What does utopia look like for Black Americans? It’s the question at the heart of essayist, editor, and translator Aaron Robertson’s The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, which explores the history and meaning of Black freedom movements in the U.S. The topic is a personal one for the author, whose paternal grandparents had a plot of land in Promise Land, Tenn., the historic all-Black town founded in 1870, five years after the Civil War ended. In the summer of 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and protests following the murder of George Floyd, Robertson began researching the inception of this safe harbor for Black families, and how it could be replicated in the present day. Using his ancestors as his guide, Robertson lays out a path toward survival and prosperity for all Black Americans.
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