“Unity Is Strength”: Labor, Race, Garveyism, and the 1920 Panama Canal Strike

Abstract

This study traces the events leading up to a massive strike by black workers in the Panama Canal Zone on February 24, 1920. Although the strike was called under the auspices of the United Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way and Railway Shop Employees, a U.S.-based railroad union, one of the forces behind this rising militancy was Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey, however, did not espouse worker radicalization. Instead, he believed that if black workers unionized and succeeded in securing wages equal to those of their white counterparts, employers would no longer hire them and would replace those employed with whites. I argue, however, that the organization’s official stance cannot explain how UNIA members in various locals heard and used Garvey’s message in ways that were meaningful and relevant to their particular situation. Laborers in Panama adopted the UNIA’s message of racial equality and uplift, combined it with the United Brotherhood’s mission to defend worker rights, and ultimately fashioned a militant and race-conscious union movement that was uniquely their own. Because the ideology that propelled this grassroots movement evolved out of the workers’ own creative adaptation and modification of the principles of these two organizations, it spoke directly to their shared plight as exploited black workers and rang true in a way that the individual ideologies of the UNIA and the United Brotherhood could not. The result was an unprecedented united front that challenged canal authorities in 1920.