Cleage, who changed his name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman in the early 1970s, played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement in Detroit during the 1960s and 1970s.
He founded a church-owned farm, Beulah Land,[2] in Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, and spent most of his last years there.
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.".
[3] 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 was a major figure in the Detroit medical community, even being designated as City Physician by Mayor Charles Bowles in 1930.
He was interested in creating religious films, but withdrew after a semester to take a position in a San Francisco congregation.
[4] Following ordination, he began a pastorate with Chandler Memorial Congregational Church in Lexington, Kentucky.
[5] He was editor of a church published weekly tabloid newspaper called the Illustrated News that was widely circulated throughout African-American neighborhoods in Detroit during the 1960s.
The mission of the shrines was, and is, to bring the black community back to a more conscious understanding of their African history, in order to effect positive progression as a whole.
Cleage then changed his name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, meaning "liberator, holy man, savior of the nation" in Swahili.