BLACK NATIONALISM

BLACK NATIONALISM. The idea that black people should establish a nation-state that would manifest their social and cultural aspirations can be located in the thought of African Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the particulars of the nationalist idea have changed with shifts in the political and social climate, four elements consistently surface in dialogue about the proposition: assumptions about racial traits and black identity, the prospect of a territorial homeland, the self-help emphasis, and antiwhite ideology.

As white hostility toward free blacks increased throughout the North during the first half of the nineteenth century, black communities launched many self-help institutions such as churches, schools, and benevolent associations. But as political steps taken to disenfranchise free blacks in Northern states spread rapidly, many blacks abandoned the hope of meaningful freedom in the United States and turned their attention to the possibility of migration to Africa, Canada, or other countries.

Expressions of nationalism in this period were grounded in the contemporary ideas about "race" and "nation." Proponents of emigration and a sovereign state assumed that certain inherent values, abilities, and temperaments of black people would provide the cultural and social cohesion necessary to mold a new and just nation. From the perspective of the theories about racial traits characteristic of Western social thought at the time, the goal of a sovereign state seemed logical, if not practical. But leaders like Frederick Douglass rejected the claim that there were inherent differences between blacks and whites and questioned the notion of a nation organized around racial group membership. Douglass conceded the need for blacks to act collectively and aggressively against racial oppression, but he held forth for racial justice on American soil.

The annual Negro Conventions that met from 1830 to 1861 thoroughly debated the merits of colonization and racial separatism. Blacks in several Northern cities launched programs to relocate blacks outside of the United States. In 1816 an ideologically eclectic group of whites formed the American Colonization Society (ACS) to promote and orchestrate colonization of the free black population in Africa. The ACS could claim limited success when, in 1821, despite strong opposition in urban black communities, 17,000 blacks voluntarily migrated to Liberia on the west coast of Africa.

Through the abolitionist 1850s, few blacks opted to seek well-being abroad. Yet some of the best-educated blacks, including Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander Crummel, and Martin Delaney, continued to press for a black nation on African soil. Emancipation and the defeat of the slaveholding South produced a surge of optimism in black America. A significant number of blacks elected to acquire land in the Midwest and establish all-black towns, under the rubric of state and regional authorities. But as political and economic conditions worsened for blacks at the end of the nineteenth century in the North and South, the ideological seed of racial nationalism found an effective host in Marcus Garvey.

Garvey, born in Jamaica, was an activist for workers' rights and racial justice in his native land and later in London. He formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 in Jamaica to promote black self-help programs in the West Indies, Africa, and in the United States, to which he moved in 1916.

Garvey found a receptive audience for his race pride and self-help message. The virulent racism of the first decades of the twentieth century heightened the racial consciousness of the urban black masses. Many Southern blacks had migrated to the industrial North seeking economic gains, yet found themselves relegated to low-paying and irregular employment. Black soldiers returned from World War I and the European theater only to again confront racial hostility. The contrast between the degree of liberty black soldiers enjoyed in Europe and the social climate they were expected to weather in the United States was dramatic. The agendas of mainstream black organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reflected priorities of the nascent black middle class, rather than the concerns of laboring black masses. The UNIA spoke to these needs. It became the largest black mass organization in American history.

Garvey confronted the "race"/"nation" conundrum in an interesting way. He urged that blacks every where consider themselves part of a black nation and take aggressive steps to build institutions and enterprises to enhance the well-being of blacks. This formulation dodged the question of a sovereign territory, yet encouraged a "race-first" or Pan-Africanist development. Garvey's foray into territorial separatism led to his downfall. A project to organize a steamship line to build trade with Africa and relocate blacks in Africa ran into management difficulties. Garvey's foes—black and white—pressed to remove him from the political equation in America. He was convicted for mail fraud and served three years in federal prison before receiving a pardon from President Calvin Coolidge and agreeing to leave the country. When the charismatic Garvey was deported, the UNIA declined in both membership and impact

The next forceful expression of racial nationalism came from the Nation of Islam (NOI) under Elijah Muhammad. The NOI (whose members are often referred to as Black Muslims) blended key elements of the Garvey self-help program and demanded land in the South on which to found a black nation. They considered the requested land as reparation for the economic and social subjugation of blacks during slavery. Unlike Garvey, Muhammad's nationalism was religiously grounded in Islam and contained a robust strain of antiwhite ideology that appealed to poor urban blacks. Buoyed by the potential of racial self-sufficiency, the NOI created farms, fisheries, and other businesses designed to break links of dependency with "the white devils." Elijah Muhammad's protégé Malcolm X emerged in 1962 as a militant and charismatic voice for NOI-style nationalism.

In the mid-1960s, the optimism of the Southern civil rights movement collapsed in the face of white indifference. Youthful black-consciousness advocates steered many blacks and intellectuals away from the integrationist ideals of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights campaigns. The term "black nationalism" quickly made its way into the American lexicon, but unlike the earlier land-based nationalism, the term spread into literature, music, and the arts. Paralleling the pan-racial vision of Garvey, cultural nationalists like Amiri Baraka spoke about the "oneness" of African people wherever they were. Arguments about the existence of a black aesthetic leavened the social and cultural thought of the period.

At the start of the twenty-first century, black nationalists had all but abandoned hope for a sovereign state. Yet blacks from across the political spectrum endorse the idea of group self-help even as they debate the government's obligation to ameliorate black disadvantage. Continuing patterns of racial inequality and oppression guarantee that a significant number of black people will remain estranged from white society. The national dialogue has now shifted away from polarizing approaches to "blackness" and its meaning, but racial pride and consciousness have veered toward nationalism in times of sharp social conflict. The future of black nationalism is uncertain.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Evanzz, Karl. The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad. New York: Pantheon, 1999.

Franklin, Vincent P. Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of the Faith of the Fathers. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1984.

Fredrickson, George M. Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

McCartney, John. Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African-American Political Thought. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992

Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, ed. Classical Black Nationalism: The American Revolution to Marcus Garvey. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Vincent, Theodore G. Black Power and the Garvey Movement. Rev. ed. Berkeley, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1972.

William M.Banks

See alsoAfrica, Relations with ; Black Panthers ; Black Power ; Emigration ; Pan-Africanism ; andvol. 9:Black Power Speech .