Is Pan-Africanism Dead?: The Relevancy of Garveyism in the Twenty-First Century: The

Politics of Black Self-Determination in the Southeastern United States

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the Center for International Studies of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Bakari K. Lumumba

August 2018

© Bakari K. Lumumba. All Rights Reserved

2

This thesis titled

Is Pan-Africanism Dead?: The Relevancy of Garveyism in the Twenty-First Century: The

Politics of Black Self-Determination in the Southeastern United States

by

BAKARI K. LUMUMBA

has been approved for

the Center for International Studies

by

Loren Lybarger

Associate Professor of Classics and World Religions

Ghirmai Negash

Director, African Studies

Lorna Jean Edmonds

Vice Provost of Global Affairs

3

ABSTRACT

Lumumba, Bakari K., “M.A.,” August 2018 African Studies

Is Pan-Africanism Dead?: The Relevancy of Garveyism in the Twenty-First Century: The

Politics of Black Self-Determination in the Southeastern United States

Director of Thesis: Dr. Loren D. Lybarger

Since the 1960s, Pan-Africanism has steadily lost its currency amongst leaders

and citizens in the African continent and throughout the African Diaspora. During the

past fifty years, Pan-Africanism has suffered a series of seemingly insurmountable

setbacks, including the assassinations of prominent activists and statesmen such as

Patrice Lumumba, Steve Biko, Malcolm X, and Thomas Sankara to name a few.

Furthermore, Pan-Africanism flagship organization the African Union (AU) has had its

fair share of challenges, and criticism leading its detractors to call it a “toothless

bulldog.”

Additionally, the growing disillusionment amongst Africans in the continent and

throughout the Diaspora towards an ideology that has promised so much but delivered so

little has caused Pan-Africanism to be seen as an antiquated model of resistance to global

white hegemony. This stance has also caused many to question the efficacy of the

philosophies and opinions of Marcus Garvey in the age of globalization, in which the

forms of oppression African people face have evolved through sophisticated social

structures that produce contradictory forms of consciousness. Moreover, the pessimistic

undercurrent toward Pan-Africanism that permeates the African world leads one to ask

the question, is Pan-Africanism dead?

4

DEDICATION

To my watoto Amir, Zaina, and Asantewaa for believing in me.

Mimi kupenda sana.

&

To Dr. Boikai S. Twe, Baba Larry Crowe, and Mama Nozipo Glenn for being models of

what a Pan-Africanist is in the twenty-first century.

5

ACKNOWLDEGMENTS

I am forever indebted to Ohio University’s Center for International Studies

African Studies program, the Voinovich School of Leadership & Public Affairs, and Dr.

Lybarger, Dr. Muhammad, and Dr. Houston for their time, effort, diligence, and patience

in helping this thesis become a reality.

To my ancestors who are too numerous to name, thank you for teaching me to

always bet on Black!

6

TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....3 Dedication...…………………………………………………………………………...…..4 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………......5 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..7 Chapter 1…………………………………………………………………………………26 Chapter 2………………………………………………………………………………....43 Chapter 3....……………………………………………………………………………....56 Chapter 4…………………………………………………………………………………72 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..79

7

INTRODUCTION

This thesis will critically analyze how and why Pan-Africanism1 has become

associated with an antiquated model of resistance to racism/white supremacy, while also

examining how the philosophies and opinions of Marcus Garvey are as relevant today in

the 21st century as they were during the time of Garvey through the idea of the “alienated

revolutionary.” The alienated revolutionary is one who is cynical about existing power

structures but argues that progressive change can only take place via the use of calculated

acts of instrumental violence.

In 1889 Henry Sylvester Williams, an Afro-Trinidadian barrister, created the

African Association in London, England in partnership with Mrs. E.V. Kinloch, a Black

South African. Williams later coined the term Pan-Africanism2 and attributed doing so to

Mrs. Kinlock whom he heard speak in Britain in 1897, about forced labor in the mines of

South Africa. 3

Williams would subsequently call and lead the first of several Pan-African

conferences in 1900 “to protest the stealing of lands in the African and West Indian

colonies by European powers, racial discrimination and other issues of interest to

Blacks.”4 A young W.E.B. DuBois, played a leading role during the conference, and

drafted a letter to the Queen of England and other rulers of Europe which contained “an

1 Pan-Africanism in this thesis is defined as the concept and conviction that Africans are a distinct people with a distinct historical personality and that they should unite in order to gain the structural capacity to define, defend and develop their own interest as a people. 2 Stylistic Note The terms Pan African, Pan-Africanism, and pan-African are all used interchangeably to reference the social-political, ideological and economic movement that’s advocates solidarity and resistance against oppression for Africans throughout the world. Furthermore, African, Black, African American, people of African descent, are referred to interchangeably, but with due deference to the context involved. 3 Bonita Harris, “Caribbean Women & Pan-Africanism,” African Journal of Political Science New Series 1, no.2 (1996): 257. 4 Tajudeen Abdul Raheem, Pan-Africanism, Economy and Social Change in the Twenty First Century (New York, New York University Press, 1996), 2.

8

appeal to struggle against racism, to grant Black colonies in Africa and the West Indies

the right to responsible government, and demanded

political and other rights to Blacks in the United States.” 5 The document asserted, “‘The

problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color bar.’”6 The conference would

signal a coherent beginning of the Pan-African movement, advocating liberation from

foreign oppression, unity of African people at home and abroad, and the coalescing of

political and economic resources for the benefit of African people. These objectives were

briefly met in some form during the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, and the

establishment of Haiti as a nation state. During the 1920’s Garvey era its ability to unify

African people domestically and abroad under the cause of African redemption through

organized efforts. Efforts that included, US-based Civil Rights/Black Power movements,

and African Decolonialization/ Independence movements that ended de jure second-class

citizenship in the US and direct European rule in Africa.

Today, however, after 118 years, there is a new clarion call to African people led

by voices such as Tanzanian businessman Ali Mufuruki. Who declared in April of 2015

at the Meles Zenawi lecture series, in the Ethiopian town of Bahir Dar, that “Pan-

Africanism is dead, and that Kwame Nkrumah was no hero.’’ 7Mufuruki presented the

legacy of Nkrumah quite differently from how others have, stating:

I studied the biography of Nkrumah for several weeks to prepare this

lecture. I was first surprised, then disappointed, and petrified about what I

5 Ibid., 2 6 Ibid., 2 7 CORRESPONDENT, SPECIAL. "Kwame Nkrumah Was No Hero, Pan-Africanism Is Dead and Other Stories from a Unique Presidential Meeting." Mail & Guardian Africa. N.p., 21 Apr. 2015. Web. 17 Apr. 2017.

9

found. Like all leaders full of ideals, the father of Ghana’s independence

and Pan-Africanism had his own dark moments. As a matter of fact, the

Pan-Africanist dream still struggles to be fully implemented. Shouldn’t we

consider it ‘dead?8

Moreover, this call is being made outside the halls of academia by a community

that is disenchanted with an idea that has promised so much but produced so little. In the

US this call has been made by Michael Harriot of The Root, an online magazine of

African-American culture, has argued that African Americans are unaware of what Pan-

Africanism is. He asserts that its few remaining acolytes promote an anachronistic

ideology based more on fantasy than reality, championed by economically destitute

African Americans who promote alternative facts and conspiracy theories via Hidden

Colors DVDs. 9 Furthermore, Zimbabwean, journalist and civil activist Vince Musewe,

has also joined the chorus in stating that Pan-Africanism is dead in an article for The

Zimbabwean an online journal for the voiceless, in which he lambasted Pan-Africanism

for its inability to unify African people. Musewe, also cites the history of its acolytes use

of such noble claims as a stepping stone to gain public trust en route to gaining access to

elite positions in society that were formerly held by European colonizers. 10

The statements of Mufuruki, Harriot and Musewe, true or not, speak to the

growing disillusionment among Africans on the continent and throughout the diaspora.

These sentiments support the perspective that Pan-Africanism has promised so much but

delivered so little. During the past fifty years, Pan-Africanism has suffered a series of

8 Ibid. 9 Michael Harriot, “We Fact-Checked Umar Johnson's Hotep Tantrum with Roland Martin Because Someone Had To.” The Root, www.theroot.com, 11 July 2017. 10 Vince Musewe, “Pan-Africanism is dead,” The Zimbabwean, 8 April. 2014.

10

seemingly insurmountable setbacks. Setbacks that, include the assassinations of

prominent activists and statesmen such as Patrice Lumumba, Steve Biko, Malcolm X,

and Thomas Sankara. Pan-Africanism has also faced challenges from the African Union

(AU). Some of the challenges with the AU have been its unwillingness and or inability to

enforce and uphold its referendums to its failure to maintain present national boundaries.

As an example, the creation of the nation-state of South Sudan in 2011. Furthermore, the

AU’s inability to implement numerous initiatives due to lack of funding, continued

international interference in African affairs by the European Union, the United States,

and China has led its detractors to call it a “toothless bulldog.”11

However, in the United States over the past 50 years, Pan-Africanism has made

critical interventions in the movement for Black liberation via the Activist-Intellectual

tradition of resistance through literary force. This practice of literary resistance has

helped keep the idea and concepts of Pan-Africanism alive in academic and intellectual

circles. For example, the Black Power Movement’s promotion of self-determination,

cultural grounding, relevant education, cultural pluralism, and student activism led to the

emergence of Black Studies as a discipline and a movement in 1966 at San Francisco

State College (SFSC), now San Francisco State University (SFSU).12 Dr. Nathan Hare, an

African American sociologist, activist, academic, and psychologist, became the

coordinator of the department in February of 1968. Under Hare’s leadership, the Black

Studies Department at SFSU would inspire the establishment of numerous Black Studies

programs and departments at American colleges and universities and the subsequent

11 Tajudeen Abdul Raheem, Pan-Africanism, Economy and Social Change in the Twenty First Century (New York, New York University Press, 1996), 6. 12 Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies 4th Edition (Los Angeles, University of Sankore Press, 2010), 12.

11

creation of the first doctoral program in African American Studies at Temple University

in 1992.

Pan-Africanism in the United States would also find grounding in the cultural

thrust promoted by the US Organization under the leadership of Dr. Maulana Karenga.

This organization embraced the call of Malcolm X, Sekou Toure, and Amilcar Cabral for

a cultural revolution to recover the best of African views, values, and practices and use

them to enrich and expand the lives of Black people and enhance their capacity to wage

and win the struggle for liberation.13 The US Organization would also singularly embrace

Malcolm X’s view of culture as expressed in his “Statement of Basic Aims and

Objectives of the Organization of Afro-American Unity,” presented in Harlem on June

28, 1964.14 The statement asserted:

You must have a cultural revolution before the violent revolution…for the

cultural revolution gives identity, purpose, and direction…We must

recapture our heritage and our identity if we are ever to liberate ourselves

from the bonds of white supremacy. We must launch a cultural revolution

to unbrainwash an entire people.15

Malcolm X’s declaration would serve as the basis for the establishment of the US

Organization founded in 1965 in Los Angeles, California under the leadership of Dr.

Maulana Karenga. The organization would consequently adopt Black cultural nationalism

as a mode of resistance to White supremacy while also creating Kawaida philosophy, an

emancipatory philosophy dedicated to cultural revolution, radical social change, and

13 Ibid., 160. 14 Scot Brown, Fighting for US, Maulana Karenga, The US Organization and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York City, New York University Press, 2003), 23. 15 Ibid., 23.

12

bringing good in the world. The organization’s greatest contribution to the Pan-Africanist

struggle is its creation of the Pan-African holiday Kwanzaa in 1966, as a celebration of

family, community, and culture. Today, Kwanzaa is celebrated by more than 40 million

people on every continent in the world.16

The cultural thrust also had an impact on academia via, Dr. Molefi K. Asante’s

book Afrocentricity: The theory of Social Change (1980). Asante’s book started a

discourse around the issue of African agency, and proper place of African peoples’

history. Afrocentricity as an intellectual idea evolved out of and is based on several

fundamental assumptions. First, it assumes that African culture is not only worthy of

study, but critical to understanding society and the human experience, given its key role

in each. Secondly, Afrocentricity or African-centeredness as a methodological orientation

contends that the most effective and fruitful way of studying and understanding African

people is from their own perspective. Finally, Afrocentric theory assumes that if an

African-centered approach is incorrect or of little value, then so is the discipline of Black

Studies, which is based on an equally important assumption that the African experience is

both a valid and valuable subject of study.17

Asante’s Afrocentric initiative would spread beyond the campus to the African

American community, the larger society, and internationally, as well. Furthermore, other

scholars would begin to apply Afrocentrism as an answer to a myriad of issues plaguing

the African American community in academic and social spaces as a popular approach to

African social and human issues. 18

16 Ibid., 160-161. 17 Ibid., 43. 18 Ibid., 40.

13

Paradoxically, Asante’s pre-eminence as the progenitor of contemporary

Afrocentric thought declined in the minds of many due to Dr. Marimba Ani’s massive

text Yuguru: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior

(1994), and her coining of the term MAAFA in her book "Let the Circle Be Unbroken:

The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora" (1998), to describe the history

and ongoing effects of atrocities inflicted on African people. Ani’s treatise Yuguru

captured the ears of many contemporary Afrocentrists, due to her militant critique of

European thought and culture as a tool to promote and maintain white hegemonic rule

throughout the world. Furthermore, Ani’s coining of the term MAAFA in reference to the

atrocities committed against African people has been accepted by many to serve a similar

purpose as the idea of the Holocaust serves to name the distinct Jewish experience of

genocide in Nazi Germany.

Despite the positive cultural impact of the US Organization and of Black cultural

nationalist in the academy, whose work persevered and expanded Black Nationalism and

Afrocentrism has key concepts, Black cultural nationalism has failed to gain a sizeable

following in the African American community. Even with the popularity of

Afrocentricity as a solution to African social and human problems, pan-Africanism’s

thrust in the academic and cultural realms has failed on a macro-level to positively affect

the lives of African Americans who suffer under the vicissitudes of life and the vagaries

of everyday living.

The concepts of Afrocentricity, including cultural nationalism and racial

solidarity, are too abstract for people who confront grinding poverty, illiteracy and

political oppression. While suffering from the residual effects of chattel enslavement and

14

second-class citizenship, African Americans have also had to battle with contemporary

issues, such as the New Jim Crowism19, police misconduct, extrajudicial violence and a

lack of adequate healthcare.

Because of the tendency to intellectualize African American problems, rather than

solve them, pan-Africanism has gone into an abeyance as leaders and citizens in the

African continent and throughout the African Diaspora have sought alternative ways to

deal with the myriad of challenges that confront African life. Alternative modes of

thought such as assimilationism have also failed to bring ideological and organizational

coherence to the effort to achieve social, economic, and political freedom – as well as

equality to the African world.

For example, Dr. Amos Wilson, in his treatise Blueprint for Black Power: A

Moral, Political and Economic Imperative for the Twenty-First Century (2011), speaks to

the weakness of assimilationism, due to its ability to be co-opted by the white power

structure. Wilson argues, that the assimilationist led Civil Rights Movement was

successful in the expansion of Black middle and professional classes as well as markedly

reducing discrimination against Black consumers. The interest overall of Black business

and economic development, however, were not well severed.20 Wilson consequently

regards the assimilationist-led Civil Rights Movement to that of a consumer rights

movement in which the freedom to spend money with white businesses and

establishments became synonymous with political freedom or “1st class” citizenship in

the minds of many African Americans. Additionally, Wilson chides the National

19 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarnation in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, The New Press, 2012) 20 Amos N. Wilson, Blueprint for Black Power: A Moral, Political, and Economic Imperative of the Twenty-First Century (New York, Afrikan World InfoSystems 1998), 598.

15

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Urban League, Southern

Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the institutional Black Church for being

unable to or unwilling to create sociocultural, politico-economic, technological-military

development plans for Black people -- things that are essential to their survival and

advancement. 21

Over more than sixty years after the United States Supreme Court outlawed

segregation of the races in America’s schools, supposedly in the interest of providing

African Americans with “equal education” through racial integration, the majority of

Black students find themselves hyper-segregated in urban ghetto schools, entrapped in an

education system in severe crisis and in imminent danger of total collapse. 22Sixty plus

years after Blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, won the right to ride in the front of the bus,

Blacks in urban America are virtually the only ones along with other forlorn minorities,

riding the buses -- buses to nowhere. Fifty years after gaining the right to vote, having

benefitted from the passage of the great 1964 Voting Rights Act, Blacks in urban and

rural America vote for Black politicians who cannot improve their plight. 23They can vote

for the president of the United States, the only problem being that their urban votes are no

longer crucially influential in determining who will be elected president. Therefore, the

major parties gain political supremacy by running hard against Black images and Black

interest. Forty years after passing fair housing legislation, Blacks are hyper-segregated in

urban ghettos and suburban neighborhoods. Sadly, after sixty plus years of being

America’s moral conscience, Blacks find their communities being devastated by

21 Ibid., 831. 22 Ibid., 827. 23 Ibid., 827.

16

immorality; after preaching brotherly, race-transcending love, they find themselves the

most hated of races. For Blacks in America, fifty years after hearing “Free at last! Free at

last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!” America has become a prison, sealing their

bodies, hopes, and aspiration in dungeons of despair.24

Pan-African thinkers offer a solution to the maladies of Black life in America, in

the form of a nuanced and pragmatic form of Garveyism, by engaging in a critical

analysis of why Pan-Africanism failed in its initial manifestations and why alternatives

have also failed. James Pope in his position paper, Pan-Africanism in the United States:

Identity and Belonging, speaks to the obscure nature of Pan-Africanism in the United

States, due in part to the praxis of Pan-African resistance activity traditionally being

centered on the idea of common struggle against chattel slavery, Jim Crow, Apartheid,

colonialism, and imperialism. Today, these overt forms of marginalization have evolved

through sophisticated social structures that produce contradictory forms of

consciousness.25 This process has undermined one’s sense of sociopolitical, cultural and

economic belonging in the twenty-first century, resulting in a lack of clearly defined

points that would create international solidarity, due to overt oppression being more

subtle and nuanced. 26

Which begs the question, is Pan-Africanism useful today? Is it still a developing

idea? Can it be infused into current social movements against police brutality, racism in

education encapsulated in #Blackoncampus, #BlackLivesMatter and

#ConcernedStudent1950? How does the formation of Pan-African critical consciousness

24 Ibid., 827-828. 25 Olayiwola Abegunrin, Sabella Ogbobode Abidde, Pan-Africanism in Modern Times: Challenge, Concerns, and Constraints (Lanham, Maryland, Lexington Books 2016), 231. 26 Ibid., 107.

17

look today? Can it be cultivated in the growing movements headed by young activists in

an environment that does not have overt institutions of the age of imperialism,

colonialism, Jim Crowism, and South African apartheid?27

Pan-Africanism can be useful today if properly channeled in a nuanced race-first

form, if its adherents move away from a focus on creating social organizations that

exclusively promote Black pride, self-love, and an embrace of African heritage and

history. It can do so by moving toward a pragmatically based focus on obtaining

legitimate political and economic power in U.S. society. To do so requires that its

adherents make the transition from warrior and activist to diplomat, statesmen and

professional using these positions of power and influence to create legitimate spaces of

power for African people to build, develop and maintain rather than only criticize,

deconstruct, and destroy. This necessitates moving away from a crisis-oriented leadership

model that simply responds or reacts to racism to a model that is pre-emptive in nature.

Pan-Africanism must work to build and develop political and economic power to insulate

the Black community from racism, rather than simply responding to it.

This thesis will critically analyze how and why Pan-Africanism has become

associated with an antiquated model of resistance to racism/white supremacy, while also

examining how the philosophies and opinions of Marcus Garvey are as relevant today in

the 21st century as they were during the time of Garvey through the idea of the “alienated

revolutionary.” The alienated revolutionary is one who is cynical about existing power

structures but argues that progressive change can only take place via the use of calculated

27 Ibid., 107.

18

acts of instrumental violence.28 Moreover, the alienated revolutionary reaches the point

of alienation due to their disenchantment with the white power structure and other forms

of Black political resistance to white domination. These forms of resistance fall into four

distinct categories according to John T. McCartney author of Black Power Ideologies: An

Essay in African American Political Thought (1992). The first category, the “political

bargainer,” conforms to the established political process, because he or she can “work

within the two-party system” and has a major goal of “equalizing” opportunities to

produce goods and services. Individuals like Shirley Chisholm, former Representative

Julian Bond of Georgia, former Representative John Conyers of Michigan, and Black

political organizations like the Black Congressional Caucus are “real world” examples of

the political bargainer category. 29 The second category, called the “moral crusader,” is

more interested in “saving the soul of society” than in goods and services, is usually

nonviolent, is not averse to making deals with the status quo, and because of a

willingness to compromise is frequently “open to the charge of being a sell-out.”30

The third category is the “alienated reformer.” The alienated reformer is “cynical

about the possibilities of effecting change through the existing system,” supports the

concepts of Black control of Black communities, and wants a transformation of society,

but one premised on a revitalized Black community. Additionally, the alienated reformer

is also interested in “bread and butter issues” like the political bargainer, but unlike the

28 John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought (Philadelphia, Temple University Press 1992), 112. 29 Ibid., 112. 30 Ibid., 112.

19

latter, is “contemptuous of ‘white middle-class values’” and takes pride in Black culture

worldwide.31

Stokely Carmichael and Chokwe Lumumba at some point in their political careers

started out as adherents of the other approaches. However, traumatic defeats/experiences

(Lumumba learning of the murder of Emmitt Till and Carmichael’s unsuccessful bid to

desegregate the Democratic Party) led them to move to a revolutionary ideology in which

both Black separatism and the idea of a revolutionary transformation of the United States

by any means necessary played a prominent role in their actions.32 For example, the

Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began with a moral-crusader

stance in the early 1960s, however, by the late 1960s it moved to a revolutionary

ideology in which both Black Separatism and the idea of revolutionary transformation of

the United States by any means necessary played a prominent role in the organization.33

Malcolm X’s dictum that African Americans had to be ready to resort to armed

self-defense as a means of liberation highlights the important role that violence has in the

self-assertion and psychological liberation of the oppressed. The calculated use of

instrumental violence according to Fanon is an invariable prerequisite to decolonization,

resistance, and freedom from oppression.34 Moreover, violence is a cleansing force that

rids the colonized of their inferiority complex and of their passive and despairing attitude.

Violence, Fanon argues emboldens them and restores their self-confidence. 35 It is

violence, in which self-assertion and self-affirmation manifest that lies at the heart of

31 Ibid., 112. 32 Ibid., 112. 33 Ibid., 113. 34Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth (New York City, Grove Press, 2004), 1. 35 Ibid., 51.

20

Pan-Africanism, for through the use of violent struggle (the success of the Haitian

Revolution) African people realized that they could free themselves from foreign

domination and take their place among the nations of the world as a free, proud, and

productive people.

The role of the alienated revolutionary and alienated reformer can be seen in the

work of Stokely Carmichael and Chokwe Lumumba, showing that Pan-Africanism in a

nuanced form is still a vibrant, effective ideology for African liberation. It can

accomplish this if it moves away from a focus on creating social organizations that

exclusively promote Black pride, self-love, and an embrace of African heritage and

history, toward a pragmatically based focus on obtaining legitimate political and

economic power in U.S. society. Moreover, the attention placed on Carmichael’s and

Lumumba’s political work and aspirations brings into focus how Pan-African solidarity

leads to the stance of the alienated revolutionary.

Moreover, it is arguable that any contemporary discussion on Pan-Africanism in

the twenty-first century is incomplete without a discussion of Marcus Garvey and

Garveyism for a multitude of reasons. First, Garvey was one of the most well-traveled

Black men of his day, for by the time he had arrived in the United States, on March 23,

1916, the 28-year-old Garvey had already traveled throughout the Caribbean, Central and

South America and Europe, assessing the plight of people of African descent.36 Second,

Garvey was the leading African Diaspora leader of the twentieth century, leading a

movement of more than five million people on every continent. Hence, his popularity and

international appeal allowed him to spread the gospel of Pan-Africanism via his literary

36 Mark Christian, “Marcus Garvey and African Unity: Lessons for the Future from the Past,” Journal of Black Studies 39, no.2 (2008): 328.

21

organ the Negro World. Moreover, his philosophies and opinions would lead to the

creation of many Pan-Africanist organizations inspired by his work, such as the Nation of

Islam (NOI) led by Elijah Muhammad, the African National Pioneer Movement (ANPM)

led by Carlos Cook, the Organization of African American Unity (OAAU) led by

Malcolm X and, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). Lastly, it has been contended that

even though Garvey was not successful in the 1920s in securing outright victory over

European colonialism, he did lay the foundations for the following generation of African

leaders from the continent and Diaspora to engage in the effective liberation of Africa in

terms of direct Europe rule. However, since the 1960s, there has been limited progress in

securing a viable and sustainable notion and practice of African unity, and efficacious

resistance to foreign oppression (neo-colonialism). 37

What can we learn from Garveyism that is relevant today for Black liberation

theory? Can self-determination be achieved in contemporary Black communities

besieged by self-negation and a quick-fix cultural mentality based on crude materialism?

Is there something from the era of Garveyism that needs to be put in practice in

contemporary Black communities? Garvey scholar and Miami University professor

Mark Christian argues that there is, by keeping Garvey alive in our teaching, studies,

conferences, and publications. There is a hope that Garvey’s message of self-

determination will eventually come into greater practice throughout the African continent

and the African Diaspora.38

37 Ibid., 328. 38 Mark Christian, “Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association: New Perspectives on Philosophy, Religion, Micro-Studies, Unity, and Practice,” Journal of Black Studies 39, no.2 (2008): 164.

22

Christian might be right, but one of the contributions of this thesis is to point out

that scholarship is not enough. For this reason, the discussion that follows will include a

focus on Black political self-determination in the southeastern United States for several

reason. First, the southeastern United States has the largest population of African

Americans in the U.S., due to it being the point of debarkation for some 400,000 Africans

during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Therefore, the southeastern U.S. is of vital

importance due to the fact that African Americans are the numerical majority in many

cities and counties throughout the region, thus their prospects of gaining political power

are greater in the southeast than in other regions in which they are outnumbered.

Furthermore, there has been a trend of reverse migration amongst African

Americans, in which after nearly 100 years African Americans are leaving the Midwest

and Northeast to return to the Sunbelt. The attraction of year-round warm weather, the

scarcity of economic opportunities due to deindustrialization, and the effects of

globalization on the Rust Belt has helped spur retirees and Black millennials to take their

chances in a region that their ancestors once fled en masse generations ago.

Chapter 1 briefly reviews the history of Pan-Africanism tracing its origins to the

success of the Haitian Revolution and the creation of the first Black republic in the

Western Hemisphere. This chapter highlights several alienated revolutionaries who

became cynical about existing white hegemonic power structures, arguing that

progressive change can only take place via the use of calculated acts of resistance.39 The

analysis starts during the proto Pan-Africanist era (prior to the 18th century) and ends

with the classical era of Pan-Africanism (18th century to 20th century). Furthermore, this

39 John T. McCartney: Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought (Philadelphia, Temple University Press 1992), 112.

23

analysis focuses on the development and trajectory of the concept of the alienated

revolutionary, with an emphasis on how it has been used by key charismatic figures in the

movement.

Chapter 2 explores the importance of Marcus Garvey as a principal figure in the

Pan-Africanist movement. Garvey serves as the link between the classical Pan-Africanist

era, and the modern (20th century to the present) era. Furthermore, the philosophies,

opinions, and legacy that Garvey left have been instrumental in spawning numerous Pan-

Africanist organizations and leaders that were inspired by his work and teachings. These

leaders include Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, and Carlos Cook to name a few.

Additionally, this chapter examines the role that Garvey’s ideas have played in

continuing the idea of the alienated revolutionary, through the work of Stokely

Carmichael and Chokwe Lumumba Sr.’s. fight for Black political self-determination in

the southeastern United States.

Chapter 3 examines the early lives and political development of Stokely

Carmichael and Chokwe Lumumba Sr., which includes Carmichael’s work with the

Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The chapter then explores his attempt

to organize the Black citizens of Lowndes, to create their own political party and elect

Black public officials in the Black majority county, while also analyzing how the former

Vice President of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), Chokwe Lumumba Sr., was able to

successfully become mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Moreover, emphasis on

Carmichael’s LCFO and Lumumba’s successful mayoral bid are important because it

models the possibilities that open up when Pan-Africanism and the alienated

revolutionary stance are embraced. This success can be replicated if Pan-Africanism is

24

practiced in a nuanced version congruent with 21st century global realities in which local,

national, and international economics are linked due to the advance in technology.

Chapter 4 ends my analysis, by reflecting on the success of Chokwe Lumumba

Sr.’s pragmatic Pan-Africanism as Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, and his use of

legitimate political power as part of the American democratic system of governance to

help a majority Black city transition from possible state trusteeship to a city on the road

to recovery and redevelopment. This chapter also examines the continuation of his work

through his son, Choke Lumumba Jr., who successfully became Mayor of Jackson,

Mississippi in July of 2017. Ultimately, Carmichael’s LCFO and Lumumba’s successful

mayoral bid demonstrates the continuing relevance of Pan-Africanism and the

revolutionary alienation that it leads to. Their political maturity and militant stance

against white oppression, led to them embracing third-party politics and eschewing the

two-party platform as a way to empower Blacks via the ballot box. Moreover,

Carmichael and Lumumba stance of alienated revolution via the ballot box offers a more

nuanced range of alternatives beyond revolutionary violence. The stance of the alienated

revolutionary constitutes an active refusal to work within white power structures. It is a

decision to emphasize black solidarity and to assert oneself in terms of this solidarity.

The means of this assertion are not always violent even if the response from white power

structures might very well be violent. Black self-assertion can make use of the

instruments of democratic action and economic self-sufficiency. The alienated

revolutionary can also take other forms such as that of the “alienated” statesman,

diplomat, and professional. Thus, the alienated statesmen is one who prescribes to the

ideas of Pan-Africanism, while seeking political office/power outside of the two-party

25

system with the implicit goal to use said office/power to the benefit of African/Black

people.

26

Chapter 1

The origins of Pan-Africanism

“Every people should be originators of their own destiny.”40

Martin Robison Delany

Dr. Ali Mazrui, a Kenyan political scientist, argued in his book The Africans: A

Triple Heritage that “one of the great ironies of modern African history is that it took

European colonialism to inform Africans that they were Africans. 41If such a sentiment is

true, one can say that it took Africans being ruthlessly exported by the millions as slaves

to the Western hemisphere to create the foundation and struggle for the unity of African

people throughout the world. The ideological and social movement known as Pan-

Africanism would become the impetus for that struggle. The core of Pan-Africanism was

its insistence on African self-assertion and liberation from chattel enslavement;

correspondingly, a revolutionary alienation from, and a refusal of, hegemonic white

power would also take place. This refusal and alienation is the common, essential

element in every form that Pan-Africanism takes at different points in time.

According to Dr. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, the ideology of Pan-Africanism has

gone through several phases: starting with the proto Pan-Africanist era’s42 drive for self-

determination in the 1600s; moving on to the success of the Haitian Revolution at the

turn of the 19th century; to its flourishing in the 1850s, its eclipse in the 1870s, and its

renewal and apex in the Garvey movement; to its feeble recrudescence in the 1960s to

40 Martin Kilson, A.Cromwell Hill, Apropos of Africa: Sentiments of Negro American Leaders on Africa from the 1800s to the 1950s (New York City, Routledge, 2014), 22. 41 Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston, Little, Brown & Company 1986), 99. 42 Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1978), 25.

27

today.43 The proto Pan-Africanist era is readily identifiable due to the creation of the

Brazilian republic of Palmares in the 1600s. It can also be seen among the enslaved

Africans who managed to gain their freedom by taking refuge in “Maroons societies,”

creating autonomous communities of resistance to white hegemony and enslavement in

Jamaica, Brazil, and Suriname.44 Maroon communities are known to have existed in

North America as well, particularly in Florida where Africans seeking freedom and a

reprieve from the indignities of chattel enslavement linked their destinies to those of the

Seminoles.45

The classical era of Pan-Africanism was based primarily in the United States.

Among the principal spokespersons were African Americans, Martin Delany, Bishop

Henry McNeal Turner, James T. Holly and Anna Julia Cooper; the West Indian, Edward

Wilmot Blyden; and the West African, Africanus Horton.46 Their works culminated with

Henry Sylvester Williams coining the term Pan-Africanism in the late 1890’s, as well as

organizing the first Pan-African conference in London in 1900. The conference was

organized with the assistance of Alexander Walters, who was a leader of Blacks in the

United States and a Bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.47

Most historians, however –particularly Dr. Robert Johnson Jr., place the genesis

of Pan-Africanism on the tiny Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Dr. Johnson states “the

desire to re-connect with ancestral and traditional ties found expression in the drums of

43Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York, New York University Press 1996), 6. 44 Ibid., 6. 45 Ibid., 6. 46 Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1978), 18. 47Ibid.,19.

28

the African in Hispaniola, and in his/her militant resistance to slavery and separation

from Africa.”48

Consequently, Pan-Africanism found its birth in the nineteenth century in the

Haitian Revolution. The successful rebellion of so called primitive Africans against the

modern French military under the leadership of one of the greatest military minds the

world has ever known, Napoleon Bonaparte, ushered in a new era of African-national

sufficiency. As a result, Independent Haiti became not only a symbol of defiance,

achievement, and hope, but also a clear signal to Africans struggling against European

hegemony throughout the world. Haiti’s victory demonstrated that through armed

resistance, Africans could claim their rightful place among the nations of the world.49

Therefore, it is of no coincidence that the Haitian Revolution began at the

grassroots level with a proclamation and affirmation of their African spirit. Under Dutty

Boukman’s leadership, enslaved Africans gathered in the forest on August 22, 1791 to

swear allegiance to one another. They swore that they would never submit to the colonist

again and that they would fight to the death to prevent others from suffering the

deprivation and punishment that came from slavery.50 The great Pan-African Marxist

scholar, C.L.R James, explained in graphic detail in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint

L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the ruthless and immoral form of

punishment that many slaves had to endure:

Whipping was interrupted with pepper, citron, cinders, aloes, and hot ashes

were poured on the bleeding wounds. Mutilations were common limbs,

48 Robert Johnson Jr., Returning Home: A Century of African-American Repatriation (Trenton, New Jersey, Asmara, Eritrea, African World Press, Inc., 2005), 1. 49 Ibid., 1. 50 Ibid.,.12.

29

ears, and sometimes the private parts, to deprive them of the pleasures

which they could indulge in without expense. Their masters poured burning

wax on their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied the boiling cane sugar

over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them in slow fires, filled them

with gunpowder and blew them up with a match; buried them up to the neck

and smeared their heads with sugar that the flies might devour them;

fastened them near to nests of ants or wasps; made them eat their excrement,

drink their urine, and lick the salvia of other slaves. One colonist was known

in moments of anger to throw himself on his slaves and stick his teeth into

their flesh.51

Given the depravity of the cruelty the slaves endured they believed they were

fighting against demonic forces and therefore called upon the divine to assist them in

their quest for freedom, justice, and liberation. Boukman encouraged his compatriots by

stating:

Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct

our arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol of the god of the whites who

has so often caused us to weep and listen to the voices of liberty which

speaks in the hearts of us all.52

Boukman’s declaration and the subsequent victory over the French showed the

power that the memory and spirit of Africa has amongst her displaced progeny.

51 C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York City, Vintage Books, 1989), 12-13. 52 Robert Johnson, Jr, Returning Home: A Century of African-American Repatriation (Trenton, New Jersey, Asmara, Eritrea, African World Press, Inc., 2005), 12.

30

Consequently, Pan-Africanism spread throughout the western world and to Africa,

through slave revolts, political and economic organizations, and repatriation to Africa.

Sadly, in the centuries since the revolution, Haiti has gone from being considered

the ‘Pearl of the Caribbean,’ to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, due to

political corruption, debt, poor financial management, political instability, and the US

invasion and occupation of Haiti in 1915. This occupation led to the restructuring of the

Haitian political economy following the assassination of Haitian president Vilburn

Guillaume Sam.53 Sadly, the circumstances in Haiti would serve as a harbinger of the

challenges of Black self-governance for many Caribbean and African nations upon

acquiring independence.

Despite this devolution into corrupt post-independence rule, the Haitian

revolution constituted a militant example of the revolutionary alienation that came to

characterize Pan-Africanism. Haiti’s message was one of Black self-reliance and

empowerment paired with a violent rejection of white colonial power. The violence,

however, was merely the reflection and response to the violence of enslavement. Self-

assertion inevitably provoked an intensification of the colonial violence that aimed to

reinforce white dominance. Black Haitian victory, achieved at a terrible price in the face

of overwhelming odds, would become the animating spirit for later proto-Pan-Africanists

struggling against slavery in the continental United States. Alienated revolution could

succeed; Haiti had proved it.

53 Philippe Girard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History-From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation (New York City, PALGRAVE MACMILLAN,2010), 76-79.

31

Pan-Africanism Before Marcus Garvey

The period from 1787 to 1817 is often referred to as the period of proto-Pan-

Africanism.54 These years were marked by the Haitian Revolution and the emergence of

abolitionist writing by Diasporan Blacks. Among them were the works of Olaudah

Equiano (Gustavus Vassa), Otto Cugano, and Ignatius Sancho, all former slaves

concerned with the plight of African people.55 Although Equiano, Cugano, and Sancho

were not Pan-Africanist in the formal sense,56 their use of literature ushered in an era in

which Diasporan Blacks used written language as a means of expressing their discontent

and dismay with the institution of chattel enslavement and the Trans-Atlantic Slave

Trade. Such activities by Diasporan Blacks countered the widely held notion that Blacks

were not sentient beings, while serving as templates in the use of narratives for the works

of prominent abolitionist figures like Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglass, Solomon

Northup, and Harriet Jacobs to promote the abolitionist cause. Furthermore, the works of

Equiano and Cugano also served as the precursors to Pan-African literary organs such as

The North Star by Martin Delany, The Negro World by Marcus Garvey, and The West

African Pilot by Nnamdi Azikiwe.

Paul Cuffe: The First Expatriate (1759-1817). Pan-Africanism in nineteenth

century America, under the auspices of voluntary reintegration of Africans into Africa,

began seven years after the Haitian Revolution through the work of a prominent, self-

54 Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1978), 25. 55 Ibid., 26. 56 A case can be made that Equiano, Cugano, and Sancho were Pan-Africanist, due to their understanding of race based inequality, discrimination, slavery, and their fervent denunciation of it. Furthermore, they organized themselves into a Black quasi-literary abolitionist group. Such a case has been made by Francis and Barry Sanders Adams in their book, Three Black Writers in Eighteenth Century England (1971), and Sandra Burr, Adam Potkay, Suzanne Rintoul treatise, Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas (1995).

32

made businessman named Paul Cuffe. Cuffe began planning a voyage to Africa that

would both repatriate free Africans to the continent and establish commerce between

Africans on the continent and those in America.57 By contemporary standards, Cuffe

would be defined as a Black economic separatist. Regardless of such contemporary

labels, Cuffe was a unique man. One of only a few African Americans to have never

known slavery at the time. Cuffe was born to an African father and a Native American

mother on January 17, 1759 in New Bedford (Westport) Massachusetts.58 Furthermore,

Cuffe was a member of a large group of free Africans who happened to be mulattoes born

of either mixed African and Indian parentage or African and European descent.

One means of acquiring freedom was through voluntary manumission. As some

plantation owners specified in their wills that certain slaves who had served them well,

should be freed upon their death. Other slaves obtained freedom by assisting slave-

owners in maintaining order and the status quo on the plantation. For example, the

Commonwealth of Virginia gave a slave his freedom in 1700 for discovering a plot by

other slaves to rebel.59 Nevertheless, this act of manumission was an aberration; for soon

after, the Virginia legislature passed an act in 1723 that no private slave-owner could free

his slaves. This law was passed to protect the thriving economic enterprises involving

tobacco and cotton. The public policymakers realized that without slave labor, these

thriving industries could experience a severe recession if the plantation owners had to pay

for the labor of African people. Slavery was essential to the continued economic vitality

57 Ibid., 20. 58 Ibid., 20. 59E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States (New York, Asmara, Eritrea, Macmillan, 1971), 60.

33

of the south.60 Cuffe, despite the restriction upon African labor, educated himself and

soon developed an interest in commerce and shipping while being employed on a

whaling ship. 61

Cuffe, only five years after his maiden voyage on a whaler, began to build his

own ships. It took six years to build one large ship, two brigs, and several smaller boats.

62 In 1810, Cuffe had amassed enough money to captain his own ship, with a Black crew.

Cuffe sailed to Philadelphia and ultimately Sierra Leone, where he would investigate the

possibility of African resettlement and commerce. Cuffe became the first African

American of record to successfully return to Africa. Furthermore, Cuffe did not simply

return, for he began to share many of the skills he obtained in America with his

continental African brothers and sisters. Cuffe, as a Christian, was motivated by a spirit

of evangelism which led to criticism that he was simply seeking to “civilize” indigenous

Africans through Christianity. Yet, that is not completely true; yes, Cuffe, as many

African Americans who had taken on the Christian religion, carried a sense of moral

superiority over traditional African religious practices. However, this must be taken into

context, due to the fact that during the nineteenth century, all knowledge of Africa came

from Europeans. Thus, all information disseminated featured a racist slant to uphold

negative stereotypes about Africa and its inhabitants as sub-human brutes who could only

be civilized through the institution of slavery. Cuffe was an unfortunate recipient of the

mis-educational climate.

60 Robert Johnson Jr., Returning Home: A Century of African-American Repatriation (Trenton, New Jersey, Asmara, Eritrea, African World Press, Inc., 2005), 20-21. 61 Ibid., 21. 62 George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (London, Dennis Dobson, 1985), 45.

34

Nonetheless, Cuffe’s concern with the physical well-being of Africans in both

Africa and America and his epistle of the Society of Sierra Leone stand as testaments to

his willingness to affirm a Pan-African kinship amongst Africans in America and

Africa.63 Regardless of the criticism leveled at Cuffe for his intentions upon reaching

Sierra Leone, what we do know is that Cuffe’s trip to Sierra Leone signaled the beginning

of a history of African American repatriation and the emergence of the American

Colonization Society (ACS).

Cuffe introduced a new aspect of what later would become Pan-Africanist

revolutionary alienation. Where Haiti modeled a violent alienation from white power,

Cuffe pioneered a type of voluntary self-alienation through migration away from the

centers of white power and toward Africa itself. Cuffe did this despite retaining a view of

African religions as inferior to Christianity. Even as he turned away from white

domination he nevertheless carried elements of it within him in the form of his religious

prejudice. Nevertheless, his turning toward Africa was significant. Haiti fought white

power; Cuffe turned away from it. Both acts constituted a rejection of white power and an

act of alienation from it.

The Classical Era 1850-1925

The classical era of Pan-Africanism arguably reached its fullest expression in the

years between 1850 to 1925. As a movement, it was defined as the effort of primarily

African Americans to create a sovereign nation state and an ideological basis for a

concept of national culture.64 Ironically, the ideas of nineteenth century Pan-Africanists

63Robert Johnson, Jr., Returning Home: A Century of African-American Repatriation (Trenton, New Jersey, Asmara, Eritrea, African World Press, Inc., 2005), 23. 64 Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York, New York University Press, 1996), 2.

35

typically resembled those of upper-class Europeans and White Americans, rather than

native African or African American peoples.65 Thus, the nationalism of prominent Pan-

Africanists such as Alexander Crummell and Marcus Garvey was situated in a “high

culture” aesthetic that venerated symbols of imperial power, military might, and

aristocratic refinement,66 while also being enamored with the concepts of uplifting and

“civilizing” the race. As a result, Pan-Africanists of the time defined their mission as a

movement for “African civilization.” Such sentiments of course reflect the prevailing

narrative of the time, for it isn’t until the post-Garvey era in which Pan-Africanists begin

to ascribe to a kinder view of Africa due to the influences of twentieth century

anthropology, which tended to idealize African village life, sentimentalize the rural south,

and romanticize the urban ghetto.67

David Walker (1796-1830). David Walker, a free born African American (due

to his mother being free, his father was a slave), was an outspoken abolitionist, writer,

and anti-slavery activist who used his freedom to advance the cause of his enslaved

brothers and sisters. Walker used his publication Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured

Citizens of the World, to speak out against racism/white supremacy and the treatment of

African people around the world. Consequently, Walker’s book perturbed plantation

owners as he spoke out against the motives of the American Colonialization Society

(ACS) and the institution of southern slavery. In his book, Walker delineates the causes

of what he terms African “wretchedness”: 1. Slavery, 2. Ignorance, 3.The preachers of

65 Ibid., 3. 66 Ibid., 3. 67 Ibid., 3.

36

the religion of Jesus Christ, and 4. The Colonizing Plan.68 Of these four causes, Walker

specifically attacked “the colonizing plan” in which he condemned former Secretary of

State and Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, who argued for the resettlement of

“colored” people to Africa to bring “the arts, civilization, and Christianity.”69Walker, in

the spirit and memory of Africa, distinguished the God of African people from that of

European-Americans, believing that his God would avenge the wrongs done to them by

slave owners. Walker’s work, addressed to “the colored citizens of the world,”

presupposed that Black people everywhere were morally bound to revolt against their

common heritage of oppression.70 Such an audacious declaration is a clear example of

militant Pan-Africanism, due to Walker’s support of violence as a way to overcome

global white hegemony. Sadly, Walker suffered a mysterious death in Boston in 1830,

one year before the Nat Turner slave rebellion.

Walker’s resistance to hegemonic white rule is reflective of the Haitian model of

violent revolt, not Cuffe’s model of self-alienation via repatriation, but he also

demonstrates a principled use of his freedom to advocate for enslaved Africans. He

actively placed himself in solidarity with slaves and argued against forced repatriation to

Africa through the use of literature.

Alexander Crummell (1819-1898). Alexander Crummell was a revolutionary

African American minister and academic who studied at Cambridge University, where he

developed concepts of Pan-Africanism. In 1853 Crummell emigrated to Liberia, due to a

68 Robert Johnson, Jr., Returning Home: A Century of African-American Repatriation (Trenton, New Jersey, Asmara, Eritrea, African World Press, Inc., 2005), 52. 69 David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (New York, Hill and Wang, 1965), 64. 70 Wilson Jeremiah Moses: Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York, New York University Press 1996), 15.

37

desire to bring up his children “under Black men’s institutions.”71 Crummell regularly

spoke of the duties that African Americans had to their ancestral home, leading many to

perceive Crummell as an elitist. Nonetheless, Crummell hoped to promote in Liberia a

political economy like that of England and the United States. However, to do so,

Crummell believed (as did many Pan-Africanist of his era) that European culture must

first be brought to Africa. Such thinking caused him to favor Christianity and the English

language as a means of “civilizing” West Africa.72 Crummell was unable to create the

Liberian society he envisioned and returned to the United States in 1873, working

tirelessly until his death in 1898 to support Pan-Africanist organizations.

Crummell’s version of alienated revolution coincides with that of Cuffe’s, model

of voluntary alienation through repatriation to Africa; but he also creates organizations,

which is something new. When the Liberia project fails, he builds Pan-African structures

in the US. Crummell’s actions show that it is not enough to simply fight or turn away

from white power; one must also create the organizational foundation of Black

independence. Moreover, Crummell’s version of alienated revolution embodies the idea

of a nation builder by creating organizations that serve the African American community.

This idea of nation building will be embraced by subsequent Pan-Africanist as well.

Martin R. Delaney (1812-1885). Martin Roberson Delany is considered by many

to be the father of Black Nationalism. Delany, the grandson of an African prince was also

an abolitionist, journalist, physician, writer, and one of the first three African Americans

admitted to Harvard Medical School. His dismissal from Harvard on racial grounds

71 Ibid., 21. 72 Ibid., 22.

38

motivated Delany to become an active emigrationist.73 In 1852, Delany published The

Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United

States, in which he like his Pan-Africanist contemporaries viewed colored people as

powerless, and the objects of pity the world over.74 To remedy this condition, Delany

urged Blacks to observe how whites have raised “massive buildings,” launched swift

vessels, “with their white sheets spread to the winds of heaven,” built railroads “flying

with the velocity of the swallow.” 75 Delany’s sentiments stung worse than African

honeybees, and he proposed a vigorous program of self-help, while also considering the

prospects of emigration to Canada. Delany would eventually move his family to Canada

in 1856, due to the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Delaney’s form of alienated revolution would serve as a hybrid of Cuffe’s

revolutionary alienation and Crummell’s nation building, in which Delaney advocated

repatriation to Africa and emigration to Canada after the passing of the Fugitive Slave

Act, while also founding the abolitionist newspaper the North Star. Moreover, Delaney

did this despite seeing whites as the standard barriers of contemporary civilization even

though he advocated Black-self-rule.

Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (1834-1915). Bishop Henry McNeal Turner was

a minister, politician, and the 12th elected Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal

(AME) Church.76 In 1892, the American Colonization Society (ACS) ceased its active

involvement in Liberia. As a result, the militant and charismatic Henry McNeal Turner of

73 Ibid., 22. 74 Ibid., 23. 75 Ibid., 23. 76 Robert Johnson, Jr, Returning Home: Why Blacks Left America For Africa: Interviews with Black Repatriates, 1971-1999, (Westport, Connecticut, Praeger, 1999), xv.

39

the AME church assumed the call for African American repatriation. Turner, like many

African Americans bitter from the lack of promise that came after the Civil War, turned

to developing organizations to address the plight of African Americans after being

abandoned by the federal government and northern carpetbaggers.77 Consequently,

Turner (along with others) created the Kansas African Emigration Association (KAEA)

and the Liberia Exodus Company (LEC), which was founded by Turner and Martin

Delany. The latter organization bought a ship and transported two hundred Blacks to

Liberia.78 Because of the influence of Martin Delany and Alexander Crummell, Turner

came to his own conclusion on the issue of the African condition in America and

repatriation. He wrote:

The Negro race has as much chance in the U.S. … of being a man as a frog

has in a snake den…. Emigrate and gradually return to the land of our

ancestors…The Negro was brought here in the prudence of God to learn

obedience, to work, to sing to pray, to preach, to acquire education, deal

with mathematical abstractions and imbibe the principles of civilization as

a whole and then return to Africa, the land of his fathers, and bring her his

millions.79

Turner’s summation of the political, social, and economic conditions African

Americans faced, coupled with the violent reign of terror that African Americans were

subjected to, led Turner to advocate for emigration to Africa. Perplexingly, Turner held

many of the same beliefs about why Africans were enslaved and transported to the

77 Ibid., xv. 78 Ibid., xv. 79 Ibid., xv.

40

western world as racist whites. Consequently, showing once again, that during the

nineteenth century Africans in the diaspora learned a large amount of their history and the

culture of their ancestors from whites.

Turner’s variation of alienated revolution was multifaceted like Delaney, in which

he advocated for revolutionary alienation, as well as nation building, while bringing the

concept of Black theological nationalism to the forefront of Pan-African movement.

Turner’s assertion that God is a Negro, would help pave the way for Black Liberation

Theology and further development of Black theological nationalism, though the Nation of

Islam, and the Shrine of the Black Madonna via the Pan-African Orthodox Church.

Henry Sylvester Williams (1869-1911). Henry Sylvester Williams was an Afro-

Trinidadian barrister often recognized as the father of Pan-Africanism, a title he shares

with the West Indian educator, writer, diplomat, and politician Edward Wilmot Blyden. I

have chosen to record the work of Williams in this treatise due him coining the term Pan-

Africanism and his creation of the initial Pan-African conference in 1900 in London,

England that led to the subsequent DuBois led congresses.

Williams, as with other prominent West Indians of his day, was a well-travelled

man, who after studying in Canada, went to England where he studied law.80 In 1897,

Williams founded the Pan-African Association with the purpose of lobbying on behalf of

Africa, due to his concern with the scramble for Africa and the South African situation.81

At the turn of the 20th century, Williams convened the first ever Pan-African conference,

in which some 30 delegates assembled from the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and

80 Tony Martin, The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond (Dover, Massachusetts, The Majority Press, 1983), 11. 81 Ibid., 12.

41

Africa. They discussed how they could unite the African world into a strong body that

would fight on behalf of Africa and rescue Africa from the grips of European

hegemony.82

After the conference, Williams toured the West Indies, visiting his native Trinidad

and Jamaica, founding several branches of the Pan-African Association.83 In 1903,

Williams emigrated to South Africa, due to his concern with the South African situation.

During his stay in South Africa he became the first Black to practice law in the country,

until he returned to Trinidad dying in 1911.84

Williams’s version of alienated revolution, can be found in his ability to develop

the Pan-African idea at a philosophical level through his creation of the first Pan-African

conference. Furthermore, Turner’s advocacy for African people as an barrister, situated

him as an alienated professional, in which he would fight white power in the courtroom,

not the battlefield as did his Haitian brethren.

The early fight against global white supremacy, led by proto and classical era

Pan-Africanists, such as Paul Cuffe, Alexander Crummell, David Walker, and Henry

Sylvester Williams, while unsuccessful in its initial manifestation shaped the idea of the

alienated revolutionary. Through the idea of revolutionary alienation, proto and classical

era Pan-Africanist militancy and violent rejection of white domination; voluntary

repatriation to Africa in an act of turning away from white domination and toward

independence in Africa itself; rejection of repatriation in favor of enacting the Haitian

model in the U.S.; building organizational self-sufficiency both in African and in the US;

82 Ibid., 12. 83 Ibid., 12. 84 Ibid., 12.

42

would help the shape the Pan-African idea. Moreover, despite these breakthroughs

toward alienated revolution, the transformation was not complete, since many early era

Pan-Africanists had absorbed white racist attitudes of cultural superiority toward Africa

and Africans. The issue of cultural superiority and white racist attitudes would dissipate

through the work of Marcus Garvey and his creation of the Universal Negro

Improvement Association (UNIA). The following chapter discusses the life, work and

legacy of Marcus Garvey.

43

Chapter 2 Look for me in the Whirlwind

The Life, and Legacy of Marcus Garvey

“Garvey was the first man of color 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 he was somebody.”85

Rev, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Jamaica 1965

The world that Marcus Garvey entered at the turn of the 20th century was a far cry

from the African world that his Pan-African predecessors dreamed of. Nineteenth century

Pan-Africanist efforts, which focused on racial uplift, Christian evangelicalism, and

European cultural indoctrination, failed to palpably change the conditions of African

people the world over living under global white supremacist rule. Adding to the African’s

global quagmire were several seminal events that would take place during Garvey’s

formative years. First, the Berlin Conference of 1885 convened to officially parcel Africa

out to European colonial powers. Second, the U.S Supreme court case of Plessy v.

Ferguson of 1896, stripped African Americans of their citizenship, while also persevering

separate but equal segregation. Lastly, beginning in 1885, King Leopold of Belgium,

began his reign of terror over the Congolese people, taking the Congo as his own

personal possession while committing an act of genocide against the Congolese people

that would wipe out half of its population by 1908.

Garvey, upon entering the U.S. in 1916, would initially subscribe to the

accommodationist politics of Booker T. Washington, believing that racial uplift would

85 Olayiwola Abegunrin, Sabella Ogbobode Abidde, Pan-Africanism in Modern Times: Challenges, Concerns, and Constraints (London, Lexington Books, 2016), 277.

44

come through practical and achievable economic means.86 However, Garvey would

subsequently turn toward Pan-Africanism and the role of the “alienated revolutionary”

during his fund raising tour across the U.S for his Jamaican Farm and Industrial Institute.

In which he witnessed firsthand the debilitating and psychologically crippling conditions

that Jim Crowism had on African Americans in the south.87 “In embracing the stance of

alienated revolutionary, Garvey drew not only on the Haitian model of militant

resistance, but also on the models of African repatriation and Black organization building

that proto-Pan-Africanists had pioneered in the 19th Century. Garvey’s unique synthesis

of these different modes of alienation and resistance created a new model and inspiration

for alienated revolution for later figures such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and, as

we will see, Stokely Carmichael and Chokwe Lumumba. Specifically, Garvey’s synthesis

of Black economic nationalism, audacious and flamboyant rejection of the white power

structure, would serve as catalyst for the resurgence of the Pan-African idea, while

unifying the African world in the belief of African redemption though the concept of One

God, One Aim, One Destiny.

Early Life of Marcus Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr., was born August 17th, 1887 in St. Ann’s Bay,

Jamaica to Sarah and Marcus Garvey. Of his eleven siblings only, Marcus and his older

sister Indiana lived past childhood. The elder Marcus Garvey was a descendant of the

Maroons,88 as well as a master stone mason, who was a lover of books of which he

86 Colin Grant, Negro with A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York City, Oxford University Press, 2008), 69. 87 Ibid., 82-83. 88 The Maroons were a community of African runaways who created autonomous communities that often served as bases for raids on white settlements. Many communities were guarded by palisades and elaborately constructed defenses, including disguised paths, false trials that sometimes led into quicksand, and booby traps. Before 1700, Maroon communities were generally led by men who had been born in Africa: many claimed they had been kings in

45

owned a vast number.89 Garvey’s mother was the business anchor of the Garvey family.

She along with one of her brothers owned an allotment of land in which they grew

pimentos and citrus fruits which they sold in the local market. From such an endeavor a

young Marcus Garvey learned industry, while physical strength and a love of reading

derived from his father. 90

After a series of financial setbacks due to a hurricane that wiped out the Garvey

family crops. Marcus decided to move to Kingston where with the assistance of a

maternal uncle, Garvey secured employment at Benjamin Printery, where he became the

youngest foreman in the history of the trade at the relatively young age of just 18 years

old.91 It was from here that a young Garvey’s political views would take shape.

Beginning in participating in the first trade union to be formed on the island, known as

the Printers’ Union, Garvey out of sympathy joined his colleagues on the picket line.

However, after dabbling in organizing for social uplift, Garvey was left penniless.

Without a means of livelihood, Garvey left for Costa Rica to work for the United Foods

Company (now multinationals Chiquita and Dole). Upon arriving in Costa Rica, Garvey

was employed as a time keeper in which he observed the deadly work conditions in

which Blacks toiled. Costa Rica was rife with disease-infested swamps and roads that

were deathtraps, where bandits preyed upon workers, robbing them and often hacking

them to death.92 Garvey of course, was repulsed by the site of the conditions in which his

their homeland. After 1700, Maroon leaders were often Creoles familiar with both the ways of whites and with African practices. There were Maroon communities in Brazil, Colombia, The Guianas, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, and in the United States in which they were known as black towns. Maroon societies show that throughout the African diaspora Africans never acquiesced to the suffering and degradation slavery but fought for the lives, freedom, and humanity despite the odds being stacked against them. 89 Amos Wilson, Afrikan-Centered Consciousness Versus the New World Order: Garveyism in the Age of Globalism (New York, Afrikan World InfoSystems,1999), 15. 90 Ibid., 15-16. 91 Ibid., 16. 92 Ibid., 16.

46

people lived. He protested upon the seat of the British consul to help Blacks. The counsel

response was blunt to say the least “if they don’t like it here, they can leave.” In this

incident, Garvey learned a brutal lesson in the value that Black life has in the eyes of

whites. Consequently, Garvey once again tried his hand at social activism and organizing,

by starting a series of papers to address the plight of the Black workers. These

newspapers, La Nacion and La Prensa, sought to unite Black workers to fight for better

conditions and higher pay. However, due to dwindling resources and worker fear and

apathy little became of his efforts.

Garvey subsequently travelled to England in 1912 to broaden his perspectives.

He attended lectures at Berbeck College and The University of London and spoke at the

famous “Speakers Corner.” While in London, Garvey secured employment with Duse

Mohamed Ali, a Sudanese Egyptian who was a brilliant scholar, propagandist, and world

traveler who agitated for African independence.93 Ali became a mentor to Garvey,

enlightening him on Africa’s rich history and its vast mineral wealth, as well as

continuing brutalities of the Arab Slave Trade and how Islam came to dominate much of

Northern Africa.

Consequently, Garvey returned to Jamaica in June of 1914 with visions of

enterprise. On August 1st, 1914, Garvey founded the Universal Improvement and Negro

Conservation Association and African Communities League.94 The association was

founded on the first of August because the date marked the anniversary of the abolition of

93 Ibid., 16. 94 It is unclear when Garvey omitted “Conservation” from the title. However, some time before he left for the US this was done.

47

African enslavement in the British West Indies.95 Unfortunately, after a year of

organizing in Kingston, Garvey’s following had only amounted to about 100 people.

Subsequently, in 1916 Garvey travelled to the United States to visit Booker T.

Washington after reading Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery (1901) to discuss

plans for Washington to help him create an industrial school in Jamaica. Sadly,

Washington died a year before Garvey arrived, leading Garvey to ask the question,

“where is the Black man’s government? Where are his King and his kingdom? Where is

his president, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big

affairs?” Finding none of these things Garvey resolved: “I will help to make them!” 96

Committing his life to answering these questions, Marcus Garvey became known

by many as the greatest Black leader of the twentieth century, as he led the only mass-

based repatriation movement through his organization the Universal Negro Improvement

Association and the Africa Communities League (UNIA-ACL). With a membership that

swelled to well over 5 million and 966 branches of the UNIA in the United States and

throughout the world,97Garvey went ahead with his plans of African redemption.

However, Garvey’s movement was not limited to simple repatriation, for Garvey

understood that the basis of racism was economics. Therefore, Garvey became a man of

industry, creating several Black owned businesses in Harlem. The UNIA’s inspiring

motto “Up, you mighty race; you can accomplish what you will!" encouraged community

participation in African redemption, through the UNIA’s the Negro World newspaper; its

95 Amos Wilson, Afrikan-Centered Consciousness Versus The New World Order: Garveyism in the Age of Globalism (New York, Afrikan World InfoSystems, 1999), 22. 96 Amy Jacques Garvey, The Philosophy & Opinion of Marcus Garvey, Or African for the Africans (Dover, Mass, The Majority Press, 1986), 126. 97 Amos Wilson, Afrikan-Centered Consciousness Versus the New World Order: Garveyism in the Age of Globalism (New York, Afrikan World InfoSystems, 1999), xi.

48

own church (African Orthodox Church); its own women’s groups (Black Cross nurses);

its own businesses (Black Swan Phonograph Company); its own industries (the Negro

Factories Corporation, the Berry and Ross Company that manufactured Black dolls); and

its own police force, choirs, bands, marching society, cooperatives, and labor unions.98

As result of Garvey’s UNIA membership and fund raising, Garvey started his most

audacious plan of all: the Black Star Line. The idea of the Black Star Line was to

physically link the three parts of the African world: the United States, the West Indies,

and Africa. Garvey even successfully negotiated the acquisition of land in Liberia. The

European powers, however, worked to block Garvey from coming to Africa, due to fears

that he would organize Africans in Africa to fight against colonialism. With the

assistance of the U.S government and W.E.B DuBois, they were successful in preventing

Garvey from coming to Africa. Garvey gives his account of what happened:

There was a great rubber shortage from 1922 up till 1925 on the part of the

Americans. You English had cornered the rubber market; you had the entire

rubber plantation under your control in the Malay Peninsula. The

Americans had no rubber reserve. Mr. Hoover acted as a foster father of all

American rubber interests. He set out to get control of rubber lands in any

part of the world where he possibly could get control of them. My

organization, in carrying out the serious program of rebuilding Africa

through the helped influence of the educated Negroes of the west going

home, had completed an agreement with the Liberian government for that

government to place at our disposal four sections of the little country so that

98 Nell Irvin Painter, Creating Black Americans: African-American History and its Meaning, 1619 to the Present (New York, Oxford University Press, 2007), 203-204.

49

we could start our experiment in helping build Liberia and make her worthy

worthwhile Negro state in West Africa……. An agreement was entered into

with the President of Liberia … After we had spent nearly half a million

dollars, after entering in to agreement s with expert civil engineers and

mechanical engineers and mining engineers. Firestone’s agent found out

that it was possible to grow rubber in Liberia. He influenced Liberian

President Charles King the man who had entered into a sacred contract with

us to abrogate the contract between us in his government and to place the

land at Firestone’s disposal. As a result, when our ships arrived, with nearly

200,000 worth of material in tow they took our material and have kept them

up till now. They also gave Firestone 1,000,000 acres of land which they

had placed at our disposal for colonization purposes; Firestone was backed

by the Secretary of Commerce in America.99

Educator and historian Walter Rodney elaborates on the political climate in

Liberia that led to Garvey’s betrayal in his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,

explaining the dynamics of colonization in Liberia and Firestone’s business there.

Rodney begins by stating "it is common knowledge that Liberia was an American colony

in everything but name. The U.S. supposedly aided the Liberian government with loans

but used the opportunity to take over Liberian customs revenue to plunder thousands of

square miles of Liberian land, and generally to dictate to the weak government of

Liberia.”100 The main investment in Liberia was undertaken by Firestone Rubber

99 Edited by John Henrik Clarke, Amy Jacques Garvey, Runoko Rashidi, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (Baltimore, Maryland, Black Classic Press, 1974), 293-294. 100 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington D.C., Howard University Press, 1982), 192.

50

Company. Firestone made such huge profits from Liberian rubber that it was the subject

of a book sponsored by American capitalist. Furthermore, between 1940 and 1965,

Firestone took 160 million dollars’ worth of rubber out of Liberia; while in return the

Liberian government received 8 million dollars.101As a result, the UNIA’s plan for

repatriation failed, however, Garvey still made several enemies who envied his position

as a leading figure in the Black world. By 1919 Garvey’s Negro World newspaper was

being circulated throughout the United States, Latin America, the West Indies and Africa,

as the leading Black periodical of the day, 102over rival papers such as W.E.B DuBois’s

Crisis, the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

(NAACP), and labor organizer A. Phillip Randolph’s the Messenger. Such success

caused envy amongst the Black leadership in America leading to Garvey must go rallies

led by A. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Owen.103

Nonetheless, the proverbial thorn in Garvey’s side would come from the attention

that he attracted from the United States and British governments, both of which viewed

his activities amongst there Black subjects with heightened dismay.104 Such animus by

the U.S. government led to several attempts to remove him from the country. For

instance, in 1921 Garvey by a whisker thwarted an attempt to bar him from returning to

the U.S., when for several months the State Department and its consular agents in the

Caribbean refused to give him a visa to re-enter the country after a short trip to the West

101 Ibid., 192-193. 102 Tony Martin, The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond (Dover, Massachusetts, The Majority Press, 1983), 57. 103 E. David Cronon, Black Moses: the story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison, Wisconsin, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 105-106. 104 Tony Martin, The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond (Dover, Massachusetts, The Majority Press, 1983), 95.

51

Indies.105 Attempts to deport and ban Garvey from the U.S. recommenced in 1922 when

Garvey was arrested on the charge of using the mails to defraud. The case was tried in

1923, with the prosecution alleging that Garvey mailed or caused to be mailed, circular

containing a misleading prospectus for the Black Star Line.106 The evidence produced

was an empty envelope bearing the imprint of the Black Star Line. Nevertheless, Garvey

was convicted given the maximum jail term and fined, ordered to pay the costs of the

trail, and initially imprisoned without bail pending his appeal. In 1925, Garvey lost his

appeal and entered the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The government had accomplished

its mission; it had done what it had long desired and ensured that Garvey would be

deported as an alien convicted of a crime involving “moral turpitude,” where under

certain conditions one could be subject to deportation.107

After being released from prison and deported to Jamaica. Garvey would settle in

London, to resurrect his now defunct organization. It was during this time that Garvey’s

inability to fulfill his mission, his earlier deportation, political movement to the right, and

arguably inopportune condemnation of Ethiopian emperor Hailie Selassie; caused him to

fall out of favor with many of his most loyal and staunch supporters. Furthermore,

Garvey was labeled by his arch-nemesis Dubois as, “the most dangerous enemy of the

Negro race… and a lunatic or a traitor.”108 While others who were just as unkind viewed

him as an “opportunist and demagogic charlatan.”109 However, after Garvey’s death in

June of 1940, C.L.R James like many of Garvey’s critics came to eulogize Garvey, “as

105 Ibid., 95. 106 Ibid., 96. 107 Ibid., 96. 108 E. David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison, Wisconsin, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 190. 109 Ibid., 107.

52

one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.” 110Nevertheless, two

decades after his death he was seldom mentioned unless in contemptuous haste. It took

the calamity of Jim Crowism and the militant response of the Black Power movement of

the 1960s entrenched with the Garveyite colors of Red, Black and Green, advocacy of

racial pride, self-reliance, anti-imperialism, and revolutionary nationalism to raise Garvey

to his rightful place in the annals of history. 111

The Legacy of Marcus Garvey

Garvey bestrode the Black World in a manner no other Black leader has, for his

influence on the minds of subsequent generations of Pan-Africanist is effervescent.

Garvey resuscitated and further developed the model of what I have been calling the

‘alienated revolutionary.’ He did so by creating an all-encompassing movement that

focused on African repatriation but also on forging institutions capable of supporting

independent Black national existence throughout the Diaspora. Influenced by rising labor

activism and contacts with anti-colonial resistance leaders abroad, he infused a

transnational spirit into Black uplift in the United States. In doing so, he created the first

mass movement of alienated revolution in the U.S. Although his efforts failed ultimately,

especially the Liberian project, his legacy nevertheless would have an immense impact

for later generations.

The impact of Garvey’s work and legacy would begin with Carlos Cook a former

officer in Garvey’s Universal African Legion from the Dominican Republic. Cook who

created the African National Pioneer Movement (ANPM), an “educational, inspirational,

110 Colin Grant, Negro with A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York City, Oxford University Press, 2008), 454. 111 Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Dover, Massachusetts, The Majority Press, 1976), 360.

53

instructive, constructive and expansive society” devoted to “bringing about a progressive,

dignified, cultural, fraternal and racial confraternity amongst the African people of the

world.”112 Cook was considered by Robert Harris to be Garvey’s ideological son due to

his consistent efforts to keep the work of Garvey alive, his obsequious devotion of

Garveyite teachings since the age of six, and his creation of the ANPM which sought to

establish a Marcus Garvey Memorial Building.113 The ANPM primarily focused on Black

economic self-reliance, self-love, and racial pride through its “Buy Black Campaign and

promotion of natural hairstyles and condemnation of the “ominous appellation”

“Negro.”114

Garvey’s influence also spread to the Nation of Islam (NOI) whose founder Elijah

Muhammad had Garveyite origins, as well as Malcolm X and the Organization of African

American Unity (OAAU) whose father was a UNIA organizer.115 Additionally, Garvey’s

impact philosophically reverberated throughout the African world, impacting Kwame

Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and a healthy cadre of young African nationalist in colonial

Africa. For example, Kwame Nkrumah in his autobiography, Ghana: The Autobiography

of Kwame Nkrumah, acknowledged the impact The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus

Garvey had on his thinking.116 Furthermore, Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya,

is said to have stated in regard to the Negro World the literary organ of the UNIA,

112 William L. Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York City, New York University Press, 1997), 84. 113 Robert Harris, Nyota Harris, Grandassa Harris, Carlos Cooks and Black Nationalism: From Garvey to Malcolm (Dover, Massachusetts, The Majority Press, 1992), x. 114 Ibid., 84. 115 Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Dover, Massachusetts, The Majority Press, 1976), 360. 116 Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York City, International Publishers, 1957), 45.

54

“Africans memorized its articles to share with other Africans hungry for some doctrine

which lifted them from the servile consciousness in which [they lived].”117

Such sentiments on the African continent speak to Garvey’s ability as a master

propagandist and organizer who channeled the anger, frustration, and disillusionment of

Blacks worldwide to promote Black economic prosperity, educational advancement,

religious autonomy, and African political independence. Furthermore, his ability to

surpass his political contemporaries and rivals such as Hubert Harrison, due to his

inability to translate ideas into a strong mass organization; to W.E.B DuBois who was

seemingly handcuffed and cloistered by the White-led and dominated NAACP due to

liberal white paternalism;118 and A. Phillip Randolph who was simply a labor activist,

speaks to Garvey’s transformative role as the preeminent leader of the Black world.

Moreover, Garvey also played a role in the development of numerous Black

writers giving them the ability to share their talents and their views to African people and

the world through the pages of the Negro World. Numerous notable writers ranging from

Zora Neale Hurston, and J.A. Rogers to Carter G. Woodson and Arthur A. Schomburg all

graced the pages of the UNIA’s literary organ at some point in time.119 To conclude,

Garvey’s most enduring act was arguably his creation of the Pan-African Flag (Red,

Black, and Green) to represent African people as a nation (not a nation state), and his

dream of a United States of Africa. Garvey’s flag is still used to this day to identify

African people at home and abroad as one people, while the Red, Black, and Green colors

117 Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press 2012), 69. 118 William M. Brewer, “Some Memories of Dr. W.E.B DuBois,” The Journal of Negro History 53, no.4 (1968): 346. 119 Amos Wilson, Afrikan-Centered Consciousness Versus the New World Order: Garveyism in the Age of Globalism (New York, Afrikan World InfoSystems, 1999), X.

55

were used by numerous African countries to create their flags during the African

Independence era. Finally, Garvey’s dream of a United States of Africa came to fruition

twenty-three years after his death with the creation of the Organization of African Unity

(OAU) on May 25th, 1963.

Marcus Garvey’s stance of the ‘alienated revolutionary’ receives its fullest

expression in the direction of organization building, Black separatism, and African

repatriation. Garvey’s rejection of white power structures, refusal to work within or with

them to create reforms, something DuBois arguably sought to do, speaks to his Pan-

African belief in Black self-assertion, his insistence on Black institution building so as to

create a separate sphere of Black empowerment within the Diaspora and a basis for Black

repatriation in Africa. In this respect, Garvey continues the voluntary self-alienation (via

repatriation) and organization building that first emerged among early era Pan-Africanists

such as Crummell, Delaney, Turner, and Williams. The militant legacy of David Walker

would persist, however, and reappear in later figures like Malcolm X. Garvey’s legacy,

too, would continue powerfully, especially in organizations like the Nation of Islam and

in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement in which his philosophies and opinions

would once again be called upon to address the problems of African life in America.

56

Chapter 3 Garveyism in the Modern Era

Black Political Self-Determination in the Southeastern United States

“The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over,”… We

been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothing.” What we gonna start saying

now is Black Power! 120

, Stokely Carmichael

In the post-Garvey world, the Second World War kept African Americans’

attention turned outward: toward their traditional concern with Africa, Europe, and the

colonized world.121 African Americans identified with the colonized peoples of Africa,

the Caribbean, and Asia. They also took a special interest in India’s drive toward

independence, a concern that the UNIA had once voiced in the 1920s.122 Moreover, once

again African Americans were confronted with the need to struggle for the United States’

war aims and against American racism.123This two-pronged struggle (later known as the

“Double Vee” strategy) to secure victory over Nazism in Europe and racism in America

would lead to a renewed fervor in the fight for African American human rights, through

the politics of assimilationism and the belief in the power of moral persuasion, best

articulated by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Due to the leadership of Dr. King numerous African American’s embraced

assimilationism in their approach to fight for human rights. This approach led to the ideas

120 William L. Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism: From the Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York, New York University Press 1997), 119. 121 Nell Irvin Painter, Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (New York, Oxford University Press 2007), 239. 122 Ibid., 239. 123 Ibid., 239.

57

of Garvey becoming obscure until the rise of the Black Power movement questioned the

efficacy of assimilationism and the politics of moral persuasion.

By the 1960s, the American Civil Rights Movement was in crisis. Malcolm X, the

eloquent spokesman of Black Power, had been assassinated, and numerous activists had

become disillusioned with the Big Three Civil Rights organizations’ (SCLC, CORE,

Urban League) inability to create tangible change for an exceedingly impatient African

American populace, suffering from the vicissitudes of American racism, urban squalor,

voter repression, and state-sponsored terrorism.

To solve this problem, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC,

pronounced “snick”) was formed in 1960 to help facilitate nonviolent direct action civil

rights demonstrations throughout the South.124 By mid-decade, however, Black-white

tensions within the organization and the growing attraction of Black Nationalism as an

ideology and organizational tool caused SNCC leaders Stokely Carmichael (now Kwame

Ture) and H. Rap Brown (now Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) to conclude that their work

would be made easier if non-Blacks were excluded from participation.125 In 1966, whites

were expelled from the organization as SNCC adopted an openly nationalistic orientation.

Carmichael, at the age of twenty-five, would become Chairperson of SNCC.

Carmichael, a Trinidadian born, Bronx, New York raised, Howard University educated,

self-proclaimed Pan-Africanist, who was once known as the Prime Minister of Afro-

America, was the final survivor of the iconic Civil Rights triumvirate that had included

Malcolm X and Dr. King. Carmichael, like Garvey, believed that Black political power

124 William L. Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism: From the Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York, New York University Press 1997), 119. 125 Ibid., 119.

58

resided in the will and political self-determination of the common person e.g.,126 the poor,

destitute and despondent –living under the debilitating conditions of legal segregation,

social degradation, political disenfranchisement, and economic exploitation.

Consequently, Carmichael traced the need for Black Power to the weakness of the

nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. The beating and murdering of Civil Rights workers

and the killing of Black little girls in Sunday school angered Black people everywhere;

nonviolent Civil Rights workers “had nothing to offer…except to go out and be beaten

again.”127 This sentiment revealed that the success in acquiring sweeping Civil Rights

legislation rang hollow, due to the laws’ failure to improve Black life and its inability to

take aim at the de facto structural and economic inequities of Northern and Western

cities. 128

Carmichael and the Black Power movement represented a further evolution in the

figure of the “alienated revolutionary,” which, as we have seen, constitutes the core,

animating spirt of Pan-Africanism. In periods of crisis, when avenues of advancement

within the dominant structures of white power become restricted or non-existent, the

stance of alienated revolution can once again become relevant to Black communities.

Carmichael illustrates this phenomenon via his militancy modeled in the spirit of the

Haitian Revolution and in his statements and actions reminiscent of proto-Pan-Africanist

David Walker. At the same time, Carmichael channels the organizational example of

Marcus Garvey to create viable structures to empower Black self-reliance. The alienated

revolutionary is a militant who turns away from white power in order to build Black

126 Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York City, BasicCivitas Books 2014), 87. 127 Nell Irvin Painter, Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (New York, Oxford University Press 2007), 319. 128 Ibid., 319.

59

power. Carmichael, like Walker and Garvey, grasped this truth. With Carmichael, we see

the alienated revolution of Pan-Africanism once again reassert its relevance in a time of

crisis.

Stokely Carmichael and Black Power: Lowndes County Freedom Organization

(LCFO)

In the mid-1960s, Lowndes County was one of the poorest counties in the nation.

A rural county, Lowndes was known as “Bloody Lowndes” due to the high rate of white

terrorist violence against Blacks to maintain segregation. Lowndes is situated just ten

miles from Selma (Dallas County) and the infamous Edmund Pettis Bridge. At the time

Lowndes was considered feudal by outsiders, who argued that it made the Mississippi

Delta look advanced.129 Moreover, Lowndes is located in the heart of Alabama’s Black

Belt, a string of seventeen counties with fertile black clay soil that stretches 170 miles

from the border with Georgia to the Mississippi state line.130 Lowndes would become the

home of southern Black militancy, in which traditional Black leaders, preachers, teachers,

and business persons-were eschewed for outsiders with a hunger for freedom. 131

Lowndes was a county budding with potential, home to 15,000 inhabitants

including 12,000 African Americans. Furthermore, Lowndes like several counties in

Alabama’s Black Belt had a majority Black population, yet not one of them could vote.132

Further exacerbating the issue was the fact that about eighty families owned 90 percent of

the land, leaving half of the Black population below the poverty level, with most of the

129 Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael {Kwame Ture} (New York City, Scribner 2003), 457. 130 Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York City, New York University Press, 2009), 4. 131 Ibid.,4. 132 Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael {Kwame Ture} (New York City, Scribner 2003), 457.

60

other half barely above it. Most of the women worked as sharecroppers or housemaids

making around $4 a day, while the men commuted to Montgomery for work.133

In 1966, Carmichael gave prominence to the words “Black Power” during James

Meredith’s Mississippi “Walk Against Fear,” in which Meredith was shot by an assailant

on the first day of his march.134 Carmichael seized the moment at a rally in support of

Meredith when he stated, “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’

us is to take over … We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got

nothing…What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!”135

Carmichael’s creation of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO)

would fulfill his dream of organizing underrepresented people, while also developing a

nuanced form of Pan-Africanism that moved from an activist/warrior paradigm to a

builder/creator perspective, in which Black people would have something to fight for

rather than against. Moreover, the creation of the LCFO also signaled a change from

building alternative power outside of the American political power structure to building

legitimate power inside of it, as well as a desire to move past the small incremental and

seemingly insignificant gains made by the mainstream Civil Rights establishment. SNCC

and Carmichael sought to do more than simply upset the establishment by retiring a few

African-killing sheriffs;136 they wanted to upset the apple cart by turning Lowndes from a

citadel of white supremacy to the center of southern Black militancy. This model of

activism that Carmichael pioneered constituted a critical shift in the alienated

133 Ibid., 457. 134 Neil Irvin Painter, Creating Black Americans: African American History and its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (New York City, Oxford University Press, 2007), 319. 135 William L. Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism: From the Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York, New York University Press, 1997), 119. 136 Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael {Kwame Ture} (New York City, Scribner 2003), 457.

61

revolutionary stance. Like Garvey, he focused on Black solidarity and Black

empowerment. But, rather than building separatist structures, Carmichael attempted to

develop a Black power base that could bend white power to Black interest. The emphasis

was not on integration but rather on a form of local political domination in a location in

which African Americans constituted the numerical majority. The shift here was from

militant revolutionary to democratic activist, focused on creating Black power and local

Black control. This shift, however, did not preclude a strategic resort to armed self-

defense. In Carmichael, Haiti and Garvey would coincide as a single, integrated model of

Pan-Africanist alienated revolution.

In order to become the vehicle for Black empowerment that Carmichael imagined,

the LCFO would first have to distinguish itself from it grassroots populist predecessor,

the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The LCFO would do so by choosing

the Black Panther as its symbol, noting the animal’s color and ability to defend itself.137

Nevertheless, going from dream to reality would take time, luck, hard work, and

money. Carmichael, who (like Garvey) initially took a less confrontational approach with

the white American power structure in the quest to improve the lives of African

Americans, would find himself in the role of “alienated revolutionary,”138 “cynical about

existing power structures but [arguing] that progressive change can only take place via

the use of calculated acts of instrumental violence.” 139As we will see, Carmichael would

use armed force strategically to project his independent electoral strategy in Lowndes

County against the renewal of white vigilante violence. Such a perspective should be

137 Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York City, BasicCivitas Books, 2014), 93. 138 John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1992), 112. 139 Ibid., 112.

62

considered sensible and politically intelligent, considering SNCC’s and Carmichael’s

previous and unsuccessful forays with the Democratic Party in the south. Carmichael

explained SNCC’s reasoning in choosing to organize an independent political party

stating, “To ask Negros to get in the Democratic Party is like asking Jews to join the Nazi

party!” Courtland Cox, SNCC’s program coordinator, echoed Carmichael’s sentiments

stating. “The Negro can’t control the Democratic Party on the state or county levels in

Alabama, he ought to organize something he can control.140

As expected, SNCC and Carmichael’s militant all-Black approach to political

organizing was castigated far and wide by fellow Civil Rights leaders, organizations, and

the press, similar to the way Garvey was demonized via the Garvey Must Go! Campaign.

This campaign was spearheaded by former ally turned political rival, and labor activist A.

Philip Randolph, who lead a cadre of leaders against Garvey. These leaders included

Chandler Owen, co-editor of the Messenger; orator and educator William Pickens; and

W.E.B DuBois, co-founder of the NAACP and editor of Crisis magazine.141

Carmichael’s detractors were not as harsh or as consistent as were Garvey’s,

however, the words of The New York Times, the SCLC, and the Democratic Party were

just as venomous. For example, the New York Times called SNCC’s organizing efforts

political sabotage. In an editorial, the paper claimed that extremist elements in Alabama’s

civil rights movement had adopted a rule-or ruin attitude toward the forthcoming

Democratic primary there that could only produce frustration and defeat for the state’s

Negroes.142 Such criticism was expected from the white press, which routinely lambasted

140 Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York City, BasicCivitas Books, 2014), 97. 141 Colin Grant, Negro with A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York City, Oxford University Press, 2008), 336. 142 Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York City, BasicCivitas Books, 2014), 97.

63

Black self-determination and agency as ill-witted and doomed to failure. Moreover,

shockingly Dr. King, Hosea Williams, and the SCLC publicly urged Blacks to support

the liberal candidate Richmond Flowers in the upcoming gubernatorial Democratic

primary after SNCC called for Blacks to boycott the primary to vote in the LCFO

primary.143 To the shock of Carmichael and others, Williams justified his actions by

arguing that “Blacks knew little about politics and lacked the time to learn, they were

required to support white candidates offering the best deal.”144

However, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act

of 1965 in August of that year would greatly booster the LCFO’s prospects of

successfully organizing an independent Black political party. Furthermore, Lowndes

County became the first county in the south where a federal register was assigned under

the new law.145

Nevertheless, skepticism amongst the Black community in Lowndes was high. To

them they didn’t think an “all-Black” party could be any good; they automatically saw

voting as an inclusive activity.146 They saw an all-Black party as the same old

segregation. The other reason for skepticism was sadly due to a lack of self-confidence.

They had been conditioned to think that politics was “white folks” business,” due to the

indoctrination that they were not allowed to participate in politics because they were

incompetent.147 These issues, however, were solved with political education courses, as

well showing them the educational background of the white local officials. They soon

143 Ibid., 98. 144 Ibid., 98. 145 Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael {Kwame Ture} (New York City, Scribner 2003), 462. 146 Ibid., 463. 147 Ibid., 463.

64

realized what a hoax that narrative was, and with the continuing political education

courses their confidence grew. 148

However, the whites in Lowndes County did not take kind to outsiders stirring up

their good niggers, and they turned to the only leverage they had to try to stop SNCC and

Carmichael’s organizing efforts, using white vigilante violence and their ownership of

land. Whites, however, found their attempt to defeat the movement through violence

ineffective, due to the local African American population’s rejection of non-violence and

embrace of armed self-defense,149in which they called non-violent protest…too

dangerous stating, ‘“you can’t come here talking that nonviolent shit. You’ll get yourself

killed and other people too.”’150

Whites responded to the ineffective use of violence to neutralize Carmichael and

SNCC organizers by exploiting the economic vulnerability of the movement’s base. To

do so they evicted tenant farmers and sharecroppers involved in the LCFO from their

land. SNCC’s response was swift, creating a Tent City (also known as Freedom City) to

keep evictees from leaving the county.151 However, life in the refuge was difficult, to say

the least; the first set of families, totaling fifteen people, shared a single outhouse and

toted water for cooking and drinking from a well on a distant farm. Moreover, some of

the tents had holes that freely admitted the wind and the rain, and only two had wood

floors to trap the feeble heat emanating from the inefficient stoves.152

148 Ibid., 463. 149 Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York City, New York University Press, 2009), 4). 150 Ibid.,104. 151 Ibid.,107. 152 Ibid.,107.

65

Nevertheless, the Lowndes movement began with a voter registration drive that

on May 3, 1966 registered over 900 Black voters who cast their ballots at the county seat

in Hayneville as independent participants in the primary. In the subsequent months

leading to the November general election, Carmichael and the LCFO were able to list a

slate of candidates. Sadly, none were elected due to the power of plantation bosses

coercing their captive workers to vote against the LCFO candidates.

However, the organizing efforts of SNCC and Carmichael in creating the LCFO

were not in vain, for five years after their initial convention, John Hulett, an African

American gentleman who in 1965 could not vote, and who recalled having to duck “like a

deer” into the bushes when the sheriff’s car approached, was elected sheriff of Lowndes

County.153Charles Smith became county commissioner, and in the next election, Hulett

and Smith headed a slate of eight African Americans, winning every seat contested. 154

The creation of the LCFO through Carmichael’s embrace of the concept of the

alienated revolutionary, one that is cynical about existing power structures but argues that

progressive change can only take place via the use of calculated acts of instrumental

violence,”155transformed local Black political behavior by providing African Americans

with a framework for a new kind of political engagement. This framework inspired Black

activists and emboldened Black radicals nationwide, including Oakland-based organizers

Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who named the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

after the LCFO ballot symbol.156 Moreover, SNCC and Carmichael also provided a new

153 Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael {Kwame Ture} (New York City, Scribner, 2003), 473. 154 Ibid., 473. 155 John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1992), 112. 156 Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York City, New York University Press, 2009), 2.

66

generation of African American activists with a new, more radical, rallying cry and

program known as Black Power that would be used to continue to organize third party

political organizations. For example, John Cashin an African American dentist and

political activist from Huntsville, Alabama, founded a statewide third party in 1968

patterned after the LCFO.157 Moreover, African Americans remained interested in

independent Black politics well into the early 1970s, culminating in the convening of

Black political conventions in Gary, Indiana in 1972, and in Little Rock, Arkansas, in

1974. 158

African American involvement in Black independent politics would wane

considerably in the following years due to the dissolution of SNCC in 1976. Moreover,

the difficulty of Black elected officials to bring about the social and economic changes

that African Americans sought because of wealthy and influential whites’ control of the

Democratic and Republican parties at states and national levels would also contribute to

the decline of Black independent politics.159However, after nearly 50 years the call to

independent Black politics and the concept of the alienated revolutionary would be

revived in the successful bid to elect Chokwe Lumumba the former vice president of the

Republic of New Afrika, Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. In this emphasis, Lumumba

represented a continuation of Carmichael’s integrated figure of the alienated

revolutionary, i.e., the figure who brings together the Haitian type of violent self-

assertion with the Garvey-type of Black Nationalist empowerment and organization.

157 Hasan Kwame Jefferies, “SNCC, Black Power, and Independent Political Party Organizing in Alabama, 1964-1966,” Journal of African American History 91, no.2 (2006): 187. 158 Ibid., 187. 159 Ibid., 187.

67

A Revolutionary in Mississippi: Chokwe Lumumba Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi

Chokwe Lumumba, born August 2, 1947 as Edwin Finley Taliaferro in Detroit,

Michigan, saw and experienced racism growing up at an very early age, from all-white

restaurants in Dearborn that wouldn’t serve his family, to housing and job discrimination

in the inner city.160 These early experiences with racial discrimination led to a high level

of social consciousness that would be fed by the era’s images: Emmitt Till’s battered

teenaged corpse, street battlers and sit-ins, and most formatively the assassination of Rev.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.161

These images would radicalize a young Taliaferro, leading him to adopt a new

name in honor of slain Congolese Pan-Africanist revolutionary and former Prime Minster

of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba.162 Lumumba would come to

embrace, the concept of the alienated revolutionary, “one who is cynical about existing

power structures but argues that progressive change can only take place via the use of

calculated acts of instrumental violence.”163This concept which arguably became the

basis of his work as an attorney and public administrator helped him possibly create the

framework for a more nuanced form of Pan-Africanism in which its adherents move

away from a focus on creating social organizations that exclusively promote Black pride,

self-love, and an embrace of African heritage and history toward a pragmatically based

focus on obtaining legitimate political and economic power in U.S. society.

160 Bhaskar Sunkara, “Free the Land: An Interview with Chowke Lumumba,” JACOBIN, June 1st, 2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/free-the-land 161 Ibid., 2 162 Ibid., 163 John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1992), 112.

68

To do so, Lumumba would obtain a degree in political science from Kalamazoo

College and attend law school at Wayne State University, only to put his graduate studies

on hold to join the nascent Republic of New Afrika (RNA) and serve as its “consul from

Detroit,” and later its vice president.164 The RNA, founded in 1968 in Detroit, Michigan,

was a Black Nationalist organization and movement that indirectly traced its origins and

teachings to Marcus Garvey’s UNIA. The RNA would advocate for a number of states in

the Southeastern U.S. while rebranding Garvey’s Pan-African flag from Red, Black and

Green to Green, Red and Black. The purpose of the RNA, unlike previous Civil Rights

organizations, was not to achieve integration or voting rights, but to establish a new

nation in the heartland of US slavery, one where Black people could rule themselves,

mounting their own secession from both the northern and southern styles of racism alike.

This quest was, to its adherents, a natural extension of the independence struggles then

spreading across the African continent.165

The RNA relocated to Jackson as a prelude to expanding in the south. Lumumba

joined them in Jackson where, as in other cities in Mississippi, Blacks had little political

representation and southern white Mississippian’s nostalgia for Jim Crow was still

strong.166 In August of the same year, local police and FBI agents raided the RNA

compound. In the ensuing gun battle, in which Lumumba was not present, a police officer

was killed and another, along with a federal agent, was wounded. Eleven New Afrika

164 Siddhartha Mitter, “Chokwe Lumumba, radical mayor of Jackson, Miss., dies at 66,” Al-Jazeera English, February 26, 2014. 165 Nathan Schneider, “The Revolutionary Life and Strange Death of a Radical Black Mayor,” VICE, April 17,2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gj7da/free-the-land-v23n2. 166 Bhaskar Sunkara, “Free the Land: An Interview with Chowke Lumumba,” JACOBIN, June 1st, 2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/free-the-land

69

members were arrested.167 Afterward, Lumumba would move back to Detroit, finishing

his law degree at Wayne State University in 1975.168

However, Lumumba’s revolutionary fire did not die; in 1978 he set up his own

law firm in Detroit and quickly gained a reputation for taking on the defense of militants

and revolutionaries, including Fulani Sunni Ali, rapper Tupac Shakur, and former Black

Panther Party members Geronimo Pratt and Assata Shakur. 169

Lumumba would return to Mississippi in 1988, after convincing his wife Nubia to

move with him. However, his record was not to the liking of the Mississippi bar and they

took three years to admit him.170 Lumumba would subsequently help found the Malcolm

X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) in 1990, to help develop a new generation of

activists,171 and in 2009 he ran for a city council seat in Jackson. The help of the MXGM

and his name recognition as an attorney of the people propelled him to victory.

However, it became clear to Lumumba that real power in Jackson- in particular,

power over infrastructure contracts in Jackson, was vested in the mayor’s office.

Lumumba’s successful bid for Mayor of Jackson thrust him into the national spotlight,

while also making him a media darling even though he never eschewed his Pan-

Africanist beliefs or principles, using a campaign slogan that echoed the greatness of the

Garvey era, “One city, One aim, One destiny.”172

Moreover, Lumumba would embody the concept of the “alienated statesmen," one

who prescribes to the ideas of Pan-Africanism, while seeking political office/power

167 Ibid., 2. 168 Ibid., 2. 169 Ibid., 2. 170 Ibid., 2. 171 Nathan Schneider, “The Revolutionary Life and Strange Death of a Radical Black Mayor,” VICE April 17, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gj7da/free-the-land-v23n2. 172 Ibid., 10.

70

outside of the two-party system with the implicit goal to use said office/power to the

benefit of African/Black people. The concept of the alienated statesmen was

demonstrated in his ability to obtain legitimate political power in Jackson, Mississippi, by

embracing existing powers structures and operating within the mechanisms of democratic

governance. In doing so, Lumumba shifted the concept of the alienated revolutionary

who uses acts of violence to the alienated statesmen who in a non-violent manner,

focuses on the accumulation of power on behalf of African Americans through the ballot

box via Black independent political organizing. As a result, Lumumba’s administration

created a form of resistance that is more durable than protest, yet not perceived as

dangerous as revolutionary violence. Additionally, Lumumba’s nuanced form of

alienation sought to break the monopoly of white political power from Tunica, in

northwest Mississippi to Wilkerson County in the southwest in which eighteen

predominantly Black counties in the state would finally begin to engage in Black self-

representation.173 Lumumba, believed that the route to self-determination could be led

through the accumulation of government slots to demand and build more for the Black

community in Mississippi.

To do so Lumumba would create an ambitious economic scheme based on

Ujamaa a Kwanzaa principal (a concept of former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere),

in which he sought to use city contracts and economic leverage to foster worker

ownership.174 The plan, if successful, would transform 10 percent of Jackson’s economy

173 Bhaskar Sunkara, “Free the Land: An Interview with Chowke Lumumba,” JACOBIN, June 1st, 2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/free-the-land 174 Ibid., 3.

71

into cooperatives by the end of his first term. Sadly, Lumumba died of a heart attack 14

months into his first term.

Nonetheless, Lumumba’s ability to achieve mainstream political success as an

unapologetic Pan-Africanist is something to behold; while also dispelling the belief that

“radicals” are unable to be effective leaders due to making impossible demands and

acting on reactive rage. Lumumba on the contrary was a strategist, thinking in bullet

points, enumerating and analyzing past mistakes to make future plans. 175

Furthermore, Lumumba’s use of the alienated statesman reflects his ability to

successfully continue the struggle for Black self-determination in an ever globalizing and

diversifying America; in which the Black/White political binary is no longer mutually

exclusive due to the influx of multiple ethnicities, races, cultures and identities becoming

part of the American cultural milieu.

175 Nathan Schneider, “The Revolutionary Life and Strange Death of a Radical Black Mayor,” VICE, April 17, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gj7da/free-the-land-v23n2.

72

Chapter 4

Pan-Africanism in the 21st century

“Pan-Africanism is the highest political expression of Black Power.”176

Stokely Carmichael

This thesis has traced the evolution of the concept of the alienated revolutionary

across Pan-Africanist movements and leaders. Four main lines of development have

emerged: the orientation toward militancy and violence in response to white power; the

turning away from white power through voluntary self-alienation (i.e. via repatriation to

Africa); the creation of organizational structures that can ground Pan-Africanism in the

United States and in Africa; and a synthesis of militancy and organization building for the

purpose of building Black power though available democratic means.

The viability of these different modes of development has been based on the

sociopolitical and economic realities that African people have faced in relation to the

white power structure since being ruthlessly exported from Africa to the Western world

centuries ago. For example, in 1791 on the small Caribbean island of Hispaniola, African

people suffering under the debilitating conditions of chattel enslavement relied upon the

efficacy of militant violent revolution to free themselves from bondage. In doing so, they

would create the world’s first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere: the island

country of Haiti. Additionally, the development of the alienated revolutionaries’

movement towards self-alienation (i.e. repatriation to Africa) can be seen in the life and

work of several nineteenth century era Pan-Africanists, such as Paul Cuffe, Alexander

Crummell, and Martin Delany. Self-alienation from white power (i.e., repatriation to

176 Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York City, BasicCivitas Books, 2014), 289.

73

Africa) became a viable option during their lifetimes due to numerous challenges with the

white power structure such as chattel enslavement, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and

the creation of the American Colonization Society (ACS) to name a few.

Furthermore, the expansion of alienated revolution through the work of Bishop

Henry McNeal Turner and Marcus Garvey would continue via the creation of

organizational structures that helped ground Pan-Africanism in the United States as a

viable mode of resistance to anti-Black racism. Turner’s KAEA and LEC, and Garvey’s

UNIA both sought to establish transcontinental ties among African people while also

creating organizations in the U.S. to improve Black life.

Consequently, nearly a half-century later Stokely Carmichael’s creation of the

LCFO and Chokwe Lumumba Sr.’s use of pragmatic Pan-Africanism as Mayor of

Jackson, Mississippi ushered in a new wave of Pan-Africanism. Their use of militancy

and organization building to gain political power through available democratic means

further developed the concept of the alienated revolutionary to that of the alienated

statesman. The alienated statesman is one who in a non-violent manner, focuses on the

accumulation of political power on behalf of African Americans through the ballot box

via Black independent third-party politics.

Lumumba Sr.’s success is even more impressive considering that the concept and

idea of Pan-Africanism has lost its currency in African American political discourse.

Lumumba Sr.’s use of the concept of the alienated statesman and quest for legitimate

political power helped to create a movement that would last longer than a protest, while

also not being centered on a cult of personality as was the case with previous Pan-

Africanist ideas, organizations, and movements. Lumumba Sr. modeled how Black

74

solidarity can achieve electoral results, exemplifying the importance of moving from

militancy to professional leadership within the electoral process under the current

conditions of white nationalist resurgence.

For example, in July of 2017, Chokwe Lumumba, Jr. was elected Mayor of

Jackson, showing that the relationships and goodwill fostered during his father’s

administration are still alive and well. The election of Lumumba Jr. continues the

ambitious work of Lumumba Sr., preventing Lumumba Sr.’s achievement from

becoming a flash in the pan success. Moreover, Lumumba, Jr.’s election as Mayor of

Jackson shows that militant Pan-Africanism can find consistent success in U.S. society by

using one’s professional skills, charm, credentials, and gravitas to successfully compete

for power and resources.

Furthermore, this model of leadership can offer movements like

#BlackLivesMatter, #ConcernedStudent1950, #MillionStudentMarch, and

#Blackoncampus a template on how to create effective, lasting change. These movements

have emerged in a time in which African American life has become increasingly difficult

due to the rise and resurgence of White Nationalist Hate Groups (WNHG), the

accumulative surge of white vigilante violence (George Zimmerman, Michael Dunn), and

extrajudicial killings of African Americans (Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, etc.) at a rate that

rivals the “first nadir”.177 Moreover, the resurgence in organized acts of violence towards

African Americans and the rise in anti-Black racism can be traced to the rising tide of

177 The first nadir is a term coined by historian Rayford Logan, to describe a period in US history in the Southern United States from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 through the early 20th century, when racism was worse than in any other period after the American Civil War. During this period, African Americans lost many civil rights gains made during Reconstruction. Anti-black violence, lynchings, segregation, legal racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy were omnipresent.

75

color in America. Reactionary efforts of white Americans to safeguard their perceived

threatened social status have emerged from their perception of a gap between their

expected and actual social status and power causing them to deeply resent current social

arrangements.178 The illusion of erasure from their position as the dominant American

esthetic has led a sizable contingent of white Americans to create political organizations

and movements to regain said power and status. Examples of this can be seen in the

creation of the Tea Party movement, the Alt-Right movement, and the election of Donald

J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States, after running a campaign based on

bigotry, xenophobia, and racism. Therefore, it is paramount that African Americans move

from protest to action, from simply elucidating how systems of oppression affect

historically marginalized groups in a myriad of ways, to effectively combating racialized

oppression and anti-Black racism in an organized manner by obtaining positions of

power.

Because of the resurgence of White nationalism in the U.S., it is imperative that

the models of alienated revolution created by Garvey, Carmichael, and Lumumba Sr. be

expanded upon to not only empower Black people but also reassert Pan-Africanism as a

viable mode of resistance to white supremacy in the age of globalization. The stances of

alienated revolution practiced by Marcus Garvey through organization building, Black

separatism, African repatriation, and Carmichael and Lumumba Sr.’s stance of alienated

statesmen – if expanded upon, can help create a quasi-nation state in the southeastern

United States. Similar to the audacious plan outlined by the RNA over 40 years ago, the

plan outlined above can be accomplished if Blacks would eschew their loyalties to the

178 Kathleen M. Blee, “Becoming A Racist Women in Contemporary Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi Groups,” Gender and Society 10, no. 6 (1996): 683.

76

Democratic and Republican parties in favor of a race-first third party platform to gain

political power.

Moreover, Chokwe Lumumba Sr.’s use of the expansion of the concept of the

alienated revolutionary to the alienated statesmen and quest for legitimate political

power, in my opinion, is the template for a paradigm shift in how Pan-Africanism is

articulated, advocated, and used to better the lives of African people in America.

Furthermore, this paradigm shift has answered the question that other contemporary

modes of thought have been unable to answer by moving from protest to action; from

criticizing political leaders to becoming the very leaders you want and need; and most

importantly by understanding that in order to affect lasting change one must not only gain

institutional and organizational power, but also in the words of Stokely Carmichael

organize, organize, organize.

I have argued in this thesis that Pan-Africanism can prescribe points of

intervention if properly channeled in a nuanced, race-first form. Its adherents must move

away from a focus on creating social organizations that exclusively promote Black pride,

self-love, and an embrace of African heritage and history towards a pragmatically based

focus on obtaining legitimate political and economic power in U.S. society. Its adherents

must make the transition from warrior and activist to diplomat, statesmen, and

professional. They can then use these positions of power and influence to create

legitimate spaces of power for African people to build, develop, and maintain rather than

only criticize, deconstruct, and destroy.

I have also raised the question, is Pan-Africanism still a viable form of resistance

to white supremacy in the age of globalization? Pan-Africanism, more than a century

77

after being formalized, has begun to wane. It is waning due to it losing ground because of

the many social, political, and economic problems African Americans have had and

continue to contend with.

Nonetheless, it is my contention that Pan-Africanism as an idea and movement

will never be rendered completely obsolete. However, a radical shift in perspective is

necessary. As aware as Pan-Africanists are of the history, the personalities, and the raison

d'être of the movement, they would be better off approaching it from a different

perspective. 179 Finally, although not a focus of this thesis, the challenge of globalization

will confront future Pan-Africanist. These challenges include resistance to forms of

marginalization that have evolved through sophisticated social structures that produce

contradictory forms of consciousness. This process has undermined one’s sense of

sociopolitical, cultural and economic belonging in the twenty-first century, resulting in a

lack of clearly defined points that would create international solidarity, due to overt

oppression being more subtle and nuanced. Pan-Africanism, however, is well-suited to

respond. From its very beginnings, its focus has been transregional and global in

character. Future Pan-Africanists will be well serve if they reflect on the legacy of

international solidarity among African people by considering the entire international

system (globalization) in how they relate to it.180 Therefore, the Pan-Africanist of the

twenty-first century, must be expansive in their worldview and in the understanding of a

world which is increasingly becoming more interconnected and interrelated. Pan-

Africanism must become a fluid concept and idea, able to change its tactics and

179 Olayiwola Abegunrin, Sabella Ogbobode Abidde, Pan-Africanism in Modern Times: Challenges, Concerns, and Constraints (London, Lexington Books, 2016), 250. 180 Ibid., 250.

78

perspective based on the current cultural moment without losing its substance or essence,

to fully achieve its goal of African liberation in today’s highly globalized world.

79

BIBILOGRAPHY

Abdul-Raheem, Tajudeen. Pan Africanism: Politics, Economy and Social Change in the

Twenty-First Century. London: Pluto Press, 1996.

Abegunrin, Olayiwola, and Sabella Ogbobode Abidde. Pan-Africanism in Modern Times:

Challenges, Concerns, and Constraints. Lanham: Boulder: New York: London:

Lexington Books, 2016.

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of

Colorblindness. New York, NY: New Press, 2012.

Ani, Marimba. Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in

the Diaspora. New York: Nkonimfo Publications, 2004.

Ani, Marimba. Yurugu: An African-centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and

Behavior. Baltimore, MD: Afrikan World Books, 2014.

Asante, Molefi Kete. Afrocentricity: the Theory of Social Change. African American

Images, 2003.

Blee, Kathleen M. “Becoming A Racist.” Gender & Society, vol. 10, no. 6, 1996, pp.

680–702.

Brewer, William M. “Some Memories of Dr. W. E. B. DuBois.” The Journal of Negro

History, vol. 53, no. 4, 1968, p. 345.

Brown, Scott. Fighting for Us: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black

Cultural Nationalism. New York U.P., 2005.

Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation

in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

80

Carmichael, Stokely, and Michael Thelwell. Ready for Revolution: The Life and

Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York: Scribner, 2003.

Christian, Mark. "Marcus Garvey and African Unity." Journal of Black Studies 39, no. 2

(2008): 316-31.

Christian, Mark. "Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association."

Journal of Black Studies 39, no. 2 (2008): 163-65.

Clarke, John Henrik, et al. Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa. Baltimore, MD:

Black Classic Press, 2011.

Cooks, C., and Harris, R. Carlos Cooks and Black Nationalism from Garvey to Malcolm:

Dover, MA: Majority Press. 1992

Cronon, Edmund David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal

Negro Improvement Association. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,

1981

Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed.

New York: New York University Press, 2012.

Fanon, Frantz, Richard Philcox, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Homi K. Bhabha. The Wretched of

the Earth. New York City: Grove Press, 2004.

Frazier, Edward Franklin. The Negro in the United States. New York: MacMillan, 1971

Garvey, Marcus, and Amy Jacques. Garvey. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus

Garvey, Or, Africa for the Africans. Dover, MA, U.S.A.: Majority Press, 1986.

Girard, Philippe R. Haiti the Tumultuous History: from Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken

Nation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

81

Grant, Colin. Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2008.

Harriot, Michael. “We Fact-Checked Umar Johnson's Hotep Tantrum with Roland

Martin Because Someone Had To.” The Root, Www.theroot.com, 11 July 2017,

www.theroot.com/we-fact-checked-umar-johnsons-hotep-tantrum-with-roland-

1796798532.

James, Cyril L. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo

Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's

Black Belt. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. "SNCC, Black Power, and Independent Political Party

Organizing in Alabama, 1964-1966." The Journal of African American History

91, no. 2 (April 1, 2006): 171-93.

Johnson, Robert. Returning Home: Why Blacks Left America For Africa: Interviews with

Black Repatriates. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, Inc. 1999.

Johnson, Robert. Returning Home: a Century of African-American Repatriation. Trenton,

New Jersey: Africa World Press, Inc. 2006.

Joseph, Peniel E. Stokely: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Karenga, Maulana. Introduction to Black Studies. 4th ed. Los Angeles, CA: University of

Sankore Press, 2010.

Kilson, Martin. Apropos of Africa: Sentiments of Negro American Leaders on Africa from

the 1800s to the 1950s. New York: Routledge, 2014.

82

"Kwame Nkrumah Was No Hero, Pan-Africanism Is Dead and Other Stories from a

Unique Presidential Meeting." MG Africa. April 21, 2015. Accessed April 5,

2017. http://mgafrica.com/article/2015-04-21-kwame-nkrumah-was-no-hero-pan-

africanism-is-dead-and-other-stories-from-a-unique-presidential-meeting/.

L., Van Deburg William. Modern Black Nationalism: from Marcus Garvey to Louis

Farrakhan. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997.

Martin, Tony. The Pan-African Connection: from Slavery to Garvey and Beyond. Dover,

MA: Majority Press, 1983.

Martin, Tony. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus

Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Dover, MA: The

Majority Press, 1986.

McCartney, John T. Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African-American Political

Thought. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

Mazrui, Ali A. Africans. A Triple Heritage. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1986

Mitter, Siddhartha. "Chokwe Lumumba, Radical Mayor of Jackson, Miss., Dies at 66." Al

Jazeera America. February 25, 2014. Accessed February 25, 2018.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/2/26/chokwe-lumumba-

radicalmayorofjacksonmsdiesat66.html.

Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Classical Black Nationalism: from the American Revolution to

Marcus Garvey. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1996.

Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism: 1850-1925. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1978.

83

Nkrumah, Kwame. The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. New York: International

Publishers, 1981.

Padmore, George. Pan-Africanism or Communism?: The Coming Struggle for Africa.

London: Dobson, 1985.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its

Meaning, 1619 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington D.C. Howard Univ.

Press, 1982.

Schneider, Nathan. “The Revolutionary Life and Strange Death of a Radical Black

Mayor.” Vice, 17 Apr. 2016, www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gj7da/free-the-land-

v23n2.

Sunkara, Bhaskar. "Free the Land: An Interview with Chokwe Lumumba." Jacobin.

Accessed February 20, 2018. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/free-the-

land/.

Van Deburg, William L. Modern Black Nationalism: from Marcus Garvey to Louis

Farrakhan. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Vinson, Robert Trent. The Americans Are Coming!: Dreams of African American

Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press,

2012.

Walker, David, and Charles M. Wiltse. David Walkers Appeal, in Four Articles, Together

with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and

Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. New York: Hill and

Wang, 1965

84

Wilson, Amos. Afrikan-Centered Consciousness versus the New World Order:

Garveyism in the Age of Globalism. New York: Afrikan World InfoSystems,

1999.

Wilson, Amos N. Blueprint for Black Power: A Moral, Political, and Economic

Imperative for the Twenty-first Century. New York: Afrikan World InfoSystems,

2011.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!

Thesis and Dissertation Services