Steven Hahn: A Rebellious Take on African-American History
[Steven Hahn is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. His book The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, based on the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures delivered at Harvard University, was published by Harvard University Press in March.]
As most scholars know, one book leads to another. Questions unanswered beg for more work. When I was finishing A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press, 2003), I became increasingly interested in Marcus Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, as the capstone to the story I was telling. I discovered with astonishment, however, that the secondary literature on the group (especially about those at the grass-roots level) was almost nonexistent. The UNIA, after all, is acknowledged to be the largest political movement of people of African descent in the 20th century: one that commenced in the 1910s, grew spectacularly in the United States during the 1920s (even though Garvey was a Jamaican immigrant), and became international in its dimensions, with substantial followings in Central America, the Caribbean basin, and southern Africa. Yet, aside from many volumes on Garvey himself, there was little or nothing on its political geography, social basis, local history, or legacies.
Wondering how to make sense of such a large scholarly elision, I began to reflect on a more general and unusual problem: what historians don't write about—and why....
...That returns us to the problem I opened with: Why the Garvey movement has remained largely hidden from us and what a serious investigation of it might reveal. A third and final reassessment of history making and history writing thereby begins with a geographical and social profile of the movement based on material in the published Garvey papers (edited by Robert A. Hill) and in the Negro World, the UNIA newspaper. Historians have widely assumed (based on relatively little evidence) that the UNIA was a movement of the urban North, chiefly attracting recent migrants from the West Indies together with impoverished African-Americans who suffered from a variety of dislocations. But I discovered that most of the association's divisions were in the Southern states, not in the North, and in small towns and rural areas rather than in large cities; that UNIA supporters, whether in the North, South, or West, were overwhelmingly Southern born (and not from the Caribbean); and that they were working people who were literate, had skills, were married, were living in families, and were generally in their 30s and 40s. In short, laboring folks who sought or had achieved some measure of stability and respectability.
Such African-Americans were drawn to Garveyism in great numbers because Garvey spoke a language with familiar ideas and cadences, and because the UNIA tapped into deep wells of experience and sensibility traceable to enslavement and seen in many of the struggles of the postemancipation period, especially those that focused on issues of community empowerment, self-governance, and separatism: emigrationism, the establishment of black towns, the practice of"fusion" politics (local power-sharing arrangements with white people), the development of unincorporated black settlements on the edges of plantations and towns. Garvey presented an argument and set of projects—first and foremost, retaking their African homeland from European colonizers—that took the sobering of black prospects in the depth of the Jim Crow era and offered a breathtaking vision of political struggle and redemption. The UNIA, in turn, built on traditions of fraternalism, grass-roots politics, and religious enthusiasm.
Moreover, the UNIA may be seen as part of a larger (and still to be excavated) black political underground that evinced a hybridity of politics and political ideas and that established important bridges between the mobilizations of the 1920s and 1930s and those of the 1950s and 1960s. A number of individuals either moved between the UNIA and organizations like the NAACP without cutting ties with either, or moved on from the UNIA to the NAACP, the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, the Nation of Islam, the Communist Party, or a variety of more localized projects. Garveyite influences can also be seen on figures like E.D. Nixon, the organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott, Malcolm X, Bob Moses, and Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana. Nixon had been in the UNIA; Malcolm X's father was a prominent Garveyite; Moses' grandfather was a UNIA supporter; and Nkrumah was deeply influenced by Garvey's ideas when he was educated in the United States....
Read entire article at The Chronicle of Higher Education
As most scholars know, one book leads to another. Questions unanswered beg for more work. When I was finishing A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press, 2003), I became increasingly interested in Marcus Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, as the capstone to the story I was telling. I discovered with astonishment, however, that the secondary literature on the group (especially about those at the grass-roots level) was almost nonexistent. The UNIA, after all, is acknowledged to be the largest political movement of people of African descent in the 20th century: one that commenced in the 1910s, grew spectacularly in the United States during the 1920s (even though Garvey was a Jamaican immigrant), and became international in its dimensions, with substantial followings in Central America, the Caribbean basin, and southern Africa. Yet, aside from many volumes on Garvey himself, there was little or nothing on its political geography, social basis, local history, or legacies.
Wondering how to make sense of such a large scholarly elision, I began to reflect on a more general and unusual problem: what historians don't write about—and why....
...That returns us to the problem I opened with: Why the Garvey movement has remained largely hidden from us and what a serious investigation of it might reveal. A third and final reassessment of history making and history writing thereby begins with a geographical and social profile of the movement based on material in the published Garvey papers (edited by Robert A. Hill) and in the Negro World, the UNIA newspaper. Historians have widely assumed (based on relatively little evidence) that the UNIA was a movement of the urban North, chiefly attracting recent migrants from the West Indies together with impoverished African-Americans who suffered from a variety of dislocations. But I discovered that most of the association's divisions were in the Southern states, not in the North, and in small towns and rural areas rather than in large cities; that UNIA supporters, whether in the North, South, or West, were overwhelmingly Southern born (and not from the Caribbean); and that they were working people who were literate, had skills, were married, were living in families, and were generally in their 30s and 40s. In short, laboring folks who sought or had achieved some measure of stability and respectability.
Such African-Americans were drawn to Garveyism in great numbers because Garvey spoke a language with familiar ideas and cadences, and because the UNIA tapped into deep wells of experience and sensibility traceable to enslavement and seen in many of the struggles of the postemancipation period, especially those that focused on issues of community empowerment, self-governance, and separatism: emigrationism, the establishment of black towns, the practice of"fusion" politics (local power-sharing arrangements with white people), the development of unincorporated black settlements on the edges of plantations and towns. Garvey presented an argument and set of projects—first and foremost, retaking their African homeland from European colonizers—that took the sobering of black prospects in the depth of the Jim Crow era and offered a breathtaking vision of political struggle and redemption. The UNIA, in turn, built on traditions of fraternalism, grass-roots politics, and religious enthusiasm.
Moreover, the UNIA may be seen as part of a larger (and still to be excavated) black political underground that evinced a hybridity of politics and political ideas and that established important bridges between the mobilizations of the 1920s and 1930s and those of the 1950s and 1960s. A number of individuals either moved between the UNIA and organizations like the NAACP without cutting ties with either, or moved on from the UNIA to the NAACP, the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, the Nation of Islam, the Communist Party, or a variety of more localized projects. Garveyite influences can also be seen on figures like E.D. Nixon, the organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott, Malcolm X, Bob Moses, and Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana. Nixon had been in the UNIA; Malcolm X's father was a prominent Garveyite; Moses' grandfather was a UNIA supporter; and Nkrumah was deeply influenced by Garvey's ideas when he was educated in the United States....