Albert Cleage - Early Life

Early Life

Albert B. Cleage Jr. was born in 1911 in Indianapolis, the first of seven children. During much of his later life, his light skin color would become a common feature of discussion. His first biographer, Detroit News reporter Hiley Ward said it left him with a lifelong identity crisis. Grace Lee Boggs would later describe Cleage as "pink-complexioned, with blue eyes, and light brown, almost blond hair.". His father graduated from Indiana School of Medicine in 1910 and moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan to practice before taking a position in Detroit. Dr. Cleage helped found Dunbar Hospital, Detroit's only hospital that granted admitting privileges to Black doctors and trained African-American residents. Dr. Cleage was a major figure in the Detroit medical community, even being designated as City Physician by Mayor Charles Bowles in 1930.

Upon graduation from Detroit's Northwestern High School, Albert Cleage had a peripatetic post-secondary education. He attended Wayne State University beginning in 1929, finally graduating in 1942 with his BA in sociology, but he also studied at Fisk University under Sociologist Charles S. Johnson. He worked as a social worker for the Detroit Department of Health before commencing seminary studies at Oberlin College in 1938, finally earning his Bachelor of Divinity from Oberlin Graduate School of Theology in 1943. He married Doris Graham in 1943 and he was ordained in the Congregational Christian Churches during the same year. He had two daughters and later divorced Graham in 1955. Cleage's final encounter with formal education was at the University of Southern California's film school in the 1950s. He was interested in creating religious films, but withdrew after a semester to take a position in a San Francisco congregation.