Black Madonnas: A Womanist Approach to the Aesthetics of Liberation

This paper will examine the theological imaginations offered in two public works of art: the *Black Madonna* in the Shrine of the Black Madonna #1 in Detroit, hereafter Detroit *Black Madonna*, and *the Madonna and Child of Soweto* in Soweto, South Africa, hereafter Madonna of Soweto.

In the 1960s, Black Christians for generations were bombarded with images of a White Christ, blond-haired and blue-eyed, in popular media, culture, and their own sacred spaces. But as they began to take to the streets to demand better economic prospects, voting rights, and the end of the daily indignities of de facto and de jure segregation, they began to wonder if God was on their side. Was Malcolm X correct that the God of the Christian religion had "the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes as the slave master"? Were the White clergymen in Birmingham who called the marches and boycotts "unwise and untimely" right that these actions had no place in the Christian religious tradition? This Christ represented on television, in stained glass windows, in sermons, and in the burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan seemed to be either silent or disapproving of their struggle for equal rights.

Theologians Albert Cleage and James Cone agreed that the White Christ had little to offer Black Americans in their struggle and instead argued that Christ was black. As part of the struggle for Black dignity and civil rights, Cone and Cleage would both work to construct a Black Christ through their sermons, writings, and teachings. But Cleage would extend his vision to visual presentations of Christ as black. In 1967, Cleage would bring his theological vision into his sanctuary through aesthetics with *Black Madonna* which depicts Mary, the mother of God holding an infant Jesus Christ. The mural was a focal point of worship as it was directly behind the pulpit. In the centering of brown-skinned Mary, Cleage makes real the theological themes found in his sermons: not only is Christianity compatible with the Black freedom struggle, but it is only through the Black Christ that American Christians can overcome White supremacy. 

Yet, theologian Kelly Brown Douglas criticized both Cone and Cleage's Black Christ as too male, too oblivious to intra-racial conflict, and too one-dimensional in their analysis of the challenges of Black life (Brown Douglas, 1994, pgs. 84-88). In her work *The Black Christ*, Brown Douglas offered a womanist approach to the Blackness of Christ that confronts the daily struggles of Black women against oppression, affirms their fight for freedom, and celebrates their steadfast faith in God for their survival (Brown Douglas, 1994, pp. 97). I will argue that Black Madonnas represent the liberative vision at the heart of womanist theology while also re-affirming the *Imago Dei* in brown skin. 

The Detroit *Black Madonna* is but one vision of the hope and resistance found in the brown arms of Mary. Another compelling vision is found in *the Madonna of Soweto*, which was commissioned in 1973 during apartheid as a method of raising funds for the education of Black South African children. Subsequently, it was hung in the Regina Mundi Church, a site of both anti-apartheid protests and at least one of the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission meetings. Unlike the Detroit *Black Madonna*, *the Madonna of Soweto* was a work of theological imagining not by a pastor but by an artist named Laurence Scully.

Scully's ebony-hued Mary and Christ child are presented in ways that identify them with the contemporary struggle against apartheid but also a future beyond the violence and indignities of life under apartheid. As Michelle Wolff states, this painting links “God's incarnation in the form of a Black baby, the violence against South Africans contemporaneous with the production of the painting, and a future hope for something different” (Wolff, 2018, p. 573). The Detroit *Black Madonna* and the *Madonna of Soweto* represent works of theological making and remaking of the Black self, the relationship between the transcendent and the liberation struggle, and hope.

But now, over 50 years later, after a Nelson Mandela presidency in South Africa, a Black male president, a biracial Black female vice president in the US, Black billionaires, and CEOS of major U.S. companies like Pepsi and Xerox does the Black Christ still speak to our struggles? Is a Black Christ that represents the sacredness of Black life all that Black Christians can hope for? What can depictions of Black Jesus and Black Mary tell us about contemporary political projects of liberation, and are certain visions more compelling than others?

This paper will begin with a brief history of Black Madonnas as icons of resistance that help emancipate knowledge from acts or ideologies that render us incapable of opposition and struggle (Foucault, 1980, p. 85). The creation of Black iconography and the repurposing of religious images is an act of resistance and remaking the Black self. The *Imago Dei* is affirmed or re-affirmed in the brown face of Mary, a woman who lived under the patriarchal oppression of the Roman Empire and knows the sorrows of losing a son in an unjust killing at the hands of the state.

The greatest gift of these iconic works of art, beyond their symbolic power, is the womanist theological vision of liberation found in the brown face of Mary. Black Madonnas represent a rejection of the exaltation of Whiteness and the White Christ both Cleage and Cone sought to erase while offering a multi-dimensional analysis of the challenges of black life by centering the lives and struggles of black women akin to Brown Douglas. In the brown face of Mary, the unwed teenage mother from Nazareth, who became “Mother of God,” pointed toward a future where the oppressive powers and principalities would be made low, and the hungry would go away filled in this life and the one to come.