Aaron Robertson – a literary critic, translator, essayist, journalist, and all-around public intellectual – has amassed a prodigious output in recent years. A frequent fixture in the pages of the better little magazines and the glossies alike, he has written on an extraordinarily wide range of topics in just as wide a range of genres. His 2019 translation of the Somali-Italian novelist Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon (2008) was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award. He has profiled Afrofuturist artists for The Detroit Metro Times, analyzed the racial theories of contemporary and historical Italian fascists for n+1, translated the Ethiopian memoirist Martha Nasibù for a small press anthology, covered the gentrification of upper Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood for the New York Times, elegantly attacked Italy’s successive right-wing governments in Foreign Policy, eruditely surveyed African-American folklore for The Nation, and written an extremely underrated and profound meditation on the parallels between medieval sainthood and Black Lives Matter in the Los Angeles Review of Books. He was also a judge on the 2024 International Booker Prize committee. Despite its variety, Robertson’s work is united by recurring themes: a humanistic tenderness towards the varieties of social types and personal experiences, an internationalist sensibility rooted in world literature and culture, the rediscovery of lost Black literary and political traditions, antifascism, and an interest in religion motivated in no small part by the loss of it.
His first book, The Black Utopians, was released earlier this year after beginning its life as essays in The Point. At once a work of history, memoir, and political philosophy, The Black Utopians weaves together stories from Reconstruction to the present day of communities that sought to create for themselves what would never be handed to them in America: the conditions for a dignified and flourishing life. Earliest in the chronology is the story of a little-known town in rural Tennessee, Promise Land, which was founded by freedmen in the decades after the Civil War and managed, miraculously, to escape racial violence from its white neighbors and sustain itself at a high quality of life well into the twentieth century. It was also the home of Robertson’s ancestors on his father’s side, until his grandparents moved to Detroit toward the end of the Great Migration. Between these historical chapters, Robertson continues the family story into the present, interspersing heartwrenching letters from his formerly imprisoned father Dorian that reflect on his life, his faith, his regrets, and the uncertain fate of Black Americans. At the center of the book is the city of Detroit, Robertson’s hometown. He is particularly intrigued by the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a little-known Black Christian Nationalist church in the city led by the charismatic Rev. Albert Cleage, Jr. The Shrine – which was explicitly inspired by socialist communal models for collective child-rearing and cooperative economics – was famous locally for its enormous painting of the titular Black Madonna, a beautiful depiction of the Virgin Mary and Christ as Black people. Robertson uses the Shrine as a thematic hub, following the trail of many disparate and fascinating individuals who wandered through it at one point or another. The excerpt that follows is the picaresque tale of Glanton Dowdell, the troubled working-class painter of the Black Madonna mural who spent much of the 1930s wandering the underbelly of Depression-era America.
~ Editors
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Detroit’s poor, overcrowded Black Bottom neighborhood,1 Jeremy Williams, “The Rise and Fall of Black Bottom” (master’s thesis, Prescott College, 2011); Jeremy Williams, Detroit: The Black Bottom Community (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2009); Darlene C. Conley, “Driven and Pursued: Black Migrant Detroit— An Analysis of the Neighborhoods Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, 1916–1968” (master’s thesis, Morgan State University, 2016) which in the early 1950s would become one of the country’s first casualties of urban development, was a place where liberal dreams of gradual progress languished and died. It was here that the artist Glanton Dowdell was born in 1923 to parents who came up from Georgia during the first wave of the Great Migration. Today, outside of the Shrine of the Black Madonna, Glanton is remembered mainly by a small number of historians, art collectors, and surviving family members, along with a dwindling pool of black nationalists who knew him in the 1960s and ’70s and an indeterminate number of people in Sweden, where he fled into exile in 1969 and lived until his death in 2000. In Europe, he became an international symbol of the black American revolution and a testament to the unceasing fight against fascism, imperialism, and capitalism around the world.
Like many other figures associated with the Shrine, Glanton Dowdell is largely absent from histories of America’s countercultural and black liberation movements. His brief association with Albert Cleage, Jr., in the waning years of the 1960s shaped black nationalist activity in Detroit when the city was a focus of national attention following the 1967 rebellion. When Glanton painted the Detroit Shrine’s chancel mural of a Black Madonna and Child earlier that year, he created one of the most galvanizing images to come out of the black counterculture. The painting became the symbol of Cleage’s Black Christian Nationalist movement, giving generations of black people a visual point of reference for a new conception of themselves.
Glanton was not a God-fearing member of the Shrine, but he used the church as a springboard for finding his place in the wider world. When he realized that the black revolutions in his own country were foundering, he chose to go elsewhere. The utopian’s dilemma has always been whether to fall in line for the sake of the group or to prioritize the sanctity of one’s own needs. Glanton became the archetypal fugitive who saw, or forced himself to believe, that many paths were available even when fortune did not seem to favor him.
As I tried to piece together Glanton’s story from the traces he left behind—an unfinished memoir,2 Glanton Dowdell’s untitled, unpublished manuscript was shared with me by one of his daughters, Anna Simoni. My recreation of Glanton’s childhood years wouldn’t have been possible without this remarkable account. his many portraits of black life, his family and friends in Europe and the United States, and a mural that expanded the meaning of the sacred for scores of black people—I found that his biography at times defied conventional notions of truth and fiction. He told lies to hide himself. He was determined to stay off any kind of map I could easily read. In Black Bottom, where Glanton was raised by his mother and grandmother, Ruby and Annie, he had to choose whether to stay or to leave. When he chose to run, he was not racing toward something better, just something different than what he had known.
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In one of Glanton’s earliest memories, a white doctor who employed his mother, Ruby, parked a Cadillac in front of their tenement on St. Antoine and Palmer with a dead black bear splayed across the hood. Without delay, Grandmamma Annie ordered Ruby’s boyfriend and another tenant to bring it up three flights of stairs. Children followed, squealing and prodding the beast. Other men puffed on cigarettes as they watched. By the time Annie’s helpers brought the bear through a narrow hall onto a back porch, she had already laid down sheaves of newspapers. Glanton sat silently atop a box out of the way as the men hung the bear from its hind legs while his grandmother and a bevy of women tied their hair and aprons. Annie removed a set of knives from flannel wrap. The women sliced between the animal’s hide and flesh. Its innards plunked onto the covered floor. All parts but the head and paws were boiled in massive black pots, jarred, and distributed to neighbors. Glanton and the other kids played outside in the meantime, caping themselves with the bloody bear hide and riling the dogs.
with permission from Dowdell’s family, http://www.glantondowdell.org/img/workingonthemadonna.jpg
Glanton would remember the smells of kerosene, camphorated oil, and burning coal in his childhood home, as well as the scratching of the mean rat hordes that pulsed behind walls and under floorboards. Lovett Dowdell, Glanton’s father, had come to Detroit from Americus, Georgia, to work in a car factory. Long before the stock market crash, Lovett enjoyed one of the best jobs a black man could have at the time before he received a notice of dismissal. Smallpox killed him in 1924, nine months after Glanton was born.
Annie had come up from Okefenokee in southern Georgia to watch the baby as his mother toiled in other people’s homes. She quickly made their white frame house into a waystation for migrants from small Georgia towns who were looking for work, food, or lodging in one of the Midwest’s industrial cities when there was little of any of that for black folk. Family from Cordele, Americus, and St. Petersburg sent up the crated hogs and citrus that turned their home into a soup kitchen, along with the hundred-pound sacks of cornmeal, flour, and beans that Ruby’s boyfriend retrieved from who knew where.
Although it was not true, the boy thought his grandmother was old enough to have witnessed the Jubilee celebrations of the newly emancipated. She was a midwife who sheltered battered wives and a healer who took in survivors of botched abortions. Eventually, the family sent for Annie’s elder sister, Sarah, bringing her up from Okefenokee as her mind declined. Sarah shouted questions in one room and shuffled into another to answer them. Lodgers watched without knowing how to help or what to say as Annie wrung out her fouled bedsheets, set a bath, and scrubbed her down under the glow of a lamp like she would also do for the boy
The stories Annie told Glanton about Okefenokee sometimes made the town sound like heaven on earth, but also pointed to what he later described in his memoir as “the ever present horror just beyond the borders of our peaceful and vulnerable we-group.” When Glanton was small, Annie often held him on her hip, which would one day make him think of Auguste Rodin’s powerful sculptures. She poked ashes around in the early morning to rekindle fires, sewed buttons on the boy’s clothes, snapped beans, plucked chickens, and in a darkened room smoked tobacco that she had somehow scavenged during the daytime when Glanton could have sworn she was doing other chores.
In these years of lack, Ruby would powder her face and put on lipstick and mascara for the rent parties she went to with her man Sam. Draped in a black floral kimono or a hand-me-down dress from one of her employers, she looked forward to dancing the Charleston and the Mess Around. Rhinestones framed her wrists, amber hung from her ears, and when Glanton told his mother how pretty she was, she looked at him hard before her coolness warmed. Ruby’s beauty and Annie’s ability to multiply fishes and loaves blinded Glanton to the fears of adults who huddled around stoves outside and stared at nothing.
The boy was known to ride the trolley past Hastings Street’s shopfronts. As a seven-year-old, he had memorized the faces of prostitutes and turned over in his mind the still life of a dead man on the sidewalk. The thought of getting home too late—walking past neighbors who shouted, “What he need is a killin’!”—made his backside sting in anticipation of a plaited clothesline. Most of Glanton’s days were spent trying to avoid the wrath of someone who loved him too much to let him rip and roar without consequence. He made games out of slipping away from Annie’s near-omniscient gaze, Ruby’s concerned rages, and the hard scrub brush and P&G soap used to wash away the dirt from his skin. For a while, he did not think about leaving Black Bottom. The neighborhood had given him so much. It was “this wondrous, geographical ribbon [that] shielded me, nourished me.” Where was there to go? For now, all he knew were the aromas of hoecakes and moonshine tonic, the sight of mattresses swollen with urine and chinches.
In the alleys, men whom Glanton called “shadow people” played craps. The boy had a vague sense that the things these men talked about—pink slips, layoffs, breadlines, evictions—were what had made them shadows in the first place. He was hearing these words frequently around the winter of 1931, when diphtheria, scarlet fever, and consumption galloped through the neighborhood. Before he was ten years old, Glanton knew how to maneuver small coffins as a pallbearer for children struck down by polio and spinal meningitis. There were kids all over the place who limped as they played and raced even though they were fitted with braces. Annie made Glanton wear an asafetida necklace. When he became deliriously ill with pneumonia, he was treated with potions, alcohol baths, and the laying on of hands by people his family helped feed. Black Bottom lost some of its communal mother wit when the Depression came.3 E. Franklin Frazier, “Some Effects of the Depression on the Negro in Northern Cities,” Science & Society 2, no. 4 (1938): 489–99. People sank into lonely foxholes. Booze was “twisting and contorting an almost unbearable reality into something not quite as severe, not quite so final,” Glanton remembered, keeping the illusion of a horizon alive by blurring everything else, including the road one had to follow to get there.
That distant horizon did not guarantee a better tomorrow. It wasn’t so much a destination as a thing “abstract and awful [which] was hovering menacingly overhead and approaching.” By 1933, Glanton had learned from listening to adults talk in barbershops, in front of pool halls, on the corners, and around the kitchen table that the loss of one’s livelihood caused a contagious grief in the “we-group” of Black Bottom. Glanton was ten years old, but he had no more time for clipping out Lucky Bucks from the Sunday kiddie comics. To earn real money, he sold bottles, copper wire, rags, aluminum, and brass to junk dealers. He and the other black boys watched the hustlers at Eastern Market ply their trade and became their informal apprentices. They carried grocery bags, cleaned around the stands, loaded produce, and scrapped with immigrant boys over turf. Glanton brought home as much as seven dollars on weekends.
The money from hustling was more of a constant in these years than some of the people who came into the boy’s life. He met a solitary, twenty-one-year-old factory worker named Virgil, who moved into his family’s building. Virgil kept his flat clean. His wavy hair was parted to the side in a way that made him look like Joe Louis. He played the blues on his guitar for Glanton, singing “Balling the Jack” and “My Blue Heaven.”
There was a black cop—a “coon killa”—who stalked the tenements after white men gave him a badge. The cop had heard that Virgil was handing out union literature in front of the River Rouge factory4 Elizabeth Esch, The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Charles Williams, “The Racial Politics of Progressive Americanism: New Deal Liberalism and the Subordination of Black Workers in the UAW,” Studies in American Political Development 19, no. 1 (2005): 75–97; Joyce Shaw Peterson, “Black Automobile Workers in Detroit, 1910–1930,” The Journal of Negro History 64, no. 3 (1979): 77–90. and came by telling him to publicly burn the pamphlets. With Glanton watching in the room with him, Virgil refused. He tried to run. Two shots in the back from the cop’s revolver sent him the rest of the way down the tenement stairs. During the funeral service at Bethel AME, Glanton asked himself what kind of man Virgil must have been for white autoworkers and their wives to come weep beside blacks. What did those pamphlets say?
An aura of foreboding enveloped Glanton. He wondered aloud to Annie whether he was a soothsayer. “I get a feelin’ somethin’ gon’ happen ’fore it happens,” he told her. “Honest.” His prophecies spoke to a limited set of outcomes that were more obvious to those with limited choices. It was a dubious gift. The boy reached an age when Annie felt she needed to remind him that suffering was not his unique cross to carry. She told him about the white men back in Georgia who had mutilated the genitals of her second husband for refusing to give away their beloved mule. This miserable image haunted Glanton. It was all he could think about for a time. He was eleven years old. He needed a new way of measuring the worth of a life beyond the fact of mere survival.
~
There was once a time when Glanton believed in God. He remembered kneeling as a boy, clasping his hands together, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and arguing with an invisible presence. One Sanctified Right Reverend in Black Bottom, a small bald man who was always chewing on the food stuck between his gold teeth, heard that the boy could paint. His family had encouraged this skill in him. Even Ruby’s boyfriend brought him paper and pads for him to draw his favorite movie characters—Popeye, Felix the Cat, and the cowboys played by the actor Tom Mix. A half dozen neighbors would crowd into Ruby’s bedroom to admire his artistry.
The Right Reverend asked if the boy could paint a crucified Christ above his altar. For sixty bucks, Glanton figured he could. The sour face the reverend made at the thought of paying the boy a commission gave him his model for Christ’s agony. The Right Reverend was a jackleg who almost succeeded in scamming Glanton out of his money, until Ruby’s boyfriend intervened.
Someone would need to prime the wall with white paint first and bring him brushes, linseed oil, cans of paint, turpentine, and scaffolding. He worked a week of school nights, drawing, scaling, and enjoying the time alone. When the Crucifixion was done, one woman hung a veil over the mural until the next Sunday morning, when the covering came down with a rush of amens and tambourine jangles. It isn’t clear whether Glanton made his own Christ black. How many of the congregants knew about the mural Marcus Garvey had enshrined during a canonization ceremony at Harlem’s Liberty Hall a year after the boy was born, in 1924?5 “Black Church Head Talks ‘Black’ God from White Ritual,” New York Age, August 9, 1924. See also E. David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955). That image showed a black Christ and Virgin Mary, giving weight to a claim that the AME bishop and black nationalist Henry McNeal Turner made in a 1898 sermon: “Every race of people who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or any other form or figure, have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves, and why should not the Negro believe that he resembles God?”6 Melbourne S. Cummings, “The Rhetoric of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner,” Journal of Black Studies 12, no. 4 (1982): 457–67. For more on Bishop Turner, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: University of Oxford Press, 1978); Tunde Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).
Glanton’s work on the mural brought neighbors to his home with pictures of their newborns and their dead, seeking portraits of their own. One middle-aged man whose daughter died suddenly at eighteen invited Glanton to accompany him to the mortuary for a session. The boy would have to use the only picture the father had of her as a reference, taken when she was nine, to imagine her light brown eyes. Glanton was only a child. He wanted to help the man and was not afraid of the dead, but he grew uneasy at the thought of using a corpse as his model. Almost more nauseating was the prospect of telling the father no, when a cardinal rule of his upbringing had been, he wrote, “to do any and everything within reason to ease the suffering of those in mourning.” It was decided that a photographer would capture the daughter’s face in her casket, giving him a model to work from. An image was nothing if not a bridge, a transitional stage between the imagination and lived reality.
~
One of Glanton’s downstairs neighbors, a fifteen-year-old girl, was surrounded one day by a dozen mourners after her two-month-old daughter was discovered dead in her crib. The bite marks and discolored bloating were the horrid work of rats. Neither Black Bottom’s slumlords nor Detroit’s board of public health were going to do anything about the rodents, so the community organized the Great Rat Hunt in vengeance.
The boys reveled in blood sport, pushing nails into broomsticks after church one Sunday and goring the rats for two cents apiece. Or they held them over small fires so that the fetid roasting stench brought the other rats screaming out of the houses into an open trap. Dogs lunged. The boys speared and clubbed. The girls watched in contentment and most of the adults, though shaking their heads, did not protest.
A circle of neighborhood women cornered the shop owner who was paying the boys to deliver dead rats into a wooden barrel behind the barbershop. They demanded that he stop encouraging Glanton, one of the most zealous exterminators. Glanton did not forgive the women for taking away his livelihood. From the rat hunt’s proceeds, he had been able to buy himself a BB gun, silk stockings for Ruby, a new pipe for Annie, and a cigarette lighter for Sam.
Ruby thought her son, with his bony body, ashy knees, and possum laws, was becoming half-rabid. She knew he scrounged through garbage and sold coal that the boys stole from freight cars, tossing as many pounds as they could into gunnysacks. His grades in school were suffering, but he had many skills—an acrobat’s agility, an artist’s attentiveness. None of them, his teacher said, were especially useful.
Tales like “The Ballad of Casey Jones” and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn lost their mystique for Glanton as he began embarking on his own journeys. He caught rides for fun on freight cars going to the glass factory on the Detroit River. The formula was easy: ride, jump off when it felt right, walk back home. One day the train started moving too fast. Glanton could not leap down, so he stayed on top as the locomotive left familiar places behind and rattled past “vast industrial complexes that spewed smoke and fire.”
The speed of the journey peeled the ghetto from Glanton’s eyes and replaced clapboard houses with a landscape of farms and tree-studded fields. Daylight submitted to the dark. The train stopped hours later in Chicago’s Central Yard. Uncertain of how to get home, he tried another train only to push deeper south into Illinois, to East St. Louis. Blacks in the train yard’s tent city,7 Nathaniel Mills, Ragged Revolutionaries: The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). the Jungle, advised him not to go to the police unless he was willing to risk the workhouse.
The Jungle was the only place many of its inhabitants were allowed to live without being harassed by the authorities. The encampment had its share of troubadours, vaudevillian comics, and jig dancers. Glanton’s no-hands backward flips were celebrated here much like his drawings were back home. He overheard some blacks and whites in the Jungle speak reverently of one place—the “new world” of California—where “lodging was provided, and even if not, the weather was warm and sunny all year round with grapes and citrus fruit growing up by the side of the road.” Those who could make it past railroad detectives, vigilantes, and the police could find themselves under the protection of the Associated Farmers of California. Their pamphlets of smiling field workers8 Carey McWilliams, “California Pastoral,” The Antioch Review 2, no. 1 (1942): 103–21; Clarke A. Chambers, California Farm Organizations: A Historical Study of the Grange, the Farm Bureau, and the Associated Farmers, 1929–1941 (1952; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022); Nelson A. Pichardo, “The Power Elite and Elite-Driven Countermovements: The Associated Farmers of California During the 1930s,” Sociological Forum 10, no. 1 (1995): 21–49 promised work for every able-bodied person.
No one starved in California, the boy thought, not heeding the warnings of travelers who passed through the Jungle on their way east. They said California was “a land of slavery and betrayed hope” where the Associated Farmers—nothing like the union that Virgil had advertised outside River Rouge—made women and children into widows and orphans. Glanton did not think about how many people were trying to reach Detroit as hard as he was now trying to leave it behind. He had not wanted much until he left Black Bottom, and he hadn’t meant to leave.
“If there were riches to be got in California, and my folks were as poor as they said,” Glanton later wrote, “I’d be less than a man-child not to pull my weight.” A man-child was someone who left home with good intentions and didn’t know the way back. A concerned young mother in the Jungle promised Glanton that she would send Ruby the letter he wrote for her: Mother, the people here say there is a lot of money to be made in California. I know we need money so I am going out there to make some. The woman tried telling him, “California ain’t goin’ nowhere, and you got plenty time to grow up and get there,” but he and many others in the camp were too far gone in their reveries. Glanton had been there only a few days.
Jungle children from Tennessee, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania whose fathers died from black lung, consumption, and mine explosions were, like the adults, riveted by “visions of the Garden of Eden to be found in California.” Communing with dispossessed farmers and industrial laborers, Glanton adopted their fantasies as his own. “This crackling enthusiasm was a self administered placebo against the onslaught of hopelessness. Instead, I became infected with the dream and drawn into a not very wise commitment.”
A man named Zeke, who volunteered to accompany Glanton as he also went west for a job he didn’t yet have, hoped that the journey would show the child something. “You will soon learn, boy, not too late, I hope, that everything that’s said isn’t necessarily so.”
From a rail yard, Zeke and Glanton spotted their freight train as it bore out of the east, blowing black smoke into a purple sky. Once Zeke helped Glanton into an empty boxcar, the boy had to square the exhilaration of independence with pangs of homesickness. They shared a car with a white boy around Glanton’s age who had fled an orphanage in Delaware after he had been beaten and sterilized. Was this what bred amity between the races? Union literature and universal misery that always seemed to be running away from itself? Glanton and the boy mused about where they were going and imagined “unlimited opportunities in a state that needed bodies.” They watched the plains and mountains go by. Eventually, Glanton cradled his head between his knees and slept.
~
He suddenly felt the warmth of floodlights. Another train yard. Men charged the tracks with clubs, axe handles, and shotguns. Glanton scrambled out of the freight car to hide beneath a truck. Where were Zeke and the white boy? A flashlight on his face and a round of kicks to his side convinced Glanton that this was not a dream. First there was a paddy wagon and then, in a strange building, Glanton was sprinkled with white powder. It had something to do with the spreading of lice.
He sought an explanation from the kind but distant nursing staff. Had he made it to California? Yes, though not exactly the land of his dreams. He was in Los Angeles, in a holding center for vagabond children. Those whose families could not be found would be placed in foster homes. Fortunately, Glanton knew his address by heart, even if he did not know the route home. There was nothing to do except send him back east. Now he was like one of the travelers who had warned the Jungle’s dreamers. On the four-day bus ride home, one of the drivers referred to Glanton as a runaway. Glanton didn’t believe this was true. Runaways fled hell. He was racing toward paradise.
When he returned to Detroit, dozens of Glanton’s neighbors met him at the bus station. There was no shouting, only relieved tears. Glanton was surprised to learn that a letter to Ruby from the young mother he had met in the Jungle was sufficient insurance against his family’s wrath. The letter explained everything the boy was trying to do for his loved ones. They now asked one thing of him: to accept the Lord as his personal savior so that, should he ever decide to do something so stupid again, he would at least be in God’s hands. That Sunday, the pastor preached a sermon on the Prodigal Son, impressing upon the once-lost child that “just as the family is a collection of single souls, so is our community a collection of single families.” Annie put it in more vivid terms during the service. She told Glanton that the finger which is cut off from the hand will rot even as the hand heals.
“I just wish to say to you all that the truth is right at the end of your arms,” the pastor cried. “When vanity, greed and folly tempt you to leave the circle of family, church and community—to leave the hallowed circle of loved ones, look to your hand and remember the profound words of Sister Annie.”
Glanton quit vagabonding. He fell in with some of the older kids who stole meat from the delivery trucks outside butcher shops. They had seen Glanton’s little scrawny self run and knew nobody could catch him. Could he distract a driver long enough for the others to strip the truck of its contents? Sure. Over time, the boys stole hundreds of dollars’ worth of prime beef. The Russell Street Gang met in the attic of a yellow frame house where they smoked and played dominoes. Hanging around the older boys yielded luxuries Glanton had never known: salami loaves, smoked hocks, cans of corned beef. Bullies at school stopped teasing and then avoided him altogether. Most children did, in fact, including Glanton’s friends. Their families barred them from spending any more time with a boy who must have been up to no good with that thieving ragtag.
In 1938, the same year Albert Cleage, Jr., accepted that social work would never fundamentally improve conditions in Detroit’s ghettoes, Glanton was fifteen and growing fiercer. When a white man raped an eleven-year-old neighborhood girl, Glanton found him and stabbed him with an ice pick. There was enough blood to scare the boy into thinking he had killed a grown man. The scene reminded him of the Great Rat Hunt. Ruby wiped the white man’s blood from Glanton’s face and neck with a wet towel at the kitchen table. Given the seriousness of what he’d done, she was being uncharacteristically tender.
~
Glanton stopped thinking of his robberies as criminal. “By now I instinctively knew that the game rules known as laws were conceived to provide me and mine with a crippling handicap. Maneuvering through, around and over these restrictions entailed risks, but risks, for me, were a fact of life.” He was sitting on an unusable war chest of more than one thousand dollars, money that may as well have been Lucky Bucks since no one in his household would have knowingly let him spend the ill-gotten cash on them.
In his barbershop, Glanton heard about the National Negro Congress,9 Lawrence S. Wittner, “National Negro Congress: A Reassessment,” American Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1970): 883–901; John Baxter Streater, Jr., “The National Negro Congress, 1936–1947” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1981). which the Socialist labor advocate A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was leading. One brother in the barbershop shared NNC literature with Glanton and brought him to a local chapter meeting where, to the boy’s surprise, young white immigrants from Europe were in attendance alongside blacks. The reading material Glanton had been given had the same magical effect as Virgil’s union pamphlets.
Did the boy’s Communist sympathies begin here?10 Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Communist Party members made up a small part of the NNC. A. Philip Randolph criticized Party leaders as opportunists who were often insensitive to the racialized struggles of black Americans, and he would leave the organization in 1940 over concerns that Communist ideology was incompatible with the organic growth of black mass movements. Initially, however, he wanted the NNC to be a popular front for blacks of many political persuasions, including Communists, so long as the pursuit of black civil and economic rights was their priority.
Did Glanton hear one of the trade unionist brothers call for robust unemployed councils, the passage of a federal anti-lynching bill, collective bargaining rights, or a shift in the tax burden from the poor to the rich? Would he have learned that his neighbors dreamed about the creation of a Farmer-Labor Party, consumer cooperatives where people could “buy black,” a declaration of rights for black Americans, or an interracial coalition against the creep of fascism?
For at least the last ten years, ever since the black Bolshevik Harry Haywood called for global black self-determination at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, some black Americans from the Cotton Belt to the Manufacturing Belt started to see themselves as members of an oppressed and functionally separate nation within the United States.11 Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1948); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). The competing appeals of Communists and Garveyites for solidarity across ethnic, geographic, and class lines captured their imaginations. One day, Glanton would embrace the belief that a workers’ revolution led by an enlightened avant-garde could eliminate fascism around the world.
He would not fully appreciate what the National Negro Congress was fighting, though, until 1939, when he was sent to the Boys’ Vocational School in Lansing, Michigan. After robbing the reception desk of a theater, Glanton had attempted to make a getaway. An old acquaintance from elementary school spotted him the moment he hailed a taxi. With time running out before he was discovered, Glanton hurried the boy into the taxi, impulsively stole the driver’s money at gunpoint, and left the cabbie fearing for his life in an alley. He then took the car with his friend still in it and dropped him off at home with half the take. When officers found and violently interrogated Glanton the following day, he rightly suspected the other boy of snitching.
The Boys’ Vocational School,12 Vickki Dozier, “Lansing’s Reform School for Boys,” Lansing State Journal, November 14, 2018; Michigan Department of Social Welfare, State of Michigan Statutory Provisions Governing Boys’ Vocational School, Girls’ Vocational School [and] Michigan Children’s Institute (Lansing: Michigan Department of Social Welfare, 1948); “‘Crime School’ Charge Held Unfair to Institution for Boys,” Detroit Free Press, March 24, 1940; James M. Haswell, “‘Crime School’ Relief Offered,” Detroit Free Press, May 18, 1940; “State Judges Renew Reform School Pleas,” The Herald-Press, February 12, 1941. Glanton wrote later, “might easily have passed for an idyllic university. Beautifully ivy-covered landscaped grounds, dotted with clean, red brick buildings did not resemble a place of incarceration. That is what it was, however.” Before being assigned a cottage, each of which housed forty-two boys, the young people of the Boys’ Vocational School spent two weeks in quarantine and silence. Among the boys were white supremacists13 Salaina Catalano, “When It Happened Here: Michigan and Transnational Development of American Fascism, 1920–1945,” Michigan Historical Review 46, no. 1 (2020): 29–67. who supported the American Nazi Party, the German American Bund, and the Black Legion. They attacked black children and were especially brutal toward young Jews. Glanton had never seen this before. Poles, Hungarians, and Italians were beating up Jewish kids more than those from his own we-group.
Glanton was made to read Carl von Clausewitz’s On War and he excelled at a rigorous battery of military drills. Their instructors denounced the pagan ways of antichrist races. The school’s moral lectures were given by evangelical temperance groups that condemned drink, perversion, and masturbation. To emphasize their point, they showed the boys pictures of rotting penises.
Glanton internalized the words of Sergeant Duncan, an American Legionnaire whom the school’s director invited to shape the boys into fighting men: “Can you imagine what a sweet privilege it is for those who, on the spur of the moment, in the prime of life, are able to give their life for something they believe in, for something they love, for the good of those they leave behind?”
Sergeant Duncan railed against the Huns. He was advising Glanton to be wary of Germans, but to the boy, “the Hun” was just another term for the buckra, the white man. The sergeant told Glanton that against a “good American fighting man,” the Hun would not last long.
“Remember that!” the sergeant said.
I did, Glanton wrote.
Little else is known of his time at the Vocational School except that he left it prematurely. One day, all that stood between him and freedom was an unsecured window. He leapt from it and soon thereafter began a new voyage south, to Florida. This time, he knew exactly where he was going. ~
