Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920-1927. By Mary G. Rolinson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv, 286 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3092-5. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 978-0-8078-5795-3.)

Abstract

Since their discovery in 1970, scholars have debated the significance of card files from Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (unia) showing that nearly half of all divisions active between 1926 and 1928 were located in the South. In Race First (1976), Tony Martin contended that although southern branches were far smaller than northern ones, the files nevertheless demonstrated that Garveyism appealed not just to “newly urbanized Afro Americans” but also to “the great mass of black peasants all over the South, the Southwest and elsewhere” (p. 17). In The World of Marcus Garvey (1986), Judith Stein portrayed the files as remnants of a failed “southern strategy” aimed at rebuilding in the wake of Garvey's détente with the Ku Klux Klan (pp. 160–61). Most recently, Steven Hahn, in A Nation under Our Feet (2003), contended that southern Garveyites “exemplified the vitality and adaptability of popular ‘organizing traditions' whose genealogies extend deep into the history of slavery and early emancipation” (p. 473).