Garvey Movement Research Articles

The rise and fall of the Garvey movement in the urban South, 1918-1942

The rise and fall of the Garvey movement in the urban South, 1918-1942

Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950

The story of the rights movement is well-known, popularized by both the media and the academy. Yet the version of the story recounted time and again by both history books and PBS documentaries is a simplified one, reduced to an inspirational but ultimately facile narrative framed around Dr. King, the Kennedys, and the redemptive days of Montgomery and Memphis, in which black individuals become the rescued survivors. This story renders the mass of black people invisible, refusing to take seriously everyday people whose years of persistent struggle often made the big events possible. Time Longer than Rope unearths the ordinary roots of extraordinary change, demonstrating the depth and breadth of black oppositional spirit and activity that preceded the rights movement. The diversity of activism covered by this collection extends from tenant farmers' labor reform campaign in the 1919 Elaine, Arkansas massacre to Harry T. Moore's leadership of a movement that registered 100,000 black Floridians years before Montgomery, and from women's participation in the Garvey movement to the changing meaning of the Lincoln Memorial. Concentrating on activist efforts in the South, key themes emerge, including the under appreciated importance of historical memory and community building, the divisive impact of class and sexism, and the shifting interplay between individual initiative and structural constraints. More than simply illuminating a hitherto marginalized fragment of American history, Time Longer than Rope provides a crucial pre-history of the modern rights movement. In the process, it alters our entire understanding of African American activism and the very meaning of civil rights.

Manliness and its discontents: the black middle class and the transformation of masculinity, 1900-1930

In a pathbreaking new assessment of the shaping of black male identity in the early twentieth century, Martin Summers explores how middle-class African American and African Caribbean immigrant men constructed a gendered sense of self through organizational life, work, leisure, and cultural production. Examining both the public and private aspects of gender formation, Summers challenges the current trajectory of masculinity studies by treating black men as historical agents in their own identity formation, rather than as screens on which white men projected their own racial and gender anxieties and desires. Manliness and Its Discontents focuses on four distinct yet overlapping social milieus: the fraternal order of Prince Hall Freemasonry; the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association, or the Garvey movement; the modernist circles of the Harlem Renaissance; and the campuses of historically black Howard and Fisk Universities. Between 1900 and 1930, Summers argues, dominant notions of what it meant to be a man within the black middle class changed from a Victorian ideal of manliness - characterized by the importance of producer values, respectability, and patriarchy - to a modern ethos of masculinity, which was shaped more by consumption, physicality, and sexuality. Summers evaluates the relationships between black men and black women as well as relationships among black men themselves, broadening our understanding of the way that gender works along with class, sexuality, and age to shape identities and produce relationships of power.

Unruly virtues of the spectacular: Performing Engendered Nationalisms in the UNIA in Jamaica

This paper complicates notions of anticolonial nationalist resistance by discussing images emerging within the performances of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Approaching the Garvey movement as a practice taken up by active subjects who engaged with and used its ideas, the paper contends that anticolonial resistance cannot be reduced to a single narrative, easily appropriated or overturned by dominant groups. An examination of anticolonial performance in the Garvey movement allows us to move beyond the binary of resistance versus accommodation because performances were productive in multiple ways. UNIA performances were marked by excesses, strategic collusions, contradictions and absences. It was precisely this instability that allowed subjects from diverse social locations to grasp alternative social possibilities and elaborate these in terms of the particular marginalization or exploitation that they faced. The multiplicity of narratives generated point to the difficulty of reducing Garveyite resistance to a set of fundamental fixed ideas. Two examples bear out this argument. The first focuses on performances of gender in the movement. Spectacular parades taught the official position of the movement, privileging a militant, modernist image of black masculinity, ready to rule but reliant on subordinate, if active and organized, femininity. Women resisted these images of subordination, drawing on their training in the movement to advance a black feminist critique outside of the movement. Their struggles were simultaneously reformist and radical, for while they improved middle-class women’s lives, they overlooked the needs of working-class women. The second example focuses on challenges to middle-class respectability and sexual rigidity through variety concerts at Edelweiss Park. The result is that, through its performances, the UNIA facilitated multiple unruly forms of resistance and advanced different claims for change over time and space.

Social Justice Versus Social Equality

During the 1920s, the Garvey movement challenged Black intellectualism, which at the time was in the midst of a renaissance. Influenced by the philosophy of Booker T. Washington and considered irreparably idealistic, Garveyism, nevertheless, remains the largest sociopolitical race movement in history. Throughout his legal quandaries, Garvey accurately articulated that the American legal system was highly bureaucratized and that the efficient processing of legal matters was the system's paramount concern. Garvey's ideology eerily resembles the law and economics paradigm of contemporary American justice, and his embrace of social justice over social equality is now realized in the rational choice framework of the American legal system. Consequently, Garvey remains relevant because he correctly surmised that capitalism is the cornerstone of righteousness and thus social justice should be evaluated by a capitalistic yardstick rather than by a social justice paradigm.

The Black Star Line: The De-Mystification of Marcus Garvey

In the American heartland, Chicago's esteemed Goodman Theater has mounted on its stage The Black Star Line, a play by Charles Smith which offers an overstuffed, untutored view of Marcus Garvey's Back-to-Africa Movement in the 1920s. It is, at best, a pedestrian piece of dramatic execution, an episodic series of scenes driven by a much-too-wordy text that takes itself more seriously than the subject, arbitrarily manipulating facts to reconstruct African American history into a disingenuous docu-drama that never achieves dramatic cohesion. Thus it implodes, rather than explodes, with new revelations to validate its pretense of representing an enlightened point of view. Were it not for Garvey's significance to black struggle in America, the play could easily be dismissed, avoiding the risk of too much protestation that might dignify the work and bring, perhaps, unworthy attention to an undistinguished and totally uninspired narrative. Marcus Garvey's messianic mission to create a homeland for the 400 million black people in Africa was a monumental challenge to the European colonialization of Africa and the oppression of blacks in a racist social system of American apartheid. The strength and unwavering audacity of his uncompromising opposition to white supremacy was viewed by most whites in America as a threat to white privilege, and caused alarm among assimilationist blacks, who viewed the separatist movement as an obstruction of their efforts to achieve a new social order through integration. Responding to pressure from France and England, the United States government unleashed J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to pursue means--any means necessary--to dismantle Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Planting seeds of conspiracy to undermine the leadership of black organizations would become an obsession for Hoover throughout his career, including his harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr., years later. While it is generally accepted, in the spirit of artistic freedom, that an author should be allowed to have the creative license to reinterpret history from his personal point of reference, the manufacturing of lies is wholly unacceptable. It is imperative that the author aspires to raise his inquiry to at least the level of the historical event, as opposed to bringing history down to the knee-jerk level of personal experience, trivializing the collective experience of African Americans with uninformed distortions. And what could be a greater distortion of facts than to insinuate that the Garvey Movement was compromised by petty thievery within the organization, deceptively ignoring the true fact that Garvey had been left exposed to Hoover's indictment of mail fraud when he was unable to produce a boat purchased with UNIA funds solicited by mail because the ship broker, a certain Mr. Silverstein, had absconded with the $25,000 down payment. Much of what is documented in the play as fact, speciously orchestrated to give the illusion of truth, deals with issues peripheral to the higher aspirations of the Garvey Movement. Rather than identifying the nationalist issues that captured the imagination of more than 2 million African Americans who had been dues-paying members in the UNIA (not to be confused with revisiting the cliched sociology of the downtrodden Negro), the author chose to graft the petty issues of his personal concerns onto Garvey, creating a racial soap opera that assigns critical roles of influence on the demise of the movement to black preoccupation with hair-straightener pomades and skin-lightener creams. The Black Star Line belongs to a tradition in the American theater, from minstrelsy through the plays of Eugene O'Neill, which routinely subordinates black roles to stereotypic characterizations that correspond with inferior or crudely developed sensibilities--immersed in violence, sexual aggression, and self-deprecation--that preserves for whites a comfortable sense of superiority. …

Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African-American Political Thought

Preface Acknowledgments 1. The Background to Black Power Imbalances and Injustices Against African-Americans * Theories About Why Inequality Persists * The Context of Black Protest 2. Black Nationalist Thought in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries The Colonization Movement: A Profile * Reactions to and Criticisms of Colonization * The Ideology of the Colonization Movement * The Tactics of the Pan-Negro Nationalists * Pan-Negro Nationalism and Beyond 3. The Abolitionist Movement Early Abolitionism, 1645 to 1807 * Abolitionism from 1807 to 1870 * The Ideology of the Abolitionist Movement * Frederick Douglass: A Profile * The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass * The Tactics of the Abolitionists * Abolitionism and Beyond 4. The Politics of Accommodation Booker T. Washington: A Profile * Booker T. Washington's Philosophy of Education * The Social and Political Thought of Booker T. Washington * The Tactics of Booker T. Washington * Opposition to Booker T. Washington 5. Marcus Garvey and the Resurgence of Black Nationalism Racial Equality by Integration: A Survey * Garvey's Early Career * Garvey's Later Career and the Garvey Movement * The Political Thought of Garvey * Garvey's Organization and Tactics * Minor Expressions of Black Nationalism 6. Martin Luther King and Moralism The Moralist Approach: A Profile * King's Background and Intellectual Influences * King's Philosophy of Nonviolence * The Political Thought of King * King's Tactics * King and the Black Power Challenge 7. What Is Black Power? The Range of Usages of the Term Black Power * Reshaping the Categories of Black Power * Commonalities in the Usage of Black Power * Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black Power 8. The Counter-Communalists: A Comparison and Analysis Huey Newton's Background and Intellectual Influences * The Political Thought of Huey Newton * Huey Newton and the Tactics of Counter-Communalism * Other Counter-Communalists on Tactics 9. The Black Power Pluralists: A Comparison and Analysis Shirley Chisholm's Background and Intellectual Influences * The Political Thought of Shirley Chisholm * Other Pluralists on the American System * Shirley Chisholm on the Obstacles to True Pluralism in the United States * Other Pluralists on the Obstacles to Democracy * Shirley Chisholm and the Case for Black Power Pluralism * Other Pluralist Visions of the Good Society * The Tactics of Pluralism 10. The Black Power Separatists: A Comparison and Analysis Elijah Muhammad's Background and Career * The Political Theology of Elijah Muhammad * Elements of Elijah Muhammad's Political Theory * The Tactics of Separatism: The Black Muslims * Other Separatists on Tactics: Imamu Baraka and Imari Obadele I 11. A Critical Assessment of the Black Power Ideologies The Paradoxes in the Goals of the Black Power Ideologies * Malcolm X and the Dilemmas of Black Power * The Life of Malcolm X and Its Meaning for the Black Power Movement * Black Power and Individualism * Black Power and the Intellectual * Permanent Contributions of the Black Power Ideologies Notes Bibliography Index

“ALWAYS LEADING OUR MEN IN SERVICE AND SACRIFICE”:

This article focuses on the most important woman in Garveyism: Amy Jacques Garvey, Marcus Garvey's second wife. Amy Jacques Garvey's true value in the Garvey movement has rarely been acknowledged; most authors and scholars have misleadingly depicted her as Marcus's “helpmate.” This article proposes that Amy Jacques Garvey was a key architect of Garveyism and a lifelong advocate of social justice in her own right. The author also examines the relationship among race, class, and gender as it pertains to Amy Jacques Garvey's life and social thought.

Review: The UNIA and Black Los Angeles: Ideology and Community in the American Garvey Movement, by Emory J. Tolbert

Review: <i>The UNIA and Black Los Angeles: Ideology and Community in the American Garvey Movement</i>, by Emory J. Tolbert

Randall K. Burkett, Black Redemption: Churchmen Speak for the Garvey Movement

Randall K. Burkett, Black Redemption: Churchmen Speak for the Garvey Movement

Emory J. Tolbert, The UNIA and Black Los Angeles: Ideology and Community in the American Garvey Movement

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsEmory J. Tolbert, The UNIA and Black Los Angeles: Ideology and Community in the American Garvey MovementCharles VincentCharles Vincent Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 66, Number 1Spring 1981 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2716885 Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1981 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Garvey Movement in British West Africa

The paper seeks to present new information concerning the activities of the West African branches of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. The author has included biographical profiles of the British West African Garveyites to integrate the Garvey movement into the history of West African nationalism and Pan-Africanism.It is argued that Garveyism was welcomed in British West Africa by the older cultural nationalists who saw Garveyism as an extension of Blyden's ideas. Pan-African sentiments of racial unity and solidarity of African and American blacks, pride in the history of the race, and self-help projects had wide circulation in West Africa from the latter part of the nineteenth century, as a result of Blyden's influence. Joining the branches of the U.N.I.A. was a practical demonstration of a long-standing commitment to cultural and racial nationalism among the West African elite.The Garvey movement also marked the beginning of a new era in West African nationalism. Garvey's radical pronouncements on freeing Africa from colonial rule were unacceptable to the older cultural nationalists who dominated the Garvey groups. They disavowed any interest in organizing a central nation for the race. However, Garvey's ideas may have had long-term effects. By the 1930s the idea of independence from colonial rule seemed more attractive to the West African nationalists. Garvey was one of the first to speak out boldly for freedom from colonialism.The concrete achievements of the West African branches of the U.N.I.A. were small indeed. Nigeria had the most Garveyite activity in British West Africa. There was an agent for the Black Star Line in Lagos and a branch of the U.N.I.A. and A.C.L. The Gold Coast had the least Garveyite activity, probably because of their involvement in the National Congress of British West Africa and also because of their more critical attitude towards co-operation with American blacks. They believed that Africans were best qualified to lead any joint efforts for intra-racial co-operation.

From Pan-Africanism to Socialism: The Modernization of an African Liberation Ideology

The concept of Pan-Africanism has been around for a long time in spite of great historical events. Beginning as the nationalist thought of more or less detribalized Africans in the New World during the era of slavery, Pan-Africanism has survived the impact of such developments as the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction era, the rise and fall of the Garvey movement, European colonialism in Africa, the Russian and other socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, and the black freedom movements in Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean since 1945.

From Pan-Africanism to Socialism: The Modernization of an African Liberation Ideology

The concept of Pan-Africanism has been around for a long time in spite of great historical events. Beginning as the nationalist thought of more or less detribalized Africans in the New World during the era of slavery, Pan-Africanism has survived the impact of such developments as the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction era, the rise and fall of the Garvey movement, European colonialism in Africa, the Russian and other socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, and the black freedom movements in Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean since 1945.

From Pan-Africanism to Socialism: The Modernization of an African Liberation Ideology

The concept of Pan-Africanism has been around for a long time in spite of great historical events. Beginning as the nationalist thought of more or less detribalized Africans in the New World during the era of slavery, Pan-Africanism has survived the impact of such developments as the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction era, the rise and fall of the Garvey movement, European colonialism in Africa, the Russian and other socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, and the black freedom movements in Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean since 1945.

From Pan-Africanism to Socialism: The Modernization of an African Liberation Ideology

The concept of Pan-Africanism has been around for a long time in spite of great historical events. Beginning as the nationalist thought of more or less detribalized Africans in the New World during the era of slavery, Pan-Africanism has survived the impact of such developments as the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction era, the rise and fall of the Garvey movement, European colonialism in Africa, the Russian and other socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, and the black freedom movements in Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean since 1945.

Book Review Section: Africa and African World Writings: Black Power and the Garvey Movement

Book Review Section: Africa and African World Writings: Black Power and the Garvey Movement

Black Power and the Garvey Movement

Journal Article Black Power and the Garvey Movement. By Theodore G. Vincent. (Berkeley: Ramparts, 1971. 299 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, and index. $5.95.) Get access E. David Cronon E. David Cronon University of Wisconsin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 58, Issue 4, March 1972, Pages 1046–1047, https://doi.org/10.2307/1917911 Published: 01 March 1972

Theodore G. Vincent, Black Power and the Garvey Movement

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsTheodore G. Vincent, Black Power and the Garvey MovementWilliam Loren KatzWilliam Loren Katz Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 57, Number 1January 1972 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2717084 Views: 2Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1972 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Chief Sam's African Movement and Race Consciousness in West Africa

THE DEATH OF EDWARD W. BLYDEN in 1912 can be taken as a convenient, though arbitrary, date to mark off the Pan-Negroism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century from the post-1918 Pan-African movements of W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey. This article attempts a reinterpretation, based on new documents located in London and West Africa, of a little known predecessor of the Garvey movement,1 led not by a Negro American or a West Indian, but by a West African-Chief Alfred Sam of the Gold Coast. This was the back-to-Africa or 'African Movement' of 1914-1916.