Turning Points in Pan-Africanism: Marcus Garvey

This lecture took place on Saturday 22 January 2022 at 2pm (New York), 7pm (London), 8pm (Lagos)

This public lecture is supporting the course, The Making of Modern Africa as part of the Foundation Certificate in African History

Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism are often thought of as two distinct methods of liberation. But what if we reimagined the connection between the localized nature of nationalism and the quest for Pan-African unity?

In this lecture, we discuss how Marcus Mosiah Garvey reimagined the theoretical framework of Pan-Africanism to see it as a political program for global repatriation and ‘Negro’ state formation. We uncover how he reimagined the structures of western imperialism for use as tools of liberation. In particular, we explore how his belief in the insularity of Negro identity and in economic development as a tool of liberation fed into his theories of Pan-Africanism.

Through examining primary source material, we trace how the ideologies of Garvey not only centered Africa in state-building and civic participation in the diaspora, but also influenced later spiritual and philosophical inquiries into a global Black identity, such as Rastafarianism.

Lecturer: Kai Mora, Senior Fellow

Transcript

Introduction

This the second instalment of Turning Points in Pan-Africanism.

In this lecture series, we will be discussing three of the most significant intellectual turning-points in Pan-Africanism–concepts of race, nationalism and Marxism. Though many are introduced to the Pan-African movement in Africa during the second half the 20th century, it was the diaspora in the late 19th and early 20th century that set the ideological foundation that would later evolve into the political movement. In this lecture series, we will discuss this ideological foundation in the early 20th century, rather than the Pan-African movement that came later.

This lecture series seeks to explore a selection of early Black thinkers and how their intellectual work contributed to what motivated the Pan-African world. Each thinker chosen for this series emphasized the role of either race, nationalism or Marxism in Pan-Africanism. In our first instalment, we spoke about the Trinidadian Historian and Marxist thinker CLR James. You can watch a recording of this lecture on our website. Today we will be speaking about Marcus Garvey and Nationalism, then our final instalment will be on Saturday February 26 on the Nardal sisters and Race.

Introduction to Garvey

CLR James’, who was a hard critic of Marcus Garvey, once said that while W.E.B Du Bois posed the question of Black unity, Garvey made it a ‘popular question,’ through which he made ‘the American Negro conscious of his African origin, and created for the first time a feeling of international solidarity among Africans and people of African descent.’ This was a general consensus among Black intellectual and political leaders of the 20th century. Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said of Marcus Garvey that he was ‘the first man of colour in the history of the United States to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man, on a mass scale, and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny, and make the Negro feel that he was somebody.’

Born in St Ann’s Bay, Jamaica in 1887 to working class parents, Marcus Mosiah Garvey took an early interest in printing and publication, becoming a printer’s apprentice in 1901. It was around this time that Garvey became aware of racial disparity. He cites the experience of a white couple preventing their daughter from continuing to befriend Garvey, on account of his race. In 1906, he moved to Kingston to take a job at a printers shop where he became active in labor politics as part of the printer’s union. In 1911, he left Jamaica to spend time with his family in Central America, where he observed further political crises and took up more editorial jobs. He then moved to London in 1912 to study law and philosophy at Birkbeck College, where he began to develop his Black nationalist ideologies. Back in Jamaica in 1914, he formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) before moving to the United States in 1916 where most of his political and community organizing occurred.

Race

Garvey arrived in Harlem, New York, just when the Harlem Renaissance, a golden age of Black cultural production in America, had just begun. The Harlem Renaissance, beginning around when WWI ended and lasting until the mid 1930’s, was an inspiration to the Négritude movement of the 1930’s, which had a profound influence on how CLR James saw race. I mention here both the Négritude movement and CLR James as a call back to the first lecture in this series, because I would like you all to begin to see the threads between the figures being discussed in this lecture series. I mean to reinforce a fundamental element of Pan-Africanism–the conscious and unconscious intellectual and cultural exchange within the Black world.

Just after WWI, just as the global Black world was realizing that Western imperialism did not adjust it’s racism on account of national history, the Harlem Renaissance was surging as a Black cultural production that promoted the racial solidarity which was critical to Garvey’s Pan-African thought. Traces of the Liberian political thinker Edward Blyden’s theory of African Personality was found just as much in the Harlem Renaissance as in the Négritude movement. Thus, Garvey also was deeply impacted by the idea that there was something intrinsically unifying about the Black race despite any geographical differences, and thus, only Black people could be responsible for cultivating and improving themselves. He also thought the same for other races and therefore advocated for the separation of races. Working from the ‘principle of Europe for the Europeans and Asia for the Asiatics,’ Garvey states that, “we also demand Africa for the Africans at home and abroad.” Here Garvey was directly borrowing from Dr Blyden who had published an article with that title in 1878 foreshadowing the colonisation of Africa that would gain pace a few years later. Garvey’s idea here is that through racial unification, the Black world will be able to put up a political and economic vanguard, based in Africa, that could compete on the world stage. In 1925, in the Negro World, the UNIA’s publication, Garvey writes ‘the Negro must be united in one GRAND RACIAL HIERARCHY. Our UNION MUST KNOW NO CLIME, BOUNDARY, or NATIONALITY.’ That is, racial interests must be the guiding principle in uniting the Black world and the building of Africa.

His justification, Garvey explained, was that

‘this world in which we live in is divided up into separate and distinct national groups. It is also divided up into great human groups. Each and every one of these national groups, and each and every one of these many race groups is fighting for it’s own interests…the Universal Negro Improvement Association strikes out in behalf of the Negro world over with an interest that is clear to each and everyone…the hope of that group is that there shall be an African republic that is second to none in the world.’

Here is the essence of Garvey’s intellectual practice: Africa belongs to and will be built by the Black race and it is on the basis of race that a great African republic will be built. Moreover, Garvey is not merely content with the separation of races, he sees Pan-African unity on a racial basis as a ‘new hope’, that is, the possibility of the Black world taking the place and power of the white Western world, and the United States in particular. To achieve these aims, Garvey thought it crucial to work within the framework of racial insularity. Garvey thus insisted

‘on a campaign of race purity; that is, doing everything moral and social within the race. Close ranks against all other races. It is natural that it is a disgrace to mix your race with other races. To split up the race is unwholesome and does not tend to morally dignify the race. It will be a beautiful thing when we have a standard Negro Race.’

He further wrote that to marry someone outside of the Black race was to ‘insult [one’s] mother, nature and God, who made his father.’ In short, Garvey was a racial purist who was ‘striving for Negro supremacy in every department of life.’ However, Garvey warned against colorism within the Black world. He wrote:

‘You must never put color within the race against color. You must never insult any color within the race. Whatever has happened in the past was without our consent and truly because slavery and the wicked damnation of the white man imposed upon us [immoral] behavior that we could not restrain. Now that we know better, it is for us to adjust these things within our own race.’

Thus, Garvey is arguing that racial unity has a moral imperative. To work within and for your race even at the level of your individual choices, such as marriage and sexuality, is a moral imperative for the Pan-African world. In this way Garvey’s stance on race is opposed to CLR James’ argument that the Black world would inevitably have to link up with other undeveloped peoples and poor whites, illustrating the diversity of Pan-African thinking on this issue, despite similar foundations in both their Caribbean Heritage and their broader philosophies on race and nationalism. CLR James and W.E.B. Du Bois were among the harshest critics of Garvey’s ideas on racial purity. We have already mentioned that James criticised Garvey for his hard-line racialism that led him to advise ‘Negro workers against linking up with white workers in industrial struggles.’ However, despite conflict in ideology, Garvey and James had many similar interests in nationalism. Like James, Garvey in part looked toward Trinidadian Captain A.A. Cipriani as an example of nationalist leadership and even corresponded with him despite the fact that Cipriani was a white Trinidadian. Cipriani was invited to join the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association, which was permeated by adherents to Garveyism, and would later make appeals to the British government in 1937 to change their position on barring Garvey from entering the country.

However, Garvey and Du Bois had perhaps an even fiercer rivalry on both topics of race and about their legacy within the Pan-African world. On one hand, Du Bois– known as the ‘father of Pan-Africanism,’ and a critical influence on CLR James–criticised Garvey for his plans to ‘oppose white supremacy and the white ideal by a crude and equally brutal Black supremacy and Black ideal…for what shall this poor world gain if it exchanges one race supremacy for another?’ Du bois asks. Moreover, their rivalry sparked serious conversations around elitism and grassroots organization in Black liberation.

One one side, Du Bois criticised Garvey’s lack of formal education, writing:

‘Garvey had no thorough education and a very hazy idea of the technique of civilization. He fell easily into the common error of assuming that because oppression had retarded a group, the mere removal of the injustice will at a bound restore the group to full power. Then, too, he personally had his drawbacks…he had the common weakness of untrained devotees that no dependence could be put upon his states of fact.’

On the other side, Garvey criticised Du Bois’ background, stating

‘starting even from the elementary stage of his education up to his graduation from Harvard and his passing through Berlin, [he] got all that through the charity and philanthropy of good white people. Admitting that Marcus Garvey was born poor, he never encouraged a hatred for the people of his kind or class, but to the contrary devoted his life to the improvement and higher development of that class within the race…’

Thus, to Du Bois, Garvey represented the hyper-racialised, unrefined wing of Pan-African thought. To Garvey, Du Bois represented that privileged class of Black intellectuals that loosely came together in such activities like the Pan-African Congress. However, as James admits, Garvey did introduce a grassroots element of Pan-Africanism based on race, which continued to be critical to the Pan-African movement on the continent.

However, while Garvey urged the Black world to ‘never allow any other race to preside over your affairs,’ toward the end of his political career, he was heavily criticised for connecting with members of the Ku Klux Klan. While this may be difficult to reconcile, it reflected Garvey’s dedication to building an African republic that was unified by race and could oppose the hegemony of the White world. Garvey states that:

‘the Ku Klux Klan expresses to a great extent the feeling of every real white American. . . The attitude of the Universal Negro Improvement Association is in a way similar to the Ku Klux Klan. Whilst the Ku Klux Klan desires to make America absolutely a white man’s country, the Universal Negro Improvement Association wants to make Africa absolutely a black man’s country.

Nationalism

Thus, Garvey’s understanding of the role of race in nationalism was deeply impacted by what he was witnessing in the US. While much of the Caribbean, Garvey’s home region, had already gained independence, forming nations where Black people were the majority, in the United States, African Americans were battling against Jim Crow laws–an unfamiliar practice to Garvey and the Caribbean–and fighting for the right to live equally the white population as a Black minority. Upon Garvey’s arrival to the United States, WWI was in full swing, and as mentioned in our lecture on CLR James, the entire Black world, which was being called upon and drafted to fight in the armies of the imperial powers, were facing racial mistreatment amongst the ranks, leading them to realize that discrimination against Black people was all encompassing and undifferentiated across the world.

This had a deep impact on Garvey’s nationalist, Pan-African thinking and the direction in which he would guide the UNIA. The experience of witnessing the Black world, and African Americans in particular, fighting for equal rights solidified his belief that Black people would need to work within their own political, social and economic frameworks to be fully liberated. Garvey thus took a nationalist approach to Pan-Africanism. To him, Africa was the anchor of the Black world, and wherever a Black person may reside, they should actively work toward the cultural, economic and political strength of Africa. In 1920, at the end of WWI and on the heels of W.E.B. Du Bois’ ‘first’ Pan-African Congress in 1919, the UNIA had its first conference at which it drafted the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World.

This document would be the provisional constitution for Garvey’s imagined African Republic. In the first resolution of the document, it states:

‘Be it known to all men that whereas all men are created equal and entitled to the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and because of this we, the duly elected representatives of the Negro peoples of the world, invoking the aid of the just and Almighty God, do declare all men, women and children of our blood throughout the world free denizens, and do claim them as free citizens of Africa, the Motherland of all Negroes.’

This publication of this document was a pivotal moment in Pan-African thought. It was one of the first movements out of the theoretical into the practical, and it was taking shape in the form of grassroots nationalism. While W.E.B. Du Bois and his contemporaries were part of a privileged Black intellectual class, Garvey represented the common man with a history of involvement in labor politics. In this way perhaps, Garvey’s limited experience in academic institutions aided in his appeal. Nevertheless, Garvey saw Africa as a geographic space for Black people to gain economic and political strength. Garvey’s emerging brand of Pan-Africanism was centered on erecting a ‘United States of Africa’ to which all Black people would flock.

Moreover, while Garvey was studying in London just before his arrival to the US, the writings of African American educator and political advisor Booker T. Washington became fundamental to Garvey’s ideological approach to nationalism. Booker T. Washington, a known rival to W.E.B. Du Bois, was known for arguing that Black people should avoid using politics and protest as an approach to liberation and instead opt for self-improvement which, in his view, would inevitably lead to political and economic liberation. Thus, it is not surprising that Washington’s ideas, in combination with Garvey’s own separatist ideas on race would lead the latter to saying that those in the diaspora in particular were,

‘not in a community to overthrow the law in that community. [They] are there to live under the law. The national aspiration of the race is to find expression not in revolution where you are established when you are under other people’s government, but to accomplish the end in Africa.’

In other words, Black people should not concern themselves with modifying an already racist or foreign society, but work to build a unified political, cultural and economic infrastructure in Africa, which responds to the specific needs of the Black race. Garvey took Washington’s self-improvement approach a step further by asserting that self-improvement for Black people could only be achieved within a Pan-African framework. That is to say, Garvey believed that Black liberation and economic self-sufficiency would have to be attained through the rebuilding of Africa.

Garvey, however, understanding the breadth of the diaspora and witnessing the advance toward civil rights in the US, also asserted that while Black people should not be involved in the politics of reform in racist societies:

‘wheresoever they form a community among themselves [they] should be given the right to elect their own representatives to represent them in Legislatures, courts of law, or such institutions as may exercise control over that particular community.’

While this may seem like a contradiction, what Garvey suggested is the idea that Black people should work amongst themselves toward the uplifting of themselves regardless of their geographic reality. This may also foreshadow the flexibility Garvey was later pressured to express when his rhetoric led many leaders of the Black world to reject his ideologies and legally block attempts at repatriation. Thus, Garvey argued not just for a geographic approach to nationalism and Pan-Africanism, but also for a Pan-Africanism that is embedded in the Black person regardless of their geography. In other words, While Africa is the anchor to which the entire Pan-African world can look, Garvey urges the Black world to establish the authority and autonomy of the Black race wherever they may reside.

It is important here to note that Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist and repatriation plans made him one of the revered figures of the (Jamaican) Rastafarian movement. Though Rastafarianism is a religion and satellite of Judeo-Christianity, it is also essentially a Pan-African movement that calls for the repatriation of Black people to Africa, specifically to Ethiopia, which is considered the new Holy Land (usurping this title from Jerusalem). The Rastafarian movement venerates Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I, formerly Ras Tafari Makonnen before being crowned in 1930. Rastafarians interpreted Garvey’s 1920 prediction (some say fictitious or misinterpreted) that Africans should “Look to Africa, where a Black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is at hand,” to refer to the coronation of Haile Selassie I in November 1930. One could argue that Garvey was simply referring to his own ambitions, because in the same year he was ‘elected’ as the ‘Provisional President of Africa’ during the first UNIA Congress. Further, it was rumored that Garvey critiqued Emperor Selassie I for the practice of slavery that was still legal in the country and further tagged him as a ‘coward’ after the latter fled to England when Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935.

Nevertheless, the Rastafarian movement gained traction in the second half of the century and even achieved mainstream recognition through reggae artists like Bob Marley. Rastafarianism has stood the test of time and has even achieved a small but significant resettlement of Rastafarians in Ethiopia. Even those who did not believe in the religion during its peak but enjoyed the music of Rastafarian reggae stars became attracted to their message of Pan-African unity, repatriation and Black liberation. Countless songs by Rastafarian reggae giants such as Bob Marley, Burning Spear, Peter Tosh and The Gladiators have referenced Garvey.

Visual Culture

Both Garvey and Rastafarianism have their roots in Ethiopianism. Ethiopianism was originally an 18th and 19th century Afro-Atlantic movement that coalesced around the idea that Africans were a chosen people forcibly migrated through slavery in order to adopt and reinvent Christianity, curing it of corruption, and bring it back to Africa as the ‘true’ Christianity. During the 20th century, Garvey and his contemporaries borrowed from this philosophy, and coalesced around Ethiopia as a divinely protected African nation, having never been formally colonized, a record of repelling European invasion, and being one of the oldest Christian civilizations in the world while having a monarchy and religion that were African in origin. Ethiopianism spoke to the religious nature of both Rastafarianism and Garvey. Biblical at it’s foundation, it gained inspiration from the 68 Psalm, 31st verse, which reads ‘…Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.’ The Black world interpreted this verse as a prophecy that Africa would soon play a pivotal role on the international stage, and thus a call for repatriation ‘back to Africa’ was a spiritual, Pan-African imperative. Garvey, a Christian man, often cited the Psalm while emphasizing the importance of Ethiopia as a powerful example to the Black and Western world. He thus rooted his visual culture on the imperial history of the nation and the nature of Africa more broadly–in fact, Garvey often equated Africa with Ethiopia, using them interchangeably, and referring to the African diaspora as ‘scattered Ethiopia.’

Nevertheless, Garvey provided the Black world, particularly the ‘grassroots’ Black world that was the subject of critique by Du Bois, with an explicit display of racial pride to which they could look to. Garvey asserted that the Black world must employ a practice of visual culture that will eventually become systematized into ‘customs’ which ‘are based upon acceptance of propaganda skillfully engineered.’ Thus, Garvey urges the Black world to develop ‘propaganda’ as an antithesis or answer to the white western world. For example, Garvey emphasized the importance of ‘[canonizing] our own saints, [creating] our own martyrs, and [elevating] to positions of fame and honor Black men and women who have made their distinct contributions to our racial history,’ reflecting this sentiment in his references to Ethiopia.

Garvey, writing in 1923 in Current History Magazine, writes that the UNIA ‘has succeeded in organizing the Negroes all over the world and we now look forward to a renaissance that will create a new people and bring about the restoration of Ethiopia’s ancient glory.’ He further refers to and proposed in the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World that the ‘anthem of the Negro race’ be ‘Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers,’ written by UNIA members Benjamin Burrell and Arnold J. Ford. This centering of Ethiopian heritage is arguably a result, reflecting back to Ethiopianism, of the legacy of Ethiopia routinely resisting both Western Christian and Arabic Muslim invasions, and additionally it’s imperial history of making several conquests of both Christian and Muslim territories. Ethiopia’s legacy of a strong military in particular undoubtedly inspired Garvey’s approach to visual culture.

However, believing that a great African republic would need to match, nay, overtake the White Western world, Garvey’s iconic regalia–the military uniforms, the feathered hat, remnant of Western military garb– were used to develop a visual culture that brought together his reverence for the Ethiopian legacy with contemporary politics in which the white west ruled. Though this shocked the Black and white people alike in the US to see droves of Black people in matching, ‘military’ garb decades before the Black Panthers would be seen in their iconic all black outfits, Garvey himself was borrowing from a tradition of Black nationalist movements that happened centuries before, such as the Haitian Revolution.

This display of ostentatious organization also permeated the structural arrangement of the UNIA and its meetings, in which Garvey conferred titles of Dukes, Barons and Knights on his members, leading to much criticism from the outside world. Again, Garvey was developing an antithesis or answer to white western hegemony. For example, after the fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935–which CLR James also protested against–led to the installation of a ‘Duke of Addis Ababa,’ Garvey pointed out that Mussolini had not received the same criticism as he for appointing a ‘Duke of the Nile’ in 1924. Thus, we see why Garvey had so vehemently pushed for Pan-African iconography that could both match and condemn white western hegemony into disrepute, in an effort to build an African republic that would become the new world superpower.

Garvey’s Pan-African iconography encompassed his display of military might with regalia and the proposing of a ‘Negro anthem.’ However, and perhaps most crucially, it also encompassed his visual displays of Black economic power with the Black Star Line and cultural pride with the Pan-African flag–that of the Black, Red and Green. The Black Star Line, was a steamship corporation established by Garvey in 1919 to begin commercial and migratory relations in the Black world. Though it ultimately failed, never actually visiting any African countries, and also led to Garvey’s arrest on frivolous mail fraud charges, it was an important visual propaganda tool that cultivated Black pride by it’s display of significant economic potential.

Garvey’s Pan-African flag was presented at the 1920 UNIA Congress. Not long after in a 1921 speech, Garvey is quoted as stating, ‘Show me the race or nation without a flag, and I will show you a race of people without any pride!’ The canonical meaning of the colors for Garvey and UNIA members was:

Red: ‘For the color of the blood which men must shed for their redemption and liberty.’
Black: ‘For the color of the noble and distinguished race to which we belong.’
Green: ‘For the luxuriant vegetation of our Motherland.’

However, in Race First, Tony Martin describes that when speaking to the meaning of colors of the flag, it sometimes shifted ‘to deliberately alarm his interviewer.’ At least in once instance, Martin recounts, Garvey stated that

‘Red expressed the UNIA’s sympathy with the “Reds of the World,” the green expressed a similar sympathy for the Irish in their struggle against the British, and the black stood for the people of the African race.’

Nevertheless, this speaks to both the Pan-African iconography and shock value with which Garvey wanted to galvanize the world. However, as stated above, Garvey’s goal was not to destabilize the US or any other Western nation, but to build a nation that could supersede it. His focus on Pan-African iconography and propaganda ultimately became part of his long lasting legacy. The colors of his Pan-African flag have been duly adopted by Black liberation movements throughout the century and continue to be utilized. Just as the Rastafarians revolutionized Christianity with visual culture taken from Ethiopia, Garvey revolutionized how the Black world coalesced around a visual culture in the advancement toward liberation.

Conclusion

Working in the midst of a Black intellectual and cultural golden age in Harlem, New York, Garvey imagined a program that offered citizenship and government by and for Black people as a solution to the oppression faced at the hands of White rule. Garvey’s repatriation and Pan-African citizenship program was supported by the idea that all Black people had a distinct racial identity that was inextricably rooted in Africa, whether as a historical fact or through an intangible, spiritual even, connection that could not be cut by geographic boundaries, real or imagined. Through Garvey’s political program, one can argue, ties between the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude movement were made. Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, Garvey moved the idea of Black unity from the theoretical and cultural to the practical and political. Garvey’s repatriation movement on the basis of racial unity would inspire generations of Black thinkers such as those who would rise through the ranks of the Négritude movement. Garvey, a diasporan, also carved out a Pan-African plan for a politically unified Africa even before Kwame Nkrumah, the African leader who led Ghana to independence, began his own campaign for Pan-African unity–a testament to the longevity of Garvey’s vision. Though Garvey was heavily criticised for his hard race thinking, the idea to internationally and politically unite on the basis of race rivaled the political organization the white population of the imperial world was able to achieve on the basis of their own race. Through the geographical and political connections Garvey began to foster, and with his rising concept of Africa as the glorious homeland of Black people, the connection to an African identity grew politically stronger.

Turning Points in Pan-Africanism: Marcus Garvey