How nonviolent movements in the Caribbean influenced Pan‐Africanism

Abstract

AbstractA project centering Black people across the African continent and diaspora, Pan‐Africanism has been both a local and a global force since the late eighteenth century. Its history of people, ideas, and networks is rich with connections. My article explores the relationship between Pan‐Africanism and nonviolence. I examine the place of nonviolence in popular struggles in the British Caribbean colony of Trinidad in the 1930s. Against the divide‐and‐rule of the colonial authorities, Afro‐ and Indo‐Trinidadian activists and communities converged around Gandhian and labor styles of mass nonviolent organizing and protest in the 1930s. Led by activists like Elma Francois, Tubal Uriah Butler, and Adrian Cola Rienzi, these struggles made an impact on two great Pan‐Africanists from the island, C.L.R. James and George Padmore. I argue that the influence of nonviolent organizing and protest on Pan‐Africanist thought between the 1930s and 1950s has been underappreciated.