The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture

The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920-1927

Mary G. Rolinson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807872789
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The black separatist movement led by Marcus Garvey has long been viewed as a phenomenon of African American organization in the urban North. But as Mary Rolinson demonstrates, the largest number of Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) divisions and Garvey's most devoted and loyal followers were found in the southern Black Belt. Tracing the path of organizers from northern cities to Virginia, and then from the Upper to the Deep South, Rolinson remaps the movement to include this vital but overlooked region. Rolinson shows how Garvey's southern constituency sprang from cities, countryside churches, and sharecropper cabins. Southern Garveyites adopted pertinent elements of the movement's ideology and developed strategies for community self-defense and self-determination. These southern African Americans maintained a spiritual attachment to their African identities and developed a fiercely racial nationalism, building on the rhetoric and experiences of black organizers from the nineteenth-century South. Garveyism provided a common bond during the upheaval of the Great Migration, Rolinson contends, and even after the UNIA had all but disappeared in the South in the 1930s, the movement's tenets of race organization, unity, and pride continued to flourish in other forms of black protest for generations.

1 Antecedents

He spoke from his soul . . . and ah, Garvey spoke the words that you thought you was speaking yourself. . . . They were in your thoughts, in your mind, in your brains, but still you did not speak them the way Garvey spoke them. And it . . . ah, it was in one accord. It was just like, ah, everybody had one mind.—Virginia Collins, Louisiana Garveyite, 2001

Many of Marcus Garvey’s inspiring words and ideas sounded familiar to his followers because they were not necessarily new.¹ Many of the most important themes of Garvey’s speeches, botspoken and transcribed weekly in the Negro World, echoed the voices of generations of black clergymen, journalists, and other influential black leaders of the American South. So much of what appealed to American Garveyites, whether they were born in the rural South or remained there, came straight out of the collective memory of generations past. From the intermittent African American colonization of Liberia, to the emigrationism, racial pride, and self-defense espoused by African Methodist Episcopal (AME) bishop Henry McNeal Turner, to the efforts to uplift and redeem African societies by African American missionaries from the rural South, to the self-reliance and economic nationalism of Booker T. Washington, Garvey’s program blended preexisting strategies familiar to rural southerners, while adding elements that appropriately addressed the postwar setting of the 1920s.

African American leaders struggled with issues of legitimacy. Who did southern blacks consider their leaders in this modern era? Who articulated their agenda, and how did their lives and issues overlap with those of African American migrants to urban areas? Certainly ministers, journalists, and even national figures like Booker Washington and Bishop Turner confronted problems in diverse ways. Garvey successfully appropriated and transformed popular tactics and rhetoric that spoke to rural people’s issues: survival, spirituality, coping strategy, pragmatism, strength, and preparation for protest, organization, and community formation and reconstitution.

In the North and in southern cities, alternative approaches to black advancement had begun to take shape, most of which tailored protest to the urban setting and addressed issues confronted by urbanites. The Great Migration, which began the eventual shift of millions of African Americans to cities, had begun, but in the early 1920s southern blacks remained predominantly rural and agricultural. Many held on to previous models for race advancement but recognized their limitations. The UNIA leadership walked a fine line between embracing what was useful from previous efforts and defining ways in which some old practices were obsolete.

The adjustments Garvey wanted to make in strategy required black pride and dignity in interactions with whites and a modern, nationalistic approach to community building and economic development. At Carnegie Hall in August 1919, Garvey, then viewed by Harlem’s black leaders as a radical West Indian upstart, went so far as to say, “The white man of the world has been accustomed to deal with the Uncle Tom cringing Negro. Up to 1918, he knew no other Negro than the Negro represented through Booker T. Washington. Today he will find that a new Negro is on the stage.”²

Another attempt at distinguishing the UNIA program came in an early Negro World editorial entitled, “Honorable Marcus Garvey and Our Fossilized Missionaries.” In this column J. Arthur Davis, a black American organizer who became the early Miami UNIA division president, stressed the uniqueness of Garvey’s plans while comparing their purposes to those of Henry McNeal Turner and other black missionaries to Africa: “Like Bishop Turner, [Garvey] dreams of a Negro flag in Africa. Like our missionaries, he claims that if Africa is to be saved, it must be saved by black men. But he would save it wholesale, while our missionaries have been trying to save it by the retail. For fifty years they have been raising money to that end.” Implying that missionaries had “sold out” Africa in the face of European imperialism, Davis argued that Garvey and the UNIA were more sincere. He posited that the creation of a steamship line and the development of commerce were the logical routes to African redemption. It was not enough to transplant black American farmers to Liberia. The industrial development that could make this imagined black nation competitive in the modern world, Davis asserted in the Negro World, was essential to the new program.³

Although never an advocate of emigration, during his years as a student at Hampton Institute Booker T. Washington had considered, with many others, becoming a missionary to Africa, a continent that had interested him since childhood. Providence, he believed, took him instead to Alabama to found Tuskegee Institute. In 1900, however, he found a concrete way to form a connection with the vast continent across the Atlantic. The German Colonial Society requested the assistance of experts in cotton cultivation, and nine Tuskegee men answered Washington’s call to take their farming expertise to Africa. All the volunteers were from the South, the sons of Alabama slaves.⁴The first four went to Togoland, and later others went to Sudan, South Africa, Congo Free State, and Liberia.⁵ Several of these men reported their impressions to Washington, and in 1910 he took his interest a step further: he began to solicit participation in an international conference “[t]o bring together not only students of colonial and racial questions, but more particularly those who either as missionaries, teachers or government officials, are actually engaged in any way in practical and constructive work, which seeks to build up Africa by educating and improving the character and conditions of the native peoples . . . to get from the people on the ground a clearer and more definite notion of the actual problems involved in the redemption of the African peoples.”⁶ The 1912 international conference at Tuskegee anticipated Garvey’s bolder yet similar meetings by eight years and mirrored the Pan-African conference organized by Henry Sylvester Williams of Trinidad in 1900, as well as later meetings associated with W. E. B. Du Bois.⁷

Despite Washington’s complicity in assisting colonialists more than Africans themselves, in Garvey’s Philosophy and Opinions, published in 1923, we find a more forgiving and approving attitude toward the strategies of “Booker T. Washington’s Program.” While acknowledging the benefits of the Tuskegee idea of industrial training, the UNIA leader argued that the “New Negro” sought also political and military leadership. The political leadership he referred to, of course, would be attained not in the countries of the African diaspora, not as subordinates to whites in a colonial system, but in an independent Africa.⁸

During the golden years of the UNIA, only Haiti, Ethiopia, and Liberia were black-ruled nations. However, Haiti had been under U.S. occupation since 1915, Liberia was propped up by extensive loans from American creditors, and Ethiopia was the last remaining African kingdom not yet under European rule. This mountainous section of eastern Africa was coveted and eventually invaded in 1935 by the Italians, who got a late start in the European imperial land grab.⁹ Undeterred by the power of his imperial rivals, Garvey accepted leadership of a provisional, imagined nation of the “Negro People of the World.”¹⁰ The bulk of this constituency lived either in parts of Africa and the West Indies dominated by Europe or as second-class U.S. citizens.

Garvey’s position on the black man’s natural right to and attachment to Africa echoed an earlier proponent of Negro nationalism. A native of the Virgin Islands, Edward Wilmot Blyden, the loudest African voice on the international scene in the 1880s, spoke all over the United States to promote emigration to his adopted home country, Liberia. In 1882 he lectured in the Deep South at institutions of higher learning. He stressed the need for American blacks to come to Liberia and strengthen the black nation with their contributions and skills. He had much earlier asked the Christian Recorder, the national AME organ founded in 1852, to solicit half a million American Negroes for Africa. Hollis Lynch, Blyden’s biographer, has estimated that Blyden’s speech in Washington, D.C., the institutional home to the American Colonization Society (for which he and Henry McNeal Turner served as agents), contained his most important utterances from his U.S. speaking tour. Blyden “predicted that as the Negro masses [became] educated they would grow impatient with their circumscribed lives, and must then feel ‘an irrepressible desire to return to the Fatherland.’”¹¹

Africa burned not just in the minds of Washington and Garvey, neither of whom ever reached its shores, but also in the imaginations of black farmers in the South. Some of their community elders, born around 1820, had been born in Africa and sold as slaves illegally after the importation ban of 1808. The census of 1920 reported 243 African-born people of color living in the United States, the lowest number of native Africans alive in the United States since the seventeenth century. About a quarter of these were very elderly southern black people who had once been slaves. The others were apparently children born to African American missionaries while serving in Africa.¹² Recorders of the history of Mitchell County in southwest Georgia, later a center of UNIA activity in the Deep South, noted the remarkable longevity of a number of local blacks who had been born in Africa and who lived well past their one-hundredth year. Africa-born former slave Paul Frazier died in 1902 at 110 years old. John Brimberry, who died in 1911 at 131 years of age, identified himself as an “Arbo” kinsman.¹³ In 1920 four Yazoo-Mississippi Delta blacks had been born in Africa well before the Civil War, and in Arkansas ten black people recorded Africa as their place of birth. One colored Pulaski County schoolteacher, twenty-eight-year-old Diane McNeil, was Liberian and had Africa-born parents. Although few in number, these direct contacts to Africa reinforced the connection African Americans felt to their heritage. Moreover, oral traditions kept Africa alive in the imaginations of black families all over the United States through the generations. Few had the detail and drama of Alex Haley’s Roots, a saga of his family’s multigenerational odyssey from freedom in the Gambia to freedom in America. None, like Haley’s, became a best-selling book and in 1977 the most widely viewed television production in history. But stories of the wisdom of ancestors or remembrances of a former life of freedom had psychological power, especially among people with few literary options.

After the deaths of Turner and Washington, both in 1915, black people in the American South felt a void. This predominantly rural group, located on farms in the Black Belt, missed the national leadership that these great men had represented. Urban leaders like Du Bois and Atlanta Baptist College’s (now Morehouse) John Hope offered solutions that seemed more applicable to the middle class or at least to the urban context. Garvey, with the help of his organizers, recognized this drastic need and rare opportunity in the rural South. Over several years Garvey’s plans evolved, he used his powerful newspaper to promote his ideas, and he adopted previous leaders’ models. By 1922 he had carved out his niche as the recognized leader of the Negro race in the rural South and elsewhere.

A clear link exists between Garvey’s philosophies and those of Blyden and Turner. It is certain that Garvey read their writings extensively, although he credited much more ideological influence to the better-known and more recent Washington. Moreover, this continuity of thought extended to the literate members of black, southern communities, especially to those who were pastors. It should not surprise us that Garvey gathered support in areas where Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, the African missionary movement, and the long-lived African colonization movement had a following. The missionary, sacred, and emigrationist components of Garveyism grew out of the powerful influence of evangelical Christianity among nineteenth-century African Americans. These links are most clearly defined in the rural South where these factors had their greatest impact and endurance.

Bishop Turner’s long leadership career and enormous influence among rural blacks began as an AME pastor and chaplain for the Union army. He spent his years immediately after the Civil War as the architect of the strong AME church network in Georgia. He traveled constantly, lived and worked in Atlanta and Macon, served in the Georgia legislature, and eventually settled in Savannah in 1872. In 1876 he became the director of AME publications, including the Christian Recorder, which made him a national spokesman for the largest black organization in the country. In that year U.S. troops withdrew from the South, and the gains of Reconstruction for blacks began their steady decline. Turner became an outspoken champion of black farmers trapped by debt peonage.¹⁴

In 1880 the General Conference of the AME church assigned Turner to the Eighth District, which included Arkansas, Mississippi, and the Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Turner spoke at churches and organized new ones all over these states, emphasizing race pride and encouraging the spread of the AME church. A Mississippi audience member noted, “We did not know that our race owned so many great men, but after hearing all the splendid things he said, we went directly home and washed our faces and resolved that we would nevermore try to be white.”¹⁵

Turner’s advocacy of black emigration to Africa made him a controversial figure, though sources admit that his views accurately mirrored the sentimental impulses of “the masses” in the South, especially in rural Arkansas.¹⁶ Turner’s biographer Stephen Ward Angell calls the bishop’s mission to the South, which was mostly responsible for AME membership growth from 20,000 in 1858 to 452,725 in 1896, his most important achievement. Angell paraphrases the remarks of one of Turner’s fellow bishops, Reverdy Ransom, on Turner’s remarkable accomplishments in the South: “it was impossible that the world would ever witness someone like Turner again, because what he did—transforming an impoverished, scattered people into a disciplined organization wielding great collective power—only needed to be done once. Succeeding generations of African-American ministers and politicians faced the different task of refining the organization that Turner established.”¹⁷ This refinement, undertaken by Garvey in the post–World War I era, was adapted to twentieth-century conditions, borrowed heavily from Turner’s persuasive and provocative ideology, and appealed to an identical constituency.

During the Civil War, Turner first developed an interest in a black homeland where assimilation of the races would not be necessary.¹⁸ The Christian Recorder, of which he later became editorial adviser and publisher, provided a forum for Turner’s opinions through the years of his service as an AME pastor and bishop. It circulated widely all over the United States and even further as the church organized internationally in the West Indies, South America, and South Africa. In 1917 it was celebrating its sixty-fifth anniversary as the longest continuous race paper ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Grassroots Garveyism
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Rediscovering Southern Garveyism
• 1 Antecedents
• 2 Lessons
• 3 Growth
• 4 Members
• 5 Appeal
• 6 Transition
• Epilogue: Legacy
• Appendix A: UNIA Divisions in the Eleven States of the Former Confederacy
• Appendix B: Numbers of Southern Members of UNIA Divisions by State
• Appendix C: Numbers of Sympathizers Involved in Mass Meetings and Petitions for Garvey’s Release from Jail and Prison, 1923–1927
• Appendix D: Phases of Organization of UNIA Divisions in the South by State
• Appendix E: Ministers as Southern UNIA Officers, 1926–1928
• Appendix F: Profiles of UNIA Members in Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi, 1922–1928, and NAACP Branch Leaders in Georgia (excluding Atlanta), 1917–1920
• Appendix G: Women Organizers in the UNIA in the South, 1922–1928
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index