Universal Negro Improvement Association Research Articles

An exploration of his thinking: Dolores Joseph Montout and the Costa Rican Caribbean, 1930-1938

This article is an exploration about the thinking of a writer, thinker and Afro-Costa Rican activist Dolores Joseph Montout, especially his relation ship with the Caribbean zone. The reconstruction of his ideas is based on his journalistic work in the Thirties, in The Searchlight and The Atlantic Voice, which he assiduously wrote about his mainly concerns about the Afro-Costa Rican people. It is recovered three basic aspects of his work: a) his nationalistic inquisitiveness and his struggle for the integration and citizenship of the afro-descendant, b) his relation and controversy with the ideas of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the attacks as a consequence of his position and c) the importance that he gives to education and the intellectual background of the young people for the development of their culture, for example, through the Alpha Literary Club. As conclusions, it is evinced the contradictory and complex of his thinking and the diversity and differences among the Afro-Costa Rican people between 1930 – 1938, their nationalistic and patriotic ideas, just as the importance to continue with this kind of studies, both from the author and from other thinkers that have been made invisiblein the history of the Costa Rican Caribbean.

Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927

Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

‘The League Will Not Ignore the Cry of the Negro Race for Justice’: Marcus Garvey, the League of Nations and South-West Africa

Marcus Garvey’s petitions to the League of Nations on behalf of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1922 and 1928 were a central but overlooked component of his anti-colonial politics in the 1920s. In both cases, Garvey’s main objective was to have the League of Nations mandate for South-West Africa transferred from South Africa and given to the Universal Negro Improvement Association, particularly in the wake of the Bondelswarts rebellion and what he considered to be South Africa’s white supremacist colonial rule following the end of German imperialism in the area. These petitions reflect the significant place of southern African racial and colonial politics in the USA in this period and further reveal the agency of Namibians in political movements beyond Africa and throughout the African diaspora. Far from being ineffectual, these petitions called attention to racial injustice and set a pattern for post-Second World War diasporic politics and decolonisation movements that scholars have not hitherto appreciated.

Banished from Johnstown: Racist Backlash in Pennsylvania

Banished from Johnstown: Racist Backlash in Pennsylvania

Black Political Worlds in Port Cities: Garveyism in 1920s Britain

Abstract The presence of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the British ports of London, Manchester, Cardiff, and Barry during the 1920s has yet to be charted by historians of either Garveyism or Black Britain. Uncovering this history provides fresh insights into both fields. Far from the localism emphasized by much of recent Garveyism historiography, followers of the movement in Britain were closely connected to their fellow Garveyites distributed around the globe. Meanwhile, although recent literature on the transnational character of Black Britain has detailed the activism of relatively elite figures and groups, the presence of Garveyism in port areas elucidates an alternative vein of diasporic Black political culture among working-class seafaring communities extending beyond the capital. Far from the parochial victims portrayed in much historiography, Black people living in Britain’s ports were deeply invested in the global project of Garveyism. Through their travels, readings of and writings to the UNIA’s Negro World newspaper, and participation in sophisticated aural and visual cultures, Garveyites in Britain connected their struggles to a mass diasporic movement which profoundly altered global Black politics.

A “Common Spectacle” of the Race: Garveyism’s Visual Politics of Founding

The questions of what makes a people a people and how they are endowed with political power are central to political founding. Through the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s first annual convention, this essay reconstructs the central role of aesthetic practices to the constitution of a new people. The convention’s spectacular performances were a vehicle through which participants came to understand themselves as constituting the Universal Negro—a transnational and empowered political subject. Founding was tied to the development of “reverential self-regard,” which was a process rather than a singular moment. Central to this process was both the gaze of spectators whose affective responses confirmed the power of the people and the political leader who served as the people’s mirror. Focusing on a mass movement rather than canonical instances of constituting republics brings into sharp relief the reiterative labors of staging, enacting, and viewing necessary to the practice of founding.

Shifting the Meaning of Democracy: Race, Politics, and Culture in the United States and Brazil by Jessica Lynn Graham

Reviewed by: Shifting the Meaning of Democracy: Race, Politics, and Culture in the United States and Brazil by Jessica Lynn Graham Travis Knoll Shifting the Meaning of Democracy: Race, Politics, and Culture in the United States and Brazil. By Jessica Lynn Graham. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019, p. 392, $29.95. This richly sourced and concisely written expansive diplomatic and cultural history brings the growing scholarship on Black internationalism (Keisha Blain 2018, 2021; Sarah Azaransky 2017) in conversation with the vast national literatures on race relations in two countries with the world's largest African diasporas. Graham's traces "the co-constitutive emergence of racially inclusive nationalisms as Brazilian and US state doctrine" (2) during the presidencies of Getúlio Vargas and Franklin Roosevelt. These doctrines responded to Communist and fascist efforts to undermine liberal democracy as incapable of delivering for its citizens. She divides fascist, Communist, and liberal democratic treatments of race into four categories: racial realism, racial denial, racial dissuasion, and racial obstructionism (8). Communist competition drives the first chapter, beginning with the Third Communist International (1919-1943), or the Comintern's, efforts to bring U.S. and Brazilian Blacks into worldwide struggles, especially in Asia (43). The Comintern exploited the new racial rhetoric ushered in by the New Deal even as it clashed with rival organizations like with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, which preached self-sufficiency and conservative bourgeois values. While US communists made racial struggle a cornerstone of their anti-imperialist agenda, the Comintern had to pressure the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) to admit Brazil had a racial problem, something it only did after stiff competition from Brazilian Integral Action (AIB) and Arlindo Veiga dos Santos' Brazilian Black Front (FNB). The second chapter lays out how Getúlio Vargas' Estado Novo and US government officials made racial plurality central to their anti-Communist efforts. Graham counters traditional scholarship that says the United States incorporated racial democracy in the 2000s, centers important right-wing actors, and shows elements of the Vargas regime highlighting racial plurality in a more forceful and confident manner than its US counterpart. The United States' response to Communism's assertion of a more racially equal society suffered from divisions embodied by the struggle between New York Rep. Hamilton Fish, who acknowledged racial inequality, and Texas Rep. Martin Dies, who denied it. Blacks in turn sought to cast the Ku Klux Klan and other rightist domestic terror groups as more dangerous than either German fascism or the Soviet Union. Architects of the Estado Novo, such as Francisco Campos, sought to frame democracy as stability, the state's defense of itself (90-91), through cultural events like the Estado Novo Exposition and books like Brazil is Good (92-93). [End Page 583] Chapter Three explains how pre-war fascists Plínio Salgado and African-American Lawrence Dennis claimed the democratic mantle and contested US definitions of democracy. As portrayed in works such as the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation (1934/5) and Hitler Speaks (1939), US-style democracy was a sham that neither provided order nor lived up to the multi-racial ideas for which the system ostensibly advocated. The Nazis believed that this contradiction would lead Brazil into their camp, but Brazilian Integral Action (AIB) was put off by the Nazis' racial exclusivity and instead mixed Italian fascist ideas with homegrown discourses of racial harmony. This racially plural fascism influenced Black activists like Veiga dos Santos (and, in his early years, Abdias de Nascimento). Dennis longed for a modified version of US fascism which would embrace efficient government, discard racial superiority, and reject imperialistic ambitions. Other Brazilian and US Blacks such as Júlio Romão, Joel Augustus Rogers, and Adam Clayton Powell dissented from these fascist organizations but lamented that the sad example of race relations in liberal democracies was a poor counterpoint to fascist pretentions. Chapter Four covers the use of New Deal-era radio programs such as Harold Ickes' Radio Education Project and the Estado Novo's support for samba schools to juxtapose democracy's racial tolerance with fascism's racial chauvinism. Though centering Blacks, these programs often celebrated formal abolition while absolving the two...

Judas to the Garveyite Cause: A Review of Jeffrey Perry's Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927

In his second volume biography of Hubert Harrison's life entitled Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1917–1928, Jeffrey Perry accomplishes what his Introduction states it would do, which is to detail "the extraordinary last nine and one-half years of Harrison's life, which [was] lived at the edge of poverty in a United States shaped by capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy". However, there are aspects of Harrison's life in this biography that are unable to clearly describe Harrison's work as both a US government informer and his work as an editor for the Negro World newspaper that promoted the principles of self-reliance and nationhood for members of the organization that Marcus Garvey co-founded, the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association). These principles are at odds with those of the US government which, since 1919 was undermining the work of the UNIA.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church: A History

On 17 June 2015 a white supremacist invaded Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire on a Bible study group. Nine members were killed, including the pastor, Clementa Pinckney. Pinckney had been a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and of the State Senate, as well as an AME minister, and the eulogy at his funeral was given by President Barack Obama. The story of the Charleston atrocity and its aftermath says much about the history of the AME, the largest of the black Methodist denominations, capturing its courageous and risky witness against injustice, its role in giving institutional expression to black aspirations, and its success in claiming a recognized place in the polity and public life of the United States. These themes, and more besides, are explored in Dennis Dickerson's magisterial history of the denomination.Professor Dickerson is well qualified to write the history of the AME Church. As the substantial bibliography to the present volume shows, he has been publishing on related subjects for more than two decades, and he has amassed an extensive knowledge of the primary and secondary sources. Here he presents a chronological account, beginning with the development of African Methodism in North America and the Caribbean, and describing the origins of the AME in the work of Richard Allen (1760–1831). Allen's departure from St George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1787 rooted the AME in an Exodus narrative that continued to be significant as a new denomination gradually took shape. Formally constituted in 1816, with Allen as its first bishop, the AME grew steadily through the nineteenth century, seeing itself as ‘a Creole church for the Atlantic world’ (106).Dickerson shows how building the infrastructure of the denomination, including flagship institutions like Wilberforce University in Ohio, could sometimes sit uncomfortably with the AME's ‘insurgent’ emphases, with commentators like Frederick Douglass criticizing the AME leadership, albeit unfairly, for failing to prioritize the cause of abolition. During the era of Reconstruction the AME grew rapidly in the southern states of the United States; thereafter, economic pressures and the impact of ‘Jim Crow’ segregation led to a massive migration to the industrial and urban north in the decades around World War I. Both developments posed challenges and opportunities for the denomination in ministering to new populations and addressing deep human needs. The narrative here weaves together the broad themes of political, social, and ecclesiastical history with case studies of individuals like Winfield H. Mixon, of Alabama, Bishop Henry M. Turner, the Social Gospellers Reverdy and Emma Ransom, and the Garveyite R. H. Tobitt. The final chapters discuss the civil rights years and the AME's sense of being a global church by the closing decades of the twentieth century.The tension between institution and insurgency surfaces in each chapter: over abolitionism before the Civil War and Tuskegee-style strategies in the ‘Jim Crow’ era; over responses to Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and proto-apartheid in South Africa; over civil rights and equal rights. But other themes emerge: pressure for indigenous rather than African American leadership in AME churches in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America; challenges to episcopal autocracy and occasional abuses of power; the call to recognize and fully affirm the ministry and leadership of women. Dickerson acknowledges that ‘respectable’ AME congregations sometimes proved less than welcoming to southern migrants and African musical traditions, and that the AME lost ground to Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal denominations at the beginning and end of the twentieth century, although he records the success of AME megachurches like Allen Cathedral in Jamaica, New York. He also notes that the United Methodist Church had a far better record of appointing black women bishops than the AME, although twenty-first-century General Conferences worked hard to redress this situation.Threaded through this history is an insistence that those nurtured in the AME Church remembered their heritage, and that the denomination continued to draw on its African and Methodist origins. AME heritage mattered to Shirley Graham Du Bois and to Dave Chappelle, and the AME retains its place within the structures of World Methodism. How the Wesleys' Methodism and its later expressions are inflected in a worldwide denomination that is nonetheless predominantly African American in membership and ethos remains a fascinating phenomenon.Grateful thanks are due to Dennis Dickerson for this thoroughly researched and beautifully written study of one of World Methodism's most significant branches.

A Religious Movement on Trial: Transformative Years, Judicial Questions and the Nation of Islam

The Nation of Islam (NOI) is one of the most controversial political-religious groups in the United States. Some define it as an exclusionary race-based group, while others see it as a genuine empowerment movement. Although it has been viewed as an unconventional fringe group, NOI represents an important syncretic movement of its time. Its approach to Islam was marked by a range of currents from the anti-colonial interpretive framework of the Ahmadiyya to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association forging a highly dynamic narrative to explain the racial injustices and individual and collective requirements of future emancipation. Despite its strong anti-establishment discourse, NOI operates within the parameters legal and judicial system and seeks to reach out to new groups. As NOI faces the challenge of balancing its clashing inner currents rooted in its commitments to orthodox vs. vernacularized Islam or anti-systemic vs. accommodationist policies and often stigmatized by outside observers, it constitutes one of the most promising and precarious black movement.

Rethinking Garveyism as Religion: The UNIA Universal Negro Ritual and UNIA Universal Negro Catechism

Abstract New developments in anthropology since the publication of Randall K. Burkett's Garveyism as a Religious Movement (1978) have led to new directions within ritual studies. Criticized by the NAACP as “silly rituals,” the theology of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) is probably the least studied and most misunderstood aspect of the UNIA's religious life, which was centered around the African diaspora. However, the ritual and catechism of the UNIA was arguably the motivating factor driving people to become members. The ritual and catechism supported and sustained the spiritual life of the group. Here I reexamine the theological framework of the UNIA ritual and catechism and the ways in which the ritual life was interpreted and understood by the members of both the UNIA and the African Communities League (ACL).

George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The Messenger Years, 1923-1924

George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The <i>Messenger</i> Years, 1923-1924

Anti-Commodified Black Studies and the Radical Roots of Black Christian Education

This article thinks about the intellectual inheritances bequeathed to Black Studies scholars, and specifically to scholars of African American religions, from Black women Christian educators of the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It focuses on two women: Catherine (Katy) Ferguson (1774-1854), a Presbyterian who started the first Sunday school in New York in 1793, and Emily Christmas Kinch (1879-1932), a missionary in the African Methodist Episcopal Church who founded the Eliza Turner Memorial School in Liberia in 1909, and also became a member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s and championed African redemption. It shows how Black women Christian educators developed an “anti-commodified Black Studies,” which in my formulation, refers to grassroots educational institution-building and pedagogical innovation that democratizes the spread and reach of new knowledges for all people.

‘Lower types of cranks, crooks and racial bigots’? The Universal Negro Improvement Association and black political violence in the United States, 1918–1930

This article examines the involvement of the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in black political violence in the early-interwar period in the United States. Evidence suggests that the UNIA was the organisation most often involved in black political confrontations, and the article discusses how the state, the black and white press and other black activist organisations may have both benefitted from and perpetuated the UNIA’s reputation for political violence. The essay argues that the UNIA’s involvement in violence against other black organisations and groups can be explained partly by the intensity of the ‘war of words’ among prominent black leaders in the United States, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Furthermore, the article suggests that ethnic and gender differences within the American UNIA itself could exacerbate pre-existing tensions between different groups of Garveyites. Contextualising black political violence in these ways allows us to move beyond a reductionist view of grassroots Garveyites as prone to violence. Instead, this approach allows us to better understand the relationship between the famous ‘war of words’ and the kinds of tensions, confrontations and violence that sometimes occurred at grassroots level between supporters of different black organisations and groups. The article contributes not only to the growing historiography about the UNIA at grassroots level, but also to discussions about the militarisation of black protest during World War I and in the 1920s, including the use of self-defence and paramilitary-style tactics by people of African descent in the United States.

The Pluralities of Black Geographies

AbstractThis paper seeks to spur conversations around the inherent pluralities found within Black Geographies. While analyses of Black Geographies have provided important reflections on the spatial imaginaries and practices of Black populations, less attention has been paid to the differences found among Black geographical expressions. This piece therefore seeks to draw out the ways in which Black people uniquely conceive of space by highlighting the distinctions present within different Black social movements. The authors explore the spatial politics of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Black Panther Party for Self‐Defense, and the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika to argue that while these three movements all attempted to create spaces of Black self‐determination, they did so with distinct spatial aspirations and concrete politics. The authors argue that recognising and accounting for the pluralities of Black spatial creation is necessary for realising more just geographies.

The Challenge of Garveyism Studies

The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of work on Marcus Garvey, Garveyism, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the American academy. Building on a first wave of Garveyism scholarship (1971–1988), and indebted to the archival and curatorial work of Robert A. Hill and the editors of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, this new work has traced the resonance of Garveyism across a staggering number of locations: from the cities and farms of North America to the labor compounds and immigrant communities of Central America to the colonial capitals of the Caribbean and Africa. It has pushed the temporal dimensions of Garveyism, connecting it backward to pan-African and black nationalist discourses and mobilizations as early as the Age of Revolution, and forward to the era of decolonization and Black Power. It has revealed the ways that Garveyism, a mass movement rooted in community aspirations, ideals, debates, and prejudices, offers a forum for excavating African diasporic discourses, particularly their contested gender politics. It has revealed that much more work remains to be done in Brazil, West Africa, Britain, France, and elsewhere.

Nyasa Leaders, Christianity and African Internationalism in 1920s Johannesburg

In 1920s Johannesburg, African nationalism challenged colonial categories of tribe, race and nation. Some African leaders, however, espoused alternative solidarities that were even more expansive and distinctly internationalist. Through the lives of four Christian leaders from colonial Nyasaland (modern-day Malawi), this article rehabilitates a tradition of globally orientated black politics that emerged in 1920s South Africa. Reimagining the past and future in cosmopolitan, internationalist terms all four Nyasa men looked beyond the limits of the South African nation for liberation. They were nevertheless starkly divided in their Christian beliefs. Ethiopianist Christians, George Wellington Kampara and Clements Kadalie, respectively, led the first branch of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Johannesburg and Southern Africa’s first major black trade union, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), and were both explicitly critical of the South African government. J.G. Phillips and J.R.A. Ankhoma, in contrast, were Zionist and Pentecostal Christians who strictly adhered to the laws of the land, at the same time as pioneering Nyasa nationalism. Complicating the ‘connexions’ between early African-led Christianity and African nationalism, this article highlights the international and imperial frameworks that these men thought through, and the divergent Christian-informed solidarities that they imagined from Johannesburg.

Marcus Garvey and His Relation to (Black) Socialism and Communism

“Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts,” Marcus Garvey, the creator, heart, and soul of the prodigiously successful Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA),2 2 At its height the U...

Review: The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Volumes XI-XIII edited by Robert A. Hill

Review: The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Volumes XI-XIII edited by Robert A. Hill