Developments taking place in Chicago, where Gordon once dominated the black political scene, underscore the continuum of nationalist and internationalist thought and praxis in black political movements. During the 1960s and 1970s, local black activists, including some who had been inspired by Gordon’s PME, worked to popularize black nationalist and internationalist politics in the city. For example, A. B. Baker, a local activist who had joined the PME under Gordon’s leadership, continued to hold weekly PME meetings in the city in an effort to advance many of the unfulfilled goals of the organization. Through his weekly column in the New Crusader, a newspaper published in Chicago, Baker promoted black emigration, universal black liberation, Pan-African unity, economic self-sufficiency, and self-determination. Perhaps unbeknown to Baker, federal officials were closely monitoring his activities when they caught wind of the popularity of his weekly column.
While A. B. Baker worked under the auspices of the PME, other black activists in the city were attempting to advance black nationalist and internationalist politics through various groups—old and new. In the late 1960s, a cadre of black nationalists in Chicago, including UNIA leaders James A. Bennett and Elinor White, continued to push for black emigration to West Africa.4 White, with the assistance of Jean Slappy, a Garveyite based in Philadelphia, provided assistance to Rev. Clarence W. Harding Jr., a UNIA official from Chicago who spearheaded the organization’s activities in Monrovia, Liberia.5 During this period, a younger generation of black nationalists found a space in various new groups in which to advance their political goals. For example, a chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) emerged in Chicago in 1968 under the leadership of Fred Hampton.6 Originally established by college students Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966, the BPP was the largest black revolutionary organization of the period.7 During the late 1960s, thousands of young black men and women joined the BPP, dedicating their lives to protecting black communities and combating police brutality. While the BPP was by no means identical to groups like the PME or UNIA, their political goals certainly mirrored those of earlier black nationalists and internationalists. Similar to the PME and the UNIA (which both had militia units), the BPP advocated for armed resistance as a viable response to racial oppression. And like earlier groups like the PME and the UNIA, the BPP provided a platform for black activists to agitate for universal liberation, economic power, community control, and political self-determination.
In this way, the passing of influential women leaders like Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, Ethel Waddell, and Amy Ashwood certainly could not squelch the powerful ideas that undergirded their political activism during their lifetime. Through organizations like the BPP, black nationalist and internationalist ideas remained salient in public discourse during the twentieth century. Far beyond political ideas and strategies, however, the black women profiled in this book left behind a spirit of hope. Indeed, these women dared to dream of a better future and sought to “set the world on fire”—to eradicate global white supremacy and to (re)awaken the political consciousness of black men and women in the United States and across the African diaspora. They did not accomplish all of their political goals, and in fact, some of their actions, in hindsight, undermined the same goals they fought so vigorously to achieve. But the “freedom dreams” they envisioned propelled them to create new spaces and opportunities for people of color to openly confront racial and sexual discrimination and assert their political agency.8 In so doing, these women left an indelible mark on the lives of countless black men and women in the United States and across the globe. No doubt they will inspire generations of activists for many years to come.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Dover, Mass.: Majority Press, 1976); Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014).
2. Peace Movement of Ethiopia, One God, One Country, One People; also, a Brief History, Memorial to President, Funeral Oration and Burial Ceremonies, Battle Hymn of the Peace Movement (United States: s.n., 1941), 14 [Peace Movement of Ethiopia Constitution].
3. Peace Movement of Ethiopia Constitution; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 2009; orig. ed., 1944), 813; Michael Fitzgerald, “ ‘We Have Found a Moses’: Theodore Bilbo, Black Nationalism, and the Greater Liberia Bill of 1939,” Journal of Southern History 63 (1997): 293–320; Ethel Wolfskill Hedlin, “Earnest Cox and Colonization: A White Racist’s Response to Black Repatriation, 1923–1966” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1974).
4. Michael O. West, “ ‘Like a River’: The Million Man March and the Black Nationalist Tradition in the United States,” Journal of Historical Sociology 12, no. 1 (March 1999): 81–100; Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
5. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism.
6. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism; Essien Udosen Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (New York: Dell, 1964); William L. Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Alphonso Pinkney, Red, Black, and Green: Black Nationalism in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African-American Political Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
7. Douglass Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 193.
8. Joe William Trotter Jr., From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? African Americans, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 34–35.
9. Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations, and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
10. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, eds., Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1993).
11. Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Michael Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin, 2009).
12. Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth Century Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1.
13. West, “Like a River”; Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism; Essein-Udom, Black Nationalism; Theodore Draper, The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism (New York: Viking, 1970); Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967); Pinkney, Red, Black, and Green; Rodney Carlisle, The Roots of Black Nationalism (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1975); John H. Bracey Jr., August Meier, and Elliot Rudwick, Black Nationalism in America (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970); Nikhil Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
14. Kari Palonen, “Four Times of Politics: Policy, Polity, Politickin
g, and Politicization,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 28, no. 2 (2003): 171–86.
15. Ewing, The Age of Garvey; Erik S. McDuffie, “Chicago, Garveyism, and the History of the Diasporic Midwest,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 8, no. 2 (2015): 1–17; Daniel Dalrymple, “Reclaiming the Fallen: The Universal Negro Improvement Association Central Division, New York, 1935–1942,” Journal of Black Studies 45, no. 1 (2013): 19–36; Asia Leeds, “Toward the ‘Higher Type of Womanhood’: The Gendered Contours of Garveyism and the Making of Redemptive Geographies in Costa Rica, 1922–1941,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no. 1 (2013): 1–27.
16. Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); Erik S. McDuffie, “ ‘I Wanted a Communist Philosophy, but I Wanted Us to Have a Chance to Organize Our People’: The Diasporic Radicalism of Queen Mother Audley Moore and the Origins of Black Power,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 3, no. 2 (2010): 181–95; McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Gregg Andrews, Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2011); LaShawn Harris, “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party During the Great Depression,” Journal of African American History 94, no. 1 (2009): 21–43.
17. Craig Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, The Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 4.
18. Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), xi.
19. James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); West, Martin, and Wilkins, From Toussaint to Tupac; Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011).
20. Joy James, Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 41.
21. Ula Y. Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 2; Ula Y. Taylor, “ ‘Negro Women Are Great Thinkers as Well as Doers’: Amy Jacques-Garvey and Community Feminism, 1924–1927,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 104–26.
22. Linda Gordon, “What’s New in Women’s History,” in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. Theresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 29.
23. Joy James, Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 41.
24. See Deniz Kandiyoti, “Nationalism and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Dossier 26, no. 45 (October 2004): 45–58.
25. On the discourse of manliness, manhood, and masculinity, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Martin Anthony Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). On black nationalism and masculinism, see E. Frances White, “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African-American Nationalism,” Journal of Women’s History 2, no. 1 (1990): 73–97.
26. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From the Margin to the Center (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000).
27. W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994); Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones, eds., Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Chapter 1
1. Eunice Lewis, “The Black Woman’s Part in Race Leadership,” Negro World, April 19, 1924. On the “New Negro Woman,” see Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), chap. 4; Erin D. Chapman, Prove It on Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
2. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1979); Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani, eds., Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
3. E. Frances White, “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African-American Nationalism,” Journal of Women’s History 2 (1990): 76–97.
4. Martin Anthony Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 8, 26. On the discourse of “manliness and civilization” and its relationship to imperialism, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
5. Barbara Bair, “True Women, Real Men: Gender, Ideology and Social Roles in the Garvey Movement,” in Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History, ed. Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); Beryl Satter, “Marcus Garvey, Father Divine and the Gender Politics of Race Difference and Race Neutrality,” American Quarterly 48, no. 1 (March 1996): 43–76; Asia Leeds, “Toward the ‘Higher Type of Womanhood’: The Gendered Contours of Garveyism and the Making of Redemptive Geographies in Costa Rica, 1922–1941,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no. 1 (2013): 1–27.
6. Joy James, Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 41.
7. Theodore Vincent, Black Power and the Garvey Movement (San Francisco: Rampart, 1972); Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Chad Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
8. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1998), 50–91.
9. Martin, Race First; Vincent, Black Power and the Garvey Movement; Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998). On UNIA membership, see Martin, Race First, 11–12, 14.
10. Erez Manela, A Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
11. Martin, Race First; Amy Jacques Garvey and Marcus Garvey, eds., The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey or, Africa for the Africans (Dover, Mass.: Majority Press, 1986); Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014).
12. Robert A. Hill, Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press
, 1983), I:5.
13. Beckles and Shepherd, Caribbean Freedom; Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
14. Amy Ashwood, “The Birth of the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” in The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond, ed. Tony Martin (Dover, Mass.: Majority Press, 1983), 223.
15. Quoted in Nadia Swaby, “Woman Radical, Woman Intellectual, Woman Activist: The Political Life of Pan-African Feminist Amy Ashwood Garvey” (M.A. thesis, Sarah Lawrence College, 2011), 15.
16. Ashwood, “The Birth of the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” 221.
17. Grant, Negro with a Hat, 49.
Set the World on Fire Page 26