© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/1572543X-12341250 Exchange 42 (2013) 51-67 brill.com/exch Savior of the Race: The Messianic Burdens of Black Masculinity Ronald B. Neal Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem nc, USA nealrb@wfu.edu Abstract This paper is concerned with the messianic construction of manhood within African American communities in North America and its normative imprint in shaping and measuring masculinity among African Americans. In this essay, messianic manhood is treated as a utopian construction of masculinity that is found in liberal and conservative constructions of Protestant Christianity. In examining this tradition of manhood, representative messianic men are interrogated who have participated in and have been shaped by this tradition. Overall, messianic manhood is inconceiv- able apart from an oral tradition of preaching and singing where the person of Jesus is understood as Lord, savior, and ally of the oppressed. Keywords African American Christianity, Messianic, Attainability, Approximation, Suffering, Sacriijice, and Martyrdom The present crisis, involving as it does the black man’s struggle for survival in America, demands the resurrection of a Black Church with its own Black Messiah. Only this kind of Black Christian Church can serve as the unifying center for the totality of the black man’s life and struggle. Only this kind of Black Christian Church can force each individ- ual black man to decide where he will stand — united with his own people and labor- ing and sacriijicing in the spirit of the Black Messiah, or individualistically seeking his own advancement and maintaining his slave identiijication with the white oppressor.1 During the late 1960s, African American Christian thinkers Albert B. Cleage and James H. Cone forwarded one of the most creative theological responses to white supremacy conceived by African Americans. Motivated by the 1 Albert B. Cleage, Jr., The Black Messiah, 1968, in: James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore (eds.), Black Theology: A Documentary History, Volume One: 1966-1979 Maryknoll ny: Orbis Books 1979, 105.