The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America

One of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024 One of the Washington Post's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History A New York Public Library Top Ten Book of 2024 | A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024 A New Republic Best Book of the Fall | A Time Must-Read Book of the Year A 2025 Michigan Notable Book | A Booklist Best History Book of 2025 Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker | Literary Hub | Essence | Elle | Chicago Public Library "[An] extraordinary new work of history and memoir . . . Unforgettable." —Gabriel Bump, The Washington Post A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia—and sought to transform their lives. How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start.