“Look, Baby, We Got Jesus on Our Flag”

• Author: Edward J. Blum
• Date: 01 September 2011
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716211407464
• Published date: 01 September 2011

Examining debates about the person, place, and mean-
ing of Jesus Christ in African American social develop-
ment, creative expression, political thought, civil rights
activism, international visions, and economic plans, this
article suggests that religious discussions have revealed
robust democratic cultures. From the age of slavery to
the era of Obama, religious discussions and political
cultures have been intertwined. Spiritual debates have
played a role in community formation; individualism
and universalism have worked in tandem; and Jesus
Christ—a provincial figure executed thousands of years
“Look, Baby, ago—became essential to international and political
visions. This article suggests that Jesus functioned his-
We Got Jesus torically in two prominent political ways for African
Americans. First, he stood as a counterpoint to
American racism that limited the social, legal, political,
on Our Flag”: and cultural rights of African Americans. Second, he
functioned as a focus of intraracial and interracial
Robust
debate, dialogue, and dissension over the role of reli-
gion in black politics.
Democracy and Keywords: democracy; Jesus Christ; race; religion
Religious
Debate from Known at one time as the “angriest black
man in America,” Aaron McGruder may
the Era of
be the most provocative cartoonist of the early
twenty-first century. He is most famous for his
Slavery to the cartoon series The Boondocks, where two inner-
city African American boys move to the sub-
Age of Obama urbs. In one episode, one of the main characters
shouts at a crowd of local whites, “Jesus was
black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the
government is lying about 9/11” (Rambsy 2008,
154). McGruder is often playful and insightful
By
about the role of religion in American and
EDWARD J. BLUM
Edward J. Blum, an associate professor of history at
San Diego State University, is the author of Reforging
the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American
Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Louisiana State University
Press 2005) and W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet
(University of Pennsylvania Press 2007).
NOTE: The author would like to thank Paul Harvey,
Kathryn Lofton, Amanda Porterfield, John Jackson,
Anthony Pinn, and the members of Rice University’s
African American Religious Studies Forum for their
insights on this article.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716211407464
ANNALS, AAPSS, 637, September 2011
17

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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
African American cultures. In his little-known graphic novel Birth of a Nation
(2004), he and coauthor Reginald Hudlin imagined a new secession scenario for
the United States. This time it did not come from Dixie, and it did not come from
whites. African Americans in East St. Louis had had enough. They had tired of
police forces that kept them from voting at the polls, and they were fed up with
conservative politicians who ignored their needs. It was time to form their own
nation: “Blackland.” Given the chance to enact their own autonomous democracy
and to build their own nation-state, the community had a lot of work ahead of
them. They elected new officials, renamed schools, and placed new faces on their
currency. All of it meant debate, discussion, and dissension. For instance, there
was a vigorous dialogue on whether Ike Turner’s profile should be placed on the
$5 bill.
The leaders of Blackland established a “Nation Time” committee to settle the
debates and create new national symbols. Designing a suitable flag was the hard-
est part. The committee rejected the first few suggestions. One had a map of
Africa emblazoned on the front. Another had a Nike swoosh and came with “a
generous donation” from the shoe company (McGruder and Hudlin 2004, 58).
The flag that was finally accepted came as quite a surprise.
Jesus Christ was the central figure of Blackland’s new flag. The flag had a
tricolored background of red, black, and green rectangles—the three colors
“back-to-Africa” proponent Marcus Garvey had hoped would unite Africans and
their descendants in the early twentieth century. Centered on this pan-African
background was a white-skinned, blue-eyed, bearded Jesus. “The most creative
people in the world, and they came up with that?” one young female character
wondered in shock. “Hey, it was mostly old people at the Nation Time meetings,”
her boyfriend responded. “You know how old black people feel about Jesus”
(McGruder and Hudlin 2004, 65). Throughout the rest of the novel, the white
Jesus with the pan-African background figured in every critical aspect of
Blackland’s society. He was in their economy, raised outside the First Bank of
Blackland. He was in their education, raised outside of Martin Luther King Jr.
Elementary School. He was there to defend the nation diplomatically, politically,
and economically. On a television news program to debate an accusation from
white Americans that the Blacklanders were Communists, an elderly spokes-
woman for Blackland raised the flag and explained, “Communists? Oh, no. . . .
Look, baby, we got Jesus on our flag, and He wasn’t no communist.” This was
convincing evidence, and the white reporter immediately responded, “Well, that
sure is Jesus and he sure wasn’t a communist” (McGruder and Hudlin 2004, 72).
As a national symbol, this white Jesus was a prominent part of Blackland’s
politics, economics, social development, and democracy. Yet he was also the spark
of debate, dissension, and conflict. In Birth of a Nation, McGruder and Hudlin
(2004) invoked Jesus to address African American debates over cultural creativity,
community representation, generational divides, public discussions, political posi-
tions, and economic structures. With their humor, McGruder and Hudlin tapped
into several key features of race, religion, and democracy in African American
history. They revealed and reveled in many of the paradoxes exposed by the

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“LOOK, BABY, WE GOT JESUS ON OUR FLAG”
19
presence of Jesus in African American political, communal, and international
development. He was a unifying symbol and a divisive one. He was, supposedly,
a white man who stood for (or perhaps surveyed cautiously) black power and dia-
sporic consciousness. He was a non-American who represented America’s eco-
nomic system.
Scholars typically present religion and African Americans as “problems” within
American democracy. Politically, socially, and culturally, white Americans have
long searched for answers to what places religion and African Americans occupy
in the United States. The founding of the nation was an exercise in defining and
bracketing—whether in the form of church disestablishment or of the three-fifths
clause that numbered slaves as three-fifths of a person. With disestablishment,
the founders attempted to separate church and state. They tried to disambiguate
enmeshed concepts, such as morality, law, religion, government, belief, and poli-
tics. Ever since, American citizens have tested these definitions and proven them
amazingly complicated (Gaustad 2004; Huston 2007; Green 2010; Sehat 2011).
The place of religion in American democracy has been a problem brought to
courts and to courts of public opinion, to polls and to protests, to prison cells and
to oval offices. The title of Noah Feldman’s (2005) book epitomized the “problem”
approach: Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem.
Race, too, has been considered a “problem” in and for American democracy.
Americans have tried to square claims to democratic nationhood with realities of
slavery and racial discrimination. If the United States is a land of freedom and
liberty, then somehow African Americans (as historically unfree people) consti-
tute an enigma (E. Morgan 1975; Horsman 1981; Waldstreicher 2009). The title
of Gunnar Myrdal’s (1944) famous work summed up this approach: An American
Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.
Yet the “problem” method is only one way of considering links among race,
religion, and democracy. If rather than looking from the outside in (from the van-
tage point of white American democracy to determine where religion or African
Americans fit within it) we instead look from the inside out (from the standpoint
of how African American communities incorporated religion into their democratic
cultures), we find a very different tale. We find religion and African Americans
not to be “problems” of democracy, but key participants in it. We find religious
discussions—especially about the person, place, and meaning of Jesus—to reveal
robust democratic cultures among African Americans. Of course, black church life
has had profound limits. Men have dominated pulpits and church hierarchies, and
higher education—beginning in the late nineteenth century—was a way to create
class divisions of power among African Americans (Higginbotham 1993; Gaines
1996; Savage 2008). But in several spaces and publics, including song, speech, and
publishing, African American conceptions of Jesus have included women and
nonelite men at various creative levels. In short, two of the “problems” of
American democracy may actually reveal elements of that democracy at work.
This article examines some of the debates over the place of Jesus in African
American social development, creative expression, political thinking, civil rights
activism, international visions, and economic plans. It does not focus on

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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN...