categories of race, gender, and sexuality. She focuses on the significance of ritual in the lives of two Black queer women, “Big Sister” and “Little Sister” to illuminate how ASSC renames its devotees within the time and space of an African-centered cosmos that displaces entrenched protocols of blackness and sexuality.

Nationalism, as a topic in and of itself, is taken up more explicitly in the final two essays. In “Aesthetics of Resistance: Black Theology and the Visual Culture of The Shrine of the Black Madonna #9,” Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones follows the iconography of the Black Madonna in the PanAfrican Orthodox Christian Church (PAOCC) from Detroit to the West End, where the image, “Our Lady of Abernathy,” currently resides in Shrine #9 on Abernathy Boulevard. A symbol of Black birth and mothering that is central to the PAOCC’s broader vision of Black liberation and nation building, the Black Madonna “function(s) as the visual claim to liberated selfhood” to resist “internalized narratives of Black inferiority.” 16 The final essay, Diana Burnett’s “Sovereignty & SelfDetermination: Hebrew Israelite Proposals for Expanding the Conversation on Rights,” is a thoughtful reflection on Burnett’s ongoing ethnographic research of the global community of African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, but with a particular emphasis on its West End diaspora.

Hebrews in the West End draw from Atlanta’s centrality to the Civil Rights Movement to buttress their self-determined claims to indigeneity within the context of Hebrew history. Through their theology and their gastronomical commitments, Hebrews on Abernathy affirm their homeland in Dimona, Israel, while challenging the public discourse on civil rights as a complete remedy to the US nation’s history of injustice. Rather, civil rights are doctrines that endow Hebrews with entitlements to sovereignty, selfdetermination, and freedoms beyond what can be ostensibly granted through the regime of the state.

16

See Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones’s essay in this issue of Africana Studies Review, p. 11.

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Through Black Atlantic rituals and sacred traditions, commodities circulate throughout West End, mapping sacred geographies of Africancentered community that reach beyond its shores. Organized efforts to transform the city often leverage the Civil Rights Movement tradition to cultivate entrepreneurial development, a pragmatic renewal of Booker T. Washington’s vision at the end of Reconstruction to build new industry.

Atlanta residents have seized this approach through many ventures—the entertainment industry, for instance; however, the city’s culture producers often embrace, and widely preach uplift within the economic and political terms of the US nation. For instance, in the wake of the summer 2020 uprisings following Officer Derek Chauvin’s chilling murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Hip Hop artists Michael “Killer Mike” Render and Clifford “T.I.” Harris appeared at a press conference with Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to denounce those who destroyed properties in Atlanta. In a tone different from that assumed in their personas as emcees, they pleaded for civil order. “We have to be better in this moment,” Killer Mike implored, “We have to be better than burning down our own homes because if we lose Atlanta, what else do we have?” 17 While Atlanta’s culture workers represent the city to the world under the seductive moniker of the “Black Mecca,” fissures reveal themselves at every turn. The 2020 uprisings responded, not only to Floyd’s murder, but to Atlanta’s own patterns of police brutality, revealed a week later when Atlanta Police Officer Garrett Rolfe fatally shot Rayshard Brooks, an unarmed Black man, twice in the back. Georgia’s state apparatuses disproportionately injure Black lives in other ways, too. Black people constitute over 60% of Fulton County residents living in poverty, have an infant mortality rate nearly five times that of whites, and a fetal mortality rate roughly four times that of whites. 18 In the 1971 Ebony article that first

Quote taken from Devyn Springer, “Killer Mike, T. I. and Atlanta’s Black misleadership class.” The Independent, June 2, 2020.

18 Recent poverty rates found at https://datausa.io/profile/geo/fulton-county-ga#economy; recent infant mortality rates found at https://oasis.state.ga.us/oasis/webquery/qryInfantDeath.aspx; and recent fetal mortality rates were taken from https://oasis.state.ga.us/trendingtool/index.html?redirectto=Fetal.

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proclaimed Atlanta as a southern Mecca, Julian Bond, a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the first Black Georgia State Representative, made a statement that continues to hold true to this day: “[Atlanta] is the best place in the United States for a black if you’re middle-class and have a college degree, but if you’re poor, it’s just like Birmingham, Jackson, or any other place.” 19 And yet, even the Black middle class is vulnerable to the perils of the market. In the first quarter of 2008, the state conjoined with financial institutions to claim, in neocolonial fashion, Black owned properties. The West End was disproportionately represented in the “mortgage crisis”; among the nearly 18,000 homes forfeited to banks nationally, those around Abernathy declined in median price from $86,000 to $36,000, a near 59% drop. 20 Since much of Black families’ wealth is concentrated in home equity, the mortgage crisis will also lessen the transfer of wealth from one generation to another, 21 the effects of which will continue to materialize for years to come. Popular narratives of progress engraved in front of shopping malls, and that absorb Abernathy’s legacy into the commercial branding of Civil Rights memory, hide a host of social inequities that spare few Black people.

Recovery from the mortgage crisis has changed, and will continue to change, the West End—its demographics, the values of its homes, and the shape of its commercial district. Nearly thirteen years since the 2008 mortgage crisis, home values now range from $50,000 to $500,00, depending on the extent of necessary property renovations. And with the elongated scale of the real estate market, the area has already begun to attract new, more affluent businesses that sit beside longstanding, more modestly priced hair salons, cellular service stores, and restaurants, as well as community institutions like the Family Health Center at West End. Take,

Phyl Garland, “Atlanta: Black Mecca of the South,” in Ebony 26 (10): 152-157 (August 1971), 157.

20 Barbara Harris Combs, “The Ties that Bind: The Role of Place in Racial Identity Formation, Social Cohesion, Accord, and Discord in Two Historic, Black Gentrifying Atlanta Neighborhoods” (PhD Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2010), 128.

21 Kai Wright, “The Subprime Swindle,” The Nation (June 26, 2008).

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for example, the “Slutty Vegan” full-service restaurant on Abernathy Blvd.

Initially a “vegan burger food truck,” the restaurant, founded by a Clark Atlanta University graduate, sells savory vegan food at prices far above those of other eateries in the West End. The future of West End’s gentrification presents questions: How will changes to the demographic composition and physical landscape of the West End reshape its marketplace of sacred objects? How will commodities of sacred Blackness intersect with those that come with the secular, gentrified world? And, which Black Atlantic rituals will survive, and what new kinds of kin-making might they foster in the midst of shifting class dynamics?

A deadly pandemic has ravaged the world since the ethnographic work for these essays was conducted. In the final days of January, there were over 740,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Georgia, almost 200,000 of which were Black, as well as over 12,000 deaths, about a third of which were Black. From the last week of December 2020 through the third week of January 2021, Blacks made up 30% of new cases and 46% of new COVID deaths in Fulton County, and there were just over 25 cases per square mile in the West End. 22 The pandemic has also severely impacted the West End’s commercial district. In September 2020, half of West End businesses had closed their doors. 23 Nonetheless, given how Black nationalist sensibilities have historically theorized and contested state-sanctioned violence, these essays, with their reimagining of the sacred terms of Black nation-craft in a localized Southern space, are a snapshot of a changing same. The essays are by no means exhaustive of all the faiths housed in and around the West End. Practitioners of Ifa and Lucumí and numerous Protestant denominations are not represented in this collection, for instance, but their absence is not a shortcoming, but a call for more investigations of the West

Rates of COVID-19 were taken from https://dph.georgia.gov/covid-19-daily-statusreport.

23 Bill Liss, “Atlanta’s West End small businesses fight for survival,” 11alive.com (September 11, 2020). Retrieved from https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/downtown-west-end/atlantas-west-end-smallbusiness-fights-for-survival/85-6166852b-42b9-4eda-a621-471224091abb.

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End’s enduring Black religious nationalism as it responds to emerging mechanisms of colonial control. Each scholar in this issue was drawn to the West End at different junctures of her personal and professional journey, each possessed by the loving power of Black sacred work being done there.

That love—of the West End, of Atlanta, and of Black Life—sounds through the essays in the following pages.

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THE BLACK ATLANTA SEEKERS: MAKING SENSE OF DAGARA RITUAL AROUND RALPH DAVID ABERNATHY BOULEVARD

T

MEREDITH FRANCES COLEMAN-TOBIAS

he first time that I visited “the Shrine” was on a weekend in 1992. My mother had taken me to Atlanta to see my cousin, Tami, who was getting some fancy degree from Clark Atlanta University – when Atlanta was the Black-and-white city before the Summer 1996 Olympics. Mama and I awakened early to go over to The Shrine of the Black Madonna #9. I remember the congregation’s black and red uniformity and the long service; its bookstore that reminded me of the Black one, Roots and Wings, that we frequented back in my other home, Montgomery, Alabama. The people were proud, even as we left the several-hour service early.

My mother and I often had these unapologetically Black field trips in new places; she was (and remains) on a ferocious intellectual quest to understand if latent Black power and Christianity were the organic companions that Black liberation theology professed.

Abernathy was somewhat of a birthright by default, then: a place where many others gathered to try and make meaning out of Black, empowered, and religious life.

It was no surprise then when, ten years later, I found myself back on the same street that reminded me of all the rites of passage retreats, Saturday lectures turned daylong debates, “African garb” adorned proudly, and alternating Juneteenth and Kwanzaa celebrations of my childhood. Abernathy indexed many childhood sensoria.

My first young adult encounter with Abernathy came in 2002. The factory-fumed skies of southwest Atlanta cloaked the cement heat in orange light. A friend and I strolled out of Spelman’s gates, spilled out onto Lee Street, grated our hands against the rusted, metal fence as we passed over the highway, and made our way down Lee Street. A sharp right landed us at a large entertainment room in one of the Shrines of the Black Madonna on Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard. Flyers had been passed out on campus; that night two poets, Gina Loring and Sekou Andrews, A FRICAN A S TUDIES R EVIEW | V OLU ME S EVEN | N U MBER O NE | S PRIN G 2021 | 23

deepened my Brooklyn-native appreciation of spoken word. I loved them. I listened to them as they talked race, sex, color and police. I bought both their independently-produced CDs and began to listen religiously in solidarity with their loud Afro-alterity. Love and politics, of course.

Abernathy, to my young adult self, was a performed place of emergent “consciousness”: eyebrows waxed to a Toni Morrison angle by the Bonner Brothers technician in the West End mall met oft-discussed loc twisting at the Hebrew Israelite salon where the sister told me to be quiet as the brothers talked. It meant pounds of takeout plates at Soul Vegetarian and cashew nogs that slid slowly down my throat and cowrie shelled earrings, quickly broken, from various vendors. Alternating loud oils making my presence stick in a room long after I departed. Afro-clichés of my becoming.

Abernathy was as much longing as it was concrete possibility: nostalgia and some romance from an outsider looking in.

Isn’t it interesting that the Hebrew Israelites are right over here across the street from “the Shrine,” all interpreting each other?

Emblackened Bible stories made three-dimensional contemporarily? These were the proxies that created a religious lifeworld for me; I dealt with these signs religiously. It would take me some time before I realized that this actually had to do with religion.

Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard’s emplaced religious instruction on Black power landed for me while in the throes of my doctoral research on Sobonfu Somé in the early 2010s. In response to a perceived spiritual malaise in “the West,” Sobonfu Somé, a Burkinabé émigré, functioned as a teacher of Dagara spirituality in the United States and emerged as a contemporary ritual leader until her untimely 2017 death. While attempting to understand the impact of Somé’s presence in the Western hemisphere, I realized that she had a small, dedicated following amongst Afrocentrists in Atlanta. Unlike her majority white American following, who often learned from an assortment of ethnically-coded new religious movements across the West, the subset of African Americans who found Somé’s teachings useful did so within a broader canopy of African American religious nationalism.

I found interlocutors on and near Abernathy who confirmed this theory. For example, when I told the cashier at the Soul Vegetarian restaurant that I was writing about the Somés, he held up the line of waiting

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customers with his own well-formed opinion and in-depth questions about the direction of my research. A mentor began sending me flyers for her exhusband’s next appearances at the Shrines’ book store. Talking to Black Somé followers, I discovered, unsurprisingly, that people were crafting Dagara ash circles right off Abernathy. I began noticing that the Somés had another geography that was more local; one that was more about the Black American South’s radical designs post-Civil Rights than it was about white people practicing Dagara ritual in Laguna Beach – what I previously thought my research would highlight. “The white women have gotten Sobonfu,” as pioneering African American sociologist (and my godmother) La Francis Rodgers-Rose said to me, in passing, of my research. But there were many Black people within Somé’s orbit who remained, and they were physically and ideologically housed on and around Abernathy. Somé found her place in Atlanta because of what Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard engineered; her texts and rituals functioned contrapuntally to establish her significance in Afrocentric, Atlantan life.

This essay highlights an oral historical engagement of Somé’s Dagara ritual life in Atlanta. Through Somé’s West End-adjacent devotees, it becomes clear that Somé’s unique contribution is critical to a larger story of African American religious nationalism on and around Abernathy.

Somé’s Abernathy interface lands within two life stories with communal and interpersonal significance. These instances point to a larger recognition and celebration of Somé as adding something vital to the West End’s lifeblood.

Searching for a Jegna: Introducing Sobonfu Somé to Black Atlanta In 2002, Dr. Wade W. Nobles published a chapter entitled “From Na Ezaleli to the Jegnoch: The Force of the African Family for Black Men in Higher Education” within a larger collection, Making It on Broken Promises: African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education. 1 From its outset, the article aspires to “rescue and reconstruct the best of African culture and to use it as a paradigm for a renewed, modern African human authenticity” (173). Working both within and beyond the

Wade Nobles, “From Na Ezaleli to the Jegnoch: The Force of the African Family for Black Men in Higher Education,” in Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education, ed. Lee Jones (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2002), 173-186.

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academy, Nobles points to a familial, admittedly paternal, mode of relationality as a blueprint for how senior Black male scholars should comport themselves within and beyond their respective academic communities. Most pointedly, the chapter champions the realization of the Jegna (Jegnoch, plural form), an Amharic (Ethiopian) conceptualization, as an ideal embodiment for senior Black male scholars.

Jegna (Jegnoch, plural form) are those special people who have (1) been tested in struggle or battle, (2) demonstrated extraordinary and unusual fearlessness, (3) shown determination and courage in protecting his/her people, land, and culture, (4) shown diligence and dedication to our people, (5) produced exceptionally high quality work, and (6) dedicated themselves to the protection, defense, nurturance, and development of our young by advancing our people, place, and culture. The easiest and foremost interpretation of the Jegna is one whose central focus is on the culture and character of one’s people…. It is also important to point out that…[i]n Ethiopian history there were many women Jegnoch. It is well known that without their contributions the victory of the Ethiopians over the Italians would not have been realized (181).

Following an African American nationalist predisposition that wittingly draws upon a wealth of African continental philosophies – historical and contemporary, Cape Town to Cairo – one of Nobles’ initial expositions of the Jegnoch took root in local Pan-African communities. Nobles’ colleague and friend, Dr. Asa Hilliard, a famed educational psychologist, was then based at Georgia State University in the heart of Atlanta. His scholarship engineered many local conversations in and around Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard 2 in Atlanta’s historic West End neighborhood. Hilliard also

2 Once Gordon Street (after a confederate general, John B. Gordon) in Atlanta’s historic West End neighborhood, Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard acquired its current name on April 17, 1991, the first anniversary of Ralph David Abernathy’s death. Abernathy was a Baptist minister, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and generally understood as the “first lieutenant” of King’s work.

Some opposed the street name change because of controversy around Abernathy’s memoirs, while other business owners bemoaned the expense of changing letterhead and advertisements. Nonetheless, the name change was mostly celebrated by Atlanta’s city

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popularized the use of jegnoch as it began to gain currency in other Black American, Afrocentric 3 communities around the country. A 2019 gathering of Black psychologists more recently articulated that a jegna “is someone who is not afraid to speak truth to power, is full of integrity, and is committed to the welfare and protection of [African and Africandescended] people.” 4 Though jegnoch could be translated as “mentors” in English, Nobles and his students preserved the Amharic designation because it pointedly circumvents the word “mentor.” 5

council, Abernathy’s family, and champions of the Abernathy’s courageous, religiouslyinformed leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. See “Atlanta Honors Abernathy With Road Name Change,” United Press International Archives, March 19, 1991, Accessed November 11, 2020, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/03/19/Atlanta-honorsAbernathy-with-road-name-change/8590669358800/.

3 According to Molefi Asante, pioneering purveyor of Afrocentrist intellectual philosophy, “Afrocentricity [proposes] an adjustment to black disorientation, decenteredness, and lack of agency. The Afrocentrist asks the question, ‘What would African people do if there were no white people?’ In other words, what natural responses would occur in the relationships, attitudes toward the environment, kinship patterns, preference for colors, type of religion and historical referent points if there had not been any intervention of colonialism or enslavement?” While this perspective was the animating impulse of Black Studies departments in the 1960s, its critics have cited its U.S. base, androcentrism, and heterosexism as its significant shortcomings. Afrocentricity and African American nationalism are twin social movements, sharing similar animating impulses and demographic representations. Throughout this essay, I use “Afrocentric(ity)” to signal communities that privilege separatist Black social formations and gatherings as a source of collective Black empowerment. See Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Buffalo: Amulefi Publications, Inc., 1980) and Molefi Asante, “Afrocentricity,” Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, published April 13, 2009, accessed November 26, 2016, http://www.asante.net/articles/1/afrocentricity/.

4 The Association of Black Psychologists, “ABPsi 2019: The Association of Black Annual International Convention,” Psychologists 51st https://www.abpsi.org/convention/pdf/ABPsiProgramBook2019.pdf (accessed January 28, 2020).

5 Nobles’ chapter is somewhat unclear when it problematizes the word “mentor.” Nobles tells a portion of The Odyssey myth and notes that the figure, Mentor, was a friend of a chief protagonist, April. This friend, left with the responsibility of caring for April’s family, instead became – according to Nobles – the family’s downfall; “[h]istory has it that Mentor…protected April’s son and family with faith and loyalty. In actuality, Mentor should mean someone who is an accomplice to rape, murder, and destruction. However, ‘Mentor’ has undeservedly come to mean a wise, loyal, advisor and trusted counselor.

Without the help of Mentor, the cruelty and destructive behavior of his friend might not have happened” (180-181). Nowhere in the chapter does Nobles articulate what Mentor did to be deserving of such judgment. It appears that there may be some underlying

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In the early 2000s, Dr. Itihari Toure, a senior scholar at Interdenominational Theological Center in the Atlanta University Center, not far from Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, reports that she, Hilliard, and Nobles were in search of persons who actively embodied what Nobles dictated as a jegna in their day-to-day world within and beyond the academy. Sobonfu Elisabeth Somé was one such person and, identified as such, she became an honored invitee at their Nsaka Sunsum (Touching Spirit) conference at Clark Atlanta University in 2004. Nsaka Sunsum sought, with intentionality, to bring together a continental and diasporic coterie of Africana healers: designated, contemporary jegnoch. As a spiritual consultant, leader, teacher, and writer, Sobonfu Somé already had spent over ten years working in collaboration with and apart from her exhusband, Malidoma Somé, as a facilitator of ‘African ritual’ in North America. She continued in this fashion until her untimely 2017 death. In addition to ritual facilitation, Somé maintained an active website, published three books and one audiobook, and functioned as the primary subject of two documentaries and numerous interviews. Toure, Hilliard, and Nobles assessed that Somé lived into the sixfold rubric that Nobles articulated two years prior.

Though Toure reports following the work of Sobonfu and Malidoma Somé for over a decade, Nsaka Sunsum was her first chance to meet Sobonfu, the Burkinabé spiritual teacher who, by that point, had amassed a sizeable, if predominately white, following in the United States.

When Toure shared the story of Nsaka Sunsum with me, she emphasized what a serendipitous meeting her initial encounter with Sobonfu Somé was.

More than the familial kinship that the two women wrapped around each other immediately, was the beginning of Somé’s relationship with an

homophobia implicit within the privileging of the jegna/jegnoch as opposed to “mentor.”

In a blog post, for example, Afrocentrist Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti opines that the “jegna” should be used instead of “mentor” “…because Mentor is derived from the mythical Greek character Mentor (sic) who Odysseus left to care for and educate his son Telemachus in his absence. As with every other ‘mentor’ in ancient Greek society, a significant part of his role as a teacher and guardian was to personally introduce his ward to a homosexual sexstyle.” While this quasi-historical observation could be leveraged as a valid critique of pedophilia, Baruti instead is critical of the designation “mentor” because of its imagined homosexual “sexstyle” implications – a bias reflected in some other Afrocentric writings. See Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti, “Jegna,” I Am We, Accessed January 28, 2020, https://iamwe.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/jegna/.

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Afrocentric, Atlanta-based community: the passionate community thinkers who would gather at a conference like Nsaka Sunsum. For these Africana enthusiasts – intellectuals, artists, students, activists, entrepreneurs and religious devotees who assembled on and around Abernathy, Somé would bring a newer encyclopedia: a Dagara religio-cultural archive, enshrined by everyday ritual and, adjacent to ritual, overall sacrality. It would initiate a relationship with Atlanta and, particularly, those who regularly gathered in Abernathy’s restaurants, book stores, gift shops, and natural hair salons in order to intentionally support Black business as part of a greater ethos of both Afrocentric and Pan-African solidarity. Somé would come back to Atlanta often, hosting a yearly event with Toure called “Live Your Purpose.” Additionally, she was a regular guest ritual leader within Toure’s congregation, First Afrikan Presbyterian Church, in nearby Lithonia. 6 While being an appointed jegna bespoke an Ethiopian cultural identity some three thousand miles away from her birthplace in Gnigdama, Burkina Faso, Somé, ever an adaptable ritual arbiter, accepted the designation in Atlanta’s West End, an evolving, neo-African stage.

Somé and African American Religious Nationalism What was happening in and around Abernathy in the 1990s and early 2000s reflected what sociologist Patricia Hill Collins asserts as a response to the political climate. She observes that “the resurgence of African-American interest in Black nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s may [have been] a direct result of an increasingly conservative political climate in the United States, the deteriorating economic base in African American communities resulting from changes in global capitalism, and the persistence of an increasingly sophisticated racial segregation.” 7 It makes sense that when this political climate met the intellectual fervor of Atlanta itself – arguably housing one of the highest concentrations of Black academics in the metropolitan South – Atlantan Afrocentrism would emerge in intellectual treatises like Asa Hilliard’s communally circulated

I witnessed one of Somé’s last facilitations of a grief ritual within this congregation’s sanctuary in September 2014. See Sobonfu Somé, “Grief as an Act of Justice: Ritual and Sacred Conversation” (presentation, First Afrikan Presbyterian Church, Lithonia, Georgia, September 26, 2014).

7 Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998): 156.

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text, SBA, 8 as well as other spatial ways that my youthful self observed and came of age within. Whether an emphasis on life-giving nutrition or a country-wide search for jegnoch to bring to Atlanta, Black scholars and community members were part of a larger movement to procure late Black nationalist meaning via religious symbols and entrepreneurial endeavors.

Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard housed these aspirations.

In earlier work, 9 I argue that, unlike the majority of Somé’s white student body, African American followers of Sobonfu Somé endow her work with great significance because it characterizes Africa’s function as a religious symbol. 10 This interpretation of Somé, however, was not immediately decipherable because she did not set forth an explicitly racial or ethnically targeted message in her written work. In her books, the category of “Westerner” is not race-based; Somé does not discuss how Western students may racialize her teachings. From Somé’s perspective, to be a “Westerner” is to embrace a proclivity that is apathetic about practicing “indigenous” ways of being. A Westerner, for Somé, can be anyone: a Burkinabé or an American person who makes no time to conduct rituals in their life. Regardless of ethnicity or nationality, all Westerners share in the same malady. Her teachings use a flexible identifier—“Westerner”—as shorthand for an overall epistemology. In order to deconstruct this disconnected way of being, she posits, her students must reconnect to their “old” ways of being; students must return to their ancestors’ land and

Asa G. Hilliard, III, SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind (Makare Publishing: 1997, 1998).

9 Meredith Coleman-Tobias, “Axis of Belonging: The Quest of Sobonfu Somé’s African American Students,” Journal of Interreligious Studies 28 (2019): 24-42.

10 With the kernels of his 1971 assertion that “the distinctive nature of black religion” needed to be examined on its own terms and his pointing to a) Africa as historical reality and religious image; b) the involuntary presence of the black community in America; and c) the experience and symbol of God, historian of religions Charles Long set forth a pivotal collection of arguments, Significations, in 1986. Significations describes Africa “as symbol, historical reality, and religious image.” For Long, Africa functioned primarily as an orientation or, more precisely, “an ‘orientational meditation’ upon itself as it navigates this New World locus and its subsequent ‘terror of time.’” See Charles H. Long, “Perspectives for a Study of Afro-American Religion in the United States,” History of Religions 11, no. 1 (1971): 55; Stewart Diakité and Hucks, “Africana Religious Studies: Toward a Transdisciplinary Agenda in an Emerging Field,” 45; and Hucks, Yoruba Traditions, 49.

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wisdom. 11 Somé’s Dagara recorded traditions, then, become a portal for students’ sense of indigenous belonging (e.g. “My grandfather was Blackfoot, therefore I should practice Blackfoot ways”; “My parents’ families emigrated from Kenya; I should visit sometime”; “ My grandmother was a Romanian witch; my quasi-Wiccan coven is my birthright”). Importantly, whether these understandings are archivally grounded, ensconced in familial narrative, or productions of a DNA test, Somé encourages persons to delve into their sense of past in order to rightly understand the present. Accompanying this discovery process is an unspoken understanding of a baseline, uniform standard: Dagara ritual can become an opening because all indigenous traditions, for Somé and her students, hold similar truths.

In Deeply Into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage, ritual theorist Ronald L. Grimes documents his multiple encounters with American persons looking for ways to invigorate significant milestones with meaning. He notes a resurgence of interest in adaptable, enactable rites to perform during significant transitions like “the start of school, abortion, a serious illness, divorce, job loss, rape, menopause, and retirement,” 12 passages for which most dominant American religious cultures have no community way of tending to potential grief and damage.

As Grimes remarks, “unattended, a major life passage can become a yawning abyss, draining off psychic energy, engendering social confusion, and twisting the course of the life that follows it.” 13 I have come to understand Sobonfu Somé as a ritual surrogate who attempted to mitigate “unattended passage[s]” through Dagara ritual for Westerners. Given their history of other African-inspired rituals, this disposition would have strong resonance with Atlanta Afrocentrists.

In addition to appealing across traditions, Somé’s indigenous reconnaissance mission complements African American cultural recovery and restoration projects from the Herskovits and Frazier conundrum to African American religious nationalism, a spirituo-cultural movement that privileges African descent as the critical cornerstone of Black sacred

In my observation, this is a primary distinction between Sobonfu and Malidoma Somé’s teachings: whereas Malidoma Somé takes more students back to Burkina Faso yearly to explore indigeneity from a Dagara perspective, Sobonfu Somé affirmed everyone’s capacity to access some indigeneity from their biological or chosen ancestry.

12 Ronald L. Grimes, Deeply Into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 5.

13 Ibid., 5-6.

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identities. 14 When Somé appeared in Afrocentric African American spaces—whether in text or flesh—people celebrated her as a purveyor of indigenous Africa. In person, she returned this honorific descriptor by affirming African American students’ senses of their African identity, consistent with an African American religious nationalist sensibility. Her vocal investment in this ongoing cultural project granted her favored access into Afrocentric African American spaces. For example, at a 2014 grief ritual conducted at First Afrikan Presbyterian Church, Somé offhandedly encouraged the all-Black grieving participants to surrender to the ritual process because “you all know how to do this!” 15 Even if everyone is indigenous, Somé’s assertion that African Americans “know” how to conduct ritual suggests that persons of African descent could intuitively apprehend and apply her teachings in a way that an all-white audience could not. Certainly, this predisposition echoed an Afrocentric proclivity. What Somé labeled “indigeneity” in white spaces became “African” in Black spaces and held more currency for an already-underway project.

According to religious historian Tracey Hucks, the designation “African American religious nationalism” has seven characteristics: 1. Black religious nationalism subverts the association of blackness with deified evil and makes a deliberate attempt to theologically realign blackness with divine essence. 2. A primary motivation is the need to de-slave or deobjectify (thus rehumanize) the historical corporality of black Atlantic people in the aftermath of traumatic enslavement, with the goal of redesignating as sacrosanct the spiritual body and essence of postslavery African people. 3. Race becomes a central hermeneutical prism for conceptualizing sacred community and determining religious membership. In this collective community, individual differences are transcended, and direct continuities and links to ancient black communities are envisaged. 4. Religious practices reflect strict moral and ethical codes of behavior and religious expression is often patterned on ancient or traditional interpretations of culture. 5. New modes of creation and primordialism are mythologized and often textualized. History is also used as a “system of narration” in the quest “not only for identification and inspiration” but also for collective “legitimacy.” 6.

Iconic renderings of the sacred and the divine are racially recast and rearticulated as affirming of black physicality while subverting the supremacy of an Anglo imago dei. New theologies are espoused that emphasize the inherent divinity or primordial universality of blackness. 7. Africa is often revalued and historically honored as a sacred source of ancient philosophies and traditions. The image of Africa and African humanity are deprimitivized and rescued from pejorative European typologies. See Hucks, Yoruba Traditions, 44–45.

15 Somé, Ibid.

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Somé’s knowledge of Dagara ritual made her an expert among African American followers. Also in 2014, I witnessed Somé sit on a panel at an African American seminary and function as the keynote speaker for a predominantly Black-attended academic conference at Harvard University themed around African and diasporic religious cultures. Somé’s function as a teacher of African spirituality defied the convention that differentiates a spiritual leader from a scholar; Somé’s African American students affirmed her Dagara knowledge as always relevant in the predominantly Black places to which she was invited.

Somé positioned herself along this continuum, affirming the work African Americans have done to create, identify, map, and display an African heritage and ongoing Afrocentric identity. Somé also spoke publicly regarding unjust racial systems in the United States; as an immigrant who had lived in the United States for over twenty years, she had been exposed to the day-to-day experience of Black life in white America. In her rituals, she anecdotally told the story of a racist neighbor and a racially-motivated, corrupt political system. 16 If Somé functioned as a guide within a religious nationalist continuum for African Americans, it makes sense to attempt to understand her African American students as creating something specifically African American using her Dagara teachings. Somé’s African American students understood her Dagara particularity as expanding and enhancing their repertoire of Afrocentric practice and, thus, their spiritual technologies.

16 Within groups of African Americans, Somé does not significantly distinguish between her identity as someone born in Burkina Faso and African Americans born in the United States. However, Somé’s birthplace is significant for her Black students. Therefore, her discursive choice to not privilege her Burkinabé identity in Black American spaces may be rhetorically astute. For example, in a 2005 issue of Essence, a magazine published for African American women’s consumption, Somé assumed the relevance of her topic— “sharing knowledge from the Motherland”—and proceeded to talk candidly with theneditor Susan Taylor about the benefits and setbacks of her divorce with Malidoma Somé.

This particular “kindred” subject-position runs counter to longstanding popular narratives about how recent West African immigrants distance themselves from African American identities. Gesturing toward the irreconcilable “problem” of intraracial cultural difference, filmmaker Kobina Aidoo troubles how/if the category of “African American” is expansive enough for contemporary relationality with Americans at all. Somé worked to bridge this chasm. See Susan Taylor, “Ritual and Renewal with Sobonfu Somé,” Essence 36, no. 8 (2005): 144–145; The Neo African Americans, directed by Kobina Aidoo (2009; Create Space), DVD.

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Two key features are significant to African American Dagara practice specifically within Sobonfu Somé’s ritual/spiritual community: 1) acquiring novel information—apprehended as cosmologies, stories, and “skills”—and redistributing that information through scholastic modalities such as books and lectures; 17 and 2) modifying Dagara rituals as taught by Sobonfu Somé and, thus, serving their own culturally specific needs. In other words, they were deeply interested in both understanding the theoretical and cosmological underpinnings of practice (perhaps because a Dagara sensibility is, effectively, functioning as a proxy) and having continued access to a how-to guide. African American Dagara ritual practitioners 18 enact both elements of what religious historian Tracey Hucks coins as “religious coexistence,” which includes “daily ritual practice” and “ritual texts for collective edification.” 19 The combination of theory with practice is a long part of the Afrocentric and, by extension, African American religious nationalist sensibility. Working at the intersection of ritual practice and instructive, devotional texts, Somé’s pedagogy is consistent with this tradition. Many of my interviews with African Americans suggest that books have a primacy in their ritual enactment; Somé’s books function as sacred texts, resource guides, and instruction manuals for prosaic ritual. Such was the case with Dr. Melva Sampson, who lived near Abernathy.

This preference resonates with a larger African American religious nationalist sensibility insofar as reading communities were as much a part of early religious nationalist communities as conversion. In Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism, Hucks argues, Textuality, particularly for the African American Yoruba, served as a critical agent for disseminating and localizing a new religious consciousness. Texts united African American readers not only within the context of a modern national populace but also within a reputed historical lineage of ancient nationhood. …[T]extual production and the ‘politics of writing’ were closely tied to the larger 1960s black-nationalist philosophies, which advocated authoring and reclaiming one’s history. Hucks, Yoruba Traditions, 124.

18 Here, I name Sobonfu Somé’s students “ritual practitioners” and not “religious practitioners” because, although I am locating them within a particular religious orientation, most of Somé’s African Americans students publicly identified within another religious culture (e.g. Christianity, Ifa-Orisa, etc.) or, as I discuss later, held a few different religious leanings of which “Dagara” was one part.

19 Tracey E. Hucks, “‘Burning with a Flame in America’: African American Women in African-Derived Traditions,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 17, no. 2 (2001): 90.

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Ash Circling off of Abernathy: A Local Dagara Manual for Thriving For Dr. Melva Sampson, a practical theologian and ordained minister based in southwest Atlanta at the time of my interview, Somé’s teachings are also consonant with those of her larger ecclesial community, First Afrikan Presbyterian Church. 20 This church community holds African descent as a central nexus around which its members articulate their cultural identity and theological meaning. 21 For Sampson, Somé does not provide a philosophy for an African-descended sensibility but, rather, gives instruction for how to go about navigating ritual.

Sampson finds Somé’s books particularly helpful. In our interview, she discussed the centrality of Somé’s book, The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient

Since I conducted this interview, Dr. Melva Sampson no longer lives in Atlanta nor attends First Afrikan Presbyterian Church, but she maintains an active ministerial and ritual community named “Pink Robe Chronicles.” Sampson describes this community as “a digital hush arbor that centers faith and spirituality using the womanist and Afrocentric values of self-determination, serious engagement, and liberating self-love to highlight the importance of collective work and responsibility in healing and sustaining marginalized communities.” Within the Pink Robe Chronicles webcast, Sampson invokes the work of Sobonfu Somé consonant with the ethnographic vignette described herein. See Melva Sampson, “Pink Robe Chronicles,” Dr. Melva Sampson Website, Accessed November 17, 2020, https://www.drmelvasampson.com/pink-robe-chronicles.

21 In Walkin’ The Talk: Keepin’ the Faith in Africentric Congregations, church historian Julia Speller conducts an ethnography of three “Africentric” congregations. She surmises that each of these congregations live into culturally relevant, Christocentric values by incorporating the Nguzo Saba, seven principles of Kwanzaa, into their philosophical values: They tap into the richness of an African spiritual worldview, reshaping and reinterpreting it into an experience that is culturally relevant for them in the American religious context. In their worship and ministries, Christ-rooted and African-centered congregations display cultural pride through artifacts, rituals, music, and dance, and they have an active knowledge of and appreciation for the history and culture of African people from antiquity to present. It is important to note, however, that their Africentric identity is not based solely on the things they do or the knowledge that they have acquired but on their self-identity as a part of a larger African diaspora, revealing an important notion of communality.

First Afrikan Presbyterian Church imbibes these values. See Julia Speller, Walkin’ The Talk: Keepin’ the Faith in Africentric Congregations (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005): xxii–xxiii. In Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism, religious historian Tracey Hucks goes on to suggest that churches like First Afrikan Presbyterian Church have members who are also within the identifiable bodies of black American Yoruba practitioners. See Tracey Hucks, Yoruba Traditions, 253–268. Sobonfu Somé visited First Afrikan Presbyterian Church on several occasions.

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African Teachings in the Ways of Relationships, 22 in her marriage.

Eschewing the conditions of romantic love and sexual attraction, The Spirit of Intimacy suggests that shared purpose, communal input, and frequent ritual in amorous relationships contribute to their longevity and success.

Somé’s book has enabled Sampson to make ritual a central part of even the most minute parts of her life. While Sampson’s ritual work with Somé was limited—she only attended two grief rituals—she conducts rituals at church and home regularly. For example, she described the ways that she and her spouse integrated The Spirit of Intimacy into their conflict resolution process: I’m remembering a time—Dareck and I were going through something and it was pretty tense…. I got the book out and we went in the backyard and we just followed it right as she, you know…. Made the little circle…we got inside the circle, and we started talking through what our issue was. So, it’s just really important. Opening—one—my eyes to the importance of ritual.

But helping me to have a particular community to walk back to.

For her—being the Dagara people. To actually retrieve the utility of these practices for healing and for wholeness. And I think when you couple that with a space like First Afrikan Presbyterian Church, it already—it’s just a good complement. And so, you know, one major takeaway for me just in terms of daily practices is really just trying to let stuff go. If you can’t do it every day, [do] it weekly. I’m thinking about this concept of grief for [Sobonfu Somé]…. As I talk through it more, it helps me to connect to an ancient, indigenous way. That is important to me. That helps me to fill in certain blanks. Where practice becomes the vehicle to faith. 23 Sampson incorporates Somé’s book utilizing a homegrown improvisation.

The Spirit of Intimacy served as a toolkit to help Sampson and her spouse resolve an interpersonal difficulty. Somé describes any couple within the ash circle as “there because they have first admitted that they don’t know what they’re doing.” The ash circle, then, “enable[d] spirit to come and

Sobonfu Somé, The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient African Teachings in the Ways of Relationships (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, Harper Collins, 2000).

23 Melva Sampson in discussion with the author, October 2015.

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become their teachers.” 24 Sampson needed to resolve an intense conflict with her spouse and her typical modes of conflict resolution—rounds of dialogue and communal input—were not proving effective. Not only did the book offer novel knowledge, but the ritual that Sampson enacted was a search for shared, interpersonal knowledge and meaning making that would enable her and her spouse to amicably resolve their conflict. Somé’s teachings helped Sampson foreground the primacy of ritual in an event as seemingly miniscule as an everyday conflict, thereby orienting the family to seek spiritual knowledge in every aspect of their lives. Somé’s capacity “[t]o fill in the blanks” provided Sampson with a generative specificity: the ability to admit that she and her spouse needed help to come to peace. By housing her conflict resolution strategy within a Dagara ash circle, she created a significant cultural link, one that ultimately created peace between the couple. Sampson’s household ritual reflects the innovation of many a contemporary Afrocentric self-motivated spiritual practice, adapted with specific individual and social healing needs in mind.

After harnessing Somé’s conflict-resolving technologies, Sampson used The Spirit of Intimacy to re-commit to her marriage. When we talked, Sampson had just finished celebrating her ten-year anniversary. At the anniversary festivity, guests took turns reading The Spirit of Intimacy out loud in honor of Melva and Dareck’s commitment. In Sampson’s home, The Spirit of Intimacy functions as what literature critic Henry Louis Gates calls a “speakerly text.” Gates theorizes the style of writer and African Atlantic religious theorist Zora Neale Hurston as a progenitor of the “speakerly text,” a text meant to be read out loud and which, as such, takes on a life of its own in a given community. 25 Through the communal, out loud reading of The Spirit of Intimacy, Sampson’s community honored the inherent orality of Somé’s text; after all, what eventually became the Spirit of Intimacy book was initially a text dictated by Somé. Sampson’s community reproduced the book’s orality during the celebration, thus creating an extraliterary ritual with the text itself. And, re-articulating helpful tools in relationships, The Spirit of Intimacy affirmed Sampson and her spouse’s longevity in conversation with Somé and their chosen Atlanta community, fortressing the shadows of Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard. 26

Sobonfu Somé, The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient African Teachings in the Ways of Relationships (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 1997), 93.

25 See Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

26 Coleman-Tobias, Ibid.

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Africo-Abernathian Future: A West End Redaction Sobonfu Somé imbibes a unique positionality on Abernathy.

For her devotees nestled within other African-inspired religious communities in and around Abernathy, she offered one contemporary Burkinabé way of knowing and ritualizing that Atlanta Afrocentrists championed. Whether heralded as a leader of public ritual or invoked in the more private space of Sampson’s backyard, Somé’s presence imbibed the religious nationalist self-determination that made Dagara ritual currently accessible. Though Somé has transitioned, her legacy is now woven into the larger African American religious nationalist religious life made visible on Abernathy.

As a college student at Spelman College in the early 2000s, I absorbed the surrounding West End’s Afrocentric celebration and reflected this selfsame identity. In many ways, what I experienced on Abernathy at the turn of the century seemed like remnants of a 1990s Africa-oriented heyday: Black businesses were thriving but functioned in critical and, seemingly, contrasting competition with nail salons and an increasing number of fast food greaseries. As West End, Atlanta slowly becomes a displaced, white residential shell of its former Black life, I wonder what the role of Somé’s after-death tutelage will be on Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard? I suspect that Touré, amongst others, will continue to host an abundance of Somé-inspired rituals within which Somé will be heralded as an inspired ancestor. There is also the possibility that the same white American propensity found in silos throughout the nation may also find their way to Atlanta through the newer, gentrifying elite. 27 However, since it was Black power that brought Somé’s presence to Atlanta, I would imagine that this potential shift will go largely unrealized. Save the fervor of one or two white Somé students eager to proselytize to other non-ritual adherents, I suspect that Somé’s Atlanta life-after-death will continue to be pointedly Afrocentric.

This essay, then, archives what was one of Abernathy’s several emplaced objectives – the strain of Dagara ritual that Somé engineered on and around Abernathy. In many ways, her rituals allowed so many of

Carol Issac, Arla Bernstein, and Linda Behar-Horenstein, “From Gentrification to Regeneration: A Grounded Theory Study of Community Leadership in Southwest Atlanta,” The Qualitative Report 25, no. 9 (2020).

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Atlanta’s homegrown religiosities to flourish vis-à-vis Dagara ritual.

Further, given the entrepreneurship of her ritual life and book production, Somé extends Abernathy’s intersection of Black, empowering religious cultures and businesses. Her jegna identity proffers more symbolic and ideological work than her initial invitation foretold.

A portion of this article is used with the permission of the Journal of Interreligious Studies.

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“TODAY IS CROSSING DAY!”: RITUAL, SPACE, AND AFROCENTRIC SPIRITUALITY IN ATLANTA’S WEST END

ASHLEY COLEMAN-TAYLOR

Crossing Day

T

he sun shone upon a grassy yard nestled between red brick buildings housing administrative offices and classrooms. A bright blue sky contrasted the rich colors of wax print cloth and carefully manicured summer florals. A group of white folding chairs were arranged in a semicircle, divided by a tent with drummers playing a welcoming rhythm on their instruments. Across the large yard-cum-stage, a row of multipatterned dashikis lined the backdrop, and long colorful sticks with curved handles sat upright next to them. Three men approached the audience from their seats near the dashikis and bellowed out “Have you heard what today is?”

They were each dressed in muted teal and gray tie-dyed oversized outfits of pants and long-sleeved shirts. Enthusiastically, one of them answered “Today is crossing day!” another proclaims “It is the celebration of the initiates’ completion of their journey.” From behind their masks, they continued the conversation, “Is there an end?” one asked, to which another man replied, “it does not end.” We know from M. Jacqui Alexander that “Crossings are never undertaken all at once, and never once and for all.” 1 As the men in muted teal and gray noticed the organized lines of community members approaching from behind the white folding chairs, another alerted the seated crowd, “I think I see those who are crossing.”

The newly initiated participants, led by predecessors who crossed before them, walked toward the promenade from either side of a large building situated behind the audience area. The woman I call “Big Sister” was one of the procession leaders. She made the “crossing” in the nineties and now serves as a dedicated elder for the group. Emerging in single file lines to loud rhythmic drumming, all participants had on white, a ceremonial color common in other Africana religious ritual practice. The initiated men and women were dressed in different attire. The women wore white cloth

M. Jacqui Alexander. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, memory, and the Sacred. (London: Duke University Press, 2006), 290.

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tied into a make-shift skirt and bra-like top. The men wore cloth made into a bottom covering. Those who had participated in the procession gathered before the small crowd on the grassy yard. Their mood was serious in recognition of the moment.

The official order of events began with a customary pouring of libations. While kneeling, the libation leader poured water upon the ground to honor and “feed” the ancestors. A practice inspired by African religious ceremonies, [libation pouring] is common in Black American Afrocentric ceremonies; its purpose is to open and mark sacred space. During the pouring, we called out the names of those who passed before us --both ancestors we knew and those we did not know--asking that they be present and aid the living by guiding the ceremony. In this practice, the archive of memory is brought forward to live in the present. As we collectively cycled through the names of ancestral spirits, the libation leader also dedicated pours of liquid to “birthworkers,” “those who carved out space,” “the orisha,” “those who endured the transatlantic slave trade,” along with the input of others in the larger group gathered there on that day.

After the libation, the founder of the spiritual community proceeded to the presentation area to address those who had gathered on that Saturday.

With the powerful cadence of a southern preacher, he educated the crowd about the significance of counterhegemonic African diasporic ideologies.

Namely, he explained that “the only way Black people will survive is if we believe we are divine.” With these words, he assured us not only that survival is possible, but that a belief in the divinity of Black people is a crucial point of departure. This framework is a direct contradistinction to the western religious ideology that framed the colonial missionary religiopolitical conquests and dehumanization of Black and indigenous peoples in the Americas. He called the group of people under his tutelage a “magical spiritual community,” a group that centers a supreme God, yet educates those who pass through the initiation process of their own power, and innate divinity.

The Afrocentric Southern Spiritual Community (henceforth, ASSC) is sustained through intergenerational connection, legacy, and deep intercommunal engagement. Those of us who observed the public crossing ceremony were able to witness the centrality of its robust lineage. After another danced presentation by the new initiates, other members of the community came to the stage area to present short, choreographed dances in order of when they made the “crossing” themselves. They each appeared to perform the same dance, a representation of the community connection across generations and the centrality of a bond through movement. We saw A FRICAN A S TUDIES R EVIEW | V OLU ME S EVEN | N U MBER O NE | S PRIN G 2021 | 41

presentations from several different groups ranging from children as young as four, to older children, teenagers, and the adults preparing to initiate. The woman I name “Little Sister” was one of the members who took care of the children, helping them remember their steps and ensuring they sat still and behaved during the presentation. Dancing became a central practice of presentation; the participants rehearsed the series of steps they had learned, and they were united though movement. They each wore the bright fabric unique to their families, a term for those with whom they crossed. “After the presentations, “Tata” 2 urged those who gathered to center faith and listening to the Higher Spirit—the theme of that crossing season. Each new initiate shared what the experience meant to them; one of them learned about “being confident in comfortable places” and another revealed the necessity of “breaking old habits.” At the conclusion of the event and before a shared meal for all who attended, the elders gifted the new initiates brightly colored staffs meant to “direct them on their journey.”

Tata, a gay man from the South, designed the program after completing his doctorate where he focused on West African rites of passage processes. Organized during a period marked by what historian Kenja McCray names as a distinctive “1990s Afrocentricity,” this rites of passage program was not the only one in the Atlanta University Center. 3 On its origin story, Big Sister told me [the ASSC] was founded “Around ’94, ’95…[as] primarily, just a brotherhood of college students who were being mentored by [Tata] after finishing [his Ph.D. program] and doing his research on Black masculinity and rites of passage in West Africa.” Little Sister explained, “as a Black man, he wanted to offer these kinds of rituals and experiences for other Black men… it started almost kind of as an experiment with just men. And that was the first journey. Big Sister added, “And in the year following, women students on campus said, ‘Well, we need rites of passage and we need mentorship too and we don’t care about your gender. We want to do this too.” As both women explained, a programmatic turn in his scholarship led to the creation of a rites-of-passage community in the mid-nineties in which young men, and later women, would be led

I use this pseudonym because it means “father” in Kikongo.

Centering women in her historical approach to Pan-Africanism, McCray situates her own experience in a rites of passage program called “The Journey to African Womanhood” while a student at Spelman College within a larger context of female leadership in cultural nationalism; see McCray, K. (2017). Complements to kazi leaders: Female Activists in kawaida-influenced cultural-nationalist organizations, 19651987 (dissertation), 347.

2 3

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through predetermined ritualized stages until they “crossed” or “journeyed” into the community and blossomed into their own selfhood. Through this ritualized course of study, initiates mastered five core principles, or lessons that would help them as the journey through life. Upon “crossing,” each initiate would gain a new name, begin contributing to the community, and work to nurture the next group of initiates.

My contribution to the larger Africa on Abernathy project is a brief reflection on the experiential narratives of two Black queer women in the ASSC and the ways that their membership informs their lives. Under its mission very clearly informed by an Afrocentric/Pan-African framework, the community works to educate its participants about African ritual, naming practices, symbolism, and the importance of rites of passage to selfdevelopment. Both self-development through and community support and accountability to both shape the processes. Through a brief ethnographic exploration, and interviews with two Black queer women participants whom I call Big Sister and Little Sister, I situate the community in a larger framework which intersects Afrocentricity, Black southern religiosity, and Black queer southern landscapes. While the ASSC welcomes individuals of African descent across gender, sexuality and class, its members are often directly connected to Atlanta area educational institutions. Both women I interview identify as queer, have been members for over five years, and are also graduates of one of the institutions in the Atlanta University Center.

Informed by M. Jacqui Alexander’s work, I examine two outcomes of the dynamic process of “crossing” and the role of ritual in the community’s ability to a) organize and establish space in a southern spiritual landscape and b) expand community through creative family building beyond heteronormativity.

Crossing as Praxis As a community comprised of the descendants of enslaved Africans, the theme of “crossing” is both a process and organizing framework central to the formation and maintenance ASSC. Their ancestors experienced a crossing of the Atlantic that demanded conversion of African selves from one mode of being to another. In fact, “we could say they were culturally ‘unmade,’ thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness.” 4 Even in the ship

Hortense J. Spillers. “Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book”. Diacritics, 17(2) (1987), 72.

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that held in its belly “ripped apart” flesh, the “human-as-cargo stand for a wild and unclaimed richness of possibility that is not interrupted, not ‘counted’/’accounted,’ or differentiated.” 5 Africans in the Crossing 6 carried with them their religious epistemologies; esoteric knowledge from their rites of passage processes lived in their skin. Bodies traveled, world-senses traveled, 7 and memories traveled—made tangible through flesh jerking back and forth on the rocky waters “crossing the vortex of thick watery salt greenish gray bluish green turquoise spew of foam.” 8 Those Africans moved and were moved, transformed in those moments. The pedagogies of the massive diasporic transatlantic Crossing cannot be deciphered through western epistemological boundaries; the methods of knowing cannot always be articulated, “at least not with colonized tongues.” 9 This is to say that the ontological shifts within the very process of the Crossing, the embodied methods of remaking in those moments of movement across the Atlantic, did not separate the Sacred from the secular. 10 In fact, the spirits that crossed with Africans to the lands of new soil did so through a type of material/immaterial union we find in Africana traditions—the person and the spirit needed each other to survive. In the oceanic journey, propertized flesh 11 was so much more than commodity; dark ships were more than sites of terror. Through the pedagogies of crossing, the Atlantic became a site of remaking and recomposition of both humans and their gods.

Though no crossings have altered the lives of African diasporic peoples like the forced transatlantic Crossing, there are other types of interAtlantic “crossings,” often occurring in Africana religious ritual contexts,

Ibid.

I refer to the Transatlantic Slave Trade as Crossing (upper case), and rites of passage programs as crossing (lowercase).

7 Oyewunmi, Oyeronke. The Invention of Women Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3.

8 Alexander, 288.

9 Williams, L. African and African Diaspora Studies Department Brown Bag Series. African and African Diaspora Studies Department Brown Bag Series. (November 2019) Austin, TX. 10 Alexander, 292.

11 I coin the term propertized flesh to reflect not only the commodification of Black bodies, but also the ways that colonized bodies are akin to colonized land and place through the logics of ownership.

5 6

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that alter the initiate’s orientation to space, place, and community. 12 Inspired by the work of Alexander, I understand the pedagogies of crossing to be the productive methods, or processes, of bequeathing new information to those in the transitive act of the crossing. As a pragmatist, I am interested not in what the methods are but instead what these pedagogies do as they function to create complex intracommunal networks within ASSC. In general, two pragmatic outcomes emerge from the ritualized methodologies of Africana religious crossings. First, crossings and other rituals mark space and place. Ordinary rooms and banal objects are sacralized through the community ritual practices. Second, crossings form and inform the boundaries of community. The kariocha ritual in the ilés of Lukumí, the kouche in Haitian Vodun, as well as the rituals undergone by the abian in Candomblé’s terreirros, and Náñigos in the fambá of Abakuá, marking both space and community. In a type of symbiotic dialectic, those who made the crossing within the sacralized ritual space become part of the community responsible for making and keeping sacred space and supporting sacred community. There is an ongoing relationship between Africana religious community and place/space as the material world is infused with the immaterial and informing the everyday.

As we see in the vignette of Crossing Day, crossing is a central organizational principle of ASSC. During the libational pour, I was struck by its leader’s naming of those figures who exist in intermediary spaces as she spread liquid onto the earth in front of her. She paid homage to “birthworkers,” “those who carved out space,” “the orisha,” “those who endured the transatlantic slave trade,” all Africana diasporic figures who work in the sites between the marked moments of Black lives. Conversant with many other rituals in the African diaspora, the transformational and didactic rites of passage demarcate the boundaries of membership. The logics of inclusion are thus built upon series of rituals in which the members are required to be present, engage the pedagogies in the process, and allow themselves to be open to a spiritual connection with God. ASSC does the constitutive work of blending the Sacred and secular, rectifying the damage of western constructs of the Holy/profane divide, and centering knowledge production in embodied experience. Eschewing the ideological violence and exclusionary rhetoric that inform heterosexist/homophobic logics of

Not all “crossings” in African diasporic communities can be considered religious. For example, I would include some “crossings” in Black Greek letter organizations or masonic rites within this context.

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inclusion, rooted in binarisms, for both Afrocentricists and Pan-Africanists.

ASSC centers an inclusive process of crossing as the rubric for community.

Crossing operates uniquely in the lives of Black queer community members. The act of “crossing” represents a “betwixt and between” situatedness, a physical representation of Black nonnormative livingness in a binarized landscape of gender- and sex-based heteropatriarchy. ASSC situating and prioritizing Black queerness allows us to recognize the troubles of navigating a world that denies our race, gender, and sexuality as instrumental to the fabric of our daily lived realities. The Black and the queer operate as intersecting positionalities, meeting at the crossroad where worlds blend into each other like the Sacred and secular in Alexander’s Crossing. 13 We could say, then, that Black queer and trans existence is a Sacred-secular axis (read: crossroad) of mutable borders and destabilizes rigid heteronormative epistemologies and hermeneutics like the oceanic ungenders and transforms Black flesh. 14 Not only does crossing emerge as central to ASSC’s creation of space and community inclusive to Black queer participants, but it also represents the fluid intercessory space that Black queerness occupies outside the rigid bounds of normativity and placemaking. This renders Black geographies as “crucial sites of knowledge production [centering not only]… embodied experiences and material realities,” but also spiritual ways of knowing and being. 15 The pedagogies of Black queer crossings disrupt the normative logics of gender, sexuality, and the Sacred—instead these meanings are always in flux and in movement toward another reality because we know we don’t quite fit into an arbitrary norm.

We learn as Black queer and trans people that we are perpetually crossing, always in the marginal, liminal spaces of movement, in the intermediary, intercessory zone. Jose Muñoz’s words aptly describes the productivity at the crossroads of Black and queer when he says “The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present…Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world” (Jose Muñoz, 2009, p.

1). As a “magical spiritual community” committed to spiritual guidance and

Alexander, 293.

Spillers, 78.

15 Latoya E. Eaves. “Black Geographic Possibilities: On a Queer Black South”. Southeastern Geographer, 57(1), 2017, 87.

13 14

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self-actualization with an “insistence on potentiality,” ASSC operationalizes crossing through place-making and community formation informed by inclusive yet esoteric rites of passage designed for holistic selfdevelopment. This Afrocentric community privileges the liminal/inbetween space as a necessary state for the didactic process of forming/informing community. The process of crossing is particularly important because it subverts the larger Afrocentric/Pan-African imperative of forming community based on an essentialist, originary narrative rooted in an idyllic narrative of precolonial Africa free of European influence (and its “homosexuality”) within which queer and trans African descended persons do not fit, which I explain later.

Ideological Violence and Exclusionary Rhetoric Afrocentric Southern Spiritual Community (ASSC) presents an interventionist narrative that demands a reconsideration of boundaries and limits placed upon Black bodies through the historical development of rigid western ideals of “normative” race and sexuality. In Queering the Color Line, Siobhan Somerville chronicles the parallels between widely accepted scientific racism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the invention of the concept of the “homosexual.” The scientific discourse of the era positioned both African descended and homosexual persons as nonnormative beings subject to experiments, “othering” rhetoric, and popular opinion that sought to prove their deviance. 16 Relatedly, Patricia Hill Collins explains, “racism and heterosexism also share a common set of practices that are designed to discipline the population into accepting the status quo…both share a common cognitive framework that use binary thinking to produce hegemonic ideologies.” 17 It is the framework of deviance, a binarized logic that there is a mythic norm and non-norm, that provides the undergirding logic of racism (privileging whiteness) and heterosexism (privileging heterosexuality). Black folk know firsthand the dangers of navigating a world where “anti-Blackness as total climate.”18

Siobhan B. Somerville. “Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5(2), 1994, 27.

17 Patricia Hill Collins. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 96.

16

Christina Sharpe. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 21.

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The tools/logics of racist science used to identify the “normative” human (thereby distancing the other) and the of tools/logics to assess inclusivity in Afrocentric circles are predicated upon binaries and ideologies established in a rigid white supremacist framework. To be “authentic” is to be “normative,” and Black bodies, queer or not, have never been the referential norm in Western discourses of race, gender and sex.

I identify traditional Afrocentric and Pan-African communities as sites that employ both ideological violence and exclusionary rhetoric to instantiate norms/inclusion guidelines which leave Black queer and trans participants banished to the margins. It is not my intention to belabor the topic of homophobia imbedded in these ideologies. Scholars, queer and non-queer, have addressed the issues that come with the myopic views of gender and sexuality in the writings of Molefi Asante, 19 Francis Scott Welsing, 20 and Yosef Ben-Jochannan. 21 Afrocentrism and Pan-Africanism do the important work of decentering whiteness and Eurocentricity in a type of decolonial epistemological approach and their influence on Black studies and shifting race discourse in the academy cannot be undervalued. The issue, however, is that the popular authors are not experts in Black/African gender and sexuality histories and couch hateful and homophobic beliefs in other research-based work. 22 This is problematic because as these theories become widespread, so do their homophobic and transphobic views. Their work often perpetuates the ideological violence and exclusionary rhetoric we experience as Black queer people. Afrocentric ideologies have trickled down to nonacademic circles who call themselves well read in “literature” concerning Blackness and many nonacademic Afrocentric community members cite these academic texts in their “research,” however thinly conducted.

The logics of inclusion for Afrocentrists, or the tenets that define those who are truly pro-black community and those who are not, are

Barbara Ransby. “Afrocentrism and Cultural Nationalism” In M. Marable (Ed.), Dispatches from the Ebony Tower Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 220.

20 Dwight A. McBride. “Can the Queen Speak? Racial Essentialism, Sexuality and the Problem of Authority. Callaloo, 21(2), 1998, 371.

21 Ron Simmons. “Some Thoughts on the Challenges Facing Black Gay Intellectuals.” In E. Hemphill (Ed.), Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. (Washington, D.C.: Redbone Press, 1991), 225.

22 Afrocentrism also biologizes and essentializes race as a “shared genetic heritage” much like logic of the racist scientists in Somerville’s work (Ransby 218).

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narrowly defined by heterosexuality, as transness gets erroneously enmeshed with the representations of the “homosexual.” These logics end up creating a counter-communal discourse in which Black queer and trans persons must combat virulent homophobia, thereby fragmenting themselves for acceptance. Two logics, in particular, inform the “inclusion” process for Afrocentricists, both academic and non-academic. First, much of Afrocentric thought is predicated upon the idea of a pre-European contact Africa in which gender and sexuality variance did not occur. Although texts like Boy Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities (2001), Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (2015), and Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men, and Ancestral Wives: Female Same-Sex Practices in Africa (2007) demonstrate the existence of precolonial gender and sexual fluidity, there remains an extant belief amongst Afrocentricists that European contact superimposed “homosexuality” on African peoples. For many authors of Afrocentric thought, the Nile River Valley is positioned as humanity’s originary site under the presumption that (what we now name) queer and trans/gender nonconforming persons did not exist and are thus “outsiders.” 23 Tangentially related is the idea that European white men brought “homosexuality” to Black Africans as part of a ploy to destroy Black virility and strength. As if the systems of colonization on the African continent and enslavement in the Americas, sharecropping, segregation, redlining, and mass incarceration in the United States were not enough to disrupt processes that could lead to economic and social development.

Second, many Afrocentric authors and ideologists purport that Black male “effeminization” is a by-product of white supremacy and, by extension, Black women’s role in Black male emasculation are the cause for Black family dissolution. 24 While this has never been proven, there are (again) well-documented examples of systems of enslavement, sharecropping, segregation, redlining, and mass incarceration hurting Black families as well as impeding community development and progress. What leads to the dissolution of Black family is not the gender presentation (which often gets confused with sexuality) of Black gay men, nor is it the overachieving Black woman [who] becomes the scapegoat for the so-called

Here, the rigid binary logic mentioned earlier emerges again.

Barbara Ransby. “Afrocentrism and Cultural Nationalism” In M. Marable (Ed.), Dispatches from the Ebony Tower Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 22.

23 24

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emasculation of Black men. What destabilizes our attempts at collectivism are countercommual discourses rooted in internalized racism, self-hatred, and homophobia/transphobia that leads to the ostracization (and abuse) of Black community members who are non-heteronormative.

Undergirding both logics is the belief that homosexuality is not “natural” for African descended peoples, a premise that ASSC fundamentally rejects.

It should be made clear that the use of “natural” and “unnatural” veers dangerously close to the scientific literature touted by late 19th century writers who sought to “prove” the inhumanity, lasciviousness, and savagery of African persons. In this same era (1892) the term “homosexual” was first used in scientific writing, and thus emerged as an identity category instead of set of behaviors. 25 The naming of same sex attraction and sexual practices designated terminology to already existing life experiences and communities, many of them precolonial and premodern. To be sure, the discourse of “natural” sexuality was crystallized in Western scientific/medical discourse and the popular American imaginary at the same time as pre-eugenics ideologies in which “African people and apes occupied a fluid border zone between humans and animals” (Collins, 2004, p. 99). The natural/unnatural constructions concerning queer existence is in line with racist science that established a binary of Black and white, homosexual and heterosexual, impure and pure, and proper and improper embodiment.

Historically, ASSC experienced backlash for its open and affirming approach to queer members. In fact, Big Sister noted “there was much more hostility towards this group for that position and for that appearance of queerness…” noting the that ASSC was founded around the time that the homophobic and hateful diatribe of writers like Welsing (1991) became popular amongst Afrocentric communities. Big Sister, however, explained that any “Black or African centered community that operates like that--I don’t roll with. But this was one that just was different so I appreciated that.” The shift away from the racist and homophobic discourse which informs so many Black queer experiences of disbelonging reveals itself to be an important one for AASC. “When you have healthy, loving people, you can work through patriarchy, and you can work through sexism and heterosexism.” [Because of the legacies the founder comes from] that legacy and allows him to be in this [Afrocentric] community. If you Black and you believe in God, come on,” said Big Sister. How does a queer-

25

Somerville, 258.

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affirming Afrocentric community in the South offer a counternarrative to the Southern religious landscape? AASC creates new possibilities for the formation of Black queer identities not as a disrupture of Afrocentric lineage or Pan-African ideologies, but as a welcome intervention. Specifically, I maintain that the ASSC is able to employ the process of crossing not only to create spiritual space and place, but also build familial community through non-linear, non-vertical kinship ties. In order to center the words of community members, I title each the subsection to follow with the words I heard from women in the ASSC. Creating Place Through Southern Spiritual Landscape “Those whose carved out space” Often blackness is rendered “ungeographic,” by “discourses that erase and despatialize;” yet as marginalized subjects, Black communities like ASSC are always involved in social processes of spatiality, re-marking and re-making place through belonging and becoming. 26 A reappraisal of traditional Geography’s reliance on static boundary-making through violent geographies of domination, Black Geography attends to the community meaning-making of place and space in dynamic processes of Black movement often due to marginality and economic precarity. From capitalism’s root in the movement of the slave ship across the Atlantic, to the current of movement Black communities out of cities like Atlanta because of capitalism’s continued proliferation, Black Geography seeks to reimagine, or re-map, Black sites through methods outside of the mainstream. In the August 1971 issue of Ebony magazine, Atlanta, as Black geography, was branded the “Black Mecca” in the post-white flight populational shift in the city’s center and burgeoning sociopolitical climate. 27 Due in large part to the work of Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, the southern metropolis has drawn persons looking for more affordable cost of living, affirmation of a Black selfhood, or the opportunity to attend school, financial gain, entry into arts and

Katherine McKittrick. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xiii.

27 Phyllis Garland. Atlanta: Black Mecca of the South. Ebony Magazine (August 1971), 152–157.

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entertainment realm or strategic Black political alignment. As Big Sister said in her interview, “Atlanta is still that mecca and it does have that draw for powerful dynamic things to happen in the South…. there’s just something powerful about Atlanta and about Georgia that magnetizes us.

And so the folks that are here; I think are here for a reason.” The magnetism of the city led to the creation of Atlanta as a “Black site” and vortex for Black people seeking a city that would welcome them and provide a path for success. She continued, “Atlanta has this draw for all of us….Whatever reason, you take yourself to Atlanta…you know that there’s something profound there, there’s an energy there. It’s grounded in a civil rights history, an activism history, its distinctly southern given our ancestor’s struggle and what they poured into this land.”

Her words “they poured into this land” offers a reflection on the work of those who tirelessly build a city that supports and maintains a diverse Black experience. Although Atlanta is well known for its southern religiosity rooted in Christian church culture, the city is also the home of multiple African inspired and African derived religious communities. In fact, Little Sister explained the ways that the active involvement in these communities enhances involvement in ASSC when she said, “You have churches like Rize Community Church and First African Church where people can go and have Christian worship. You have a very robust spiritual tradition community when it comes to Ifa and Candomblé and Congo practices. All these different traditional communities. So, I think all of those things support people being able to be consistent in ASSC.” Atlanta, more broadly, and the West End of Atlanta, more specifically, emerges as a “black site” largely informed by the placement of its black institutions. The southern spiritual landscape that surrounds Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, the street that informs the content of this special issue, exists because of “those who carved out space,” to quote the libation leader describe earlier in this article. The Christian-centered Hunter Street Baptist Church, St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, exist alongside the non-Christian Soul Vegetarian Restaurant Food Hall led by Hebrew Israelites, The Shrine of the Black Madonna of the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church, and the newly founded Abundant LUUV Unitarian

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Universalist Church inform Black spiritual life in the neighborhood. Black religious communities take up and mark space in the South unlike any other region. Southern religious landscapes, especially in Atlanta, are widespread and often situated in communities the once held black residents that maintained and supported their interconnected neighbors. In fact, in order to understand the residential neighborhood histories in Atlanta, one can examine the churches that still open their doors to congregants who can no longer afford to reside in gentrified neighborhoods after a city’s urban renewal efforts being erase and displace its populations.

Religious communities are not the only institutions that mark space in Atlanta. In fact, a major component of the Black migratory praxes with Atlanta as its destination is the Atlanta University Center--the consortium of historically Black institutions including Spelman College, Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, and the Interdenominational Theological Center. Asked the significance of ASSC’s southern placemaking praxes in the AUC, Little Sister explained that she did not “know if it could have been sustained in any place other than Atlanta.” She clarified, “The way that the community has become the phenomenon that is has is that we have privilege of being in the AUC where there is a constant influx of new people…[Tata] started it for college students and.. in the AUC you have an intersection of different skills, different types of people and it’s a whole lot of us. Being in the AUC, there’s a certain type of black mecca.”

Through her description, Little Sister situates the Atlanta University Center within the construct of the black mecca. The educational institutions are often the wellspring for community renewal and continuation, “there are people at [ASSC] who came from the Interdenominational Theological Center. There are people.. that have come from all of the undergraduate institutions.” The AUC becomes not only a vortex of Black intellectualism for those seeking educational advancement, but also a site for finding community and self-development outside of the classrooms. Crossing, then, welcomes the individuals into the space and marks them as accessors of the community sites.

“The spiritual is in the mundane”

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In Africana crossings, ritual space becomes an important part of merging the Sacred and secular; the intermingling spirits and humans build relationships during crossings to sustain each other beyond the ritual process. Referring to the transatlantic Middle Passage, M. Jacqui Alexander writes, “pedagogies that are derived from the Crossing…disturb and reassemble the inherited divides of Sacred and secular, the embodied and disembodied, for instance, pushing us to take seriously the dimensions of spiritual labor that make the sacred and disembodied palpably tangible.”

Informed by crossings in the ASSC, the relationship between the everyday and the spiritual in these women’s lives dissolves the demarcation between sacred and secular. Little Sister told me, “as a community, we focus on having a holistic lens on all the places where spirit is moving and speaking and participating with us in how we navigate our daily lives. Because that is where our own transformation and healing comes from. It’s in what you do every day. It’s less about the spectacular…” The pedagogies of crossing, then, not only reveal the thin veil between the human realm and that of the spirit world, but also how those pedagogies in ritual thin the divide between the ritual and the mundane. As Big sister explained, ASSC’s “principle spirituality is really about [one’s] personal ability to walk with, hear, and know the creator…So, spirituality is not something you go and do on Sunday. Spirituality is what you do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. How you treat people, what you put in your body, what you listen to, the choices you make. So really, a daily walk.” Little Sister provided more clarification, “we are a community that focuses on ritual. So ritual isn’t always as deep and smoky as it might sound. Ritual is anytime that you gather people together and the intention is…to use the space for a connection to orient people around a particular purpose and intention. Because we are committed to character development and self-mastery we often experience things...that feel spiritual. And spiritual for me doesn’t always me that the heavens opened up and people got esoteric messages. Most often, the spiritual is in the mundane.

For both Little Sister and Big Sister, spirituality does not require the setapartness of ritual to transform one’s character and shift one’s engagement with Spirit and other. The pedagogies of Africana crossing provide a foundation for the infusion of ritual lessons into the daily practices. The inability to separate the religious from the nonreligious and the spiritual

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from the nonspiritual is a notable element of both African traditional and diasporic religions.” To be sure, ASSC is “really about connecting to the cosmology…that really flows through most African traditions.” Both women noted the connections the community has to a larger African diasporic religious discourse. In fact, Little Sister shared, …it is a consistent resource of Black engagement and PanAfricanism and African spirituality…it isn’t my only resource for that, but it is a primary resource of that for me. Because for me that is important in not just my social life, but in my personal life that I have spaces where I am experiencing things that connect me to indigenous African practices and that connect me with other people that are committed to Black people in a particular kind of way.

Remaining “committed to Black people” and engaging in a supportive Black community rooted in holistic engagement and self-improvement, both women found a sense of familial kinship in the ASSC. This kinship, built upon active engagement and support for each other, is strengthened in the ritual processes that demand trust and accountability. Not only do the pedagogies of crossing shape and inform ritual space, sacralizing it, and marking it they also inform the permeability of the demarcation line between the spiritual and the profane. Creating/carving out space and building familial community are not mutually exclusive processes. Each of them informs the other, creating a dynamic process of place-making and fostering belonging.

Expanding Familial Community “This community is my family” ASSC deviates from the traditional Afrocentric and Pan-African ideologies of family premised upon a patriarchal notion of Black community. Black men are expected to be strong, masculine providers and leaders, as well as bear the moral compass of their families and extended networks. In this understanding, family is therefore vertical, kinship is rooted in blood, and the family is the foundation of all Black wellbeing.

This way of imagining Black family politics, however, has not been historically accurate for African diasporic communities. “Not only has the Black family been undermined by the structures of [w]hite racism that have made it extremely difficult, if not at times impossible, for Black families A FRICAN A S TUDIES R EVIEW | V OLU ME S EVEN | N U MBER O NE | S PRIN G 2021 | 55

(meaning parents and children) to occupy the same households, but [w]hite culture has also attacked the models of family that Black people have erected for their survival.” 28 Within a Eurocentric and white supremacist approach to family, Black family structures of kinship--often designed for survival in response to violent tactics of dehumanization---are illegible.

Spillers argues “Whether or not we decide that the support systems that African-Americans derived under conditions of captivity should be called ‘family,’ or something else, it strikes me as impertinent. The point remains that captive persons were forced into patterns of dispersal, beginning with the Trade itself, into the horizontal relatedness of language groups, discourse formations, bloodlines, names, and properties by the legal arrangements of enslavement.” 29 As familial ties nurture nonlinear, nonvertical chosen kinship ties in the creation of community, the ASSC offers a subaltern space of spiritual formation traditional Christian southern religious landscapes. This rites-of-passage community becomes a large family network for those who join its ranks. They care for, guide, and help to each other to grow throughout the course a lifespan. Community becomes a network of chosen members committed to each other’s growth and developmental wellbeing. The ASSC is one of Big Sister’s “core families.”

“I remember moving away from Atlanta to go to grad school and really missing the intimacy of the family and community because it is truly like family. And feeling like I had never received such a hard push for accountability anywhere in my life. I never received as much affirmation of my value and my worth as I had in that community. And also the importance of clarifying what your spiritual gifts are and what you have to lend to the world.”

Affirming her familial connection to ASSC, Little Sister said to me, “This community is my family. It is very personal to me, the relationships that I have there have been ones that have shaped me and supported me and changed my life. First and foremost it feels foundational, in the way that familial relationships do.”

Kelly B. Douglas. Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective.

(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 99.

29 Spillers, 75.

28

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The elements of growth and support mark the ways that both women described the community. Big Sister said to me, “I have several communities but it’s one of the core communities that really identify and support me.” Little Sister agrees, “…it’s a place of exponential growth. I think what [ASSC] does just kind of by the nature of it – people aren’t perfect. Processes aren’t perfect. Institutions aren’t perfect. But it is a really, really resourceful place in your own personal growth because that’s what we’re all committed to. We all come there agreeing saying that we want to be better.

The generations of members who cycle through the process of crossing and are committed to the community’s trajectory support ASSC’s familial kinship network. For Big Sister, the ASSC is “…always family and always community…[as she has] watched children grow up and raise children through it.” She went on “I’ve had different roles of actually leading other young adults in college through the rites of passage and then founding the teen kind of chapter and version of our rites of passage.” Her ability to help younger community members navigate the rites of passage that solidifies their membership into the community.

Here, the pedagogies of crossing inform the elements of community, marking who is inside and outside of the group. The kinship networks in the ASSC are fortified through the collective commitment to help each other be better versions of themselves. Little Sister told me, …there is a way that we nurture each other in both our flaws and our gifts and our graces that makes it very apparent that we are all committed to being better people. And that commitment is what kinda helps us to be consistent even when, hell, shit hits the fan and it’s not pretty or it’s difficult or it’s not comfortable or it’s outside of our preference.

Family, then, is invested in-- and supportive of growth. The active commitment to respecting each other, working through vulnerabilities that arise through difference, and self-improvement through communal relationality reinforces the familial bond of ASSC’s members. The commitment to holistic community development and individual moral formation is amplified by the intentional creation of “safe space.”

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“People are safe there” The pedagogies of crossing also inform the foundational elements of the “space” supported by the members who engage in the process of inclusivity and community accountability. They perform the intentional work required to outline the boundaries of a welcoming space that inevitably attracts Black queer persons who feel ostracized in other sites.

Big Sister explains that ASSC is “just a safe space.” She went on “We definitely continually have to do work to be a lot more progressive in our gender and sexuality politics. You will probably see more Morehouse students who are queer coming for a safe space because of the hostility outwardly towards men who are queer.” Although it is beyond the scope of this article, there is room for a critical gender analysis the community. In fact, Big Sister admitted that the ASSC is not a utopian site for those who are gender nonconforming and/or trans. “We have to figure out what trans looks like [there] because we have a male and female component.” Through thoughtful engagement, the community members have had to intentionally navigate what it means to be a truly welcoming space through an “insistence on potentiality.” 30 “Space,” then reemerges as a central feature of ASSC. The pedagogies of crossing not only mark sacred spaces where rituals take place, but also nonritual spaces that inform the work of familial kinship networks of community. Queerness has been a topic of deep introspection and reflection, demanding that members addresses sexuality and gender as central features of conversation for a group that names itself inclusive and affirming to those who wish to join. Little sister addressed then when she said, “it has always been a commitment of ours that whoever you are, however you are, is affirmed and welcomed and invited and safe.

And that has not only happened in theory, but it’s happened in practice. And so, that’s not to say that queerness hasn’t had to be discussed or identified. Or that certain things around it haven’t had to be constructed.

Although, Big Sister describes it as “a more heteronorm space, [yet] warm, supportive and safe space,” the commitment to community wellbeing and

José Esteban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. (New York: New York University Press, 2009),1.

30

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familial kinship has demanded that the members of ASSC take seriously the humanity and worth of Black queer persons. Even though they are “not necessarily super, super progressive politically.” What they are, however, is “committed spiritually,” To Big Sister this means, …whatever your walk of life, your religion, everybody’s welcome here. And so it is a queer space in that you can be as peculiar as you want to be and you are worthy of holding space and us holding space with you and us honoring the humanity and the spirit within you.

Safe space, then, is protected by family marked by nonbiological and horizontal kinship. Little Sister believes that undergirding ASSC’s intentionality is the notion that it is “unapologetically important for there to be no movements around people’s ability to fully be themselves and to fully participate in the community. So, people are safe there.”

Of the commitment to holism and the creation of safe space, Little Sister explained, “it has contributed to our ability to flourish as well because you can…choose to create a non-traditional family. And you can be like many other elders and have a heterosexual relationship. Or you could be like many other elders and have a same gender relationship. And everyone has a seat at the table that will not be compromised.”

Through many situations beyond their control (like expulsion from families of origin) Black queer kinfolk form familial networks, or “non-traditional family” through intentional processes of mutual support and creating safe space outside their families of origin. In her text Black Queer Family Ethics, ethicist Thelatia “Nikki” Young, engages “the disciplinary power of capitalism” to highlight the ways that Black queer community members are constantly “pushing back against (a) norms that subjugate diverse expressions of identities and selves, and (b) structures that foster unequal and oppressive relationship dynamics” (Young, 2016, p.110). Although it was not intended to be a Black queer space, the opening and welcoming nature of the ASSC attracts many Black queer participants as they are enveloped into a horizontal familial structure outside of their birth families in which they feel safe and supported.

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At “Crossing Day,” I witnessed the new initiates announcing their new names, receiving a dashiki-style shirt with a unique pattern and learning the collective name which reflected the (spiritually based) season in which we are crossing. This one had to do with listening to answers from the Spirit which guides this Afrocentric spiritual community. Each initiate shared what the experience meant to them; one of them learned about “being confident in comfortable places” and another revealed the necessity of “breaking old habits.” At the conclusion of the event and before a shared meal for all who attended, the elders gifted the new initiates the long colorful sticks with curved handles that sat near the row of dashikis. These staffs were meant “direct them on their journey.” This “magical spiritual community,” to use the founder’s words, values the intermediary and processual passage through ritual experiences.

In crossings, processual psychic remaking characterizes the intermediary space before the new state of consciousness or beingness. The pedagogies of crossing shape these intermediary moments in the darkness of the ritual night (hidden from non-community members) in the spaces of esoteric and unknowable sites of knowledge production. These ritual crossings, emerging in the context of formalized rites of passage throughout the diaspora, maintain at their core the pedagogical methods for transformation of Africana selves from novice to initiate. In the Afrocentric Southern Spiritual Community, the pedagogies of crossing inform both the creation of space and community. ASSC is in conversation with other Africana religious and spiritual communities that have “carved out space” and center the fact that “the spiritual is in the mundane.” Additionally, in many Africana religions formed in response to an oppressive reality “the community is.. family” and perhaps most importantly “people are safe there.”

ASSC extends a sense of belonging and acceptance to members who seek to center God as they embark upon African-inspired rites of passage processes central to the community’s formation, crystallization, and continuation. In this article I explored on the pragmatic outcomes of “crossing” as elements of rites-of-passage ceremonies. I engage the moments between the beginning and the end, when time seems to suspend, space is deemed nonexistent, and the pedagogies that guide the initiation process. By centering the experiences of black queer women, I was able to uncover the ways that queerness and crossing work together in an Afrocentric community. Although it was not founded to with the intention of introducing Black queer persons to Afrocentric spirituality, Big Sister

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explained to me, “It is a queer space in that you can be as peculiar as you want and you are worthy of holding space, and upholding space. And so what we found is more and more gay and lesbian folks would come into the organization though there wasn’t like a named positional value of the group. It’s just a welcoming and safe space.”

Utilizing “crossing” as a praxis, and carrying the pedagogies therein, this rites-of-passage community does the work to redress the exclusion and erasure of those who Afrocentric and Pan-African discourses often disregard and shun.

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AESTHETICS OF RESISTANCE: BLACK THEOLOGY AND THE VISUAL CULTURE OF THE SHRINE OF THE BLACK MADONNA #9 AMEY VICTORIA ADKINS-JONES

O

Our unveiling of the Black Madonna is a statement of faith.

- Albert Cleage

ne of the most critical aesthetic interventions of American Christianity is undoubtedly the Black Madonna and Child at the Shrine of the Black Madonna #1 in Detroit, Michigan. Unveiled on Easter Sunday in 1967, the then Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr. (Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman) stood before his congregation with the staggering 18- by 9-foot oil canvas at his back, and proclaimed with deep admiration from the pulpit: Instead of a sermon, we could just sit here and look at the chancel mural of the Black Madonna which we unveiled on Easter Sunday, and marvel that we have come so far that we can conceive of the Son of God being born of a [B]lack woman. 1

Cleage’s theological journey to the Black Madonna was a pilgrimage of his own, a culminating moment of his own deepening commitments to the radically liberatory praxis of Black Christian faith, and a resounding rejoinder to Cleage’s dissatisfaction with any theological premise that did not take seriously the prospering of Black life. The mural inaugurated for him and his followers a definitive trajectory of theological, psychological, spiritual, and social commitments to Black liberation and uplift heralded by the iconographic tradition, one that would lay claim to Black life as holy, would continue to retain the legitimacy of Black Christian practice in the United States as a historically and culturally African derived religion, and

Albert B. Cleage, The Black Messiah (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 85. The sermon that morning was titled “The Resurrection of the Nation.”

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would shape the imagination around Black flesh and sacrality across generations, whether one was a parishioner or practitioner or not. As Cleage put it most plainly, “Our unveiling of the Black Madonna is a statement of faith.” 2 But that statement has not been as easily revealed as the mural itself was that Easter morning. Indeed, the image of the Black Madonna stands at the core of the Shrines of the Black Madonna and is at the heart of the theologies promulgated by Cleage’s formation of the Black Christian Nationalist Movement, a denomination that would later become the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church (PAOCC). But even within Cleage’s oeuvre, the Black Madonna remains an underserved enigma, the eponymous mother of an entire denomination and visual archive whose breadth—her pulchritude, precedent, and significance as a theological resource—remains largely uncited and uninterrogated as a critical theological intervention. This is particularly disheartening, given her significance for a people in a “Christian” nation still facing immense antiblack racism and violence, and still very much embroiled in the fight for justice.

Yet the creation of the Black Madonna in Detroit signals a key moment in theological history and aesthetics, one that follows in the lineage of so much of Black Christian experience and expression that was forced to resist Eurocentric notions of dogma by creating and asserting new spiritual repositories and artifacts that affirmed the image of God in Black flesh. The significance of the Detroit icon, as such, is not singular: she is a clear reference for the ways Black people reimagined Black holy images on American soil. This essay considers the artistic and theological legacy of the Black Madonna at the Mother Shrine, a “commission [that] inaugurated a mural tradition across the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church,” as a holy image with reproductive capacity. 3 More specifically, this essay turns to the Black Madonna as she, and the PAOCC, migrated south. Dubbed here “Our Lady of Abernathy,” the essay frames her significance not only in the West End neighborhood of Atlanta but argues that her apparition in the

Ibid.

Melanee Harvey, “Black Power and Black Madonna: Charting the Aesthetic Influence of Rev. Albert Cleage, Glanton Dowdell & the Shrien of the Black Madonna, #1” in Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna and Child, ed. Jawanza Eric Clark (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2016), 147.

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South speaks to both the limits and possibilities of the image of a Black woman as an emblem of faith.

Birthing A Mother The origin story of the Black Madonna in Detroit is beautifully fabled, a figure birthed under circumstances both spontaneous and serendipitous. It began with Cleage’s frustrations. According to Ed Vaughan, a dedicated member of Cleage’s church and well-known activist in the Detroit community, Cleage was beleaguered by the stained-glass image at his back each Sunday. Thanks to the previous occupants of the sanctuary, the window was a shimmering tableau of the Plymouth Rock landing, centering several white pilgrims as they thrust themselves upon American shores. Cleage was no stranger to the pedagogical, formative nature of images, and was rightly agitated. For every claim he made to Jesus the Black, revolutionary Messiah come to liberate the nation of Israel, the controlling image burning holes in the mental images of Blackness was that of white settler colonialism, one that supported not only an inaccurately idyllic historical memory, but one that presented the very problem Cleage was trying to help his congregants work their way out of. Plymouth Rock was, quite literally, landing on Cleage every time he opened his mouth to speak, and Cleage knew it. He told Vaughan as much explicitly: “I am sick and tired of these pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock [....] and I want to get something black up there.” 4 Cleage enlisted Vaughan to make a change, and authorized him to form the Heritage Committee who would coordinate the commission.

However, the (re)vision for shifting the material culture of the church didn’t begin with the Black Madonna—Cleage’s initial thought was to have a mural envisage a Black Messiah. It was Vaughan who convinced him otherwise, and who sought out Glanton Dowdell to create a Black Madonna for the altar instead. Under Vaughan’s daily oversight, and with the help of their comrade, labor activist General Baker, Jr., they got to work. While Dowdell took the lead, the project was deeply communal and interdisciplinary, formed inside of a legacy of the Black creative community across Detroit. Dowdell took particular inspiration from Detroit poet Harold

Paul Lee, “Ed Vaughn on Detroit's Famous Black Madonna Chancel Mural.” YouTube, interview of Ed Vaughn with Paul Lee, 6 October 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7WXF8IFUyg

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G. Lawrence (later Kofi Harun Wangara), whose work “Black Madonna” had circulated locally for some time, accompanied by an illustration of the Black Madonna and child by LeRoy Foster, “the Black Michelangelo of Detroit.” 5 The last stanza in Lawrence’s work seems to have clearly influenced Dowdell’s interpretation of the Madonna: Now again we sense your Sensitive beauty, smiling, Black Turban crowned, robed, straight back, Very Black—and Brown and Beige too, Singing strong songs of Negritude Through Kaffir lips your vibrant Blues. 6 The stoic sensibility captured in Lawrence’s stanzas seem almost a preliminary compositional sketch of the statuesque Madonna in Dowdell’s mural (Fig. 1). The image evokes a strength and grace that seems inherent to her very existence, a quality perhaps best attributed to Rose Waldron, a rising star among Black models who sat for the image. Though intricate with depth, the image is eerily still as if in reverence. There is nothing to indicate movement in the frame, which evokes a timeless and eternal quality within the frame. The Madonna faces her audience head-on with a gaze steadfast, sure, and penetrating. Her cheekbones are sculpted, her full lips set horizontally beneath the distinctively broad nose, her expression inscrutable yet wise. In her arms she cradles the Black Messiah, whose side profile suggests he is both nestled, protected, and shielded from the elements of the world around in him in stark relief, yet also necessarily aware, able to see and observe. His eyes are closed as if sleeping, but the slight angle at his back suggests he is not in complete repose. Instead he is, perhaps, praying, conjuring a future yet unseen. The entire image is cast in an array of shades of cream, blue, brown, grey, and black. Though not formally trained in traditional iconography, Dowdell’s choice of blue plays off of the significance of the Blues in Black American culture, while falling

As it turns out, Foster would mentor numerous artists on the Detroit scene, including Carl Owens, who would receive the commission for the current chancel mural in Atlanta in 1999.

6 Harold Lawrence, “Black Madonna” in Negro Digest (Illinois, 1942), 52. The poem first appeared here, and included an illustration of an image of a Black woman (though the artist is not listed), but was recirculated with the image by Foster via Broadside Press in 1967.

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in line of the longstanding Byzantine tradition of draping the Madonna in blue, symbolic nods both to celestial royalty and grounded humanity.

The backdrop is muted, a darkened sky buttresses a silhouetted city outline of houses and buildings faintly discernible through the shadow.

According to Vaughan, Dowdell included the buildings and houses burning, “because that is what they did to black folks back in the day, they burned us out […] that’s the terror that our people went through, at the hem of her garment.” 7 But the image is quiet, the Madonna still, rooted, unmoving—a look of assurance calms the viewer as light ricochets around her face, as if refracted through the white tunics that drapes over her hair. She and her baby stand at the edge of this world, on the precipice of something we do not know but can feel. Her dress covers her feet so that we cannot see them, but there is a sense that even though she stands on mounds of piled stone, she does so without shoes, wherever she stands being holy ground. The slope of the bank gives the sense that she stands against some distant shore, while also providing “a conceptual reference to terrain represented in the preceding stained-glass window.” 8 She is quite literally a Madonna of the rocks, which only adds to the paradox of her presence. She is a symbol of fecundity and life, rooted despite being upon untenable ground, resplendent with light in a world that seems absent of it otherwise, assured though the ground beneath her is unstable.

Lee, Ibid. The Vaughn interview names the significance of the Shrine for artists, politicians, and community members more broadly, even if they were not interested in the religious claims or practices of the church. This critically signals the reach, or the economy of the Black Madonna icon, and the power of her images as a stage that makes possible new modalities of engagement with the world. Here Vaughn helpfully references an example like Nikki Giovanni, for whom the mural became a reference in her poetry. See Nikki Giovanni, “The Great Pax Whitie.”

Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48221/the-great-pax-whitie.

Accessed 24 November 2020.

8 Harvey, Ibid., 145.

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Figure 1: Glanton V. Dowdell, Black Madonna chancel mural, sanctuary of the Shrine of the Black Madonna, #1, Detroit, 1967, oil on canvas.

What is perhaps most stunning are the tonal values of black paint Dowdell utilized for the skin. The range of contrast, the bright white of her head covering juxtaposed with the flesh of her face, is exquisite. This move might seem as one that would be readily embraced, but as Vaughan recollects, during the process, several members of the congregation raised questions as to whether or not the emerging Madonna was “too black.” 9 Registering the reticence, Vaughan surveyed Cleage and others, then suggested Dowdell find a way to lighten her skin, so she could be clearly seen. Dowdell resisted. Instead of changing anything about the color of her

9

Lee, Ibid.

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skin, he adjusted the quality of light in the image—she is lit both from behind and in front, as if she herself is the one glowing, the lack of shadow making it difficult to pinpoint a singular source of light. Dowdell again, whether knowingly or not, references the theological significance of light reflected similarly in more traditional icons, a means of representing the uncreated light of God in an image, and creating depth without shadow or clear perspective. That some aspects of the image do not translate into direct realism is intentional, a part of the symbolic disruption that Dowdell seems to capture. As Melanie Harvey describes, just as “Pre-Italian Renaissance Christian iconography was concerned with presenting symbolic visual details of Christian icons, Dowdell uses the black Madonna’s body, specifically his variation of dark tones to represent the spectrum of African American appearance, visualizing the slogan ‘Black is Beautiful.’” 10 Dowdell’s refusal to alter the Blackness of the image, and the grounds for the request in the first place, speaks not just to the normative power of images, but to the theopolitical claims the Black Madonna made just through her existence. The hesitation also highlights the nuanced complexities around Blackness and beauty, and the reality of this particularly for Black Christians, many of whom had internalized an image of Jesus and his family and followers as people with white heritage and “white” genetic features. The skin color for Dowdell’s very Black Madonna surfaced deeper issues of colorism within the community, as well as the need for Cleage to double down against a white Jesus, which he adamantly claimed a historical error in the record. 11 But both politically and pastorally, several underlying questions were clear: could the Madonna be black, and beautiful, at all; and if she should, did she need to be, that Black? Could her blackness not be mitigated, or made more palatable? And what would it mean if the answer to the former series ‘yes,’ and the latter ‘no’?

Despite the grandeur of the unveiling and the celebrity attention the Black Madonna received, not everyone was ready to embrace Cleage’s theology as their material reality, particularly through such an engulfing, visual statement of theological commitment. Many rejected the icon, and through it, Cleage’s emerging vision of a Black Christian identity that took seriously the Black Arts and the Black Power movements. Although Cleage

Harvey, Ibid.

See Emilie Townes, “Another Kind of Poetry: Identity and Colorism in Black Life” in In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995).

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was readily proclaiming and developing his own sense of Black theology, not all of his parishioners had been converted to the gospel of Black Christian Nationalism. 12 And yet the Black Madonna insisted on making her apparition: it is strange to think that, without Vaughan and the work of the Heritage Committee, she may have never come to fruition, and the chancel may have been graced that Sunday morning with an image of the Black Messiah instead. Yet there she was, a sight to behold, a shepherding figure overlooking those who entered the doors of the church, drawing Cleage himself into a broader economy of the significance of her image.

The marveling that took place early that Easter morning persisted, not only as word of the mural spread around the nation, but as Cleage continued developing his own sense of theology and the pastoral and ecclesial visions that flowed forth from the Madonna’s watch. As Cleage’s commitments clarified, many parishioners chose to break ties with him and go elsewhere to worship. But the message of Black liberation drew new seekers with great interest both in Detroit and beyond. In January 1968, the church was officially rechristened the Shrine of the Black Madonna, and Cleage would publish a collection of several of his sermons speaking to his vision of Black liberation together as The Black Messiah. By 1969, images of Cleage and the Madonna would be in heavy circulation, as his national profile expanded and word spread of his vision of Jesus as a Black revolutionary. By 1972, Cleage would subsequently publish Black Christian Nationalism, and officially found the Black Christian Nationalist Movement (later the PAOCC) as a denomination with globally expanding numbers. But what are we to make of the meaning of the Madonna? Would the image alone truly suffice as a statement of faith? What was her significance on American soil, and what would her presence render for a church who took her name?

American Apparitions Though it may not have been Cleage’s first thought to center a Black Madonna in his sanctuary—which means that the mural resonated deeply enough with him to later rename the Detroit church and eventually the expansion sites to follow in her name—her presence made an immense

Here one wonders if an image solely of the Black Messiah—the image Cleage first imagined himself—may have been more digestible to some, and if the imagery of a Black man versus a Black woman would have challenged differently the assumptions of whiteness as it pertains to both Jesus and Mary.

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amount of sense given Cleage’s vision. As Harvey’s analysis describes, the Black Madonna became an almost obvious bridge between an emerging Black Liberation Theology movement, and the Black Arts movement. 13 But what Cleage quickly picked up on was the elision of the Black Madonna historically, that functioned to suppress a visual archive of blackness as sacred.

The Black Madonna, as a genre, is predominantly traced through European histories to the medieval era, between the 12th and 15th centuries, where the progressive appearances of Marian icons and statues with black skin were cited as the miraculous work of God. These icons were particularly distinctive, not only because of the stories of how many of the icons became black in color (frequently overnight), but because they appeared in communities where there were few to no people of African, or even more broadly of non-European, descent (Częstochowa, Chartres, and Montserrat, for example). These icons feature Mary, the mother of Jesus, in various postures, either alone or holding her son who also has black flesh, establishing a powerful visual genealogy of holiness. Though the numbers are inexact, depending on the record, there are approximately 300 formally recognized Black Madonnas in global existence—icons, carvings, statues, and apparitions of Mary that are authenticated by an organized church body (usually Catholic or Orthodox) for their status as an icon, site of pilgrimage, and for many practitioners devoted to Marian veneration, sources of healing and harbingers of miracles. 14 Many Black Madonnas, for example those at Czestochowa or Montserrat, are sacred sites of pilgrimage that attract millions of religious adherents each year.

In this sense, the unveiling of the Black Madonna in Detroit should perhaps not have been so shocking—her presence has a clear precedent

Harvey, Ibid., 148.

This number does not accurately include the icon traditions of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, a number of icons present across the African continent, icons or apparitions outside of normative Christian traditions, or more contemporaneous examples of recent history.

Rather, the majority of these renown icons pepper the European landscape (though there are several in Latin American countries), and are recognized through the Roman Catholic Church or Orthodox church bodies, who authorize and encourage practices of icon veneration in worship. More significantly, though, Black Madonnas have for far longer been found at the center of numerous Marian cults, whose insistence on veneration have been impetus for formal recognition. See Monique Scheer, “From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meanings of Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” The American historical review, vol. 107, no. 5 (2002): 1412-1440.

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within Christian tradition, and as so many other Black Madonnas before her, her dark flesh could readily be exegeted via the scriptural formulation found in Song of Solomon (1:5, NRSV), “I am black and beautiful.” But despite their stature across the globe, and the adherents and worshippers who continue to lay claims to the miracles worked at her feet, much of the ‘blackness’ of the Madonnas have readily been “explained away” scientifically, usually as happenstance byproducts of chemical reactions and physical deterioration. 15 Further, there is a notable absence of Black Madonna presence on United States soil (certainly within predominantly white spaces) where her so desperately needed reminders of Black life as sacred drowned in the violent waters of the mid-Atlantic slave trade, the demonization and subjugation of millions of enslaved Africans theologically justified through Christian-colonial expansion. 16 Cleage notes in brief the historical realities of the elision of the Black Madonna genre— in his sermon, “An Epistle to Stokely,” he argues: Jesus was a black Messiah born to a black woman. The pictures of the black Madonna which are all over the world did not all turn black through some mysterious accident.

Portraits of the black Madonna are historic, and today in many countries they are afraid to take the ancient pictures of the black Madonna out of storage so that people can see them … But the Black Madonna is an historic fact, and Jesus as a Black Messiah is an historic fact.” 17

Scheer, Ibid.

Images of the Black Madonna are not wholly absent, as various Black communities, particularly across the Southern region, have long histories of engagement with images evoking Black feminine and maternal presence. Rather, I cite the overwhelming absence, ignorance, and/or elision of black sacred images from the American canon more broadly, and note the white supremacist ideals inherent to and exacerbated by the wide circulation of images of a white, male Jesus, and the circulation of Warner Sallman’s 1941 painting, “The Head of Christ,” one of the most iconic American depictions of Jesus to date, whose unqualified reprinting still hangs in the sanctuaries of white and non-white churches across the globe today. See Emily McFarhan, “How an iconic painting of Jesus as a white man was distributed around the world,” The Washington Post, 25 June 2020, Online. https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/06/25/how-an-iconic-painting-jesuswhite-man-was-distributed-around-world/. Accessed 22 December 2020.

17 Cleage, Ibid., 42.

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Here Cleage makes a historical turn to the Black identity (which is perhaps best described in Cleage’s context most readily as the non-white reality) of the Madonna. However, where the thrust of Cleage’s early theology emphasized a historical corrective around the identity of Jesus— one that has been questioned for its continued helpfulness and accuracy within Black theological discourse—it is actually the aesthetic archive he cites, participates in and extends vis-à-vis the Black Madonna mural that is most theologically compelling, a claim to a theological repository of blackness that is itself a kind of “improvisational immanence,” one unbound from the problems of reifying Blackness as a predominantly phenotypical point of theological reference. 18 Rather, the Detroit mural course corrects not history, but a theological imagination of disruptive incarnation, redressing the elision of the Black Madonna (and subsequently the Black Messiah) from American iconographies coalescent with the legacies of enslavement, denigration, torture, and dehumanization of Black people.

While Cleage was not particularly concerned with exploring the dogmatic elements of Christian faith classically—his engagement with the Black Arts movement did not extend to debates around the use of images within Christianity—his unveiling the Black Madonna also unearthed a number of key revelations and critiques about Christian production and holy images, and the pastoral materiality of images as deeply formative for identity and life.

The Detroit mural made claims to a renewed vision of divine presence, and as evidenced in the hesitancy of parishioners who had been able to follow Cleage in word, but not when confronted with the corresponding image of the Black Madonna, a landscape of black aesthetics would become critical to building a revolutionary Black theology and revitalized Black church that could subtend a vision for Black liberation.

The visual field was as critical as any invocation of Scripture or tradition to root out and redress the internalized white supremacy inherent to so much of American Christianity. Cleage took seriously that, “the black church was vital in sustaining black existence and ensuring survival in a hostile white supremacist culture,” noting the way the church was instrumental as a source of hope and life through American history, but he also struggled with how the notion of the Black church, “as constituted is inadequate as a sufficient tool for black liberation in the revolutionary context of the Black

Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 255, 18

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Power movement in America”(emphasis added). 19 Though many figures would call the viability of Christianity as a faith Black people could adequately participate in into question, Cleage’s believed the history recovery of Christianity as an African religious system could still lead to liberation.

Over the next two decades, Cleage’s theology and idea of liberation would continue to evolve. As Jawanza Eric Clark notes, Cleage would “pivot from the political concerns of black theology to include the inner psychological obstacles internalized by [B]lack people in centuries of oppression.” 20 Cleage concluded that liberation for Black people must include a deeper mindset shift that not only resisted inferiority as a byproduct of a white supremacist society, but that the impetus for spiritual and mental change would be a philosophy of self-determination: Four hundred years of powerlessness and enslavement in a hostile exploitive society has had profound psychological effects upon black people. We have been incapacitated for effective struggle against our condition by a basic acceptance of the myth of black inferiority imposed upon us by our oppressors. The powerless condition that has been forged upon us by our oppressor has created the appearance of a real inferiority … To liberate black people BCN must first be a psychological CHANGE AGENT! 21 What maintained a key component in his congregations and the denomination was the commitment to imagery. Though the Black Madonna never figured prominently in Cleage’s writings and work as a key site of theological reflection herself, her icon(s) functioned as the visual claim to liberated selfhood. Her meaning was malleable, with much that was left to

Jawanza Clark, “Nothing is More Sacred than the Liberation of Black People: Albert Cleage’s Method as Unfulfilled Theological Paradigm Shift,” in in Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna and Child, ed. Jawanza Eric Clark (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2016), 48.

20 D. Kimanthi Nelson, “The Theological Journey of Albert B. Cleage Jr.: Reflections from Jaramogi’s Protégé and Successor,” in Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna and Child, ed. Jawanza Eric Clark (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2016), 27.

21 Albert Cleage, “The Black Church as a Change Agent: Transforming Black Ghettoes by Changing Black People,” 1975 Black Christian Nationalist Third Biennial Convention Booklet, Print. Cited in Nelson, Ibid.

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the eye of the beholder, but inside of the broader ethos of Cleage’s vision and the PAOCC, the murals of the Black Madonna functioned as key signposts of the very psychological change countering internalized narratives of Black inferiority. Holding the Black Messiah defiantly in her arms—the Black revolutionary who would fight for his people and their collective future—the Black Madonna’s significance was ironically trinitarian; she stood simultaneously as an emblem of proud Black identity affirmed through aesthetics and cause, a symbol of the communally invested divine maternal Black church, and the Black mother heralding the commitment to Black nation building. It only made sense that she would fall into flight, moving beyond the city streets of Detroit to explore new territories outside the northern city realms. The Black Madonna would migrate on a mission, to take up her cause in the heart of Black Christendom and the frontline battle grounds still teeming from the Civil Rights Movement.

Black Madonna in Black Mecca Within only a few short years of the unveiling of the Black Madonna, the Shrine had expanded to include several congregations in the Detroit area, and was exploring expansion in areas like Flint, Kalamazoo, and Philadelphia, their message of liberation gaining resonance among Black worshippers in Northern urban centers. Expanding southward would be a clear step in the growing denomination, but would the message of Black Christian Nationalism, and the Black Madonna who heralded, be welcomed with open arms and Southern hospitality, or would their message find closed ears along the corridors of Southern states? Cleage and the denominational leadership wanted to find out, as the Black Madonna made her way toward the city of Atlanta.

In 1974, approximately 40 members from the Mother Shrine, all between the ages of 18 and 30, moved to Atlanta to enroll in Atlanta University. Arriving in Atlanta, of course, was no accident, and corresponded to a larger influx of Black residents into the city during the 1970s. A 1971 issue of Ebony magazine had dubbed (now ubiquitously) the city of Atlanta the “Black Mecca of the South,” and timing of the young church planters’ move happened as Atlanta became the first city in the South to elect a Black mayor, Maynard Jackson. For many Black Americans, Atlanta was the destination of dreams and hopes for a renewed sense of Black life in the urban south, a kind of promised land full of prospect and possibility. The religious destination as Black Mecca was both

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strong marketing, and a reflection of the deeply religious landscape of the city. As the home of the Civil Rights Movement, the influence of Black preachers, Black parishioners, and Black churches was written into the fabric of the city’s identity and the very culture of everyday life. The same Ebony article that cited the new Black Mecca featured a photo inset of a classic church scene, so familiar as to be iconic itself. The red carpeting stark against the choir loft full of members dressed in white robes is an immediately recognizable lexicon, tightly packed pews of Black folks with well managed coifs and perfectly poised ‘crowns,’ the center aisle occupied by the classically male pastor, his robe vestment donning the three horizontal black bars across the puffed sleeves, the signature attire of Black Baptists reverends. Though the photo is a still shot, we catch him moving through his congregation mid-service in a stance of exhortation. The caption read, “Almost everybody goes to church in Atlanta where clergymen often double as civic leaders. Here Dr. Ralph D. Abernathy greets his flock at West Hunter St. Baptist Church.” 22 In a city like this, where Christianity was so ubiquitous as to be an expectation, would the big personalities and prominence of long-established churches allow room for the Black Madonna to take up residence? Or was there reason for concern? Did the Black churches of the South, and more specifically the broader culture of Black parishioners—unlike common remembrance, many of whom did not participate in the Civil Rights movement, and many of whom embodied the problems of Black Christian life and adherence that Rev. Cleage so readily had critiqued—tied to upwardly mobile Black life, actually “stand guard over a faith that continues to grip the city's black population”? 23 It seems Rev. Abernathy had his own freedom dreams of the next evolution of faith in his own denomination as well as his city, and a vision for a more radical, more collective, and more proudly Pan-African sensibility of this so-called guard. At the 1970 meeting of the Congress of African People in Atlanta, when Abernathy greeted the congress of thinkers, he named Atlanta as a place with a sordid and tenuous history of turmoil, but a city inhabiting a moment “where black people with a sense of dignity move on rapidly as never before for brighter horizons.” 24 Among questions

Phyl Garland, “Atlanta: Black Mecca of the South” Ebony Magazine. August 1971, 155.

Ibid.

24 African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress, ed.

Imamu Amiri Baraka (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1972), 9. For more 22 23

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of education and economic cooperation, a key item on the agenda, of course, was the question of religion. Rev. Cleage, “the distinguished Black nationalist theologian,” was on the original slate of leaders, and was supposed to lead the religious workshop with the then still rising black theologian, Dr. James Cone. However, while illness prevented Cleage’s attendance, it did not inhibit his presence—the religious working group reviewed the position paper he had submitted (which included remarks on the European misconstrual of Christianity), and his co-author, the Rev. William “Bill” L. Land, who helped to organize several Shrine locations, co-facilitated the workshop with Cone in his stead. The working group’s statement from the congress was astute in the direction Black religious life must take; We want a “revolutionary” theology not a “plantation” theology. A theology that teaches us no matter what we call ourselves (Baptist, Muslim, Hebrew, etc.), that we are Black first, and all those other things next. 25 The overall ethos of the convening was clear, with even Abernathy himself offering insistent reminders that Black Christians must take seriously a PanAfrican framework and method in imagining the future of their own theologies and practices, as well as in the commitments to communal uplift and racial justice that flowed beyond the doors of the church; If there is to be any new breath blown into this destructive civilization, if capitalism as a system is not to continue to ravage three-fourths of the world, then black people who have chopped the cotton, tilled the soil and suffered injustice, intimidation and assassination will be the new and creative leadership in the vanguard of America’s salvation […] We must build a new movement that encompasses black Baptists as well as Black Panthers. Black preachers as well

on the significance on the Congress, see James Manigault-Bryant’s introduction to this volume.

25 Ibid., 262. See “Resolutions by James Cone and Bill Land in Congress.”

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as black teachers. And then we must move beyond these shores. 26 It was as if Abernathy and others were summoning the Black Madonna to make her home in Atlanta—the Shrine’s unction to expand was the synchronized movement to answer the same call. As it were, the Shrine #9 was able to acquire the Gordon Theater in the demographically shifting West End neighborhood, mere steps away from the West Hunter Street Baptist Church, Rev. Abernathy’s Black congregation that had itself only recently acquired the property from the predominantly white Gordon Street Baptist Church. At the other end of the block, the Catholic congregation at St. Anthony was also undergoing a sweeping demographic shift as white flight affected city houses of worship along with every other institution. The Shrine of the Black Madonna #9 would nestle in a neighborhood ripe for flourishing, among a growing community of black artists, business people, politicians, students, and thinkers, geographically situated as a new kind of spiritual anchor for those at the nexus of the Black church and the search for Black empowerment and uplift.

The vision for expansion went far beyond a single sanctuary, as the Atlanta congregation built out an entire network of community program and spaces for commerce, all networked and committed to enfleshing a theology honoring Blackness, self-determination, and nation building. The location in the West End neighborhood of Atlanta housed their sanctuary, the Shrine of the Black Madonna bookstore (one of the largest Black-owned bookstores in the United States), a community and learning center, and later the African Holocaust Museum. Though Cleage’s broader message of Black nationalism was still often met with suspicion (if not complete opposition), Shrine Nine was powerfully positioned to bridge the lacunae between Black radical movement building and the Black Church: Although many of Atlanta’s African-American political and religious leaders frowned upon the Shrine’s nationalistic

Abernathy called for a broader consciousness organizing not only around Black identities, but for a movement stretching out. “We must find the formula for unity that encompasses the concerns of our brothers on the African mainland and our brothers who struggle daily for life in southeast Asia. We must find the unity that encompasses the chicanos and the Puerto Ricans. Indeed, we must find the unity that encompasses the wealth of struggle of all oppressed people.” Ibid, 10.

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teachings, they did not see the organization as “hate filled”; and, after all, it was Christian. Thus, by the 1980s the Shrine had forged direct political and other relationships with other Atlanta organizations, including a number of Black Atlanta’s religious institutions, to address pressing community problems. 27 Moving South cemented the reach of the Shrine movement, and signaled Black Christians who, like Abernathy himself, were in search of a more radical theology that took seriously the possibilities of self-determination.

As Bishop Randy “Mwenda” Brown, one of the founding cadre members and presiding pastor of the Atlanta Shrine noted, “Coming into the South in 1975 from a Northern experience and bringing a revolutionary message, some thought the South was not ready [...] but Atlanta welcomed us with open arms and turned out to be the gateway to the South.” 28 Mayor Jackson honored the Shrine with a key to the city, a baptismal sign of both welcome and belonging. Either strategically or providentially, the nexus of spiritual commerce on Abernathy meant that the Shrine of the Black Madonna #9 had landed on prime real estate, the economy of her icon quickly appreciating in value, made possible by the religious stock of the PanAfrican interlocutors along Abernathy. But the movement could not subsist on the iconography of another locale—Atlanta would require her own artistic expansion, an aesthetic icon of apostolic succession, a mural of her own.

Our Lady of Abernathy There have been to date two chancel murals in the Atlanta sanctuary.

The first Black Madonna and Child were completed at the same time as the congregation was formed in 1975. The icon was a distinctive color story departure from Dowdell’s Black Madonna in Detroit (compare fig. 1 and fig. 2) Where Dowdell invoked the use of more muted tones of blue and cream, the first Atlanta mural is saturated with pigment, inflecting vibrant

Alton Hornsby, “Southerners, Too? Essays on the Black South, 1733-1990” (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004), 117.

28 Idris Weusi, “Shrine of Black Madonna celebrates 50th anniversary,” Indianapolis Recorder, August 29, 2003, https://newspapers.library.in.gov/cgibin/indiana?a=d&d=INR20030829-01.1.14. Accessed 2 December 2020.

27

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reds and oranges that cast a glow from a beaming sun encircling Mary’s turbaned hair and miming a bright halo. Even the photograph of the reprinted photograph captures the luminosity of the composition. Thin horizontal swaths of blue emanate from the black, ethereal background, as if the skyline has just been formed ex nihilo. Toward the bottom of her feet the ground is lush, emerald green, a half-moon highlight referencing the fertile crescent. Together these compositional choices of black, red, and green, echo explicitly the colors of the Pan-African movement.

The four corners of the image are adorned with ankhs, symbolic of life, and the strong lines and angles outlining the background evoke a sense of sacred geometry. The face of this Madonna is less chiseled than her Detroit predecessor, but her facial features—broad nose, deep set eyes, round and wide cheeks, broad lips—are no less prominent. Her gaze too is penetrating, steady. Fixed with deep emotion, she is definitively unsmiling, uninterested in performance. Unlike Dowdell’s image, the baby in this Madonna’s arms is older and more prominent. His face is presented almost in three-quarter profile, upright and alert, with a full head of coils. His facial features as well as his expression are a near exact replica of his mother’s.

Saddled naked on his mother’s hip, his hand rests distinctly over her heart— as much as his mother protects him, so, too, the Black Messiah is postured to protect her as he also looks knowingly toward the viewer. It is a moving depiction, though there is little information about the physical detail, or the story of how it came to be, if the mural is extant, and what happened to precipitate the later mural that exists today (some evidence indicates the original murals may have been painted over or damaged during renovations in the early 1990s). The single photograph and timeline citing the artist as “Mr. Ashanti” are some of the few readily accessible details. 29

The 2020 pandemic conditions have limited access to archival research, but this line of inquiry into the first mural leaves much to be explored and examined. I was unable to confirm the artist of this Madonna, and only have access to the image via my own dated photo, snapped long before I knew I would be considering this line of questioning. The image archives and timeline on display in the church only reference a “Mr. Ashanti” as the artist of this Black Madonna. The materials and size are not documented. Based on the style of portraiture, timing, and inferences from the Black artist community in the Atlanta area at the time, I think it highly likely that “Mr. Ashanti” may actually be Ashanti-Amos Johnson, an artist from South Carolina who worked highly in pastels. However, I was unable to confirm this hypothesis with anyone from the church prior to publication.

Similarly, I was unable to confirm if the first image remains extant, or the reason a second Black Madonna was commissioned and installed.

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Figure 2: A history board in the educational wing of the Shrine of the Black Madonna #9 features a small image of the initial Atlanta mural. The only concrete reference to the artist is a "Mr. Ashanti."

Photograph by Author, Atlanta, Georgia, 2016

The current chancel image of the Black Madonna at the Atlanta church is a staggering vision in cobalt hues. Though the exact measurements are unlisted, the mural dominates the altar space, the acrylic painting executed across multiple slats of wood later fused together at installation.

The piece spans the width of the back wall behind the altar, and towers to the height of the second floor. The mural is sunny, optimistic even. The Madonna’s garments are carefully draped, with reference to the “Marian blue” so frequently referenced in iconography of the Madonna and child.

Her head is covered by a richly but indistinctly patterned scarf, evoking the

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sense of an Ankara fabric, or some other West African cloth. She stands backlit in a stone alcove, with bright blue sky over head, a city of golden hills--possibly Jerusalem, or summertime Atlanta--bouncing an aura-like light around her frame. There is no mistaking the halo of divine blessing that crowns her head. Unlike the others in the mural tradition, this Madonna has her hands folded in reverence before her. She is wholly unaware of her viewer, instead focused lovingly on her child. The divine light encircling her baby reflects off of her face, warming her features which are rounder and more youthful, a more accurate depiction of age of the teenager from the Biblical stories. The Black Messiah is wrapped in white fabric, creating a lovely contrast of the tones of his flesh. What one would assume to be flowers, are strewn about his head, though their nondescript shape may instead be meant to reference cotton. The vines along the wall recall the kudzu that covers the Southern region.

The Atlanta mural was completed by Carl Owens in 1999. Born and raised on the west side of Detroit, Owens had just begun a career as an art teacher when he was drafted into the US army during the Korean War. When his talent as an illustrator was discovered, he was tasked with designing various manuals and posters for the military, and upon his return continued to grow as a well-known illustrator and painter on the Detroit scene. Owens was still in Detroit when Rev. Cleage famously revealed the Black Madonna mural. While it is unclear if Dowdell and Owens crossed direct paths, Owens was absolutely familiar with the Shrine—over the course of his early career, he held exhibitions and sold work through the Detroit cultural center. 30 Owens, mentored by the same LeRoy Foster who had drawn a Black Madonna all those years ago in Detroit, would himself rise to great prominence in the art world, though not always with immediate name recognition. Dubbed the “Black Man’s Norman Rockwell,” Owens continued to gain unprecedented opportunities to work as an artist in the corporate sector and realized that he could gain much more success and access by making smaller, more affordable prints for Black families to have in their homes. 31 His images are canonical in the oeuvre of Black American art, his art having “rendered the dominant visual iconography of African

See Harvey, Ibid.

Nicole McFarlane, “Carl Owens,” in Oxford African American Studies Center, ed. Henry Louis Gates.

31 May 2013.

Online. https://oxfordaasc.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.001.0001/acref9780195301731-e-37602. Accessed 9 Dec 2020.

30 31

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American history, especially in the several decades following the civil rights movement.” 32 The commission for the Black Madonna was timely—Owens was living in Atlanta, and had connections to the Atlanta Shrine from his days in Detroit. Owens invited many into his process of making a Madonna. Like Dowdell in Detroit, having converted his loft living room into an artist studio simply to accommodate the size of the wood panels comprising the mural, Owens enlisted his friends and artistic colleagues to assist in completing the background composition and detail. Though Owens was not himself religious, he too was drawn to the Black Madonna as a symbol of uplift, an emblem that marked the intrinsic value of Black life and culture.

Though he had no iconographic training, it is clear he studied multiple Marian iconographic traditions, hints of which emerge in the choices and references of his Madonna. His own sense reverence manifest in the heart and soul he put into the commission, completing far more work on it than what he had agreed to in terms of compensation. For Owens, the social significance of the icon was most clear in those communal moments of gathering and work, particularly at a time where Owens was thinking less about the advertising campaigns that had sustained his career, and more about his greater legacy of affirming people with brown skin through his images. 33

Ibid.

Much of this insight into Owens is due to his son, artist Bryan Owens, who remembers vividly visiting his father as he worked on the mural in the 1990s, a kind of social project.

According to the recollections of his son, Owens’ interest was neither financial nor aspirational, it came at a point where his advertising success had left him well established— the mural had more interest and more at stake than a needed commission. The Black Madonna was one of the largest works Owens completed, and the only mural he ever did.

(Bryan Owens, personal interview, 7 December 2020).

32 33

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Figure 3: Carl Owens, Black Madonna chancel mural, sanctuary of the Shrine of the Black Madonna, #9, Atlanta, 1999 Acrylic on wood

Carl Owens work on the Black Madonna now enshrined on Abernathy provides a helpful turn to our considerations of the Black Madonna as resident in and intercessor on behalf of Atlanta. While Owens’ work is so prominent as to constitute his own iconic tradition—at one point an almost ubiquitous point of reference in Black homes across America—his name recognition is nowhere near that of white artists or contemporaries with less breadth of the time. And yet, the impact and material effects of his aesthetic interventions are very real: A FRICAN A S TUDIES R EVIEW | V OLU ME S EVEN | N U MBER O NE | S PRIN G 2021 | 83

[Owens’] work has contributed to shaping the popular imagination of the thousands of Americans who have come into contact with his illustrations and has influenced the way subsequent generations of African Americans have to come to view themselves and to be seen by the larger society. 34 Even today, Black television shows and sitcoms have hanging in their backgrounds, reproductions of Owens’ images of Black life, just as many of his images still hang on the walls of an entire generation. Owens art, the images he created, his work as (re)present(ed) but unacknowledged, or perhaps simply unrecognized among us, is a helpful corollary to thinking about what remains present but unacknowledged (or perhaps simply unrecognized among us) when it comes to the icon of the Black mother.

Visual Formations In the introduction to the volume Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna and Child, Jawanza Clark asks, “Did images of the black Madonna and child proliferate, and does it reflect contemporary depictions of Jesus and Mary at least in black churches today?” 35 This response is difficult to quantify, in a time where Christian identity continues to operate as a morally infused political apparatus in the United States, and where the proliferation of visual affirmations of a Black-identified Messiah would still wane in comparison to the contemporary commitments to white, American male vision of not just Jesus, but God, God’s self.

But while images retain a latent but powerful capacity for pedagogy—and subsequently, for change—they do not do so outside of their most proximate contexts, without the sacred economy that makes them legible enough so as to connect to the lived material realities of life and engagement. Though there is little direct reference or repeated typology between the murals that emerge between Detroit and Atlanta (and most notably later in Houston), they are linked theologically not only in their denominational ties or spiritual genealogy, but as an archive of resistance,

Ibid., McFarlane.

Jawanza Clark, “Introduction: Why a White Christ Continues to be Racist: The Legacy of Albert B. Cleage Jr., in Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna and Child, ed. Jawanza Eric Clark (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2016), 3.

34 35

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a communal and interdependent set of projects articulated inside a vision of freedom and justice that transcends personal faith identity, but that flows out in a network of relations and consent to affirm and uphold the beauty, power, and resilience of Black life. The Black Madonna in Detroit not only shifted the visual indices of Black Christian engagement with the divine, but the mural tradition expanded to reimagine and explore beauty, and more specifically the relationship between Blackness and beauty, as a theological anthropology and virtue ethic that supported the flourishing of Black life.

While it is tempting to claim that the first Detroit mural “promoted a Black Power visual program that revolutionized American Christian iconography,” one must weigh the marks of the revolution, and the ways we have yet to see space claimed and shifted in the name of the Black Madonna beyond rich resources on Abernathy or elsewhere, for among American Christians of all backgrounds, the iconography of a white Jesus still overwhelming dominates the visual field, arguably around the world. 36 That said, Harvey’s assessment confirms a critical point, that the Black Madonna most certainly should have revolutionized both the reception and engagement of iconography in the US, and more broadly, the contours of Christian life.

Our opening with Cleage’s first considerations of the kind of aesthetic undertaking he first planned, one of depicting the Black Messiah, remains telling—has the desire for (and the continued commitment to) the Black Messiah across Black theology, robbed us of the message of his mother? Is she only a sentimental image, painted for men, by men? And what is the Madonna without the child in her arms? Have we who have found inspiration and insight from her image, been held accountable to an intersectional analysis of resistance—in the science and theology of the PAOCC, of the claim to one’s best and highest self, redressing the inequities even among one’s commitments to a self-determined Black life? What are the material effects, the lived realities of reverence for the Black Madonna?

In the words of one Black woman-identified parishioner, is it possible “to be more than a chancel mural.” 37 Mapping the move to Atlanta marks not only the place of the Shrine of the Black Madonna #9 on Abernathy, but acknowledges it as a critical

Harvey, Ibid.

Velma Maia Thomas, “The Black Madonna and the Role of Women” in Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna and Child, ed. Jawanza Eric Clark (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2016), 119.

36 37

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driver of the Black Atlanta religious landscape, and the continually evolving enmeshment of Pan-African religious convictions, explorations, and ethics that both make and are made by what some would consider nothing less than divine arrangement along the same thoroughfare. The location on Abernathy is an index of possibility—at her best and her Blackest, the West End has certainly been a space of spiritual reciprocity, the icon of the Black Madonna offering us a window into divine possibility, but the space around her—most immediately the altar, the sanctuary, the Black art that fills the sanctuary and church halls around her, reaching out to the repositories of cultural and learning through the bookstore and museum, the spaces of teaching and cultivation in adjacent community buildings, extending all the way out to the pavement of Abernathy Blvd itself: space, community, and ethos are what make the Black Madonna icon legible, mark the veracity of her gathering, are what confirm the icon as access to that which is holy.

But if the beauty, the story, the remarkable history of this mural tradition is underutilized and obscured in Atlanta, the Black cultural Mecca, as a center of revolutionary force—yet she still participates in the commerce and self-identity of her community—what might be possible if attended to more fully? What aesthetic possibilities remain unannounced, yet unheralded from Abernathy? How does she call us to move differently on Abernathy, and beyond?

This essay began on Easter morning, with a congregation viewing the splendor of the Black Madonna for the first time, and Rev. Cleage’s own incitements to sit, look, and marvel. Perhaps it is time to revisit this moment, with an additional encouragement not just to look, but to see. And then to listen, and to hear. To make space for the songs in weary throats, to respond to a Black Magnificat heard not only from a distanced Black Madonna, but from all those who traverse the sociocultural oppressions and theological limitations like that of Mary—considering that in and with her flesh, are the keys to revolution. Perhaps this is the statement of faith we are yet in need of.

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SOVEREIGNTY & SELF-DETERMINATION: HEBREW ISRAELITE PROPOSALS FOR EXPANDING THE CONVERSATION ON RIGHTS

I

DIANA BURNETT

exited the West End MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) station and passed through crowds of people selling ‘Obama’ or government sponsored phones, loose cigarettes, and a wide variety of seasonal items ranging from clothing, flowers and candy in February, baskets for Easter or Mother’s Day, and other gift items. After making my way through this sensorium, the directions on my phone told me to make a left on Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, but I realized it would be quicker to cut through the Krispy Kreme parking lot with its red light shining for all to see when the donuts were hot and ready. I landed in the heart of West End, ground zero for a mélange of Black cultural and religious expressions in the United States. Suburban flight turned what was once a white neighborhood into an almost entirety Black community with the predictable markers that characterize communities with declining economic bases.

There were signs, a strip mall, a Taco Bell, Popeye’s, Church’s Chicken, Domino’s Pizza, Little Caesar’s Pizza, a nail salon. The fading linoleum in the Chinese-American food restaurant had all but turned gray, the relationships between servers and customers mediated by multiple layers of bulletproof glass. In addition to these institutions, there was a store that sold ‘African attire,’ body oils, shea butter, and an assortment of accouterment for the caricatured ‘conscious Black’ person in Atlanta. There was also a Boost Mobile, a Metro PCS, a wig store, a rim shop, a hair braiding salon, and a Goodwill, all within sight from my vantage point walking the blocks between the station and the Hebrew place of commerce. Of course, my walking tour also featured plenty of overpriced gas stations, as well as Atlanta’s famed strip clubs that operate during the day and well into the night.

While this scene could be set in many Black urban metropolitan areas, its vegan and vegetarian religious community-owned restaurants were distinctive. On the block renamed for a Civil Rights Era activist Ralph David Abernathy, there was a row of Black religious ‘healthier’ food options: local shoppers could pick between Rastafari vegan food, an Ausar Auset/Ma’at owned vegan restaurant specializing in raw food and kale A FRICAN A S TUDIES R EVIEW | V OLU ME S EVEN | N U MBER O NE | S PRIN G 2021 | 87

wraps, another Rasta-based doughnut shop, now brick and mortar after its initial popup phase, a new vegan hot dog shop, the nationally acclaimed and celebrity-endorsed vegan fast food restaurant, Slutty Vegan, was further down the road or the Hebrew Israelite vegan soul food (Reese, 2019). For the Hebrews in the United States, their current presence in this diaspora was a touch point, a reminder, according to Hebrew belief of the variety of the places that are result of the Hebrews’ exile.

Over the months I spent time with the Hebrews in the southern United States, a region that doubles as spatial signifier to the many places imprinted by a confluence of diasporas. Atlanta’s cosmopolitan center proved a meeting ground and marketplace. It attracted those looking for change, attracting those who flocked to the city from across the rural South and served as a patchwork collection of those from around the country and world who found a home there. This unique mixture of local and global communities created a unique site in which the Hebrews emerged and flourished. While situated in Atlanta, the Hebrews narrated their presence across different regions of the United States, reflecting their commitment to Hebrew diasporas and spaces of displacement. Most significant were the Hebrew accounts of the community in Dimona, Israel (Palestine) as their ‘homeland.’ This group’s ability to move across sites of exile, displacement, diaspora, and homeland maps onto and across their bodies. By working to embody a geo-political communal history in what they reference as indigenous community practices, the community recounted an alternative history to those often associated with Blacks in the Americas. While serving vegan soul food classics in urban environments in the U.S. South, Hebrew community members’ vision of identity was bound not by American national borders, but rather by what they called the ‘kingdom’ or the nation.

The Hebrew Israelite nation provided members with a passport to a spiritual and ancestral homeland (Israel/Palestine) that took root and expanded in Hebrew Israelite residences around the world. Within these spaces, a shared religiosity allowed the Hebrews to work together with their neighbors at the Shrine of the Black Madonna, to be in community with the Rastas, and to be comrades with the Ausar Auset/Ma’at, even if they believed their own theology and practice (establishment of a home elsewhere outside of U.S.) to be uniquely distinct from other groups.

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem 1 are a community drawn primarily from what they believe are the descendants of the third exile of

1

Throughout the manuscript, I will refer to this group as Hebrews or Hebrew Israelites

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the Ancient Hebrew Israelites, who were led out of Israel and into Egypt and then from Egypt out into the rest of the African continent, where they were exiled again into the Transatlantic Slave Trade. From here, a group that understands itself as descendants of ancient Hebrews returned to Liberia and then to the modern nation-states of Israel/Palestine, which they insist are their ancestral home. The Hebrew Israelites believe and fervently argue that they are an indigenous community who have and are actively working to recover their indigenous culture, which they have demonstrated through the community’s prototypical model, the Village of Peace, in the community’s international headquarters in Dimona. The community understands itself as descendants of ancient Hebrews, which is distinct from being Jewish (i.e., they refused the Israeli government’s encouragement to convert to Judaism), and construct Israel as Northeast Africa. The Hebrews espouse a nuanced historical narrative that understands multiple diasporas (religious diaspora, the African/Black Atlantic diaspora, indigenous diaspora) as a dimension of their past, which is tethered to their exile from Israel into other parts of Northeast Africa and further into the African continent and continued until their enslavement in the Americas. 2 As a transnational spiritual community with members who remain scattered across multiple locations (Israel/Palestine, throughout the Americas, Europe, and across the African continent), the Hebrew Israelites are committed to confronting their “diasporic past(s) as they work towards reclaiming their indigenous future”. 3 The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem have been present on Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard for since the early 1990s. While their presence can be conceived of as a great paradox, a long-standing presence in the United States as a place/space from which to renounce/announce that the U.S. is/as a hostile, unwelcoming, and foreign place for Hebrews and that real Hebrews belong in their homeland (Israel). Nevertheless, as characteristic of the Hebrew experience in the West End, Hebrews counter that their presence serves a greater purpose to the community and they contend that they have something to teach those who choose to enter their world. Relying on ethnographic data, I excavate the significance of the Hebrew presence on Abernathy Boulevard to the contemporary and expanded conversation about rights, particularly the yet to be achieved ones: sovereignty and self-determination.

2 3

Jackson, 2013 Burnett, 2018

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I entered this region of the Hebrew world after one of the most recent eruptions of violence plagued their international headquarters in Dimona (Israel/Palestine) which disrupted my carefully designed research study, causing me to shift my research site. My larger project was focused on how their global practices of disease prevention and health disparities were implemented across transnational sites and to understand how they were able to achieve this feat. Although I was not a scholar of the United States South, living in a country where production of popular culture was grounded in the circulation of discourses, narratives, and portrayals of the city, I was familiar, but I still would have to catch up on studies of Atlanta and its significance to the project. I was however, clear about the historical presence of the Hebrews in the West End and their infamous Soul Vegetarian Restaurant which served up vegan soul food classics before the plethora of vegan options that can now be found on multiple corners of this significant boulevard. The global constellation of Hebrew vegan soul food restaurants on multiple continents has been an outlet for engaging with the community often in the absence of other plant-based options, though the recent explosion of vegan options, even in neighborhoods like the West End has created a new landscape for conversations around consumption, food justice, and religious practice and dietary habits.

While the Hebrews tout themselves to be the oldest kids on the vegan block in contemporary West End, they too benefit from the generations of work that proceeds them. One is the legacy of Ralph David Abernathy for whom the block is named and his compatriots in the struggle for civil rights, the groundwork for alternative or healthier and more natural consumption practices, and the space for expansive identity practices.

During the Civil Rights Movement, self-determination motivated the activities, activism, and the demands for equal rights and protections under the law for all persons and a vision for the future drawn from a sense of their own destiny. For Hebrew Israelites the project of identity performance in Atlanta is often expressed through their theologically-informed practices of a plant-based diet and provisions for consumption of others through the creation of restaurants relies on the collective work of the expansive and flexible possibilities of and for Blackness in the decades leading up to the Hebrews presence in the West End. These possibilities are buttressed through the consolidation of Black political power and leadership in Atlanta, the educational training of professionals across disciplines, as well as through the perfection and creation of art forms and a center for cultural production. This is illustrated in multiple ways. First, the history of activism for racial equity and social justice in the U.S. South, nationally, and

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internationally. Second, the Hebrews benefit from the intentional development of Atlanta as a place where Black people had been and could flourish educationally, economically, socially, culturally, spiritually and more. And third, the Hebrews benefit from the intentionality of generations who aided in the movement for the civil rights of all people, especially Black people, in Atlanta.

On this foundation, the Hebrews in the West End of Atlanta have built a presence and a position that expands the work that foregrounded their presence in the city. While the Hebrews routinely add that they were vegan before it was popular or mainstream, the growth in the landscape of plantbased options especially those connected to a theological premise has transformed the dynamics, the desire for, and the availability of vegan vittles. Although competition can be good for growth, redefinition, and even reflection on the core values of the operation, the distinctiveness of Hebrews’ presence in the West End and the significance of Atlanta lies in the expansion of the discourse on rights from the successes of Civil Rights Movement, specifically the efforts to achieve sovereignty and recognized self-determination.

Civil rights have largely been theorized as the domain of recourse for racial discrimination whereas sovereignty has largely been a focus of recognized independent nations which has been reserved for Native American and First Nations communities in the United States and Canada.

In so doing, the structure of race and subsequently the structure of racism and racial hierarchy is maintained through these systems. 4 The guaranteed provisions for ensuring rights for one’s ethnic identity are diminished by a system that is inherently built on fixed racial categories that are implicitly hierarchical and therefore unjustly overdetermine what is possible for each group. Therefore, as currently structured, those racialized as Black must continue to appeal to the government to request and or demand that the rights provided by citizenship must be respected. Similarly, the consolidation of power through treaties that recognize one’s own community power to rule and govern themselves is also diminished.

In this piece, I examine the Hebrew Israelites’ work towards sovereignty and self-determination as a continuation of Atlanta’s legacy of civil rights activism. In doing so, the Hebrews’ claim for sovereignty and self-determination is an extension of their transnational claim to indigeneity. Furthermore, the argument is predicated on the interreligious

4

Harvey, 2017

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subjectivity that each of these is in conversation with their religio-cultural allies in the West End (on Abernathy) who demonstrate the role of the spiritual in fight for justice, civil rights, and self-determined identity. The Hebrew’s claim of indigeneity as presented in Atlanta functions to advocate for the achievement of sovereignty which would grant recognition of aligning self-determination and self-identification as Hebrews. Through a sustained analysis of Hebrew spirituality and practical theology, I present the significance of Atlanta’s West End to the contemporary work of achieving rights and the continuing legacies of spiritual and religious communities to these efforts. The Hebrews’ placement on Abernathy is a forward reaching movement that benefits from the strength of the past to achieve a specific aim of advancing the conversations on rights that are beyond the discourse racialized by civil rights in the United States.

While Hebrew identity is a subversion of these normative and hierarchically-structured racial categories and logics employed by the American nation-state, the Hebrews I worked with demonstrate the impossibilities of escaping racializations of being Black that are rooted in Africanness as imposed by external formations of identity. This is demonstrated through the argument I flesh out more in other work as the Hebrews signal to an identity that departs from an externally informed racialization. It is through the community relocation to Liberia (prior to a more permanent move to Dimona) and their connection to the PanAfricanist and Civil Rights Era momentum of radicalism that they participate in the projects of identity formation that would lead them “B(l)ack to Africa.” The Hebrews continue to revise their vision and purpose even at the point where I met them on Abernathy embodying a “diasporic past has led them to their indigenous future”. 5 And yet even with this radical renegotiation of their project from diasporic to indigenous, the Hebrews have been forced to contend with a continued state of dispossession and lack of formal state recognition. Similarly, the nature of their migration and their specific relationship to land focuses our attention on the models of indigenous identity formation, which mirrors the histories of others marked by territorial dispossession. The Hebrew specific iteration of indigeneity is often difficult to understand because of the numerous waves of migration, many of which are involuntary, and the inconsistency of its articulation with the traditional ways in which indigeneity is understood. For example, the primary principles that define indigeneity in

5

Burnett, 2018

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the United Nations’ “The Concept of Indigenous People” involve land; the document states that historical continuity can be demonstrated in the present by “occupation of ancestral lands or at least part of them” and “common ancestry with the original occupants of these lands”. 6 Although the Hebrews have worked to make a case that is in alignment with the basic tenets that the United Nations has used to define and conceptualize indigeneity, in a settler colonial space like the United States tensions around the rights to land, sovereignty, and identity often generate the need for clarity on definitions of indigeneity. Nevertheless, the specific challenge that the Hebrews confront further complicates their ability to be understood and accepted as indigenous beyond their multiple migrations is its overlap with their racialization as Black. This is further intensified when this is combined with their leverage of the criteria and evidence for their claims to indigeneity (their re-commitment to spirituality and obedience to God which produces the evidential substance of one’s identity rather than focusing on and complete pandering to alignment with the codes of the state) with their more recent histories in specific nation-states.

‘I have a dream’: The Hebrew Redux During my bulk of my main ethnographic research with the Hebrews in Atlanta’s West End in the mid-2010s, I observed how the intergenerational meanings of identity imported onto Atlanta served as a springboard for the wider set of identity claims of Hebrew Israelites which both cohere and diverge from the collective identities of the communities situated on Abernathy. The Hebrew physical presence on Abernathy which spans a block of businesses reflects their commitment to Black ownership, autonomy over time and enterprise, in addition to affirming their theological commitments to sartorial comportment, gastronomical adherence, and bodily care to Hebrew law. From their Restoration Hall, to the restaurant, the hair salon and barber shop, the colon hydrotherapy space, the book store, the boutique and more, the Hebrews have created a monument to a commitment to the possibility of Black sovereignty in the age during the zenith of Black occupation and governance in the city of Atlanta. As I sat with Hebrews during my ethnographic research week after week, they would continue to remind me of their community defining statement like, “real Hebrews belong in their homeland.” As I listened in the weekly

6

Cobo, 1987

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gatherings, they shared with the community and that there was no place safe for a Hebrew in the United States but rather a Hebrew needed to be in their homeland, one built and created for them. The Hebrews often utilized the current events portion of their weekly meeting to reflect on the ominous state of affairs and most recently public killings as a part of the buildup in their line of speakers which sought to reaffirm their commitments and prepare Hebrews for life outside of the United States permanently.

This particular weekly service followed the same format. It was a cool, partly cloudy, late winter/early spring Sunday afternoon. There was chill in the air that covered in the warmth emanating from the ground prompting notice that the season change was approaching. There was a slowness to the day and one of those days where you could smell the earth and all the elements which sought to cling to you and your belongings. I certainly could feel it after the long walk across the city to the Sunday meeting. The cloudiness seemed to match the mood and the overall energy in the space that day. The vibrantness which would typically characterize the community seemed distant that day. I was not sure if it was the heaviness and the sheer exhaustion of being racialized and treated as Black in society and the inherent consequences and repercussions that tinged the air, or something more severe. Given that the Hebrews worked diligently to control their public narrative as much as possible, I imagined that I might not ever know what gave context to what I experienced that day.

I would come to know that the energy I felt was a mélange of grief, remorse, deep sadness, and trauma. As I remember the story being told, a Hebrew woman who lived in Dimona but was visiting Atlanta with her children when her fifteen-year-old child was killed. This was in 2015, during the beginnings of the organization of the campaign for Black Lives Matter and the onslaught of video footage of the murders of numerous Black persons in the United States. The Hebrews used this as a cautionary tale to detail the lack of safety for bodies and persons identified as Black in the United States. This motivated them even more to commit to their plan to live where Hebrews belonged and experience the rights and freedoms that they imagined could be possible. I could feel the tension in the room and see the sadness, the anger, and then fear in the eyes of the community, particularly among those with young children. Afterwards, I spoke with a woman who was the parent of a young boy who expressed her fears and shared with me how important it was to practice her faith as a Hebrew.

Therefore, she had to structure her life in a way that adhered to the overarching principles and rights that the community advocated for as a prescriptive in their new way of being. This meant that she needed to live

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as a Hebrew in full alignment with the self-determining independence that is the birthright of Hebrews. That translated into everyday efforts to determine their political status unlike the one that was outlined and engraved into the structure of a nation-state like the U.S. that reduces the possibility of Black lives especially young Black lives and forecloses on the political, social, and cultural development. It is the co-constitutive nature of self-determination and sovereignty as rights which are brought to the fore in the proposals for a life outside the continued threat of violence without protection under one rule of law that does not protect people like this community of Hebrews, like the life that was lost.

The community’s targets for their messages were especially relevant to women of young boys and men who were understood as the most vulnerable in the impending catastrophe in this racial dystopia 7 often to the detriment of community calls to ‘say her name’ or more recent demands to ‘protect Black women.’ Community members were urged to “keep a bag packed by the door,” and to have their passports and documents ready to facilitate the ease of their relocation and migration back to their indigenous homeland. The Hebrews’ approach to the achievement of rights has been pursued through the development of an autonomous community where they would achieve what I argue is the next frontier of the conversation on rights, sovereignty and self-determination.

While living among the Hebrews, I was struck by their intergenerational collection of community that structured and triangulated their approach to define their goals and spiritual project in the world.

Moreover, the genesis of their headquarters is arguably an integrated response to the leader’s understandings and interpretation of the speeches and the work of Martin Luther King and Marcus Garvey which led to their mass exodus of the United States and the subsequent waves of migration and relocation for decades. For members of the community who were among the civil rights generation, they relied on their commitment to another way in a different land, starting over where they could achieve rights without permission from others or authorization from the United States government. Therefore, Hebrew Israelites (although they continue to face racism, discrimination, and disenfranchisement from the Israeli state) sought to build their own systems of health, education, and governance so that they might be offer themselves and their families' equal access to basic human rights. It was the Hebrews’ interpretation of the energy and

7

Shange, 2019; Vargas, 2012

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momentum of Civil Rights Movement, particularly Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream speech’ (combined with Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement) that moved them to take their liberty, justice, and access to rights in their own hands. The Hebrews believed in their dream of living in the land of their ancestors, upholding the lifestyle practices of their fore parents, and in harmony and obedience to God which is grounded in their signification to their spiritual identity and application of theology. In order to live in accordance with their system of belief and to commit to the pursuit of justice, they believed that another way was possible in another world and worked to experience it. Moreover, Hebrews’ particular iteration of achieving rights that is critical to exposing the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement in the contemporary moment and how alternative engagements in rights work done by other communities powerfully illustrate the significance of models for rights beyond integration and inclusion in the national framework.

While the Hebrews are only engaged on the periphery with the traditional work of civil rights in the contemporary moment, their efforts to achieve rights are insularly focused within their community. For example, through my ethnographic research I discovered that a substantial percentage of the founding and first generations of Hebrew Israelites were drawn to the community and drawn from other organizations who were committed to the anti-colonial struggle globally, anti-racism work in the U.S., and the achievement of rights for members of their community and beyond.

Although many of the traditional Civil Rights Movement leaders who survived continued their work in social justice careers and advocating in fields of law, education, politics, and governance; as a community the Hebrews have focused on an internal commitment to achieving rights as it relates to equity and inclusion as presented and upheld United States government. I utilize the literature on race, civil rights, and sovereignty to present here how civil rights claims have been understood as the most appropriate claims for discrimination particularly on the axis of race (especially for racialized Black communities) however, the conversations about sovereignty and self-determination have not been afforded to communities like the Hebrews who make claims for it indigeneity based on external forms of racialization and their veiled legibility as indigenous to the state.

As an ethnographer, I spent years with Hebrew community members who have divested primarily from attempts for social inclusion in the United States and in fact, the mass denouncement of citizenship by members of the community in the late 20th century demonstrates the community’s approach

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to redirect efforts to rights and residence outside of locations of their most recent colonization. Nevertheless, not all members have made aliyah (or returned home to the nation-state of Israel/Palestine) to the community’s headquarters and where the community makes an argument for an ancestral homeland. While I lived among community members in Atlanta during the genesis of the Black Lives Matter Movement which included the collective witnessing of trauma through individual videography of police brutality and assault, the Hebrews preached sermons of racial disaster preparedness to the families who attended their weekly gatherings. For Hebrews who live in community together and collectively practice their cultural and theological beliefs about the world, their efforts to bear witness to the autonomy of their community and advocacy for the recognition of their political selfdetermination and sovereignty lie in their creation of indigenous community in the lands of their ancestors and establishing leadership, systems of selfgovernance and community sustenance.

The Hebrews broaden what is possible through their transnational project of community and their work co-articulates with academic conversations on transindigeneity, 8 an examination of indigenous agency and representation through global rather than local frameworks that are constricted by imposed settler colonial hierarchies. Nevertheless, the impact of anti-Blackness combined with the settler colonial frameworks for identity and ontology in the United States continue to repeal any potential traction that the Hebrews might acquire in their arguments globally to indigeneity. It reifies the argument, I make about the dangers of ‘once you go Black’, that highlights the perils of racialization as Black as a static framing that locks and often limits a person or community’s ability to name, arbitrate, and signal one’s identity and meaning of it in the world. This operates differently in contexts like Latin America where arguments of multiculturalism and race do not completely preclude rigorous discussions of ethnic and racial identity that account for the formations of self and community that arises from communities which is why communities racialized as Black can be understood as indigenous in places like Belize, Guatemala Guyana, Honduras, and Jamaica 9 In the context of Atlanta, a place known for its connections to achievement of civil rights, the Hebrews claims for sovereignty and self-determination highlights cross-sectional approaches to Blackness and Indigeneity as well as the need to expand

8 9

Allen, 2012 Anderson, 2007; Jackson, 2012; Johnson, 2002; Lewis, 2017; Thomas, 2016

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conversations on rights, equity, and justice for those racialized as Black in the United States.

Kujichagulia, Self-Determination, & the Power to Define Self-determination is the right for people to choose their own political status, their own actions, and ways of being without constraint from external forces. For the Hebrews, self-determination is not only a sacred rite and a pathway back to God that is about identity but also about cultural, social, political, and a spiritual decolonization process that be must undergone in order to fully embrace and live into one’s life as a Hebrew.

Among Hebrews, self-determination was evident in the ways they name and define themselves, where they took residence and how they relate to those territories, and their political contradictions with government demands to perform and/or adhere to an identity that is inconsistent with who they are.

During the course of my ethnographic research, the Hebrew community lost their leader of decades, Ben Ammi Ben Israel, on December 27th, 2014. For many who were engaged with the life worlds of the Hebrew Israelites on multiple continents, the irony of this moment was not lost. It was my god-sister who but had lived alongside the Hebrews who stayed in Liberia in the late twentieth century, who emphasized this fact for me. The Hebrew leader died on the day that many who celebrate Kwanzaa uphold the principle of self-determination. His death, when the community advocates for immortality, means that the principle of self-determination will be forever etched into the hearts, mind, and the history of the community as a reminder. A reminder of the centrality of self-determination to the community as a reflection of what has been gained and what is left to do in achieving political self-determination. This principle which has been described by the person attributed to be the founder of Kwanzaa, Maulana Karenga who states that Kujichagulia “affirms the right of persons to affirms and determine their own destiny.” 10 Others have stated that this principle represents the motivation to “define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.” More broadly on a political scale, self-determination is a response to external imperial rule. As I reflect on this critical moment that the Hebrews still shy away from discussing in detail, I think about how Ben Ammi’s death continues to be a message to Hebrews about the work they have done in the world and the work that

10

Karenga, 1998

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remains to be done in regards to the representation of personhood and community. Ben Ammi’s death is serves as an eternal marker of Hebrew principles and their broader application for autonomy, agency, equality and justice, I use it as a springboard to explore how Hebrew principles, thoughts, and practices expand the rights conversation in more radical ways.

It could be understood as one of the greatest gifts that Ben Ammi had given to the community, the boldness in his proclamation that members of the community had the “power to define” a principle given to the community that has emboldened Hebrews to make claims about themselves as an indigenous group, their community as qualifying for the Law of Return, and the ability to experience physical immortality. It is the “power to define” which is a grounding principle for drawing for a commitment to self-determination on social, cultural, economic, and even political levels.

The thrust of this commitment is central to generating momentum around how Hebrew decolonize themselves and advocate for working towards a return to their indigenous ways of being. Political enfranchisement in the form for civil rights has been less of a priority for Hebrews in the quest for greater recovery of the self, autonomy, agency, and power in the world.

Through this all, the ways in which the community reifies how the work of the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement (in racial political-based justice for Blacks (and by default other groups) in the United States) built a context for their claims for self-determination. How does the Hebrew construct of self-determination work alongside the notion of a group of rights to protect one from unfair treatment or discrimination? At the core of civil rights are federally recognized protections and access to legal recourse against discrimination across factors such as race, religion, gender, age, national origin, etc. however it fails to foundational restructure a society in a way that respects people in the groups who have historically been targets of discrimination on their own terms. The Hebrews challenge and expand our traditional understanding of the rights discourse through adding selfdetermination to the category of what is needed and required for one’s existence in the world. Through the articulation of self-determination, Hebrews inquire into what is beneath federally protected categories of discrimination to delve into the motivation of protections. Do the categories of civil rights really offer freedom and equality? Self-determination offers a new perspective into the potentiality for freedom and equality that exists beyond what litigation can offer persons who have experienced discrimination, marginalization, and disenfranchisement.

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seeks to protect through its laws in a nation-state like the United States? The Hebrews actions contend for rights beyond the veiling of its detachment from true democracy. Self-determination challenges the foundation of civil rights discourse historically as a remedy to injustice and disenfranchisement. As illustrated by the Hebrews self-determination recognized by others outside of one’s self and community has impacts that are often connected to a community’s sense of well-being. The Hebrews demonstrated a longer history of attempts to represent the self has been mitigated through and rejected by the state, nevertheless, the Hebrews persist in their determination and commitment to being. Through an understanding of the Hebrews sense of self-determination we can see normative constructions of race prohibit a deeper approach to equality and freedom for this community.

Many have utilized Haiti as a backdrop for self-determination in the Americas particularly among communities racialized as Black. This idea focused on “the demand for individual and collective independence from the political, economic, and social structures that perpetuated white supremacy and limited the opportunities for [B]lack people to dictate their own lives.” Moreover, “Haiti confirmed that self-determination and freedom went hand and in hand, that the former was a necessary condition of the latter.” 11 In Atlanta with the Hebrews, the directive for selfdetermination models a more profound and fundamental demand for freedom instead of a quest for rights and privileges. Subsequently, the advocacy for self-determination becomes a call for more universal liberties.

Self-determination as a demand mandates internal and external work on the national/international, communal, and personal level. Self-determination requires an adjustment of perspective about how an entity is and comports in relationship to itself and others. For the Hebrews, dictating the terms and conditions of their own lives is critical to not only to performing it as core principle of their culture but also elevating the significance of its political dimension of the community’s existence and survival.

Sovereignty Minus Forty Acres Sovereignty at its core is about power, control, and ability to rule.

Sovereignty denotes the power to control and exert full rule over oneself.

For Hebrews, a community who understands themselves as having endured

11

Byrd, 2019, 4-5

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three exiles (out of Israel and into Egypt, from Egypt into the rest of the African continent, and then into the Transatlantic slave trade which leaves them in the Americas) and subjugation (enslavement and colonization) as a result of their disobedience to God. For the Hebrews, sovereignty as it is connected to self-determination, is a project of restoration of a people in their relationship to God but also within the global political order that revives their political agency and autonomy to live in a position of equity and harmony. As I lived among the Hebrews, I discovered that for them, sovereignty is about embracing their right and privilege to self-govern, rule, control their community and live by the rules of their currently landless nation (which is not unlike the story of Jews who were “landless” until their current occupation of the modern nation-state Israel in 1948).

The Hebrew Israelite history and community development in United States has been critical to their development and imagination and advocacy of rights beyond the rights have been obtained and granted under the law.

The racial archipelagos 12 which animate the construction of space and geography and warrant new lenses for decolonialism, power, and by proxy rule. The Black geographies 13 of United States helps one to see how the geographical isolation created an island of Blackness in the center of a vast urban metropolis. Its distinctiveness is often overlooked and undertheorized for its production of a specific racialized subjectivity, a particular formation of Blackness that while pathologized is often widely circulated and disseminated to make claims about Black people in the U.S. broadly. In my other work, I have made the connection to the construction of Black geographic disenfranchisement as archipelagoes in the United States to mirror the contested forms of sovereignty in the Caribbean among racialized Black subjects where claims to sovereignty have been made. This is foundational for an exploration of a space like Atlanta and specifically the historic West End neighborhood.

Traditional civil rights discourse and legislation in the United States has privileged the granting of rights and benefits that should be afforded to all citizens under the law. For Hebrews their investments point beyond the charity of state to recognize and protect their rights. Hebrews through their efforts to restructure their relationships to the United States’ government have sought to open the conversation for sovereignty and illustrate how racial hierarchies and anti-Blackness factor into the reception of the Hebrew

12 13

Shange, 2018 McKittrick & Woods 2007

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nation. While the Hebrews challenge the supremacy of the United States through the rejection of its terminologies and classification through attempts to be recognized in Israel/Palestine, their attempts might not be seen as successful. In Atlanta, their signification to those efforts in their headquarters in Dimona attempts to reproduce its effects through the presence of the Hebrew nation on Abernathy, illustrates the failures of the law not only to provide equality, freedom, and justice but also the narrow structures for one’s existential and ontological being when refracted through legal structures.

Furthermore, the proposals for sovereignty as a right for recognized groups of independent nations like the Hebrew proposal invoke conversations about decolonialism. While many have had the conversations about independence and the right to autonomy and governance, these conversations are thwarted through the structure of recourse and governmentality of a settler colonial nation. Subsequently the Hebrews contend with a refutation of their power to govern in any formal manner in a settler colonial space like Atlanta. While the conversations and participation in the rights conversation have been around enfranchisement communities who have been impacted or devastated through denial, I offer that communities like the Hebrews push for the inclusion of these rights as required but also challenge concepts of power and rule inherent in the concept of sovereignty through a decolonial model. Through the Hebrews’ efforts in their model of community and efforts and attempts to establish themselves as a nation; they force critical thought about decolonialism in a settler colonial model and how to see and understand the subjects of colonialism. Moreover, the Hebrews highlight the need to think more broadly about one’s conversations partners to frame the Hebrews efforts which are may not be traditional groups and locations.

While many have explored questions of political self-determination, sovereignty, and anticolonial nationalism among those born on the African continent and other places namely the Caribbean, 14 several of these conversations omit a focus on groups like the Hebrew Israelites with histories in the United States. Atlanta, which is often understood as one of the iconographic hubs of the Civil Rights Movement particularly as it relates to the consolidation of leadership, functions as a fertile space for intellectual inquiry for global efforts to think and act beyond the constructions created

14

Getachew, 2019; Fuesté, 2014

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by the afterlife of U.S. slavery and colonialism. 15 Specifically, the absence of these conversations denies the urgent need for anticolonial nationalism conversations and the possibilities for political sovereignty for mainland citizens. What strategies are available to successfully decolonialize communities like the Hebrews who have deep histories, connections to, and a portion of their membership living in the United States? Are the modes of recognition for sovereignty in the United States utilized by Native American groups appropriate for the identity claims of the Hebrews for their proposals to sovereignty? And how does race factor into this equation?

As discussed in the article “Race, Civil Rights, & Sovereignty” 16, civil rights have largely been theorized as the domain of recourse for racial discrimination whereas sovereignty has largely been a focus of recognized independent nations which has been reserved for Native American and First Nations communities in North America. In this case study, the Cherokee Freedmen, who despite residence, lineage, birth, familial connections are denied the access to tribal sovereignty that other members of the tribe are afforded. Anti-Black racial bias as a manifestation of white supremacy is often a prerequisite for denials to political sovereignty and recognition of independence in the United States. In the Americas, the fight for independence has been resisted by political powers to maintain an order and structure of domination and oppression with a range of economic, social, and cultural consequences. The independence movements and the efforts to decolonialize in the aftermath have been met with a range of outcomes most with incomplete progress on the road to equality. What the Hebrew Israelites do is perform for us is a departure from the racializing scripts that challenge the very nature of the structure of racial hierarchy embedded into models of justice and rights discourse in the United States. The Hebrew model for an expanded category of rights demonstrates the political constraints of Blackness and illustrates how the current structure produces limitation for what can be conceded in the United States political landscape.

The Hebrew configuration of their identity as indigenous while being positioned as Black, presents the limitations of racial constructions to afford rights equitable even among different marginalized racial groups.

I utilize this model outlined in “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy” by Andrea Smith 17 to discuss the ways in which anti-

Hartman, 2008; Sexton; 2010 Strum, 2014 17 Smith 2012 15 16

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Blackness is woven into the fabric of the formation of race in the United States that instantiates a racial hierarchy in which “Blackness becomes equated with slaveability.” Therefore, in order to really decolonize knowledge production and undo its foundational grounding in white supremacy as the undergirding logic that supports the construction of the Americas, we must restructure the categories of racialized identity.

Racialized Blackness and Black subjectivity as constructions seek to reify white supremacist notions that anchor the identity of Black subjects in a property-based identity, as well as one tied to enslavement that re-centers the European subjects and their role in creating global migration. The set of logics that construct who is indigenous and under what terms calls into question the penetrating depth of white supremacy to narrate self and community in language that does not resonate with the discourses provided by the supremacist structure. Sandra Harvey’s work examines the racial dimensions of sovereignty in the United States and attests to the constraints of Blackness in the perception of its limiting capacity for national sovereignty. 18 These constructions are relevant to the Hebrews’ ability to claim rights and in this case, access to political sovereignty.

Drawing on a legacy that engendered, bolstered, and intensified a binary between indigeneity and Blackness, I draw from the Hebrew model to dismantle this construction by demonstrating the ways in which the logics of white supremacy served as a theoretical framework contributing to the ongoing dispossession and intellectual ghettoization of the study of race and ethnic identity in the United States. Although a number of scholars discuss the relationship between Black and Indigenous communities as separate communities and their overlap in shared histories and alliances (King, 2019), I discuss the relationship in a different way. I illustrate the ways in which the settler colonialism that appears in my ethnographic research has fostered limited understandings of identity, which promote and support supremacist, racist, and hierarchical notions of identity. I argue that communities racialized as Black have developed, structured, and solidified indigeneity amidst the horrors of white supremacy that have moved towards cultural erasure, or cultural syncretism, creolization, or hybridity at best.

These constructions work to further theorize Blackness as culturally, socially, and politically inferior in the United States, which has been based on the histories of enslavement among a subset of the population as well as lacking a source of identity predicated on territorial dispossession.

18

Sandra Harvey 2017

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Indigeneity is intellectually seductive as a framework that has the capacity to metamorphosize the position of certain communities through the destruction of previous frames of indigeneity that buttress white supremacy.

However, the Hebrews demand a reconstruction of race and ethnic studies that does hold groups separate in ways that promote the previous formation by which different groups were loyal to their position in the hierarchy because of the benefits accrued in reference to other groups.

The Hebrew formation of indigeneity, which I theorize as migrant indigeneity, 19 is relational to the construction of modernity by dislodging ‘Amerindian’ and ‘Negro’ persons from static disparate categories in order to think broadly and more responsively to the construction of the Black subject and indigenous subjectivity through another ontological framework.

In other works, I have done so through theorizing the Hebrews and their project by emphasizing the spiritual as an epistemology to reconstruct and rework the self. 20 Moreover, I bring ethnographic material to argue against the prototypical construction of identity that attempts to supersede modes of self-identification. Therefore, while migrant indigeneity specifically seeks to respond to efforts, practices, and beliefs of the Hebrew Israelites, the interventions can be seen in the literature that addresses the colonial legacy of strategic deployment of the “honor of being named indigenous.” 21 This further marginalizes and isolates racialized Black subjects in the Americas, which substantively reinforces the difficult claims to indigeneity.

In Atlanta, on Abernathy, sovereignty is a difficult concept to promote on the grounds that the Hebrews do as it requires some heavy lifting around disengagements with the state, self-governance and therefore trust in a new set of leaders, and a commitment to a new set of terms.

Hebrew Israelites present major challenges to the issue of sovereignty particularly in the United States. For Hebrews, sovereignty is an acknowledgement of the community’s power and right to rule and govern themselves and a recognition that this power has not been externally recognized. The ways in which the system overlooks and denies the community this privilege is connected to the failing racial logics that organize particular communities as deserving of access to this power while others do not. The Hebrews are aligned with the practices and rights of those

Burnett, 2018 Alexander, 2005; Tinsley, 2018 21 Nyamnjoh, 2007 19 20

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who have been granted the status as sovereign nations while the Hebrews continue to fight for their rights to be seen and acknowledged.

Sovereignty, therefore, is a frontier and an existential possibility, as the Hebrews continue to occupy space on Abernathy among their neighboring groups of allies. Abernathy’s legacy prescribes a roadmap towards socio-political, cultural, and economic potential beyond the dream of what was possible for them using the racial logics of the U.S. nationstate. Moreover, given sovereignty’s emphasis on legitimacy, for Hebrews, the ability to have decision-making power that is legitimized and recognized by external powers has been important for the community’s evidentiary claims transnationally. The freedom from external political control is important for forecasting a possibility beyond the core civil rights that were achieved. Moreover, sovereignty is the vision and the manifestation of a life and an identity beyond the constructions of what a settler colonial based positionality could offer. Sovereignty is a liberationist hermeneutic for the achievement of rights.

Conclusion Throughout this article, I present Hebrew Israelite practices and commitments as performed on Abernathy signal to a need for a more capacious breadth and depth of the rights in context of civil rights activism in Atlanta. Specifically, I offer sovereignty and self-determination as two of the many rights that have been yet to be achieved by communities like the Hebrews. Utilizing a number of sources including my theoretical work on the Hebrew community, I analyze the substance of their cultural production through more expansive framework to understand the nature of their decolonial efforts. Through a focus on these two rights, I examine how the United States is space where the complimentary efforts of decolonialism and anticolonial nationalism have been underexplored in certain communities given the structure and formation of the settler colonial state.

I approach self-determination as an important priority and critical to the foundation of this Hebrew community’s thought through their leader’s belief that they retain “the power to define.” Through an interrogation of the power to define, I explore how cultural, social, and economic selfdetermination for Hebrews need to be in conversation with the larger United Nations’ understandings of political self-determination which is critical to the development of positive relationships among all people especially for colonialized people. If the United Nations argues that “all peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their

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political status and freely pursue their economic social and cultural development” (United Nations, 1960), then the Hebrews right to define encourages more difficult conversations about the subject position of the Hebrews in Atlanta and the discourse of rights afforded to groups based on their status. Through the Hebrew belief in the power to define and the pointing to political self-determination as mandated by the United Nations, the community encourages a more comprehensive approach to the rights conversation.

Sovereignty is a correlate to self-determination which the Hebrews also challenge is important right to consider in the larger conversations about the new frameworks to understand people and communities and the subsequent rights afforded to them. In the article, I present a theory of the form of indigeneity that the Hebrews perform, migrant indigeneity, to make a case about the nature of sovereignty in the United States and its connections to colonial rule and conquest. From this epistemic point, I argue the Hebrew proposal for sovereignty highlights the nature of anti-Black racial bias in the construction of identity and access to political, economic, social, and cultural freedoms, as well normalizing discourses about racialized identity and its accompanying rights, or lack thereof. Moreover, this illustrates the multiple paths to justice and challenges to the power and rule through a decolonial model.

Taken together, the overlap between the proposal for an expansion for the rights discourse through self-determination and sovereignty as advocated for by Hebrew practices question racializing scripts that challenge the very nature of the structure of racial hierarchy embedded into models of justice and rights discourse in the United States. Furthermore, they question the nature of how decolonialism has been practiced in the United States and what the model has and can look like for particular colonial subjects. On the whole at the core, the Hebrew practices as joined with the rights discourse helps to facilitate a critical analysis of the possibilities for freedom and equality and the most effective mediums for its articulation, recourses, and evaluation of its effects.

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CROSSING THE KALUNGA LINE: CARIBBEAN SPACE-TIME AND THE LIVING DEAD IN JUAN DE LOS MUERTOS

KHYTIE K. BROWN I survived Mariel, Angola, The Special Period and that thing that came after, and I will survive this.

— Juan, Juan de los Muertos The dead in Palo are best imagined as an uncontainable spreading, each version becoming yet another multitude that accumulates overtakes and saturates the very imagination that attributes to the dead presence and volition.

— Todd Ochoa, Society of the Dead Introduction

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lexander Brugues’s zombie film Juan de los Muertos (Juan of the Dead) is set in the Cuban city of Havana, which is subsequently overrun by zombies, or the living dead. Sara Armengot notes that Juan de los Muertos differs significantly from earlier works in that the zombies therein do not emerge from Caribbean tradition and folklore, instead they are more closely related to popular horror and science fiction zombies (Armengot 2012). While it is true that the zombies—at first represented as dissidents, then infected U.S. prisoners—are not the typical zombies of Caribbean folklore, this paper posits a reading of the living dead in the film that chooses to foreground its Caribbean roots. Its central question: what are the implications for the narrative of Juan de los Muertos if we read the zombies as ancestors?

This essay argues that the geographical imaginary of the Caribbean is central to Juan de los Muertos, because within this geographical imaginary one can unearth complex histories and traditions which inform how we read the zombies in the film and their implication for, and commentary on, post-colonial Caribbean societies, in this case, Cuba.

Contrary to the typical master/slave dialectic within which discussions of

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the primordial Haitian zombie are often enmeshed, this paper suggests that Juan de los Muertos proves a fecund terrain for reimagining the Caribbean zombie, not as dissident and antisocial, as the film explicitly states, or as merely a mindless Sisyphean figure toiling ceaselessly within an unrelenting plantation economy; rather, Juan de los Muertos offers an inroad for imagining the Caribbean zombie as emerging out of the nexus between African diasporic history and religion. The paper suggests that while the film is silent about Afro-Cuban religion and only hints towards history, consistent with Todd Ochoa’s explication of the African-inspired Cuban Palo spiritual tradition (which is heavily centered on the dead), the zombies in Juan de los Muertos may be envisioned as belonging to a special class of ancestors who can cross waters, belong to the realm of the living dead (or the “ambient dead” as Ochoa terms it) and inhabit the particularity of an Afro-Caribbean space-time. 1 Rethinking the figure of the zombie within a Caribbean, particularly Kongo-Cuban inspired worldview, enables us to tease apart some of the multiply-layered meanings of the film’s aesthetics, problematize the film’s treatment (or mistreatment) of racialized subjects and harness the particularity of a Caribbean narrative on zombies that is not simply a product of voodooization 2 and its penchant for ‘fascinating cannibalism’ 3, but holds the potential for historical and theological critiques of the various forces which created and continue to shape the Caribbean and Cuba.

Armengot notes that in Caribbean folklore the figure of the zombie is often a victim which has been spiritually sold by a bokor or other Vodoun initiate and is thus rendered a slave subjected to the will of a master and the condition is neither communicable nor apocalyptic (Armengot 2012). 4

Todd Ramo Ochoa. Society of the Dead Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba.

Berkeley: University of California, 2010.

2 Voodooization here refers to the ways in which Black spiritualities are represented in film and media in such a manner as to construct a fictional genre of voodoo centered around anxieties related to the imaginings of the body and self, gendered and racialized Others, colonialism, imperialism and empire.

3 The term fascinating cannibalism coined by Fatimah Tobing Rony in her book The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle refers to the obsessive consumption of the images of the racialized Other. Rony states that “By “fascinating cannibalism” I mean to draw attention to the mixture of fascination and horror that the “ethnographic” occasion: the cannibalism” is not that of the people who are labeled Savages, but that of the consumers of the images of the bodies- as well as actual bodies on display- of native peoples offered up by the popular media and science,” pg 10.

4 Bokor refers to a Haitian Vodou priest thought to work with black magic.

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Further, the zombie figure, as Caribbean folklore narrates, is the victim and not the aggressor and can only be liberated often through the ingestion of salt. While Armengot is not incorrect in her assertion that the zombies in Juan de los Muertos incorporate many of the characteristics of zombies in contemporary horror and science fiction genres, the paper argues that these earlier Caribbean folkloric influences cannot be elided. In fact, the first zombie we encounter, as Armengot herself states, “appears from underwater and attacks the film’s protagonist, Juan, and his friend Lazaro while they are fishing” (Armengot 2012). This zombie who emerges from under water is presumably an escaped prisoner from Guantanamo and we can imagine that it has ingested copious amounts of salt water from the sea before it happened upon Juan and Lazar and is harpooned. Here, the zombie prisoner (either escaped or thrown into the ocean upon discovery) is no longer imprisoned by its condition, as either zombie or prisoner, but has instead found freedom in the Caribbean Sea. This kind of zombie, a prisoner to another, who must ingest salty waters of the Caribbean Sea in order to be free, is very much kin to the Caribbean folkloric zombie.

Caribbean Space-Time and Palo Juan de los Muertos begins and ends in the waters of the Caribbean Sea—a choice that holds multiply-layered significance if one views the film within the geographical imaginary and cosmos of the Caribbean and KongoCuban traditions. The beginning scene of the movie is an aerial shot of Juan languidly lounging atop a makeshift raft in the middle of a placid ocean and it then switches to a view of the bottom of the raft from under the water.

Juan’s friend Lazaro pops up from under the water and scares him, which foreshadows the later emergence of the terrifying zombie figure who we can argue was the initial viewer from below the sea. Later still there is a brief (only seconds long), but highly poignant, scene of a mass of zombies walking along the bottom of the ocean and it is unclear if they are walking away from Cuban shores, towards it or are simply walking in a circle. This scene will be analyzed later in the paper; however, what is noteworthy is that throughout the film the Caribbean Sea is deliberately used as a backdrop framing many scenes. The waterfront as a backdrop serves to remind the viewer that the action is taking place on an island, a piece of land surrounded by the ocean, thus its inhabitants are intimately connected to the sea in relation to their actual comings and goings (and the issues about

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borders and exit rights) and through historical Crossings that hold Afrospiritual significance. 5 On the mundane level the aesthetics of the Caribbean Sea function as a conspicuous referent to the Cuban balseros (rafters) who attempted to flee Cuba on self-made rafts. This is both the Cuban Rafter Crisis of 1994 in which approximately35,000 Cuban refugees fled Cuba on rafts to the U.S and the Mariel Boatlift of the 1980s in which 125, 000 Cuban refugees sailed from the Port of Mariel in Cuba to Miami on boats that were most often filled over capacity. 6 Throughout the film Juan makes reference to the Mariel Boatlift when he states: “I survived Mariel, Angola, The Special Period and that thing that came after, and I will survive this.”

This reference also speaks broadly to what Sara Armengot discusses in “Creatures of Habit” with regard to the issues of the right of exit and freedom of movement. Armengot discusses the restrictions imposed on those living in and traveling to Cuba through border controls and departments of immigration, wherein there is a “daily violence and lack of mobility that are the direct result of widespread disregard of the right of exit” (Armengot 2012). The waters of the Caribbean Sea are one of the primary physical sites of contestation in which these violences are enacted, where people are patrolled and through which people might envision a passage to freedom. Yet, this passage to freedom is double-sided as journeys across the Caribbean Sea (a sub-oceanic basin of the Atlantic Ocean), while holding the possibility of freedom from repressive regimes and the hope of better opportunities, also have a history of representing bondage, death, trauma and peril. The Caribbean as ‘The New World’ was shaped by journeys across oceans and seas and what Jacqui M. Alexander terms the “forced Crossing” of millions of Africans to the European colonies in the Caribbean. The Middle Passage and the Crossing of Atlantic Waters into Caribbean Seas was the passing from freedom into bondage. For Cuban balseros the crossing from Caribbean seas into Atlantic waters potentially represents new forms of liberation; nevertheless, this journey is also perilous and many balseros perished in the ocean or made the arduous journey only to be detained and sent back.

Crossings refers to Jacqui M. Alexander’s term for the Middle Passage.

20th Anniversary of the Mariel Boatlift By PA3 Judy L. Silverstein, MSO Tampa THE COAST GUARD RESERVIST April/May 2000 5 6

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Crossing waters, the depths of the ocean and the changing tides of the seas hold another layer of meaning, one which is implicit in the film, and that is their spiritual and cosmological significance within African diasporic religions. While Afro-Cuban religions were not explicitly invoked in Juan de los Muertos, reframing the film within a Caribbean space-time— that is within a physical and social geography marked by journeys, crossings, liminality between metropole and colony, Africa and the Americas, retention and hybridity that allows the histories and traditions of the Caribbean to manifest. Caribbean space-time, according to Dorreen Massey, is the inextricability of space and time, it emphasizes the relational quality of space and asserts that space is non-dichotomous and has “both an element of order and element of chaos.” Further still, Tom Sheehan argues that Caribbean space-time is a colonial space-time that is racial and sexual and can be traversed but cannot be crossed. Caribbean space-time is represented, for example, in the figure of the mulatto who is between white and black, in the “repeated tracings and retracings of a ‘territory’ of memory, of a psyche that is placed geopolitically and shared” (Emery 21)” (Shaheen 2007). Considering these repeated tracings and retracings of territory within memory and psyche, along with the qualities of chaos and order that characterize Caribbean space-time, we might read the waters that figure prominently within Juan de los Muertos as betraying the silences about Afro-Cuban identities, histories and traditions. Amidst the silence on Afro-Cuban religions, and Afro-Cubans more broadly, the centrality of the sea in the film could be traced back to both West African and Kongo religion and philosophy and their influence on Cuban culture. It is especially productive to focus on the Kongo-inspired Palo tradition whose cosmological renderings of the sea as the abode of the dead and as metaphor for the dead—who are everywhere and who suffuse and permeate everything—mirror and enrich the zombie apocalypse narrative of Juan de los Muertos through a decidedly Caribbean lens.

The Afro-Cuban religious tradition of Palo dates to the late 19th or early 20th century emerging from a “cauldron of myriad Kongo inspirations” (Ochoa 2010). Between 1725 and 1875 more slaves were imported to Cuba than in all years prior nurturing a vibrant community of Kongo inspired spiritual traditions from central African peoples in Havana (Ochoa 2010).

Ochoa notes that these inspirations and influences struggled against one another, and also fruitfully recombined themselves into new and relevant forms within the structure of the cabildo system (Kongo-organized mutual aid societies). He states that “from the ruin of Spanish colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century they [emerged] as Palo, which in Havana is

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referred to as La Regla de Congo, translated as “Kongo Rule” or “Kongo Law”” (Ochoa 2010). Given that the majority of the enslaved Africans brought to Cuba were of central African/Bantu origin and acknowledging the influence of “Kongo Law” to the sustenance of Afro-Cuban communities, it is then reasonable to suggest that while the film is silent about Afro-Cuban religions, their influence nevertheless pervades any Cuban cultural production which focuses on the living dead. Ochoa contends that “Palo is as much the art of crafting matter into fatefully powerful substances as it is a narrative art that creates shapes of hope and fear from the silences that pervade our everyday lives” (Ochoa 2010).

Returning to the notion of a Caribbean space-time wherein the social geography is marked by liminality and retracings, Gerry Canavan suggests that zombies complicate temporality by their very nature of inhabiting multiple temporalities at once. Rather than invading from the future, zombies evade from the past “erupting from the graves of our decomposing loved ones to establish their ecology of universal death” (Canavan 2010).

He posts that “this turns out, dialectically, to be our only possible future all along…both past and future, then, zombies turn out to in this way be coextensive with the present—they are the corpses of our friends and coworkers lurching aimlessly through the sterile environment we all once shared” (Canavan 2010). In Juan de los Muertos Juan and his band of misfits come up with a business scheme to make money off the zombie apocalypse overtaking Havana by offering to kill citizens’ family members now turned zombies. The tag line for Juan’s business is: “Juan of the Dead, we kill your beloved ones.” Since Canavan advances the idea that zombies emerge from the past and are coextensive with the present, as they are the corpses of our friends and coworkers, and Juan also underscores the fact that zombies are once familiar beloveds, we can employ the lens of Caribbean space-time and Palo tradition to argue that the zombies in Juan de los Muertos are not merely an anonymous mass of infected horror movie genre zombies, but are in fact a particular kind of zombie that belongs to the realm of the ancestors and arises out of the particularities of KongoCuban tradition. What are the implications for the narrative of Juan de los Muertos if we read the zombies as ancestors?

Crossing the Kalunga Line: Zombies as Eggun In the introduction of Society of the Dead Ochoa describes a real life 1990s Havana that is eerily reminiscent of the fictional post-apocalyptic A FRICAN A S TUDIES R EVIEW | V OLU ME S EVEN | N U MBER O NE | S PRIN G 2021 | 113

Havana in Brugués’s Juan de los Muertos. Ochoa’s description is as follows: Havana in 1992 was unreal to my eyes. Basic markers of a large city were missing - the streets were empty of taxis, buses and cars; there were no signs designating storefronts, no window displays, no shoppers on the sidewalks...without cars or buses, the city’s formidable columned thoroughfares - Malecon, Calle 23, Carlos IIIReina, Infantana, Ayestaran, Belascoain, and the winding Calzada del Cerro - were silent. The movement of people was minimal, and the lines for public buses wound in baroque entanglements seeking shade under trees and covered sidewalks. The collapse of the transportation infrastructure was so great that getting to the countryside beyond Havana was impossible. The standstill was near total, and except for an occasional heavy truck, only bicycles plied Havana’s wide avenues as people covered tremendous distances in search of food and cooking fuel. Money and food seemed impossible to come by. 7 Ochoa’s description of Havana is a facsimile of the general post-apocalyptic zombie society—represented by the desolate, collapsing, urban milieu marked by scarcity—and specifically the post-apocalyptic Havana in Juan de los Muertos. Yet, in Juan de los Muertos the characters joke that it is in fact difficult to distinguish the zombies and the apocalyptic collapsing of Havana from everyday life in Cuba; it all looks the same. While it all looking the same is arguably the film’s critique of the dilapidation of Havana under the current political regime and mindless supporters of the Revolution, I reassert that observing landscapes and the use of space in the film reveals a Caribbean space-time inspired by Kongo-Cuban philosophy.

Armengot argues that “Brugues’ film is most visually effective not for its monsters or other special effects, but for its inspired approach to employing the city of Havana itself as a central character” (Armengot 2012). While the urban city of Havana is highlighted in Ochoa’s work, and functions as a central character in the film, the city does not stand alone but is consistently framed by the Caribbean Sea. The Caribbean Sea provides an inroad for

Ochoa, Todd Ramo. Society of the Dead Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba.

Berkeley: University of California, 2010.

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audiences to exercise their geographical imaginations and it is within this imaginary that insights from Kongo-Cuban traditions come to reveal themselves In his piece “Zombies in the Colony: Imperialism and Contestation of Ethno-Political Space in Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide” Saunders is emphatic that “All zombie yarns are about geography” (Saunders 2012). He utilizes analytical tools from the field of geopolitics to argue that while all zombie tales are geographically-centric tales of humanzombie encounters, which has traditionally meant the “securitization of territory against marauding hordes of flesh-eating undead” there is another side to zombie geography and that is “the construction of monstrous geographies of imperialism as a critique of the militaristic advance of Western civilization” (Saunders 2012). He further posits that in the novel of Max Brooks “zombies are (mindless) defenders of space against the violent incursion of European colonialists” (and in the geographical imagination of Brooks almost all the recorded instances of zombiism take place in a zone of contested political or ethnic territory (Saunders 2012). Saunders ultimately concludes that Brooks’ work presents a series of important milestones in world history in comic book form and through both satire and sequential art “maps territorial space in deeply meaningful ways, while simultaneously creating, perpetuating and revising geopolitical stereotypes” (Saunders 2012). In the end, while Brooks attempts to condemn cultural ignorance and bigotry Saunders argues that his zombie lore still functions as a tool for othering Afro-Caribbean cultures. While I take Saunders’ critique of Brooks seriously, what is useful about Brooks’ work is revisiting his section on “Recorded Attacks” and considering the role of his rewriting of the historical narrative of globalization as it pertains to the central argument of this paper, which is that, rethinking Juan de los Muertos through the lens of a Caribbean space-time (which centralizes African diasporic histories and religions) allows for refiguring zombies not as merely mindless reanimated slaves or gruesome, anthropophagic beings— who are fraught symbols of the process of voodooization— but as deeply wedded to Afro-Cuban histories and religions and as valuable when placed within a tradition that honors and reveres the dead.

Saunders tells us that the final segment of Max Brooks’ text, “Recorded Attacks,” provides 61 short vignettes, beginning in Katanda, Central Africa circa 60,000 B.C. and ending 2002 in St. Thomas (Saunders 2012). This historical retracing [albeit fictional] from central Africa to St. Thomas V.I. in the Caribbean is instructive for imagining the zombies of Juan de los Muertos, not as ahistorical figures, but instead inextricably A FRICAN A S TUDIES R EVIEW | V OLU ME S EVEN | N U MBER O NE | S PRIN G 2021 | 115

linked to the history of transatlantic crossings between the Caribbean and Africa (and later Cuba and the United States). The underwater scene of the zombie mass ambulating on the ocean floor stands out in Juan de los Muertos as wholly different from other scenes in the film. Aesthetically, the hues and colors were much darker, and whereas much of the film was more comical than horrifying, this short scene registered affectively as deeply troubling and solemn. These zombies are not a grunting, flesh-eating horde, but a collective mass subsumed under the watery depths of the Caribbean Sea. How did they get there? There seems to be no explanation in the film of how the current zombies terrorizing the island might have plunged themselves to the bottom of the ocean. Nothing in the film suggests that these zombies are part of the contemporary outbreak but rather, the hues, colors, textures and depth at which these zombies reside (contrary to the initial Guantanamo zombie who is at the surface of the sea and who is in contemporary prison overalls, so one can rightly assume he has turned recently) points to them being ancient, or at least, older, zombies who have resided at the bottom of the ocean prior to the current outbreak. While this scene was merely seconds in length, its reverberation and implications for thinking through Juan de los Muertos are enormous.

I do not purport to know Alexander Brugues’ intentions when including that scene in the film; however, whether intentional or unintentional, if one is familiar with the histories and traditions of the Caribbean and are attuned to thinking within a Caribbean space-time imaginary, it is difficult not to make connections between these ocean dwelling zombies and the Crossing that was the Middle Passage. These histories and spirits haunt the Caribbean and the cultural productions produced therein. Relatedly, on the bottom of the ocean floor off the shores of the Caribbean island of Grenada there is an underwater sculpture by the artist Jason DeCaire Taylor which depicts a circle of children who are of African descent holding hands on the ocean floor. An erroneous description first posted on the website of America’s Black Holocaust Museum described the work as follows: It remembers the captive Africans who died on slave ships during the Middle Passage, the crossing from Africa to the Americas.

About a third of captives died from the horrible conditions on board.

Their bodies were thrown into the Atlantic. Others, particularly women with children, who were often allowed to move about unshackled on deck, threw themselves over. Many believed in

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reincarnation and hoped to escape slavery and be reborn to a life of freedom. 8 The artist later made a statement that “It was never my intention to have any connection to the Middle passage, below is the original text. Although it was not my intention from the outset I am very encouraged how it has resonated differently within various communities and feel it is working as an art piece by questioning our identity, history and stimulating debate.”

Nevertheless, as Davide Carozza argues in his work analyzing the piece, the fact that Taylor did not intend the piece to be about the slave trade does not undermine such a reading. Carozza states that “Jason de Caires Taylor’s piece “Vicissitudes” is not a work about the Middle Passage. Except, of course, that it is.” 9 Carozza argues that given the location of the piece and the aesthetics of the piece it is understandably read through the slave trade, I echo Carozza’s assertion and argue that given the history of the Caribbean, and Cuba in particular, intentional or not, the underwater zombie scene in Juan de los Muertos brings to the fore the history of Crossings which formed the region.

Fig. 1. Jason de Caires Taylor, Vicissitudes. http://www.underwatersculpture.com/sculptures/viccisitudes/

http://abhmuseum.org/2012/05/vicissitudes-sculptural-homage-to-victims-of-themiddle-passage/ 8

“Jason de Caires Taylor, “Vicissitudes”,” Deeps, The Black Atlantic, Duke University, http://sites.duke.edu/blackatlantic/ (accessed on (May 6, 2015)).

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Reflecting on the Crossing in her work Pedagogies of Crossing Jacqui M. Alexander offers this beautiful, yet hauntingly agonizing piece: We lay in a dungeon. Many more of us lying in death, 21 times 21 times 21 and more. Crossing water on backs with sores and bellies empty except for those filled with air or swollen with child. Lying in rot and moon blood with skinless ankles and wrists, black skins turned yellow from chains acting like saws on our fearful flesh.

Rocking. Wracked bodies numbed from the pain. Rocking the dark noise, the loud silence of trembling hands and feet and whole bodies turned cold and numb from shock and heat and longing for the rhythm of daily living…Crossing that line where humans force the sea and sky to meet…back then we crossed the horizon over and over again. Some refused the Crossing deciding to use their arms as wings, thousands of winged creatures flying free. Others simply kept each other’s company at the bottom of the Sea, becoming the messengers from the spirits of the deep whose Souls had plunged there from the voyage before and the one before that and the one before that . O Yemaya…amongst your treasures rests the captives shuffled through the door of no return/ No longer imprisoned…No one knows the mysteries at the bottom of the Ocean. Crossing the line, the Kalunga Line (Alexander 2005).

Alexander’s piece is reminiscent of what happens to the body in the process of zombification: the sores, swollen bellies, blood, bodies turned cold. The 21, times 21, times 21 and more speaks to the idea of the zombie mass. Her reflections on the ocean as the space where many enslaved Africans’ souls plunged, so as to no longer be imprisoned, and who subsequently became messengers of the spirit of the deep, speaks to the underwater zombie scene in Juan de los Muertos. I return to the question: might these zombies in Juan of the Dead be conceived of as a special class of ancestors? And if so what does that mean for the film’s narrative?

Within Kongo philosophy and in the Kikongo language Kalunga was first used to describe the god of the underworld where every person goes upon death (Windsor 2008). This underworld covered all of the land as well as the part of the sea that can be seen from the shore or a coastal boat. The limit of the realm of the Kalungan world was called the Kalunga Line and when slave ships crossed this line those left behind referred to the enslaved aboard as “The Kalunga,” people who would never return from crossing this realm, who were lost in the eyes of the deity. Considering the

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proliferation of “Kongo Law” or La Regla de Congo through Palo, the symbolism of the Kalunga is exceptionally suited to reflections on the significance of the sea and underwater zombies in Juan de los Muertos.

Throughout the film we are always visually reminded of the limits of the Kalungan world through the constant images of ocean water—which we can see has a seeming end point at the horizon, beyond which is the Kalunga Line. While Armengot focuses on the material concerns with regards to exit rights and the freedom of movement, and argues that this right is curtailed in Cuba as well as on the part of the country which Cubans often want to enter (The United States), the question this paper poses is: what happens after one crosses the Kalunga Line? Does one perish? Does become a nonentity? In the final scene when Juan stays behind and bids the rest adieu as they attempt to sail to Miami, we never know what happens when they cross that Kalunga line.

While we do not know what happens to those who leave Cuba in Juan de los Muertos we do know the trials, perils and sometimes successes of the balseros who left in real life. Similarly, we do know through the historical record what happened to those who made the crossing from Africa to the Caribbean: some survived and made it to the shores of the New World and others did not. Death, however, within many Western and Central African cosmologies is not a finality but part of a cyclical model which includes the realm of the unborn, the realm of the ancestors or the dead and the realm of everyday life. In Society of the Dead Ochoa explores the centrality of the dead to everyday events and materials in Palo. The dead are very much undead within the tradition in that they still possess agency, can interact with and cause changes in this temporal world and overall matter a great deal to the workings of this world. Most poignantly, Ochoa partakes in many discussions with Isidra, a practitioner of Palo, who serves as his primary interlocutor. Isidra educates Ochoa on the dead in Palo, also called eggun, el muerto or Kalunga. Isidra sometimes describes the dead in similar terms to Juan and Canavan, as teachers, friends, or relatives who have become ancestors and spirit guides. At other times, she refers to the dead as “a writhing, boundless, mass, impersonal and anonymous” (Ochoa 2010). This writhing, boundless mass equates the dead with the sea, consistent with the notion of Kalunga. Ochoa argues that in Kongo cosmology the dead are not only beyond the sea but are as prolific and excessive as the sea’s own vastness. The sea, or Kalunga in Palo, is often just referred to as “el muerto” (the dead) and comprises all the dead that have existed and could possibly exist. He notes that “it is ancient beyond memory, and within it the dead exceed plurality and instead become a dense A FRICAN A S TUDIES R EVIEW | V OLU ME S EVEN | N U MBER O NE | S PRIN G 2021 | 119

indistinguishable mass” (Ochoa 2010). He further notes that this pressing mass of the dead can be felt viscerally in Palo and is an overlap of visceral and conceptual sensation. Isidra incisively explains to Ochoa that: The dead is not centralized [el muerto no esta centralizado]! It is not centralized in any normal manner! Not unless you would say water is central to the sea. Do you see what I mean? When you talk about something being central, other things must revolve around it, like the sun and the planets, or the Party and the masses. There is a difference here. The sea doesn’t revolve around water, it is the water! (Ochoa 2012) The dead in Palo, be they individual or the writhing mass which Isidra sometimes describes, are primarily felt viscerally and as a conceptual sensation. However, in Juan de los Muertos the dead are not felt or discerned conceptually or viscerally. Rather, they are made of material substance, they are animated bodies and are literally the living dead. Ochoa coins the term the “ambient dead” to speak of a plane of immanence and immediacy where the Kalunga, though saturating, is more like an atmosphere or climate and barely discernible. He states that “the ambient dead is a climate of transformation, complete with zones of woe and marvel, flashes of inspired intuition, and thunderclaps of astonishment that echo in the cavities of our bodies to wake us from our petrified thoughts” (Ochoa 2010). The zombies in Juan de Los Muertos are the definition of immediate and immanent because of their materiality. I extend Ochoa’s analysis to Juan de los Muertos and posit that the zombies in the film who reside under water are representative of the more traditional, viscerally felt and barely discernible eggun. The offshore zombies residing under water can be considered as invisible from the shore having crossed the Kalunga Line, yet they still exert a conceptually felt influence from their watery realm. Ochoa adds that the Kalunga “is also the sea into which objects and subjects recede, to be formed anew” (Ochoa 2010) and is as likely to generate something new from its flows as it is to consume and diminish. Forms therefore are not in stasis but are continuously changing and the dead, as Ochoa puts forward, have many versions. The material, land zombies in Juan de los Muertos are part of the ever-changing versions of the dead represented by the vast Kalunga. Therefore, the critical question is: what reason do the dead have for changing their form and version? How do the land zombies function differently from the underwater zombies, who for all intents and purposes are immaterial and part of the sensed realm for the Cubans dwelling on

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land? I suggest that we turn to issues of racialization in Juan de los Muertos for insight into this question.

Juan de los Muertos racializes the city of Havana in such a way that the audience is led to believe that Cubans are predominantly white, except for a minority of Afro-Cubans who are even more on the fringes than Juan and the rest of the misfits, and who, in the ultimate horror genre cliché, meet their deaths before the movie culminates. The only Afro-Cubans in the film are represented by China, a mulatta travesti and her bodyguard Primo who has the physique of a bodybuilder but is mute and squeamish about blood. 10 When the zombies begin to take over Havana the Cuban media immediately declares that they are dissidents paid by the United States government to stir up trouble and cause social unrest; however, this sociopolitical theory dissolves and through the actions of Juan and his band of misfits the film makes room for the possibility that this may be a supernatural or spiritual problem. Unlike many contemporary zombie films which allude to the biopolitical origins of zombification, Juan de los Muertos provides the possibility for conceptualizing the zombie apocalypse within a spiritual and theological framework. Juan and his best friend Lazaro initially misrecognize the zombies as vampires then later presume that they are demonically possessed people and attempt an inept exorcism. The exorcism is a failure, not only because Juan and Lazaro are not versed in proper Roman Catholic ritual praxis, which the comical scene showcases, but primarily because they are not up against demonic possession. 11 Juan and Lazaro’s misrecognition of the zombies, and their inability to enact proper Roman Catholic rituals to aid exorcism, are significant if we are to reconsider Juan de los Muertos and the figure of the zombie as suggestive of Kongo-Cuban histories and spiritualities coinciding in ways that address Cuban deracialization projects. What does it mean that Juan and Lazaro, and the Cuban government in general, cannot recognize the living dead for what they are? What might the failure of the clumsy Roman Catholic exorcism ritual signify?

I offer that the film’s elision of Afro-Cubans reflects the larger Cuban government’s subjugation of Cubans of African descent and speaks

Noelle M. Stout. After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-soviet Cuba. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2014.

10

The reference to vampires may be an allusion to Juan Padro’s Vampiros en la Habana (1985), a Cuban animated vampire film.

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to the deracializing policies of the state which made a conscious effort to avoid the question of race and subsume everyone under the banner of being Cuban. Avoiding talking about racialization however did not do away with inequalities predicated on race. As the silence about race is betrayed in everyday practices, including Cuba’s embracing of religious tourism which thrives on Afro-Cuban religions like Santeria and Palo, so too are the silences in the film betrayed by the Kalunga, the visceral feeling of being pressed upon by the dead and history while watching the underwater scene in the film. While the narrative of the film is one which goes from critique of the Cuban government to Juan’s triumphalism as a true Cuban who defeats the dissident zombies and avoids Crossing the water and leaving Cuba, I offer a counter narrative.

Conclusion: “the sea rises, the sea falls” 12 The Kalunga have changed forms, from underwater dwellers who are out of sight and merely felt, to the living dead who are embodied because of this process of deracialization which seeks to erase the influence of African descended people on Cuban identity and culture. The ambient dead are protesting. The film does not explain the origin of the zombie outbreak.

Juan declares later in the film that they are not dissidents or Americans, yet no explanation is offered for their emergence except from Pastor Jones, the American missionary, who claims that they are the living dead and God has given him a plan to overcome them. Lazaro however, accidentally harpoons him. Throughout the film Western Christianity proves impotent, both in the failed Catholic exorcism of one of the first zombies Juan and his band encounter to the death of the American missionary. The ambient dead are unrelenting against these religious traditions.

While Juan hails a historical trajectory that acknowledges the Mariel Boat Crisis, the Special Period and even the Angolan war, Juan’s history says nothing of the Middle Passage and Juan makes no other references which tie him to an Afro-Caribbean history and tradition. Juan becomes adept at exterminating the zombies and in the midst of the chaos commercializes his services. He becomes a charlatan priest of sorts who specializes in handling the dead. Yet, if we read the dead as eggun and as ancestors Juan’s violent treatment of them, particularly China, reflects the

A comment Isidra makes in Society of the Dead referring to the dynamics of the Kalunga.

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colonial violences and continued derision of African descended peoples and cultures. There are many ambiguities that could be further fleshed out; however, is Juan truly triumphant? The film ends with Juan being attacked by zombies and freeze-frames on him in a warrior stance with a machete, presumably to slay the zombies. However, with no more communal or familial support and no idea of whether he is the only survivor, is he truly triumphant or are the eggun making their presence felt, reclaiming Cuba and demanding that African diasporic histories and traditions no longer be ignored, sanitized or commercialized? Does the band of misfits who sail off in the makeshift car-boat for Miami make it safely and will they return to render aid to Juan, or have they crossed the Kalunga line into the realm of the ancestors which is our only possibly future all along? It would appear as though “Kalunga surrounds, Kalunga saturates, Kalunga generates and Kalunga dissipates” (Ochoa 2010) but can never truly be exterminated.

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RACIAL VS. RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION IN PUBLIC SERVICE JOBS: A TRANSNATIONAL CASE STUDY

I

DANIELLE N. BOAZ

n recent years, employers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom appear to be increasingly restricting hairstyles that are common among people of African descent (i.e.- braids and dreadlocks) as components of their grooming and appearance policies. They contend that employees who have such hairstyles harm their businesses by presenting an unkempt or unprofessional image to the public when they serve in positions requiring customer interactions. People of African descent have mounted numerous legal challenges to these policies, contending that they are racially discriminatory in their intent and/or effect.

However, particularly in the United States, these cases almost universally conclude with courts finding that hair is more of a cultural than a racial characteristic and that classifying predominantly black hairstyles as unprofessional is not evidence of racial discrimination.

However, Rastafarians are common litigants disputing the legitimacy of these hairstyle policies. In addition to the standard claims of racial discrimination, Rastafarians have asserted that forcing them to shave their beards or remove their dreadlocks constitutes religious discrimination.

Unlike persons who do not have a religious component to their claims, Rastafarians are typically successful in contesting the application of these grooming and appearance policies. Courts often force employers to provide some form of accommodations to Rastafarians so that they can retain their hair and their positions. The juxtaposition of these secular and religious cases highlights a rare example of adherents of an African diaspora faith enjoying greater legal protection than their non-religious counterparts and perhaps suggests a new approach to combatting hair discrimination.

Part I: Delivery Drivers Some of the earliest and most common controversies about dreadlocks involve package delivery companies. In contrast to what one might assume, these prohibitions on dreadlocks do not center on package sorters and safety concerns about long hair getting caught in machines.

Rather, these companies argue that dreadlocks and other black hairstyles are unprofessional for persons assigned to deliver packages and otherwise interact with the public. Several litigants have argued that these grooming

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policies are racially discriminatory, providing evidence that persons holding these positions are often predominantly persons of African descent and their co-workers have made overtly racist marks about their appearance.

However, courts have refused to find racial discrimination underlying policies barring dreadlocks, braids, and similar hairstyles. Yet, these same companies have settled cases of religious discrimination involving Rastafarians who contested these policies.

A. England One of the earliest such cases began in the late 1980s in England.

Trevor Dawkins, a 26-year-old Rastafarian male, interviewed for a position as a van driver with Crown Suppliers (Property Services Agency). 1 When he appeared with his hair in dreadlocks, Crown Suppliers informed Dawkins that he had to cut his hair to be eligible for a position as a driver because the company’s policy was that all drivers needed to have short hair.

Dawkins responded that he could not comply with this request because he was a Rastafarian; Crown Services ended the interview. Dawkins filed a case with the Industrial Tribunal claiming that Crown Services had violated the Race Relations Act of 1976 because they had refused to hire him based on his racial origins.

The central question in the case became whether Rastafarians were a separate racial group protected by England’s Race Relations Act. The Industrial Tribunal determined that Rastafarians were a separate racial group because they shared a geographic origin, language, and cultural traditions, and they were a minority, oppressed group. However, the Employment Appeal Tribunal and the Court of Appeal decided that Rastafarians are not a separate racial group from other Jamaicans or AfroCaribbean persons, in part because they had only been around for 60 years.

Instead, they are just a religious group with some shared cultural practices such as music and literature. 2 Because Dawkins argued that Rastafarians were a separate racial group, this case mentioned some of the striking statistics common in later litigation about whether refusing to hire someone with dreadlocks is a

Paul Myers, “Rastafarian Loses Court Claim Over Dreadlock ‘Bias’” The Guardian (London), January 30, 1993 2 Shiranikha Herbert, “Law Report: Rastafarians ‘Not Separate Group,’” The Guardian (London), February 1, 1993 1

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matter of racial discrimination. For example, the Commission for Racial Equality, who argued in favor of Dawkins, presented evidence that out of 68 drivers working for the company, none were black. 3 They suggested that this demonstrated racial discrimination in the company’s hiring practices.

Unfortunately, the Courts did not really address these disparities because the question before them was solely whether Rastafarians were a separate racial group, not whether Dawkins was discriminated against for being black. However, although this case does not make clear whether refusing to hire someone because of dreadlocks is racial discrimination, similar recent cases from the United States help elucidate the answer.

B. The United States In 1989, Charles Eatman, a Protestant male, began working as a package delivery driver for United Parcel Service (“UPS”) in New York.

In 1995, Eatman began wearing dreadlocks to “emulate Jesus,” because he interpreted “several passages of the Bible to mean that hair is divine and that Jesus wore his wooly hair in locks.” 4 While some of the other members of his church wore dreadlocks, Eatman did not regard this as a requirement of his religion, it was a “personal choice.” 5 Eatman also subscribed to a “Nubian belief system,” and argued that locked hair is a connection to Nubian/African ancestry and heritage. 6 In summer 1996, the UPS labor relations manager and Eatman’s supervisor notified Eatman that the company had implemented new appearance guidelines prohibiting hairstyles that are not “businesslike.”

Although the guidelines did not expressly indicate what styles would be permitted, the labor relations manager believed that these regulations precluded “ponytails, mohawks, green hair, ‘carved’ shapes, and locked hair—either short or long.” 7 UPS told Eatman that he would have to use a hat to cover his supposedly unprofessional hair. Because his hair was too long to be concealed by a standard baseball cap, Eatman was forced to resort to a wool hat that he claimed was very hot in the summer, gave him

Paul Hoyland, “Rastafarian wins job ruling on dreadlocks,” The Guardian (London), March 31, 1989 4 Eatman v. United Parcel Service, 194 F. Supp. 256, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (March 31, 2002), at 259 5 Ibid., 259 6 Ibid. 259 7 Ibid., 259.

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headaches, and damaged his locks because it caused the hair to become moist and overheat. 8 While he conceded that neither Protestantism nor Nubianism would technically prohibit him from covering his hair, Eatman also personally believed that putting a hat or other covering over his dreadlocks would suppress something beautiful about his identity.9 As a result of all these factors, Eatman only wore the hat sporadically. After several meetings with union representatives and Eatman’s supervisors about his refusal to consistently cover his locks, UPS suspended Eatman on May 18, 1998 and fired him on June 3, 1998.

Amidst these official discussions regarding the appearance policy, Eatman contended that he experienced substantial discrimination and harassment because of his hair. In 1996, one of Eatman’s managers said that his hair looked like “shit,” and another manager threatened to cut it off. 10 The following year, a different manager suggested that Eatman’s hair made him look like he used drugs. A fourth manager questioned whether a disability leave that Eatman took was caused by “‘all that shit on [his] head.’” 11 Furthermore, shortly before he was fired, a coworker pulled Eatman’s hair.

Eatman filed a lawsuit against UPS alleging that they had discriminated against him because of his race, developed “a grooming policy that has an unlawfully disparate impact on African Americans,” and subjected him to a hostile work environment. To prove discrimination against African Americans, he emphasized that 17 of the 18 employees who were asked to wear hats over their “unprofessional” hair were African American, and eleven of these individuals wore dreadlocks. 12 He also asserted that the discriminatory remarks about his hair looking like “shit” were not just directed at him but, because dreadlocks are a common style of African American hair, degraded black people more generally.

The Court found that the UPS policy prohibiting locks was not discriminatory because “African Americans are not the only persons who lock their hair.” 13 They further explained, that Eatman “has neither shown that the policy severely impacts African-Americans as a class, nor presented

Ibid, 260.

Ibid., 259.

10 Ibid. 261.

11 Ibid. 261.

12 Ibid. 264.

13 Ibid. 262.

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any evidence that the policy lacks a legitimate business purpose. Thus, his circumstantial evidence that most of the employees affected by the policy are black would not, on its own, reasonably support a finding of discriminatory intent against African-Americans.” 14 With regard to disparate impact, they found that the supervisors’ comments, while “sophomoric and insulting” were not racist because dreadlocks are “not so closely associated with black people that a racially neutral comment denigrating it can reasonably be understood” as racism. 15 Finally, the court dismissed his religious discrimination claim because Eatman did not describe wearing locks or refusing to wear a hat as divine commands but rather personal choices. For all these reason, the Court found in favor of UPS. Despite this clear ruling that UPS had not subjected Eatman to racial discrimination or a hostile work environment, only two years later, U.S. courts decided two cases protecting Rastafarians’ right to wear dreadlocks and beards in lawsuits challenging analogous policies in different branches of the same company. In November 2004, Ronnis Mason, a Rastafarian, applied for a seasonal job as a driver helper for UPS in Secaucus, New Jersey. The company had a policy that prohibited beards for persons who work in public positions and told Mason that he would have to shave his beard in order to work as a driver helper. 16 Mason informed UPS that his religion would not permit him to shave his beard, but he offered to trim it.

UPS responded that he would only be eligible for lower paying positions that did not involve customer contact. Mason filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (a commission that evaluates employment discrimination claims and decides whether to pursue them by suing the company), claiming that UPS had discriminated against him based on his religion because they refused to accommodate his religious beliefs if he applied as a driver helper, and restricted him to lower paying positions in the warehouse because of his beard. The EEOC filed suit against UPS

14 Ibid. 264. The court also explained that to prove disparate impact under Title VII, Eatman would have to show statistical evidence that African Americans were denied jobs or promotions because of the appearance policy. Ibid. 266-267.

15 Ibid. 265.

16 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”), “Office of General Counsel Fiscal Year 2009 Annual Report,” https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/litigation/reports/09annrpt.cfm; EEOC, “UPS Sued for Discrimination Against Rastafarian,” Press Release, March 29, 2006, https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/archive/3-29-06.html

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and the jury awarded Mason $10,000 in damages as well as back pay that he would have earned of $2000.

Shortly thereafter, the EEOC settled another lawsuit with UPS about discrimination against Rastafarians. UPS Ground in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, hired a Rastafarian named Nieland Bynce as a delivery driver. 17 When Bynce came in for orientation, the human resources manager told him that he would have to shave his beard and cut his hair to work for them. Bynce told the manager that he could not comply with these requests because of his religion and he asked for an accommodation. The manager fired Bynce instead. In early 2010, UPS settled Bynce’s religious discrimination case with the EEOC for $46,000 and agreed to implement anti-discrimination training.

These UPS cases are not unique. During approximately the same time period, I found at least two other cases regarding Rastafarians whose applications to work for delivery or moving companies were denied because they refused to cut their hair. In both instances, the employers settled the cases, paid a lump sum to the complainant and agreed to undergo antidiscrimination training. For example, in May 2008, a Rastafarian named Christopher Woodson applied for a loading job at a moving and storage company, Lawrence Transportation Systems, Inc. (“LTS”) in Waynesboro, Virginia. 18 Woodson had fourteen years of experience as a mover, and had even worked for LTS before he became a Rastafarian. Woodson offered to tie his hair back or put it under a hat while he was working, however, LTS rejected Woodson’s application because he refused to cut his dreadlocks.

The EEOC filed suit against LTS in 2010, charging them with religious discrimination. The case went to trial but the jury could not reach a decision.

Therefore, the EEOC and LTS settled the case for $30,000. LTS also agreed to provide anti-discrimination training to all its employees and prohibit religious discrimination at worksites. 19

17 EEOC, “UPS Freight to Pay $46,000 to Settle EEOC Religious Discrimination Lawsuit” February 17, 2010, https://www1.eeoc.gov//eeoc/newsroom/release/2-1710.cfm?renderforprint=1 18 EEOC, “Lawrence Transportation Systems Sued By EEOC For Religious Discrimination,” September 21, 2010, https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/921-10c.cfm 19 EEOC, “Lawrence Transportation Systems To Pay $30,000 To Settle EEOC Religious Discrimination Lawsuit,” August 16, 2011, https://www1.eeoc.gov//eeoc/newsroom/release/8-16-11f.cfm?renderforprint=1

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Similarly, in May 2014, a Rastafarian male named Christopher Alston applied for a delivery driver position with Mims Distributing Company, a beer distribution company in Raleigh, North Carolina. 20 Mims told Alston that they wanted to hire him but he would have to cut his hair.

Alston, who had been growing his dreadlocks since 2009, responded that his religious beliefs prohibited him from cutting his hair, and Mims rejected his application. Alston filed a complaint with the EEOC and about eight months later, the EEOC settled with Mims for $50,000 and subject to an agreement that Mims’ management would undergo training about discrimination and accommodation, and develop a policy about these grooming issues that they would post in their facility.

C. Canada These controversies about dreadlocks and delivery drivers are not limited to England and the United States. Canadian courts have also heard at least one case regarding a Rastafarian male who was denied a position as a delivery driver because of his dreadlocks. In this case, which involves a now familiar litigant- UPS, the arbitrator determined that the company’s appearance policy violated multiple human rights; however, this decision was later limited on procedural grounds. 21 In October 1994, a Rastafarian male named Leslie Huggins began working part time at UPS as a package handler, a non-customer contact position. However, between 1998 and early 2000, he repeatedly applied for a position as a delivery driver, which meant that Huggins would interact with customers at their homes and businesses. Similar to the company’s branches in the United States, in Canada, UPS requires employees who will be in contact with the public to comply with an appearance policy, which prohibits beards and hair longer than the shirt collar. Huggins met with a human resources representative and attempted to obtain an exemption from the policy, explaining that his religious beliefs would not permit him to cut his hair or beard. The representative indicated that the company would not

EEOC, “Mims Distributing Company to Pay $50,000 Lawsuit to Settle EEOC Religious Discrimination Lawsuit” January 20, 2015, https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/1-20-15.cfm 21 United Parcel Service of Canada Ltd. v. Foisy et al., 2003 CanLII 25824, Superior Court of Quebec, (December 4, 2003); United Parcel Service of Canada Ltd. v. Foisy et. al, 2006 QCCS 1466 (CanLII), Superior Court of Quebec, (March 20, 2006).

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make any exceptions. Unable to attest that he would follow this appearance code, Huggins was denied the position.

In November 2000, Huggins, with the support of the employees’ union, filed a grievance alleging that UPS had discriminated against him and denied him the position based his religious beliefs. Huggins and the union sought an order requiring UPS to hire Huggins as a driver, awarding Huggins damages for the denial of the position, and declaring the appearance policy null and void as a violation of rights to freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and right to privacy. In October 2003, an arbitrator, Claude Foisy, heard Huggins’ grievance. Foisy determined that UPS’s personal appearance regulations were an illegal and invalid violation of Huggins’ right to privacy and freedom of expression. Because Foisy found the provisions invalid on these grounds, (s)he did not find it necessary to even address the issue of religious freedom. Foisy ordered UPS to reconsider Huggins’ application and come to a decision within 30 days without taking into account his beard and long hair.

UPS appealed Foisy’s decision to the Superior Court alleging that the Union and the Arbitrator had changed their arguments during the proceedings—that they suddenly began discussing the validity of the appearance policy more generally rather than just with regard to Huggins.

The Superior Court granted a stay of the enforcement of Foisy’s decision until the court could review it. When the Superior Court finally reached a decision more than two years later, the judges agreed with UPS that the arbitrator had not only went beyond his authority to address the rights of Huggins as an individual; Foisy also failed to address the main question in Huggins’ grievance—whether the rules violated his freedom of religion.

Therefore, the Superior Court invalidated Foisy’s decision.

It is unclear whether there has been any further litigation of this case or if the parties reached any settlement agreement after the Superior Court overturned the arbitrator’s ruling. However, the arbitrator’s strong decision in favor of Huggins is telling. Not even delving into whether religious freedom had been abridged, Foisy believed that a person’s right to express themselves and their right to make private decisions about their appearance were more important than an employer’s right to control their public image.

One must wonder if a person of African descent challenging these policies on racial grounds (as well as free expression and privacy) would have achieved a different result. One also must ponder whether the Superior Court would have upheld Foisy’s decision if Huggins and the union had been clearer from the beginning that they were attacking the entire appearance policy on several grounds. To my knowledge, this is one of few A FRICAN A S TUDIES R EVIEW | V OLU ME S EVEN | N U MBER O NE | S PRIN G 2021 | 131

cases in which Canadian court have considered an employee’s right to wear dreadlocks so this issue remains unresolved there.

However, this series of cases spanning three countries and two continents demonstrates several important things. First, there is an overwhelming trend in among delivery companies to be preoccupied with the length of their male drivers’ hair. These policies may reflect strong racial discrimination—either preventing black people from obtain employment (i.e.- Dawkin’s case) or suppressing the freedom of expression of predominantly black groups of employees (i.e.- Eatman’s case). They may also be accompanied by racial slurs or discriminatory comments about the employee’s appearance. However, none of the courts have found that these policies are evidence of racial discrimination (although Canadian courts may determine that they limit a person’s free expression and privacy). Yet, national guarantees of freedom of religion have forced many employers to accommodate Rastafarians and pay substantial sums of money for their acts of discrimination.

Part II: Public Service Positions In addition to package delivery companies, employers in a variety of public service industries have implemented policies banning dreadlocks and other black hairstyles. Since 1981, U.S. Courts have heard perhaps dozens of cases where African Americans have developed creative ways to contest these policies. They have emphasized the cultural significance of hair among African Americans, the history of black hair as a symbol of racial pride, and the unique texture of black hair which naturally forms prohibited hairstyles but does not lend itself to those hairstyles that public service companies deem “professional.” Yet courts have been unwilling to characterize a “mutable” characteristic as an essential element of racial identity and a possible type of discrimination. However, when Rastafarians have contested the same provisions, courts have stressed that failure to accommodate Rastafarians’ religious beliefs restricts the cultural diversity that makes the United States a great nation.

One of the first and most important of these public services cases is that of Renee Rogers, an African American woman who worked for American Airlines for 11 years in various capacities. 22 In 1980, Rogers was

Rogers v. American Airlines, 527 F. Supp. 229, United States District Court, S.D. of New York, (December 1, 1981).

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an airport operations agent, and was responsible for issuing boarding passes, checking bags and greeting passengers. During this time, Rogers began wearing her hair in a braided style known as corn rows. American Airlines told her that wearing corn rows contravened their grooming policy (which prohibited an “all-braided hairstyle”) and suggested that she pull her hair in a bun and wrap a hairpiece around it while she was working. Rogers tried this for a short time but the hairpiece caused her to have headaches so she stopped.

Rogers sued American Airlines, claiming that they practiced racial discrimination by prohibiting her from wearing corn rows, a hairstyle that she contended had historical and cultural significance to black women.

American Airlines countered that “the policy was adopted in order to help American project a conservative and business-like image.” 23 The court denied that a "No Braided Hair" rule had an adverse impact on Black women, asserting that hair was a “mutable” characteristic (in contrast to other fixed physical features like the shape of one’s nose or the color of their skin) and these women could choose to wear an alternate hairstyle. They stressed that “the airline did not require [Rogers] to restyle her hair” and suggested that if wearing a hairpiece caused Rogers to have headaches, “A larger hairpiece would seem in order.” 24 Finding no racial discrimination in forcing a black woman to wear fake hair to satisfy the airline’s standards of beauty and professionalism, the court ruled against Rogers. This case represents a stark contrast to the courts’ rulings in a Massachusetts controversy about black hairstyles, heard several years later.

Bobby T. Brown is a Rastafarian who does not believe in shaving his face or cutting his hair. 25 In July of 2001, Brown began working as a lube technician at Jiffy Lube oil change in Hadley, Massachusetts. Part of his job was to greet customers and discuss the services that Jiffy Lube might perform on their vehicles; he also worked on the vehicles. About a month after Brown began in this position, the company hired a new Vice President of Operations and a consultant to improve sales. The consultant opined that businesses that had a “clean shaven personal appearance policy” performed

Ibid., 233.

Ibid., 233.

25 Brown v. F.L. Roberts, 419 F. Supp. 2d 7, United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, (March 3, 2006), 17.

23 24

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better; therefore, the Vice President announced the implementation of such a policy. 26 As soon as Brown heard about the new “clean shaven” policy, he approached his assistant manager and manager to explain that his religion forbid him from shaving or cutting his hair. The manager consulted the Vice President, who responded that Brown would have to work in a position that had no customer contact if he did not shave. Brown followed up with Smith directly to express concerns about religious discrimination. Smith told him that he “did not have time to check on the religion of everyone at Jiffy Lube” and reiterated that if Brown did not shave, he would be confined to a position that had no customer contact. 27 Brown continued to work at Jiffy Lube after the appearance policy went into effect because he needed the job. His pay remained the same; however, Brown contended that the working conditions were worse in the non-customer service position. In the section where he was confined, known as the lower bay, there were significant temperature changes (very cold in the winter and hot in the summer), fewer breaks, and greater danger of injury. Ultimately, Brown filed suit against the company in the U.S. District Court alleging that they discriminated against him based on religion in violation of Title VII because they refused to accommodate his beliefs.

An employee can prove religious discrimination under Title VII when an employer requires them to do something or prohibits them from doing something as a condition to obtain employment that would infringe on the employee’s religious beliefs. If an employee can show that the employer imposed such a requirement, the employer must provide a reasonable accommodation of that person’s beliefs. However, if an employer can prove that providing an accommodation of the employee’s religious beliefs would cause an “undue hardship,” then they are not required to provide it.

In 2004, the First Circuit Court of Appeals (the appellate court above the District Court) had decided a rather similar case where an employee, Cloutier, who belonged to the Church of Body Modification, wore an eyebrow piercing as a tenet of her faith. Her employer, Costco Wholesale Corporation, had a policy that prohibited employees in positions with customer contact from having facial piercings. Costco gave her several options for compliance such as wearing clear retainers in place of the

26 27

Ibid., 9-10 Ibid., 10

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piercings so that the holes would not close or to put band-aids over them.

Cloutier explained that she could not do either. The First Circuit Court found in favor of Costco because it believed that employers had a right control their “public image” and that requiring them to accommodate a religious belief that would not appeal to customers or seem professional would be an “undue hardship.” 28 Finding this case analogous to Brown’s request for grooming accommodations, the court was compelled by precedent to rule against Brown. However, they expressed strong concerns about doing so: If Cloutier’s language approving employer prerogatives regarding ‘public image’ is read broadly, the implications for persons asserting claims for religious discrimination in the workplace may be grave. One has to wonder how often an employer will be inclined to cite this expansive language to terminate or restrict from customer contact, on image grounds, an employee wearing a yarmulke, a veil, or the mark on the forehead that denotes Ash Wednesday for many Catholics. More likely, and more ominously, considerations of ‘public image’ might persuade an employer to tolerate the religious practices of predominant groups, while arguing ‘undue hardship’ and ‘image’ in forbidding practices that are less widespread or well known.” 29 The Court later explained that the decision in cases such as these was a difficult “balancing act” but they expressed concern about cases where “the balance appears to tip too strongly in favor of an employer’s preferences, or perhaps prejudices.” 30 The court opined that an “excessive protection of an employer’s ‘image’ predilection encourages an unfortunately (and unrealistically) homogeneous view of our richly varied nation.” 31 The judges also left a window for Brown to pursue his case further, noting that he had claimed a violation of a state law that resembled

Ibid, 22 Ibid. 27-28 30 Ibid., 31 31 Ibid. 31 28 29

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Title VII and suggesting that “state law may be more generous to [Brown] than federal law.” 32 A few months later, Brown filed suit in the Massachusetts Superior Court, alleging a violation of the state law that the District Court had mentioned at the end of their decision. 33 The Superior Court found against Brown but, on appeal, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts found in Brown’s favor. In doing so, they noted some distinctions between Brown’s case and the Cloutier case that the federal court used as precedent.

The Supreme Judicial Court noted that in Cloutier, Costco had presented the employee with numerous alternatives in an attempt to find a middle ground between the employee’s religious beliefs and their perceptions of professional dress for customer service employees. By contrast, Jiffy Lube merely told Brown to choose between his religion and his job. The Supreme Judicial Court also believed that if they interpreted every request for an exemption from a grooming code as an “undue hardship,” it would render ineffective the requirement that employers must make reasonable accommodations for their employees’ religious beliefs.

Citing the Federal Court’s concerns about the broad reading of Cloutier, the judges found that giving an employer the power to put public image above everything else, “would upset the balance between employer interests and employee needs that is built into” Title VII. 34 The Supreme Judicial Court explained that Jiffy Lube would have to prove an undue burden from accommodating Brown’s religious beliefs. This proof needed to be more than the consultant’s opinion, a few customer comment cards mentioning the grooming policy, and a general increase in sales after the policy was implemented. They reversed the Superior Court’s grant of summary judgement to Jiffy Lube and sent the case back for further proceedings. On July 28, 2010, the parties settled the case under unknown terms. 35 The decisions in Brown’s case are not just a chronological shift from when the Southern District Court of New York decided Rogers nor a

Ibid. 32-33 Brown v. F.L. Roberts & Co., 452 Mass. 674, Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, (December 2, 2008).

34 Ibid., 685 35 According to the Court records, this case was “Disposed by Agreement/Settled.”

However, the docket ambiguously shows that the Court dismissed the claim under a nisi order, which means that Brown failed to respond to a court order. Brown v F. L. Roberts & Co., Inc, Case No. 0680CV00132, Hampshire Superior Court, Massachusetts, (June 16, 2006) 32 33

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distinction between braids and dreadlocks. Over the last ten years, courts have repeatedly ruled against secular complaints about racial discrimination in the workplace while issuing decisions in favor of Rastafarians litigating similar issues. One of the most well-known secular cases is that of Chastity Jones, an African American female who submitted an electronic application for a job as a customer service representative with Catastrophe Management Solutions (CMS), a company in Mobile, Alabama that provides customer support to insurance companies with claims processing. 36 Most, if not all, of CMS’s business appears to be telephonic and electronic; they contact insured persons who have made catastrophe claims, communicate with insurance agents, explore whether insured persons have prior claims and track the process of the claims. 37 CMS invited Jones for an in-person interview, to which she appeared with her hair worn in short dreadlocks.

After a brief meeting with a representative, CMS hired Jones as well as several other people and gave them instructions about how to complete the necessary paperwork and lab tests before they could begin working.

Subsequently, Jones met with Jeannie Wilson, the company’s human resources manager, about a scheduling conflict she had with the lab tests.

As Jones was leaving the meeting, Wilson asked her if her hair was in dreadlocks. When Jones affirmed that they were, Wilson informed Jones that CMS would not hire her with dreadlocks because “they tend to get messy.” 38 Wilson cited a grooming policy that indicated that employees were required to be “dressed and groomed in a manner that projects a professional and businesslike image,” and that “No excessive hairstyles or unusual colors are acceptable.” 39 On behalf of Jones, the EEOC sued CMS for racial discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, alleging that CMS had committed racial discrimination when they refused to hire her with dreadlocks. In that lawsuit, the EEOC contended that dreadlocks were not only a common black hairstyle but that the very word originated during the Atlantic slave trade, when slave traders saw the natural locks that enslaved persons’ hair formed during the Middle Passage and referred to it as “dreadful.”40

EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, Case No. 14-13482, U.S Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, (December 13, 2016).

37 Catastrophe Management Solutions, “About Us,” https://catastrophemanagementsolutions.com/about-us 38 EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, 4.

39 Ibid., 5 40 Ibid., 5.

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Furthermore, aware of the long history of cases in which U.S. courts had denied claims of racial discrimination because hair was a “mutable” characteristic, the EEOC argued that race is not limited to immutable characteristics and that it should encompass cultural characteristics such as hair grooming. 41 They also emphasized that African Americans who refused to straighten or hide their natural hair were often stereotyped as unprofessional, troublemakers. 42 They stressed that “dreadlocks are a natural outgrowth of the immutable trait of black hair texture” and “that dreadlocks can be a symbolic expression of racial pride.” 43 The EEOC and Jones lost the case before both the District Court and the Eleventh Circuit Court, who reached their decisions based on similar rationales. The courts cited a series of previous cases where they had determined that Title VII does not apply when discussing something like long hair or language that the employee has the ability to change. 44 They also stressed that the EEOC didn’t argue that dreadlocks were an immutable characteristic of African Americans, but rather that they were a “natural outgrowth” of black hair texture. 45 Noting that “every court to have considered the issue has rejected the argument that Title VII protects hairstyles culturally associated with race,” the courts determined that hairstyles are not protected racial characteristics because they can be changed. 46 They acknowledged that the definition of race is far from uniform and that there was a growing trend to ask the courts to interpret culture as a part of race but the courts noted that there was no consensus that culture should be included and even if there was, it is unclear which cultural practices would be protected. Therefore, the courts determined that there was no viable claim under Title VII and CMS could lawfully rescind Jones’ job offer when she refused to change her hair. While Jones’ case seems to have put the proverbial nail in the coffin of further litigation about anti-dreadlock grooming policies being racially discriminatory, within a year of this decision, the EEOC settled a similar case in favor of a Rastafarian litigant.

Ibid., 6.

Ibid., 6.

43 Ibid., 9.

44 Ibid., 20-22.

45 Ibid., 25.

46 Ibid., 28.

41 42

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Between the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2013, a hospitality staffing company known as HospitalityStaff placed a Rastafarian male named Courtney Joseph at Shades of Green, a Walt Disney World resort hotel, as a prep cook. 47 In early February 2013, a Disney staff member conducted an inspection of the resort to ensure that all employees were complying with Disney grooming standards. Following this visit, HospitalityStaff told Joseph that he must cut his hair before he could return to work. Joseph refused, explaining that his religious beliefs would not permit him to comply. HospitalityStaff fired Joseph and Joseph filed a claim of religious discrimination with the EEOC. In 2017, HospitalityStaff settled with the EEOC, agreeing to pay Joseph $30,000 and to amend its employee handbook to allow for religious accommodations as well as to provide antidiscrimination training to its managers and human resources people. 48 The EEOC is also pursuing a similar case involving another Rastafarian contesting workplace grooming policies. On January 8, 2017, a 28-year-old Rastafarian named Guy Usher was approached by a recruiter while shopping on Publix Super Market in Nashville, Tennessee and encouraged to apply for a job. 49 That same day, Usher submitted applications for two positions (cashier and a produce clerk), and interviewed with the Assistant Store Manager, Kayla McKee. At the end of his interview, McKee explained that Publix has a grooming policy that prohibits men from having hair longer than their shirt collar, and told Usher that he would have to cut his hair. Usher replied to McKee that he would not cut his long dreadlocks because of his religion but offered to wear a hat to cover his hair. McKee said that she would follow up with the store manager about this request.

The following day, McKee offered Usher a position as a produce clerk or cashier; however, she advised that they could not accommodate his religious beliefs. Even after Usher suggested that this response might violate employment law, McKee insisted that he cut his hair. Usher accepted the position as a cashier and completed the mandatory drug screening the

47 EEOC, “HospitalityStaff Sued by EEOC for Religious Discrimination,” Press Release, July 12, 2016, available at https://www1.eeoc.gov//eeoc/newsroom/release/7-1216.cfm?renderforprint=1 48 EEOC, “HospitalityStaff To Pay $30,000 To Settle EEOC Religious Discrimination Lawsuit,” June 14, 2017, available at https://www1.eeoc.gov//eeoc/newsroom/release/614-17b.cfm?renderforprint=1.

49 Sarah DiNatale, “Publix Faces Federal Lawsuit Over Dreadlocks After Store Tells Rastafarian He Must Cut His Hair,” Tampa Bay Times, October 3, 2017.

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following day. A few days later, Usher called the store again and explained that he couldn’t cut his hair for religious reasons. During this call, Publix withdrew the job offer.

Usher filed a complaint with the EEOC, who filed a lawsuit against Publix on Usher’s behalf in September 2017, alleging that Publix’s refusal to accommodate Usher’s religious beliefs and rescinding its job offer constitutes religious discrimination. Publix responded to the EEOC’s claims with several vague claims including that it had “legitimate, nondiscriminatory, non-retaliatory reasons” for rescinding Usher’s employment offer that “were the result of reasonable factors necessary for business functions.” 50 They also asserted “Usher does not have a sincerely held religious belief.” 51 This case is still pending.

Part III: Conclusion As these cases demonstrate, a wide variety of companies have sought to restrict people of African descent from wearing dreadlocks and other hairstyles prevalent among persons with natural black hair. Even though litigants have shown that discrimination against black hair dates back to the Atlantic slave trade and that hair is an important source of pride in African diaspora communities, courts have refused to characterize hair discrimination as racial discrimination. Despite well-constructed explanations of the differences between black and white hair textures, with dreadlocks forming naturally from the former and being very difficult to grow with the latter, courts deny that hair is an essential characteristic of a race of people.

Rastafarians, on the other hand, have been successful in contesting these appearance policies. Courts have ordered employers to reconsider their job applications without regard to their long hair and beards, or instructed them to provide some type of accommodation to permit them to work in public service positions. This stands in stark contrast to secular cases, where courts have suggested that persons of African descent should simply change their hair to comply with their employer’s ideals of professional appearance. Even where forced to rule against Rastafarians,

“Answer,” Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Publix Super Markets, Inc., Case No. 3:17- CV- 01308, United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee (November 27, 2017), 3.

51 Ibid.

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judges have lamented that doing so seems the antithesis of the cultural diversity that should be respected.

This distinction is confusing, to say the least. A customer is highly unlikely to be able to distinguish between persons who wear dreadlocks for religious and secular reasons in the short interactions they would have with a delivery driver, an airline ticket counter representative or cashier. If allowing religious persons to have these hairstyles does not present an undue hardship, why would permitting secular wearers be so burdensome?

Furthermore, although Rastafarians may be one of the few faiths that actually prohibits followers from cutting their hair, for many people, particularly those of African descent, hair has become something spiritual or sacred—an extension of one’s physical being. As Eatman described in the case discussed above, this can be a strongly held personal belief that derives from the inherited trauma of slave owners cutting their ancestors’ hair. For others, it is an embodiment of the idea that natural blackness is beautiful and a rejection of oppressive standards of what appears “polished” or “professional.” 52 In the case of persons who have worn locks for a lengthy period of time, some have discussed a kind of phantom sensation or pain when the locks have been remove that is similar to that experienced by persons who have lost a limb. 53 Couple that with the staggering statistics about the profitability of the black haircare industry, which averages about $500 billion per year in the United States alone, and it becomes clear that for many in the African diaspora, these distinctions between sacred and secular hairstyles are meaningless. 54 Hair is spiritual, sacred, special—

Dawn Bennett-Alexander and Linda F. Harrison, “My Hair is Not Like Yours: Workplace Hair Grooming Policies for African American Woman as Racial Stereotypes in Violation of Title VII,” Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender 22 (2016), 438-440: discussing how the natural hair movement (the decision to not chemically or otherwise alter the texture of one’s natural hair to conform to mainstream standards of beauty or professionalism) is in conflict with many workplace grooming standards; M. Bahati Kuumba and Femi Ajanaku, “Dreadlocks: The Hair Aesthetics of Cultural Resistance and Collective Identity Formation,” Mobilization: An International Journal 3, no 2 (1998), 229-230: explaining how natural hair like afros, cornrows and dreadlocks became popular in the 1960s as “symbols for the Black Power movement by breaking away from the European hair hegemony and asserting an ‘African’ identity.”

53 Bryant Keith Alexander, “Phantoms, Amputations, and Mournings of Black Dreadlocks: Or Reentering the Barbershop,” Text and Performance Quarterly 34, no. 4 (October 2014), 413-414.

54 Bennett-Alexander and Harrison, “My Hair is Not Like Yours,” 438.

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deserving of much stronger protections that what the courts have afforded to secular litigants.

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ORI WORSHIP AND CARE

FOR WELL-BEING AND COLLECTIVE LIBERATION

VERDA OLAYINKA

Introduction

A

fricana philosophy is practical philosophy. Fusing ancient practices with modern times and updating ancient theology is what has kept African religions relevant, and none is more important than the cultivation of Ori in advancing the collective liberation of African descendants worldwide. challenging time we are in with COVID-19 and renewed attention on our nation’s racial fractures. Although these ideas center Yoruba philosophy, they apply to everyone universally, regardless of Western institutional religions or Eastern spiritual practices. 1 Application of Ori principles is both subtle and can provide extremely powerful results for the liberation of individuals, families, and communities. 2 The simple power of ori rests within each of us and the way we encounter one-another. There is a growing imperative for leaders of communities of practice to provide their practitioners of African Traditional Religions with subtle keys to enhance our prosperity. It is important to understand the aspects of Ori, which exist in perpetual motion through three lenses with each containing multiple spheres of influence – as many as the number of individuals and situations, which we encounter throughout our lifetimes. The first lens involves the Individual Self who prays to strengthen her/his Ori-Soul to maintain alignment with God and the Universe.

This paper was originally developed as a presentation for the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association (ADRSA) 2019 Conference: “Black Spirit, Black Power!

Africana Religions and Liberation.”

2 Much of the background concepts on Ori are taken from, (A. Olayinka, Ifa: Path to Enlightenment 2018) resulting from 20 years of research and classes taught by my late husband, Babalawo Ade Ifaleri Olayinka, (1939-2013). As his First Student, I edited and self-published his book, Ifa: Path to Enlightenment, posthumously, in order to preserve and propagate these unique esoteric concepts of Ifaism as they impact on our individual and collective destinies. A second edition is forthcoming. “Chapter 5: Ori” responds to the need for improvement of our individual and group activities to achieve well-being for our collective liberation.

1

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Individual bodies interact with the Ori of their Spouses, Siblings, Children, Friends, Co-Workers, Organization members, and people in general, within the second lens using continued vigilance to protect the Body-Ori from regressing through their potential negative engagement. The OriMental/Mind within the third lens acts as the shield and constant conscious reminder to care for Ori using gentle character and ethical behavior as we approach life’s challenges. In short, the three lenses represent all interactions involving Spirit, Body, and Mind.

Ori Philosophy, Worship, and Care In the philosophy of Ifaism, there are four basic aspects of Ori: Orima: The Unmanifest, Creation, close to Olodumare (GOD) Ipon Ori (Spiritual Head): The Higher Self (Soul) who lives in the spiritual realm Ori Inu (Inner Head): The Inner Soul plus the Mind, which merge allowing us to do what we do Ori Ode (Physical Head): Conscious Mind: We interact daily with ourselves and one another via the application and cultivation of awareness. (A. Olayinka 2018) Ori development and care applies to Everyday People. One doesn’t have to be initiated into or subscribe to a particular belief system.

Awareness of this great foundation and enlightened consciousness applies to all people. Until recently, the universal concept of Ori, in reference to Yoruba language and practice, has been obscured by Western social influence and domination. A Yoruba cultural interpretation of Ori provides Oye – Understanding which increases Imo – Knowledge that cultivates Ogbon – Wisdom to consciously manifest individual and collective ability to operationalize this subtle power within ourselves in our lifetimes.

Priests and Priestesses conduct ceremonies to assist individuals in following or adhering to their destinies in Yoruba traditional practice. A rogation is performed by Initiated Elders in order to “feed” the Ori. Individually, you can pray to your Ori to manifest only Ethical goals and aspirations. We may not pray to our Ori to do harm to someone else, harm a community, or to commit acts that are morally incorrect. If it is

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determined via divination, a ceremony to receive Orisha Ori may be conferred upon a Devotee.

Cultivation of Awareness: Developing the Conscious Mind – Ori Ode Cultivation of awareness is linked to the development of the conscious mind which triggers a slowdown of our spontaneous emotional reactions to people and events. (2018: 5) “Our problems are with each other. We have thousands of years where we just don’t get along with each other. We are not conscious enough, we are not aware to get along with each other.” 3The mind wants us to react with emotion. The Ori Ode of each individual is protected and remains intact and in an enlightened space when he or she becomes spiritually centered by mentally and physically slowing down.

Fela Sowande (1905-1987), a Nigerian musician, classical composer, and scholar received a grant from the Ford Foundation (19621965) to conduct research on Yoruba religion. The University of Ibadan published The Mind of a Nation: the Yoruba Child. 4 This became the source of the research on Ori presented by Dr. John Bolling, MD, Psychiatrist, Founder of the Mandala Center, Harlem, New York in his unpublished research paper, “Ori: The Personality/Character Soul and the Practical Inner Healer.” 5 He explained that each person’s Ori was made in the image of Olodumare (God). Most people in Western culture are not consciously aware of the presence of their own Ori. Awareness brings a person back from impatience to a state of patience. Bolling surmised “As we enter this new era, therapists/healers of African descent must, therefore become more aware of the role of the Soul as a vehicle of ethics, morals, and values in the therapeutic process. Understanding of this influence on the outcome of the healing process is critical.” 6

A. Olayinka, Ifa: Path to Enlightenment (New York: CCGr Publishing, 2018).

F. Sowande, The Mind of a Nation: The Yoruba Child (Ibadan, Nigeria: University of Ibadan, 1966).

5 John M. Bolling, “The Mind of a Nation: Personality/Character Soul and the Practical Inner Healer.” 3rd Orisha Conference (1986). New York: Unpublished Manuscript.

6 Bolling, 7.

3 4

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Five Stages of Awareness (As eclucidated by J. M. Bolling) 1. Having no feelings or conscious awareness towards Ori. 2. Involves active participation in the traditional religious life of the traditional community; devotees may receive an Ebo Ori or Rogation. Anyone may anoint his or her head with water for self-calming and relaxing.

3. Ifa or Orisha divination connects the Self of the one seeking solutions to life’s challenges to the alignment with his or her Ori. This procedure would elaborate more on the challenge of material welfare and not necessarily on the person’s spiritual development.

4. Ceremonies provide other opportunities as foundations for individual awareness for cultivation of Ori. a. Babalawos and Iyanifas can perform the Ikosedaye to get a peek into a Newborn’s destiny before the baby begins to walk. This would give the parents direction in bringing the child through life aware of certain expectations, ebos, or taboos for preventive and/or encouraged behaviors that would bring the child into a healthy adulthood. b. Ifa and Orisha Initiations allow Priests and Priestesses to cultivate Ori awareness during their period of training.

What was once before vague and hidden in the shadows of the invisible side of life, takes on a clearer shape, seen through the eyes of the Ori. c. Stage 4 is a considerable gradient beyond Stages 1 through 3 and with cultivation and development, provides the foundation for Stage 5.

5. The Apari Inu - internal Spiritual Head merges with Ori Apere – the sign of an individual’s personal Deity. This is manifested by their own lifetime accumulation of choices and actions of their own volition, that determined their Destiny.

In short, Ori relates to one’s Soul, links to a person’s Destiny, which impacts on her or his relationship to Olodumare - God and the Universe.

According to Dr. Bolling, Sowande elaborates on Level 5 with a caution: “He who would so qualify, will have great powers but he must also have

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learn(t) to control them; to use them only for the benefit of man; not for his own advancement or vaingloriusness; to heal and not hurt; [be] on the side of things of the Spirit; and not on behalf of the Powers of Evil. Above all, he must be ‘obedient’ to the ‘Ori’ Within.” 7 Lifetime Accumulation of Choices and Actions Everything we do has an impact on our Soul. The key for working with one another is to consciously make choices throughout our lives to honor and protect our own Ori. In Yoruba terms, a person can consciously become aware of Iwa-Character so that knowledge of one’s actions can positively affect the Soul. Ese – Legs support individuals to walk in the right direction and guide themselves to make the right choices in life to defeat Ojiji – the Shadow.

We each have to defeat the ojiji – or the negative aspects of consciousness in our lives. Emotions of hate, jealousy, envy, fear, anger, stealing, frustration, worry, violence, lying, deceit, control and manipulation, etc., prevent Ori cultivation. These emotions and actions fuel insecurity and doubt manifested by substance use, violence and similar physical, sexual, and emotional abuses directed very often at friends and family members who have close affinity to themselves. Mentally or physically abusive behaviors impact on mutual trust which block positive and productive relationships. People should develop a self-directed strategy as an alert to not allow themselves to be overcome by emotions that can trigger external negative thoughts, words and deeds toward family members, relatives, friends, co-workers, the general public or that which is observed via the media. Cultivate the use of personal power and control.

Weaver and Fabunmi provide us with contemporary clarity on the concept of character in the preface to Iwa Rere: Morality in Yoruba Traditional Religion (Weaver and Fabunmi 2016) as they call attention to the distinction between the social roles of the competitor versus those of an enemy. They speak of our existence: “In a society defined by a tradition of white supremacy, where one’s every prayer includes a wish to defeat an enemy that denies us a

7

Bolling, 20.

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place of honor and equality, that unjustly imprisons us and scatters our communities, that demeans us in media causing us to sometimes even hate ourselves, who wantonly kills us and our children as though we are not humans…” 8 Their instruction provides us with another key reinforcement for our mutual cooperation by reminding us that one of our greatest and most consistent prayers is for ire isegun ota, strength to defeat our enemies. Weaver and Fabunmi urge us to discern between one who is an enemy as opposed to a competitor or someone we just don’t like. “We should be sure to praise and to thank Olodumare – God and Orisha for the blessings of life and for the well-being of our families, our neighbors, and even of our competitors who are also Children of God.” 9 Caring for Ori: Individual, Family, and Community Well-Being for Collective Liberation In his October 2019 Newsletter, “Talk Freedom to the People: Framing Our Future in Struggle,” Dr. Maulana Karenga speaks to the “right and responsibility to be free from the deprivations of poverty and powerlessness; hunger and food insecurity; lack of access to clean water, air, and sanitation; homelessness and lack of affordable housing and healthcare; inferior and oppressive education; joblessness; official and unofficial violence; and alienation from people as fellow human beings…Help develop in them as Molefi Asante tells us, ‘the will and way to cultivate a victorious consciousness which resists and rejects any feelings of despair or fears of defeat.’” 10 Merging Individual and Community Silos According to the United States Census, there are more than 21,261,000 African Americans between the ages of 15 and 54 years living

Lloyd Weaver & A. Fabunmi, Iwa Rere: Morality in Yoruba Traditional Religion (New York: The Serengeti Network, 2016), 9.

9 Ibid, 10.

10 Maulana Karenga. “Speak Freedom to the People”. (October 3, 2019) 8

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in the United States. 11 Many are experiencing identical life challenges.

Families and neighbors do not have to suffer alone as if they were the only one/s going through these tremendous life challenges. People in our communities exist as if they were all alone and have illusions of being in total control of their lives within their narrow circles of influence – until they are hit by a social tragedy-Silo. Then what happens is that we keep it a secret and don’t tell anyone so there is no place to share experiences and come up with collective solutions-Silo. Our members of organizations think their agenda is the one and only way and people should join them and them alone-Silo. Let’s apply Ori consciousness to re-envision this reality merging all of the silos in our spheres of influence. Millions of people can merge with or form millions of organizations applying our collective knowledge and skills to address social solutions to create an impact by targeting the key tremendous challenges affecting us all. Community collectives can respond to mutual self-help objectives one for the other taking care to be vigilant and not be dissuaded by divide-and-conquer tactics.

It is important to encourage individuals to cultivate personal power and self-control while interacting with the Ori of Others. As spiritual leaders, we can develop within ourselves and coach individuals to consciously activate Alunyean – Choice. Choose to work with others of like mind to create positive actions by working together on a mutually agreed upon project in your local community. Watch the successful projects energize collective satisfaction as we engage in activities and work for mutual progress in our lives. Choose to coach and interact with family members and/or neighbors to plan safety strategies in case of climatic changes or other emergencies. Choose to merge one-on-one with significant others saying, “The Ori in me greets the Ori in you in peace and harmony. Let’s work out our differences in order to solve problems that affect us all.”

Consciously activate Akunlegba – Free Will to change personal direction from self-to group-intended activities for Community Well-Being.

United States Census Bureau. Current Population Survey: Annual Social and Economic Supplement, 2013.

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Priests and Priestesses can guide their Devotees to actualize their time to strategically plan and execute activities that lead to abundance through SelfDetermination. There is no single city or town that has exactly the same strategy. However, residents in each city know what plan would work best for them and how to make it happen. Still strategically focusing on Ori, we can operationalize our Free Will to encourage local groups to collaborate on challenging key issues. Collaboratives can expand to form CoOperatives. Not necessarily agreeing on everything, folks can execute Collective Ori Consciousness to arrive at a consensus of the majority in decision-making.

Community Well-Being A Gallup, Inc. definition of “community well-being” for the Tech Team Program at Virginia Tech University is described as, “The interaction and interdependence between many aspects of life, such as finding fulfillment in daily work interactions, having strong social relationships, and access to the resources people need, feeling financially secure, being physically healthy, and taking part in a true community.” They included emotional well-being to refine their objectives to improve the alignment of personal goals and strengths of people working together. 12 Individuals can activate their Collective Ori Consciousnesses to bring folks together to plan and execute social solutions for their communities. Elements of community well-being will emerge and foster long-term relationships for social change.

Ori Application Activates Kwanzaa Principles Dr. Maulana Karenga developed the “Seven Principles of Kwanzaa” as an activation tool for African Americans based on Kawaida, a theory of cultural and social change. As far back as 1980, Karenga called upon a “national vanguard that will develop the theory of struggle, teach it to the masses, mobilize and organize them around their own interests, and aid

G. Purdue, Great Jobs Great Lives: Gallop Purdue Index Report. Gallop, Inc. (2014; 2016).

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them in becoming self-conscious agents of their own liberation.” (Kawaida Theory: An Introductory Outline for Ourselves and History) For more than a hundred years, thousands of scholars have contributed to the great body of knowledge through their lifetimes of research and reflection as they changed European infused history and social science theory into absolute truths. Their teachings empowered many in self-determination to advance bravely and collectively as we shape our own destiny.

With fixity of purpose, we can operationalize activities for individual, family, and community well-being.

By applying our Collective Ori Consciousness evidenced by working together and achieving our goals and objectives, we can manifest the precious state of Atunwa – Rebirth of Character. This self-actualization fueled by Self-Determination will lead us to abundance. We will experience collective wealth in control of our Cooperative Economics via business and organization development. We own our own businesses and hire our own employees. We eliminate our need for externally-provided social services using our Creativity with the Purpose of taking care of Our Own. We have the skills to provide for Education, Health Services, Elder Care, and Our Own Children through Foster Care and Adoption. We develop Our Own products and commit to purchasing services and goods manufactured in Our Own communities powered by Collective Work and Responsibility. As a result of Faith and mutual trust, our Collective Ori Consciousness merges with God in mutual liberation as we Save-Our-Selves. Truly, in Unity there is strength. 13 Ori Cultivation as a Sankofa Model Ori Cultivation provides spiritual grounding of active engagement in the continued urgency for the social transformation of Kemetic/African descendants living in America. It serves as a “Sankofa” model for assisting, coaching, enhancing, and enforcing “Everyday People” to Save-Our-Selves by working together for our collective liberation.

Verda Olayinka, V. Scaling Up to Abundance. Retrieved from: http://www.pinealpinecones.com/article/scaling-abundance (August 2019)

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Sankofa is a concept popularly adapted by forward looking, culturally minded, Kemetic/African Americans to express a need to reach back using the knowledge and wisdom of our Kemetic past and apply it to present strategies for ensuring a positive future. The Sankofa symbol shows a bird picking up an egg from his back with its feet facing forward. There are substantial numbers of Akan Traditional African Religious practitioners living in America. “Sankofa symbolizes the Ghanaian West African Akan people’s quest for knowledge among the Akan with the implication that the quest is based on critical examination, and intelligent and patient investigation… To the Akan, it is this wisdom in learning from the past which ensures a strong future.” (Center 2019) Merging Ipon Ori Spiritual Head, with Ori Ode Physical Head and Ori Inu Mental Head to Ensure Collective Liberation Ori is powered by individual ethics, good character and corrective behavior. People who are not initiated into Ifa and/or Orisha practices can work to cultivate their Ori. We can stay on track to overcome obstacles and negative emotions using prayer and meditation emerging into enlightenment. Focus on principles and find your own techniques. When you meditate, you feed and develop your Ori. When you get insight, a cognition, or premonition, you are plugged into your Ori. We receive ire (good) back to ourselves as a result of our efforts and the Ori plays a role in this. Ori is about one’s soul, one’s relationship to God and the Universe.

Prayer to Ori from Odu Ifa Ogunda Meji Bi o ba maa lowo, If you want to have money, Bere lowo Ori re.

Inquire of your Head.

Bi o ba maa sowo, If you want to start trading, Bere lowo Ori re wo.

Inquire of your Head.

Bi o ba maa kole o, If you want to build a house, Bere lowo Ori re.

Inquire of your Head.

Bi o ba maa laya o, If you want a relationship, Bere lowo Ori re wo.

Inquire of your Head.

Ori mase pekun de.

Inner Spirit please do not shut the gate.

Lodo re ni mi mbo.

It is you that I’m coming to.

Wa sayee mi di rere.

Come and make my life prosperous.

Ase!

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At the time of death, the spirit drops the body. Baba Ade has spoken of this in his classes. “Some of you may remember our elders say that the soul has moved on or the soul will live forever. Life after death is a common belief worldwide. Karma and reincarnation are closely related in the Ifa philosophy.” 14 It is truly a blessing to be consciously connected to the soul before we drop our bodies.

We are here on Earth to cultivate ourselves in this training ground for spiritual development. Our spirits have a conscious objective to rise higher and higher by handling negative karma that was accumulated during our unconscious present and past lives. Spirits seeking elevation are encased in our bodies and have returned to this dimension to clean up their acts through us. As long as we have life there is time to work to develop spirit by consciously connecting with and caring for Ori. The Yorubas provide keys in their prayers that give us a deeper understanding and knowingness about Ori. 15 In the previous prayer the phrase, “Lodo re ni mi mbo” (It is you that I am coming to meet) speaks to this. When a person drops the body, the soul is there to meet him or her.

Spirit will get to rise to higher and higher planes based on its level of conscious Ori development during its lifetime. Or spirit may have to wait 3,000 years to return to this plane and again be tested based on the deeds and physical and spiritual development of the new body-person to begin its evolution, again. Each individual is responsible for that future.

We have an opportunity as humans walking the Earth to do good deeds, speak good words, have good thoughts, and help our fellow human beings. In the above prayer, the phrase, “Iwa ni mope” (My inner character is thankful) also provides a special key which is the cultivation of iwa – character. Life is a series of obstacles. As soon as you clear one hurdle or challenge, there is another to take its place.

John L. Bolling, M.D. developed A Manual of the Rites-Of-Passage to a Soul-Centered Worldview. He refers to transcendence as “the act of going beyond one stage of growth to the next higher stage of growth. 16

Olayinka, Ifa, 60.

Ibid, 51.

16 John L. Bolling, The Heart of Soul: An Africentric Approach to Psycho-Spiritual Wholeness, Vol. 1 (New York: Mandela Rising Press, 1990), 192.

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Transcendence is an act of going beyond what sometimes seems like insurmountable barriers and impossible problems in development to find a peaceful, creative, growth-oriented solution.” He describes the concept of ntu as a soul force, a healing model for growth, and defines it as “root word from the Bantu language group that is the nucleus of spiritual laws governing the relationships between people.” 17 Bolling suggests that a soulcentered community circle enables the healing growth process to the “group soul” which can benefit from the collective reciprocated knowledge via the gift of sharing. 18 This is an operational model to awaken the consciousness of the Ori Ode while interacting with others. Participating in similar activities allows individuals to apply Atunwa – the rebirth of character to compensate for deeds that took place prior to their time of Ori enlightenment.

Understanding of Ori cultivation enhances our ability to navigate ourselves using good character in this lifetime in preparation for the elevation of our spirits. As we understand how to embrace this pure reality, we can stay on track and overcome obstacles to our collective liberation simultaneously emerging into enlightenment. We can combine “our pulsating pineal pinecones by putting our heads together planning and executing greater visions and realities for our Selves, our Families, and our Communities.” 19 Ori is the personal divinity that is there for You and only You. As we work with one another on key projects for collective liberation, we will witness a positive change in one aspect of the social system result in a positive impact on the remaining interconnected parts. Active participation for individual, family and community well-being using techniques of Ori care and development can be reinforced with persuasive communication.

This collective intentional work of liberation should be seen as an emergence from becoming into being in the process of the doing. Ori consciousness will automatically morph into a positive attitude, affecting individual intention and bring about a visible change in everyone.

Ibid, 131.

Ibid, 143.

19 Verda H. Olayinka, Activating Social Solutions: Essential Keys to Progress (New York: CCGr Publishing, 2016).

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Evolution of Ori We can use the analogy to describe the relationship between Ori Consciousness and the Energy body. The Energy body can decide to go or stay. A lot of people enjoy the state of spiritual being especially if they were in pain or sick and made their transitions. The most important thing for people in life is to move with their spiritual bodies. Consciousness of the spiritual body will help a person to cultivate that and be able to step off into the Universe without fear.

In death, a person’s spirit drops his or her physical body. Baba Ade presented his students with this descriptive contemporary metaphor. Similar to a rocket, the spiritual body – shuttle (Ipon Ori) lifts off – detached from your effort and the things you tried to do in this life. The spirit goes as far as it can into space and the booster drops off. The platform of physical attachment is holding the booster of chi energy. The Ori Ode drops its physical body in the propulsion smoke accumulation of mess including anger, jealousy, frustration, fear, loss, insecurity, etc. The Ori Inu lifts off, detached from your efforts powered by the things you tried to do in life, impacted by character-Iwa, the legs-Ese, and the shadow-Ojiji – reinforced by self-control, Alunyean-choice, Akunlegba-free will and Atunwa-the rebirth of character. The Spirit goes as far as it can into Space and the Ipon Ori drops off and falls to Earth.

At the top, Orima, merges with God. Visualize yourself as separation and train your body into being one in the here and now.

Whatever you do, begin cultivating the energy force to prepare your Orima to lift off to leave this world to another world without fear. The goal is to help yourself and others rise and vibrate above the human deception and insanity on this planet in order to learn to live and work together in harmony with others. The Ori shrinks and weakens each time we offend another person in thought, word, or deed. It causes an inverse reaction to Ori development. Those who are spiritually aware will work to enhance their own Ori by reinforcing Ori praise through positive action. Personal and group Ori development improves actualization by breaking barriers that were set up to prevent our progress.

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Our most vivid example of Ori Activation took place in our living memory during and following the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. Our people witnessed mass “Collective Ori Activation” in our lifetimes for those who participated in or as television viewers witnessed the audio and visual experience of the Million Man March. The event was organized as a “Day of Atonement” by Minister Louis Farrakhan and members of the Nation of Islam on October 16, 1995. The organizers estimated attendance as between one million and one-and-a half million mostly, men and their sons, who prayed and asked God, Allah, Olodumare and each other for forgiveness as they physically and emotionally embraced one another. The television audience exponentially increases this number. The men were encouraged to become better husbands, fathers, sons, brothers and friends.

The significance of this event lies not only that the March occurred, but its lingering effects were documented, in my opinion, as the unexplainable decline in crime rates during the 1990s which have leveled off from the early 2000s to the present. National and local media reports documented this massive decrease in crime and attempted to rationalize elaborate reasons for this unexpected statistical reality. Taking a closer look, we find: “An additional conclusion from this analysis is that the simplistic accounts of why crime fell offered by so-called experts to the media can be quite misleading.” 20 “But the forces that drove the Great American Crime Decline remain a mystery. Theories abound among sociologists, economists, and political scientists about the causes, with some hypotheses stronger than others. But there’s no real consensus among scholars about what caused one of the largest social shifts in modern American history.”21 By 2014, the homicide rate was 4.5 per 100,000 people, and that was the lowest rate in at least 50 years. 2014 was really one of the safest years in the history of the U.S. 22 Crime may have begun to decrease in the early

Steven D. Levitt, “Understanding why crime fell in the 1990s: Four Factors That Explain the Decline and Six that Did Not,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18(1) (2004), 163-190.

21 M. Ford, “What Caused the Great Crime Rate Decline in the U.S.?” The Atlantic.

(April 15, 2016) 22 R. Florida, “The Great Crime Decline and the Comeback of Cities,” City Lab (2018, January 16).

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1990s, there was continued drastic trend in a downward direction from 1995, leveling off in early 2000s, with no significant rise beyond that point.

I contend that the “Million Man March” and its resulting “Power of Atonement” defined as “reconciliation after enmity or controversy” 23 resulted in immediate short- and long-term individual, family, and community effects as a result of the million plus mass treatments to the Ori Ode-Physical Head, Ori Inu-Inner Head, Ipon Ori-Spiritual Head – extending to Orima (Olodumare, Allah, God Almighty). An additional several million Kemetic/African Americans witnessed this spiritual encounter on live television. Essentially, this represents a cost effectiveness analysis 24 for our people resulting in the nationwide increase of QualityAdjusted-Life-Years (QALYs) for the 25 years since 1995. 25 The results of this statistical reality should assist us in having a positive self-image and reinforcing our ability to actualize life changes for ourselves. They explain the reason for recent overt social aggression, physical violence, and fear fueled by waning white supremacy and false perceptions of white privilege negatively impacting the well-being of our people. We can change the conversations between and amongst us inculcating Ori care and consciousness as we collectively, improve our lives by increasing our awareness and looking out for each other regardless of religious practice.

I wrote Activating Social Solutions: Essential Keys to Progress to provide ideas for Kemetic/African Americans to Save-Our-Selves by empowering the role of Change Agents who might form or become members of Social Solutions Groups for individual, family, and/or community well-being. Readers would explore the socio-historical intersecting dynamics in the social sciences and their relevance to our everyday lives. Nationwide, Sons and Daughters of Kemet living in America are encouraged to work together with people they already know, or those with similar interests, to change or remove the social barriers that confront them in their own communities, cities, or states.

T. Nas, Cost Benefit Analysis: Theory and Application. (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996), 2-3.

25 Ibid, 189-90.

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Individual immersion in digital environments can become another barrier to folks meeting in safe spaces, acting and participating in activities that reinforce social change. We can train Ori Ode-the conscious mind-to trigger awareness – to take an “e-break” allowing time and attention to do the necessary work with real people to fulfill the planned objectives.

Knowing, understanding, and applying techniques in Ori worship and care immediately aid in our spiritual upliftment and total liberation.

Conclusion We have the ability to use Ifa / Orisha divination and counseling to guide this Ori Way of Being using conscious awareness of the ways in which we interact with each other. We can operationalize forgiveness overcoming the contradictions and trappings of our self-projected hatred, deception, fear, aggression, jealousy, envy, insecurity, etc. We are now able to adapt ourselves to challenge this new socio-economic urgency by walking a different path collectively, reinforcing our well-being. Everyone has the ability to embrace this new truth within ourselves and utilize this powerful ancient practice of Ori worship and care to strengthen our spirits, using mental control and focus, as we go about our daily tasks while incorporating active involvement in our collective liberation.

We will maximize mass participation powered by conscious acceleration and infusing our collectively super charged Ori into hyperdrive. We will break social barriers with quantum leaps forward and bring our total liberation into warp speed. We will preserve generations of our melinated DNA for countless millennia. We will ensure the “AfroFuturistic” reality of our place in the universe for all time.

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CONTRIBUTORS Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones is Assistant Professor of Theology and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College Danielle Boaz is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and founder of the International Coalition to Combat Religious Racism Khytie K. Brown is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Texas, Austin Diana A. Burnett is an American Council of Learned Societies Leading Edge Fellow at the Kairos Center for Religion, Rights, and Social Justice Meredith Frances Coleman-Tobias is Assistant Professor of Religion at Mt. Holyoke College James Manigault-Bryant is Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Anthropology and Sociology and Religion at Williams College Verda Olayinka is Principal Partner at Cultural Consultants Group, LP Ashley Coleman Taylor is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Texas, Austin

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