“No Race Question”

In the past, authors have emphasized the importance of Marcus Garvey’s ideas and organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, in the development of the labor movement in Trinidad after 1919. In so doing, they have often overlooked a more complex reality on the ground. This chapter examines the ways in which the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA) combined Garveyism and labor politics, and how they navigated the potential contradictions between class-based and race-based organizing more broadly. It adds to the existing literature on Garveyism and race consciousness in Trinidad, a perspective that situates the TWA’s ideas on race and class as a local dialogue interacting with global discussions among black radicals about labor organizing, socialism, communism, black internationalism, and pan-Africanism.

Popular Pan-Africanism

The success of Garveyism in Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, and elsewhere in the African diaspora calls attention to the manner in which pan-Africanism has spread not merely through the flow of ideas, associations, and cultural traditions generated and sustained by intellectual elites, but through modes of popular knowledge production. Following the spread of Garveyism beyond the organizational limits of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and in the guise of rumor and millenial prophecy offers scholars a method of tracking the breadth and depth of the movement’s wide-ranging influence. It helps us understand precisely why white authorities across the colonial world viewed Garveyism (and its publication Negro World) with such alarm. It invites a larger rethinking of the trajectories of pan-Africanism as a political device and about the parameters of the black global imagination more broadly. This chapter pays specific attention to the dynamics of Garveyism’s spread in South West Africa (Namibia).

“Hidden” in Plain Sight

This chapter is an initial attempt to recover the overlooked histories of Garveyite women in Africa. During the 1920s and 1930s, working within the South African Garveyite movement inaugurated by Wellington Buthelezi, African women in the Transkei indigenized global Garveyism to further their objective of African self-determination, particularly in their political, religious and educational lives. Regarded as apolitical tribal “natives” by government officials and as legal minors and social children by both black and white men, Garveyite women adopted transnational “American” identities to assert themselves as political actors, moving freely throughout the country to prophesy “American Negro” deliverance and to organize hundreds of independent churches and independent schools.

Our Joan of Arc

This chapter uses the Jamaican Garveyite weekly New Negro Voice to examine gender dynamics and gender politics in the Harmony Division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the early 1940s. While the UNIA promoted patriarchal structure and binary gender roles, the pages of the New Negro Voice and the meetings of the Harmony Division also provided space for alternative visions of gender roles and critiques of women’s subordination by both female and male Garveyites who valued women’s broader activities outside the home, argued that women’s full equality was pivotal to the future of the race, and praised Jamaican women’s political leadership. Similarly, alongside images of the nurturing, caretaking “race mother” or patriarchal “race man,” the sources highlight other means of status-claiming within the organization that were more gender-neutral, based on a member’s militarism, sense of justice, their level of commitment to the organization, etc. These principles allowed women like Maymie L.T. de Mena Aiken to exercise considerable authority at Liberty Hall and beyond. The complexity of these dynamics are explored in an examination of the debate over birth control, which split the leadership of the Harmony Division among rigid gender lines and tested the flexibility of Garvey’s ideology.

Introduction

This chapter examines the emergence of Garveyism and notes its historical significance. It provides a historiography of Garveyism studies focused on the work of Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey, and the United Negro Improvement Association. It also focuses on the marginalization of Garveyism within the mainstream American academy, and pays tribute to the work of African diaspora and Garveyism studies scholars who pushed back against this erasure. And it provides a roadmap for the volume by briefly introducing each of the chapters in the volume.

Decolonization, Desegregation, and Black Power

As universal in its reach and aspirations as Garveyism, Black Power came to demand the completion and fulfilment of the visions and promises of decolonization and desegregation. It is hardly accidental that Black Power, for all its global impact, resonated most forcefully in the some of the same areas of the black world where Garveyism was most vibrant, namely the United States, Africa (especially Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana), and the Anglophone Caribbean. Indeed, the two phenomena, Garveyism and Black Power, were often linked organically and personally: a number of groups and individuals with origins in Garveyism would later join Black Power. Writers such as Amy Jacques Garvey and Walter Rodney expanded on Garvey’s work, and Pan-Africanism, the All-African People’s Conference, and Rastafari all owe a debt to Garveyism.

“The Language of Freedom”

This chapter explores the political ideas of women in Garveyism, based on their writings in several global black newspapes of the 1940s, including the African: Journal of African Affairs and the New Negro World. It shows how women in the Universal Negro Improvement Association, from diverse backgrounds and writing from various locales, promoted a global black liberationist vision and added distinctive voices to discourses surrounding pan-Africanism. Maintaining cultural and racial bonds with Africans throughout the African diaspora, these women skillfully used the black press—on local, national, and international levels—to endorse anticolonial politics, challenge global white supremacy, and counter negative images and stereotypical depictions of African history and culture. Yet, while committed to that mission, these black women also embraced imperialist, civilizationist, and patriarchal views that promoted some of the same ideals they rejected. Examining the largely overlooked writings of Garveyite women (such as Amy Jacques Garvey and her involvement in the Fifth Pan-African Congress) in the United States and other parts of the globe captures the richness and complexities of black nationalist women’s ideas and activism during the twentieth century.

“The Second Battle for Africa Has Begun”

This chapter examines the underappreciated impact of Garveyism in shaping Liberian politics and life during the 1970s. This work was spearheaded by Rev. Clarence W. Harding Jr., a dynamic Chicago-born African American leader, who relocated to Monrovia in 1966 and headed the local division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) until his passing in 1978. Through the local division, and through the Marcus Garvey Memorial Institute, a UNIA-affiliated elementary and secondary school, Harding successfully disseminated the principles of Garveyism widely among working-class and indigenous Liberians living in Monrovia and collaborated with the emergent Movement for Justice in Africa. In tracing Harding’s work in Liberia, the chapter also highlights connections between Liberia and the U.S. Midwest—or what the author has fashioned as the “diasporic Midwest.”

“No Surrender”

British West Indian migrants spread Garveyism across the circum-Caribbean in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Indeed, the organization was particularly important for those women and men who found themselves on the move. A core tenant and achievement of the United Negro Improvement Association was its portability and reliability. While spreading a powerful message of black racial uplift, Garveyites built an association that afforded members concrete benefits measurable in their day-to-day lives. Garveyism offered a degree of social capital for migrant laborers, as well as communities and networks that eased the impact of their move. This chapter examines the mechanics of this process in Cuba.

Garveyism Root and Branch

The Garvey movement was at once an end and a beginning. Although very much a product of its time – the immediate post-World War I era – Garveyism was an end in that it summarized much of the thought and struggle of nineteenth-century pan-Africanism and black nationalism. Marcus Garvey, not so much the man as the metaphor, and the United Negro Improvement Association, not so much the institution as the inspiration, sealed up a certain tradition (which included Toussaint Louverture’s Haitian Revolution and black revivalists) in the movement for black liberation in the modern world. At the same time, Garveyism was also a beginning, casting a long shadow on contemporary and subsequent movements against colonialism and white supremacy throughout the black world, including phenomena such as the Moorish Science Temple and Rastafari. This chapter places Garveyism at the center of a narrative spanning from the emergence of pan-Africanism in the eighteenth century to the Ethiopian crisis of 1935.