SET THE WORLD ON FIRE
POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA
Series Editors:
Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue
Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.
SET THE WORLD ON FIRE
Black Nationalist Women
and the Global Struggle for Freedom
KEISHA N. BLAIN
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Blain, Keisha N., 1985– author.
Title: Set the world on fire : black nationalist women and the global struggle for freedom / Keisha N. Blain.
Other titles: Politics and culture in modern America.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Politics and culture in modern America | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026795 | ISBN 9780812249880 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Black nationalism—History—20th century. | African diaspora—History—20th century. | Pan-Africanism—History—20th century. | African American women—Political activity—History—20th century. | African American women political activists—History—20th century. | Women in politics—United States—History.
Classification: LCC E185.6 .B65 2018 | DDC 320.54/60904—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026795
FOR MOM, WITH LOVE
CONTENTS
Introduction
1Women Pioneers in the Garvey Movement
2The Struggle for Black Emigration
3Organizing in the Jim Crow South
4Dreaming of Liberia
5Pan-Africanism and Anticolonial Politics
6Breaks, Transitions, and Continuities
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
We want to set the world on fire, we want freedom and justice and a chance to build for ourselves. And if we must set the world on fire . . . we will, like other men, die for the realization of our dreams.
—Josephine Moody, “We Want to Set the World on Fire,” New Negro World, January 1942
SET THE WORLD ON FIRE tells the story of how a cadre of black nationalist women—Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, Ethel Waddell, Celia Jane Allen, Ethel Collins, Amy Jacques Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Maymie Leona Turpeau De Mena, and several others—vigorously fought to challenge global white supremacy during the twentieth century. In various locales in the United States, including Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, and in other parts of the globe, including Britain and Jamaica, these women emerged as leaders in national and transnational black political movements, seeking to advance black nationalist and internationalist politics. At a moment when people of African descent were being denied full citizenship and human rights, the women profiled in this book utilized various strategies and tactics, such as letter-writing campaigns, grassroots organizing, and lobbying, to agitate for the rights and dignity of people of African descent.
Drawing on an array of previously untapped sources, including archival materials, government records, and unpublished songs and poetry, this book uncovers the previously hidden voices of black nationalist women activists and intellectuals whose ideas and activities differed significantly from their counterparts in well-known organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the National Urban League (NUL). While the activists and intellectuals in these prominent organizations were equally committed to ending racism and discrimination and eradicating the global color line, they rejected many of the ideas and strategies black nationalist women endorsed and often exhibited elitist views that caused a rift among activists. Feeling alienated from many of the ideas and political approaches of activists in mainstream civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the NUL and rejecting the Marxist platform of leftist organizations like the Communist Party, the black nationalist women chronicled in this book created spaces of their own in which to experiment with various strategies and ideologies.
Set the World on Fire centers on women leaders who were actively involved in several black political organizations of the period. Many of the women chronicled in this book were active members of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the dominant black nationalist organization in the United States and worldwide in the immediate post–World War I era.1 When the UNIA began to crumble under the weight of factionalism and conflict in the aftermath of Garvey’s 1927 deportation, some attempted to keep the UNIA afloat and worked under the auspices of the fragmented organization to keep black nationalist ideas alive and vibrant in political discourse. Others chose to pursue new avenues. In 1932, former UNIA member Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, an activist originally from Louisiana, established the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME) at the back of her restaurant in Chicago. In the presence of her husband, William, and twelve other black men and women, Gordon drafted the organization’s mission statement, endorsing black emigration to West Africa, black political self-determination, and the “confraternity among all dark races.”2 Within only a matter of months, the PME grew from a small group of black working-class activists in Chicago to become the largest and most influential black nationalist political movement in the United States, attracting an estimated 300,000 supporters in more than a dozen cities across the country.3
While the PME and the UNIA represented the two largest black political organizations in which black nationalist women were active, they were by no means the only ones. During the twentieth century, the women profiled in this book were involved in several black political groups, including the Harlem-based Universal Ethiopian Students Association (UESA) and the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, Inc., an offshoot of Gordon’s PME. Regardless of their organizational affiliation, however, all of these women were key proponents of black nationalism—the political view that people of African descent constitute a separate group or nationality on the basis of their distinct culture, shared history, and experiences.4 As black nationalists, the women profiled in this book advocated Pan-African unity, African redemption from European colonization, racial separatism, black pride, political self-determination, and economic self-sufficiency. With few material resources during a period of much economic and political turmoil, these women asserted their political power in various locales across the United States and in other parts of the African diaspora. This book highlights black nationalist women’s political organizing in the U.S. North, Midwest, and Jim Crow South and examines their transnational work and collaborations with activists in North America, Africa, Asia, E
urope, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
If, as one historian has argued, the period from 1850 to 1925 was the “golden age of black nationalism,” its decline did not occur after Marcus Garvey’s deportation.5 Rather, the collapse of Garvey’s UNIA provided opportunities for women activists to engage in nationalist politics in new, idiosyncratic, and innovative ways. While historians generally portray the period between the Garvey movement of the 1920s and Black Power of the 1960s and 1970s as an era of declining black nationalist activism, this book reframes the Great Depression, World War II, and early Cold War as significant eras of black nationalist ferment.6 During this period, women became central leaders in various black nationalist movements in the United States and other parts of the globe, agitating for racial unity, black political self-determination, and economic self-sufficiency. This is not to suggest that women’s engagement in black nationalist politics prior to 1927 was insignificant or that they did not play key roles in earlier black nationalist movements. The post-Garvey moment, however, opened up unique opportunities for women in the movement to refine and redefine black nationalist politics on their own terms.
With the effective collapse of the UNIA during the mid-1920s, a vanguard of nationalist women leaders emerged on the local, national, and international scenes, practicing a pragmatic form of nationalist politics that allowed for greater flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation. The women chronicled in this book employed multiple protest strategies and tactics. They combined numerous religious and political ideologies such as Garveyism, Ethiopianism, Pan-Africanism, and Islam. And they forged unlikely political alliances—with Japanese activists, for instance—in their struggles against racism, sexism, colonialism, and imperialism. As pragmatic activists, black nationalist women were willing to embrace “whatever seemed likely to help blacks live better lives in their half-free environment.”7 Given the shifting political and social terrain on which black nationalist women were fighting to combat racism and discrimination, their methods were diverse and ever-changing. For this reason, the strategies and tactics that appeared likely to help black people at one moment could be easily abandoned the next.
The emergence of this “golden age” of black nationalist women’s political activism coincided with the onset of the Great Depression, one of the most catastrophic periods of U.S. and world history. In the United States, the Depression was especially difficult for black Americans, exacerbating already poor socioeconomic conditions that existed long before 1929. Although Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs promised to improve economic conditions for all, black Americans received a “raw deal,” facing rampant discrimination, disenfranchisement, and unrelenting racial violence.8 The challenges black people faced on the national front were deeply intertwined with the struggles people of African descent experienced in other parts of the globe. As the United States, Britain, and other world powers inched closer to war in the late 1930s, black men and women were engaged in a war of their own. Although the leaders of these world powers claimed to endorse the democratic principles of “freedom and justice for all,” people of African descent were fighting for human rights and demanding equal recognition and participation in global civil society.
Across the African and Asian continents and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the impact of white imperial control could be felt. Despite the rhetoric of self-determination, global democracy, and freedom, British colonial rule persisted well into the twentieth century while the United States continued to exercise territorial, economic, and political control over people of color.9 In parts of Africa and Asia, Britain controlled a vast empire, encompassing diverse territories such as Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and India. Throughout the Anglophone Caribbean, the lives of people of color were circumscribed by a racial hierarchy in which British imperialists controlled the domestic economies.10 Similarly, the United States was in the business of “empire making”—culturally, politically, economically, and even territorially.11 The significant U.S. presence in Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and elsewhere helped to “internationalize U.S. culture,” providing an opening for U.S. policy makers to formally institute a system of imperial domination and exploitation.12 These two world powers played crucial roles in maintaining the global color line, which placed people of color at the bottom of the social, economic, and political hierarchy.
The desperate conditions under which black men and women were living during this period often called for desperate measures. Not surprisingly, the women chronicled in this book were willing to explore all avenues, no matter how controversial or seemingly unusual in hindsight, in hopes that they might accomplish their political goals. Rather than assessing these women’s ideas and activism solely based on the tangible outcomes of their political struggles, this book examines the principles and the philosophies that undergirded black nationalist women’s actions. Moreover, it pays close attention to how black nationalist women, especially working-class and impoverished women, sought to achieve their political goals and explains why they pursued certain strategies, tactics, and methods.
The key figures in this book expressed distinct concerns and interests, as well as utilized diverse political approaches that were influenced by various factors, including their socioeconomic backgrounds, their personal upbringings, their specific locales, and their organizational affiliations. Regardless of these distinctions, however, they were all black nationalists—a term they often used to describe themselves. Similar to other ideologies, black nationalism is neither static nor monolithic. Indeed, it has taken on several different forms and manifestations—such as cultural nationalism, economic nationalism, and religious nationalism—at various historical moments. Notwithstanding its complexity, the term provides a relevant theoretical framework and a crucial starting point for understanding the political ideas and activism of the women chronicled here. Indeed, the black women activists in this book embraced racial separatism, black pride and unity, political self-determination, and economic self-sufficiency. These core tenets, with varying degrees of emphasis at certain historical moments, have been fundamental to understanding black nationalism since its earliest articulations.13
From Maria Stewart’s and David Walker’s writings and speeches in the 1830s to the political work and expressions of Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, Malcolm X, and other black activists and intellectuals during the Black Power era, what has distinguished black nationalist thought in the United States from other political ideologies is a militant response to white supremacy, a recognition of the distinctiveness of black culture and history, and an emphasis on how people who represent a “nation within a nation” ought to create for themselves autonomous spaces in which to advance their own social, political, and economic goals. At the heart of black nationalism is a recognition that integration, were it ever to be realized, cannot fully address the persistent challenges of people of African descent in the United States and other parts of the diaspora. To view black nationalism as an oppositional stance in relation to integration does not imply that activists operated within a rigid ideological binary. Indeed, as history has repeatedly shown us, political ideas and activities are contingent, fluid, and disorderly.14 To that end, the women in this book often pushed beyond the perceived boundaries of black nationalism to craft an idiosyncratic political praxis born out of necessity.
Many of the women in this book were, in varying ways, drawn to black nationalism through Garveyism—the teachings and principles of Marcus Garvey. In addition to Mittie Maude Lena Gordon and Ethel Waddell, other women, such as UNIA cofounder Amy Ashwood (Garvey’s first wife), UNIA national organizer Maymie De Mena, and Pan-Africanist feminist Amy Jacques Garvey (Garvey’s second wife), were active in the Garvey movement during the 1920s. In the post-Garvey era, some remained involved in the fragmented UNIA, whereas others moved in different directions. For this reason, all of the black nationalist women in this book should not be classified solely as “Garveyites”—a term that reinforces the ideological t
ies to Garvey yet does not account for the diverse political and religious traditions on which black nationalist women drew.
Indeed, while this book joins an ongoing scholarly effort to assess the global impact and enduring legacies of Garveyism—as an ideology and political organizing tool—it moves beyond Garveyism as the sole or even primary prism through which women leaders crafted a political response to global white supremacy.15 Set the World on Fire highlights women’s efforts to formulate a black nationalist politics that often took on new shapes and meanings during the post-Garvey era. Black nationalist women’s political ideas and activities were not simply efforts to maintain or even to extend Garveyism but often to depart from it entirely. In the absence of Garvey’s direct leadership and influence, the expressions of black nationalism that emerged during the post-1927 era sometimes resembled Garveyism but at other times did not.
Similar to many of the black nationalists who preceded them, the women in this book drew on both radical and conservative traditions to formulate their political ideas and praxis. On one hand, black nationalist women embraced heteronormative gender politics and generally advocated civilizationist racial uplift views—often cloaked in Christian rhetoric. Whereas black women radicals in the Communist Party endorsed anticapitalism, black nationalist women promoted black capitalism, in the belief that the growth of black-owned businesses would bolster economic self-sufficiency and thus enrich and sustain black life.16 On the other hand, black nationalist women embraced many ideas that challenged the status quo. Black nationalist women’s endorsement of Afro-Asian solidarity, call for black separatism, support of African liberation struggles, and antiimperialist critique of U.S. foreign policy—to name a few—were all ideas that were considered “radical” in relation to mainstream black political discourses of the twentieth century. More specifically, their ideas and activism reflected what political sociologist Craig Calhoun describes as tactical radicalism—an emphasis on “immediate change” and a willingness to use “extreme measures” to achieve their political goals.17
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