Between Race and Nation: Marcus Garvey and the Politics of Self-Determination

The Making of a Nationalist: Garvey’s Early Influences

Like many of his followers, Marcus Garvey was an unwelcome and despised migrant. His experience with global white supremacy in nearly a dozen countries shaped what Alain Locke called his “new internationalism.” ²³ Garvey’s early life is therefore worth recounting. Garvey was born in 1887 in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, to a stonemason and a domestic worker. Of his parents’ eleven children, only Marcus (the youngest) and one sister survived childhood. At fourteen, he was apprenticed to a local printer; a few years later, he moved to Kingston, where he soon became immersed in union and nationalist politics. In 1910, the island’s worsening economy forced him to seek work in Latin America. He took a job as a timekeeper on a United Fruit Company banana plantation in Puerto Limón, Costa Rica, where he directly witnessed US corporate colonialism. The company, which was the dominant economic power in the region, had implemented Jim Crow social and labor relations. Garvey responded by founding a bilingual newspaper, La Nación/The Nation, to expose the exploitative conditions, encourage organizing, and criticize Great Britain for refusing to protect its subjects. After Costa Rican authorities arrested him, he moved first to Honduras, then Ecuador and Guatemala, before settling in Colón, Panama, where he saw similar conditions and responded in the same way through another newspaper, La Prensa/The Press.

It was clear that the fate of black West Indian workers was directly linked to US race relations. ²⁴ In Guatemala, for example, Garvey saw white managers racially insult and cut the wages of West Indian laborers for displaying pictures of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, in their cabins. ²⁵ When the laborers protested, white mobs murdered several of them. Ultimately, “sick at heart,” Garvey returned to Jamaica in 1912. ²⁶

Finding little reprieve from poverty, Garvey soon moved to England. There, he worked on the docks in Cardiff, Liverpool, and London alongside fellow colonial subjects. But he struck political gold when he took a job at the African Times and Orient Review. This London-based and fiercely nationalist journal promoted Egyptian self-rule and Ethiopianism, a philosophy that combines African ethics and self-determination. ²⁷ The journal afforded Garvey access to works by anticolonial writers from around the world, including J. E. Casely Hayford, Edward Blyden, and William H. Ferris, as well as those by socialists such as Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. ²⁸ In October 1913, the paper published his first article, which was a devastating critique of British colonialism. ²⁹ Garvey continued his contributions at intervals for several years before the British government banned the paper’s circulation in its colonies. In addition to his work in the anticolonial public sphere, Garvey briefly studied law at Birkbeck College and spent nearly a year voraciously reading in the subjects of history, political science, and sociology at the British Museum.

Aware that black people around the world faced a common form of oppression, Garvey returned to Jamaica, where he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). Two years later, in the United States, he created Negro World, a weekly multilingual newspaper that, at one time, had a global circulation of nearly 200,000 copies. ³⁰ Finally, he originated the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation (BSL), a joint stock transport company administered by shareholders. Before looking at the normative aim of his institutionalism (to establish the black diaspora as a single political community—a nation) it is worth noting two movements that profoundly informed Garvey’s political theory—Irish nationalism and political Zionism.

Speaking in New York in February 1920, Garvey recalled that “other races were engaged in seeing their cause through—the Jews through their Zionist movement and the Irish through their Irish movement—and I decided that, cost what it might, I would make this a favorable time to see the Negro’s interest through.” ³¹ In New York, Garvey suggested that present attempts to combat global white supremacy were failing because they were either disorganized or focused only on domestic concerns. ³² When he noted that Irish and Jewish nationalists were “engaged in seeing their cause through,” he underlined the weight they gave to civic organizations, newspapers, and the corporate form, specifically maritime corporations. In addition to solving informational, coordination, and collective action problems created by vast territorial, cultural, and linguistic divisions, these institutions together constituted a hybrid and complex political community.

Shared Irish and West Indian sympathies grew out of a common transatlantic history, language, and desire for self-rule. Robert Hill observes that the Sinn Féin Irish nationalist movement “provided the major ideological mainspring for Garvey’s radical political transformation.” ³³ Before migrating to Latin America, the young anticolonial activist served as secretary for the National Club of Jamaica, the island’s first organization for independence. ³⁴ In speeches and editorials, Garvey lionized Irish republicans such as Terence MacSwiney, Arthur Griffith, and Éamon de Valera. ³⁵ He swore that they provided an “illustration of the course those who desire liberty must follow” and cautioned that what the English had “done to the Irish they will do to the Negro.” ³⁶ Garvey recognized that the Irish cause was different from the struggle of the black diaspora. Though racialized within the empire, Irish men and women still occupied more privileged positions vis-à-vis their black counterparts. ³⁷ In August 1920, Garvey added that the Irish struggle was “only a matter of national limits” and was therefore different from the black freedom struggle. ³⁸ The Irish were already settled in a viable territory and therefore fighting to overthrow colonial occupation of their homeland. In addition to praising Sinn Féin’s militant efforts to reclaim a sovereign grip over its people, Garvey admired its call for an association that would promote Gaelic culture and national pride, a marine charter company that would use trade to strengthen allegiance to the cause, and a diplomatic corps that would advocate for Irish-born men and women residing outside Ireland.

But another cause proved the more apt model. In London, Garvey studied the work of Edward W. Blyden. Blyden’s admiration for Zionism influenced Garvey’s political thought. The outspoken classicist, born and raised in the Jewish quarter of the island of St. Thomas (then part of the Danish West Indies), argued that the black diaspora should emulate Zionism. At the time, the Danish government recognized its population by religion and legally compelled Jewish citizens and immigrants in the metropole and in its colonies to join local synagogues, which were required to create articles of association and constitutions outlining their principles. ³⁹ This policy unwittingly transformed a religious institution into a nursery for self-government. Blyden later recalled that he had “looked forward as eagerly” to synagogue as his Jewish neighbors and friends had. ⁴⁰ He even took a spiritual pilgrimage to the “original home of the Jews,” which he recounted in his early work From West Africa to Palestine (1873). ⁴¹ As a professor and statesman in Liberia, Blyden published The Jewish Question in 1898, two years after Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State appeared. In it, he celebrated the “marvelous movement called Zionism.” ⁴² He predicted that it would have an enormous effect on the history of all diaspora, admitting that Herzl’s words had renewed his faith in the hope for a historical homeland. Herzl would therefore speak directly to those of the African diaspora who sought to “return to the land of their fathers.” ⁴³ For Blyden, Herzl was a messianic hero, a key link in the chain of spiritual progress.

For Garvey, Herzl was a pragmatic leader who rooted a struggle for sovereignty in a transnational association and a multinational land corporation. Political Zionism did not simply diagnose the problem of anti-Semitism but also offered a solution in the form of national self-determination. ⁴⁴ In 1937, Garvey promised his followers that “the call” would soon come for them to return to their historical homeland, just as Jewish people were “now returning to Palestine.” ⁴⁵ But he tempered the passion for self-rule with the patience of self-organizing. Herein lay the true parallel between his politics and political Zionism. When Garvey told an audience in Panama in May 1921 that the “Jews fought for a restored Palestine and they have succeeded in getting it,” he was underscoring the difficult work it takes to penetrate the consciousness of people living under persecution and the slow process of getting them to see themselves as a single people with a common end—a state of their own. ⁴⁶ Herzl insisted that a Jewish association was necessary for fostering transnational political identity and a Jewish company for steering individual interests toward collective goals. ⁴⁷ While he did not invoke Sinn Féin, Herzl did confide to his diary, “I shall be the Parnell of the Jews.” ⁴⁸

The Jewish and Irish struggles clearly informed Marcus Garvey’s conviction that the UNIA and the BSL were indispensable for combating white supremacy and realizing the self-determination of Afro-diasporic people, an aim which held out the promise of political independence and social rebirth. ⁴⁹ “We want to work out a plan like the Zionist so as to recover ourselves,” he wrote in December 1937. ⁵⁰

Those with the greatest stakes in maintaining colonial and racial domination viewed Garvey as a serious threat to their respective social orders. This fear was deepened when thousands of colonial subjects and American citizens publicly rejected the legitimacy of the British Empire and the United States and instead swore allegiance to the UNIA. Advances by anticolonial forces in Ireland and India made this seeming danger to British colonies in the Caribbean intolerable. So British authorities deemed Garvey a security risk and ordered that the directorate of military intelligence investigate him. In 1919, the agency warned the US Bureau of Investigation, predecessor to the FBI, that Garvey was promoting a “radical” program in the United States that “naturally sympathizes with and has relations with the Irish, the Jews and [the] Hindus.” ⁵¹ J. Edgar Hoover, who became the bureau’s head that year, immediately placed Garvey under surveillance. ⁵² A 1920 bureau report cautioned that Garvey was, in fact, encouraging African Americans to emulate the Irish and Indian struggles. ⁵³ Alarmed, Hoover placed white prostitutes outside of Garvey’s apartment to try to entrap him in a violation of the Mann Act, which forbade the transporting of women across state lines for immoral purposes. The gambit failed. ⁵⁴ Finally, he decided to work with the US Postal Service to concoct a federal case against Garvey so he could deport him. In 1922, Garvey was charged with mail fraud, sentenced to five years in prison, and, after his release, deported to Jamaica. ⁵⁵

Lest we forget, thousands of activist immigrants, including Garvey and Emma Goldman, were deemed radical, anarchist, or communist and arrested, imprisoned, and deported from the United States. As immigrants, they were uniquely vulnerable during the first Red Scare in 1919. Disturbingly, Garvey’s African American critics fueled the fire rather than trying to calm growing fear of him as a national security threat. They insisted, in print and in private, that he was aligned with Russian revolutionists and the Irish Resistance. Though partisans of American socialism, Messenger publishers Chandler Owens and A. Philip Randolph told an interviewer that Garvey went too far, that he took his cues from “Bolshevists and the Sinn Feiners.” ⁵⁶ The same year, in a stroke of irony, W. E. B. Du Bois echoed Owens and Randolph, warning that the UNIA actively supported “Bolshevism and Sinn Féin.” ⁵⁷ He was half right. Cyril Briggs of the African Blood Brotherhood went the furthest, informing a US special agent that Garvey was training a secret “military organization somewhere in Harlem” for the explicit purposes of violent resistance. ⁵⁸ “They tried to make me a Socialist and a Bolshevist,” Garvey later lamented, “and when they found out that I was neither they said I was a crook . . . and they sent me to prison as a favour (they said) to the coloured people; and after they kept me in prison for two years and ten months . . . they deported me from America.” ⁵⁹ Whatever you think of Marcus Garvey, no one deserves what he endured at the hands of those distant and close.

Constituting a Nation

Garvey argued that the black diaspora comprised a single nation and therefore had a right to self-determination. His proposition gains theoretical traction when we look at the meaning of nationhood and the forms nationalism took in the long nineteenth century. Nation referred to a community of people who possess a set of objective features: a common culture, history, language, and territory. Having these characteristics qualifies a group as a distinct people and therefore a candidate for the right to self-rule. State, meanwhile, denoted a body of political institutions that realized a nation’s right to autonomy. This distinction shaped the two principal forms nationalist movements took. ⁶⁰ From 1830 to 1880, nationalism was primarily statist, meaning that it rested on a “threshold” principle that said only groups with a viable territorial state, strong culture, and economic power or groups that could demonstrate a recent historic association with such conditions were nations. ⁶¹ After 1880, nationalist movements rejected the statist view and its threshold principle by arguing that any ethnocultural people considering themselves a nation was just that. ⁶² Although statist nationalism prioritized civic identity and political ideals while ethnocultural nationalism stressed ethnic identity and cultural values, both assumed a stable conception of nationhood. Statist nationalists viewed the state as chronologically and ontologically preceding the nation, setting the boundaries of the people, and fostering national identity as a means of realizing political ends such as democracy, welfare, and justice; ethnocultural nationalists viewed the nation as chronologically and ontologically prior to the state, which the people use merely as a means for preserving its culture. ⁶³ The point, however, is that both frameworks leave little room for diaspora nationalism.

A diaspora, by definition, lacks a state and consequently the primary means for maintaining continuity in history, language, and culture, those objective features that qualify it as a nation and therefore a candidate for self-government. Noting the difficulty of demonstrating those preconditions for self-rule, Ernest Gellner argues that Jewish, Greek, and Armenian peoples whose struggles emphasized cultural renewal through territorial sovereignty should nonetheless be considered diaspora nations. From these historical examples, he argues for the following constituent features of a diaspora nation: the group must be economically privileged, culturally distinguishable, politically powerless, and dispersed. ⁶⁴ Because nationalist struggles often stress cultural preservation as a motive for political autonomy, philosophers tend to define self-determination as a principle that applies only to groups whose members share a pervasive culture and whose identities are shaped by their culture. ⁶⁵

While Gellner intends to expand the cultural view of nationhood to include diaspora groups, elevating those historical contingencies to the level of normative criteria excludes the black diaspora from nationhood. The black diaspora in Garvey’s day was dispersed and politically oppressed but also lacked wealth and common culture and, given that, would not be considered a nation. But there are no good reasons for making capital or culture moral preconditions of self-government. Moreover, such an understanding silently appeals to a group’s past persecution to deny its present claim for self-determination. If the black diaspora was economically destitute and culturally deracinated, it was due to slavery, Jim Crow, and colonization. One would think such injustices should have supported, not undermined, black people’s case for political autonomy. Be that as it may, Garvey had to concede that black people did not share the objective features of a nation.

Garvey argued, contrary to the cultural view, that what matters is whether a group expresses an aspiration for self-rule, not whether its members retain a pervasive culture or other characteristics generally preserved by a state. More importantly, Garvey contended that the right to self-determination arises out of a people’s collective aspiration for a common life together. Indeed, Garvey maintained that a subjective view of nationhood underlay the anticolonial struggles of the day, those the African diaspora should emulate. In a 1922 article titled “Africa for Africans,” Garvey argued that “Egypt and Ireland have already secured their freedom . . . and it is most likely that before the close of the year India will have gained a larger modicum of self-government,” and he pleaded with readers to not “allow the cause of Africa to lag behind.” ⁶⁶ In a lecture on the same subject, Garvey detailed the wave of anticolonial movements demanding self-rule before rhetorically asking his London audience why it should then be considered “unreasonable” when black people demand the same rights. ⁶⁷

But, even so, getting black people to think like members of a diaspora entailed intractable challenges. On July 13, 1921, Garvey told a New Orleans audience that racial oppression, and above all lynching, provoked a sense of unity among African Americans, but viewing their domination as stemming exclusively from unequal status within the United States also narrowed their conception of political freedom to domestic inclusion. ⁶⁸ West Indians and Africans, on the other hand, perceived their domination in global terms but were internally divided according to class. Garvey explained that the colonial policy of indirect rule, which rested on a stratified system that internally divided the native race in each colony according to class and color, meant that many of the agents of colonial exploitation were privileged Africans and West Indians. ⁶⁹ The result was a lack of trust and solidarity. On July 23, Garvey told a large gathering at the UNIA headquarters in New York City that what was needed was “a universal program that seeks to liberate Negroes everywhere.” ⁷⁰ Effectively combating white supremacy required black people everywhere to conceive of themselves as members of a diaspora facing a common form of oppression that demanded a transnational political response—in other words, to understand that black men and women, regardless of class, complexion, and nationality, were lynched on the banana plantations of Panama for the same reasons they were lynched on the cotton farms of Georgia.

Although appealing to common oppression is one of nationalism’s most well-worn paths, Garvey considered such pleas insufficient for motivating a global political response to white supremacy. Herzl, for one, reminded his audience that “[the Jews] are one people—our enemies have made us one whether we will or not. . . . Affliction binds us together, and thus united, we suddenly discover our strength. Yes, we are strong enough to form a State, and, indeed, a model State.” ⁷¹ Garvey, too, invoked the common suffering of black people to inspire a sense of mutual obligation. ⁷² He nevertheless concluded that the pain and humiliation of Jim Crow and colonization would not produce a collective identity much less sustain a cooperative politics. ⁷³ Likewise, Isaiah Berlin observed that nationalism always appeals to a collective wound but such pleas are never “a sufficient cause of national self-assertion.” ⁷⁴ He argued that “something more is needed—namely, a new vision of life with which the wounded society can identify themselves, around which they can gather and attempt to restore their collective life.” ⁷⁵ That being the case, Garvey held out the promise of self-determination and sovereignty as ideals, and he founded the UNIA as a transnational institution in which black people could assemble and attempt to restore their collective life through a project to attain both.

Fundamentally, Garvey looked to institutions, not injuries. Seeing his nationalism as evangelist in spirit and in substance, Moses portrays the UNIA as a mere propaganda machine. ⁷⁶ And revisionists argue that he promoted a “cultural and symbolic” politics best understood apart from the organizations he founded. ⁷⁷ Carnegie, for his part, excludes Garvey’s institutionalism from consideration by arguing that an institution is always “preceded by the emergence of a shared consciousness out of which some consensus can be forged.” ⁷⁸ The idea is that preferences and identities are lexically prior to institutions. It follows then that Garvey’s words inculcated interests and affinities, which the UNIA later coordinated and realized. ⁷⁹ In the end, scholars have eschewed the meaningful institutional analysis needed to grasp the normative core of Garvey’s politics.

Garvey held a constructivist conception of political subjectivity, one that is most clearly seen in his institutionalism—specifically, his constitutional politics. For example, Garvey envisioned the UNIA as an ideational and discursive context for cultivating deeper awareness of the global nature of white supremacy, instilling a strong sense of transnational identity, and producing habits responsive to a global politics. An editorial in the April 3, 1920, issue of The Emancipator explained the organization’s raison d’être in explicitly constructivist terms when it said the organization’s goals were:

The first and third aims illuminate what is most original in Garvey’s political theory. The remainder of this section looks at the first—that is, how the UNIA constructed diaspora identity and expressed a shared yearning for self-government through a dialectical interplay between the organization’s constitutional politics and its members’ subjectivities. The next section examines the third resolution, the association’s efforts to realize self-determination through statehood.

A constructivist view of nationhood is not as unusual as it seems. In 1882, using language similar to Garvey’s, French philologist Ernest Renan defined a nation as “a great solidarity constituted by . . . consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.” ⁸¹ Today, political theorist Anna Stilz argues that we should not base the right to self-determination on “pre-political characteristics” such as language or culture. Only when individuals engage in institutionalized political cooperation, and come to identify with and value that cooperation, do they become a people. ⁸² From this constructivist view, Stilz derives a political conception of self-determination. ⁸³ But the principle applies only to those groups that arise out of and are maintained through politically cooperative relationships that protect the basic rights and promote welfare of their members, and whose members value and publicly affirm those relationships. ⁸⁴ Rights assurance and consensual politics ensure that collective self-determination does not encroach on individual freedom. Garvey held a similar view, one equally attentive to the rights of the individual. A July 26, 1919, Negro World editorial argued that pursuing collective self-rule does not neglect the interests of individuals. ⁸⁵ What makes Garvey’s project so profoundly interesting is the fact that the UNIA sought to realize transnational nationhood in the face of global oppression.

The UNIA created and sustained political cooperation through a constitutional system intended to do what modern governments do—namely, realize self-government, security, and the rule of law. Garvey considered a constitution the “fundamental principles” of a political system, even a transnational one. ⁸⁶ The UNIA Constitution asserted jurisdiction over “all communities where the people of Negro blood and African descent are to be found.” ⁸⁷ It outlined the aims of the transnational relationship: preserving political autonomy, promoting social equality and welfare, and supporting commercial intercourse “for the good of the people.” ⁸⁸ It identified and authorized offices for exercising political power, all the way down to a civil service and a passport bureau; specified duties and responsibilities of officeholders; and outlined procedures for choosing and removing officials. ⁸⁹ Importantly, the constitution also reserved to the UNIA the right to levy taxes in the form of membership dues and enact policies by a two-thirds majority vote through constitutional conventions in which “kindred” societies were to be represented. ⁹⁰ The critical point, however, is that it constituted a politically cooperative relationship across borders for protecting black people’s basic rights and promoting their welfare. The organization was, of course, limited in its capacity to provide for administrative and governmental needs, including the allocation and assurance of rights and responsibilities. Still, it was an important step toward enabling supporters to acquire the attributes of nationality, including a sense of being one people.

The UNIA attained its authority and solidified the allegiance of thousands (if not millions) of black people around the world because it actively tried to deliver social welfare to the less fortunate through practices of self-government. Its constitution specified that each member must support the basic needs and safeguard the essential interests of other black people through self-taxation in the form of dues and redistribution of those funds to the worse off. Article I added that members should promote universal confraternity and dignity; provide welfare for the poor and aid to independent black communities; maintain transnational forms of political representation through voting; assure protection for all members of the race, “irrespective of nationality,” through locally and democratically elected officials and agents; fund educational efforts and encourage a public culture that affirmed the dignity of the group; support national and supranational black corporations that advanced the commercial and industrial interests of the people; and, in short, improve the social, economic, and political condition of the race. ⁹¹ The UNIA pursued distributive justice, including redistributive justice across borders, at a time when Afro-diasporic people lived in territorial states that denied them rudimentary rights.

The UNIA relied, in part, on constitutional conventions to reconstitute its members as a single people. It fashioned a national identity and nurtured a desire for self-determination. The association held eight conventions between 1920 and 1938, each a month long. ⁹² For Garvey, like A. V. Dicey, constitutional conventions instilled a public morality that transformed fundamental or higher law into everyday social practice. ⁹³ Opening the first convention, Garvey reminded the twenty-five thousand people in attendance, including two thousand delegates from twenty-five countries and four continents, that they were there “for the purpose of discussing the great problems that confront the Negro; they [were there] for the purpose of framing a bill of rights for the [N]egro peoples of the world.” ⁹⁴ The goal of the “international convention,” he explained, was to “discuss the ways and means” for combating white supremacy, both globally and locally, and to do so democratically. ⁹⁵ Delegates selected subjects for debate, recounted injustices their constituencies faced, outlined rights and freedoms that would remedy those conditions, amended the constitutional text as needed, established voting rules, and elected international representatives. The convention was a transnational social practice that transformed the ideal of popular sovereignty into everyday understandings, habits, and conduct; participants advocated for, as well as embodied, the value of self-determination.

The UNIA’s constitutional politics shifted authority and legitimacy away from white political structures, thereby making visible and salient a national black identity constructed through a political movement for self-determination. The convention, Garvey explained, voiced the black diaspora’s aspiration for “complete control” over its political and social institutions “without interference” from others. ⁹⁶ Each convention drafted a declaration outlining injustices black people faced as a people and enumerated a set of rights. The 1920 declaration listed twelve injustices in the political, social, and economic spheres. ⁹⁷ Next, it affirmed fifty-four rights, which, taken together, outlined demands for human rights, ⁹⁸ social equality and economic opportunity, ⁹⁹ and self-determination and sovereignty. ¹⁰⁰ Since Garvey and his followers imagined a transnational black polity, the declaration also demanded freedom of trade and movement. ¹⁰¹ For those who could not attend conventions, local UNIA chapters afforded similarly transformative and expressive opportunities. Through demonstrations of fidelity—such as parades, rituals, and everyday acts of unity—hundreds of thousands of black people publicly affirmed their commitment to self-determination and democratic politics.

Garvey credited the organization’s mass appeal to a vision “profound in its depths, immense in its extent, and dazzling in the heights of its ambition.” ¹⁰² Under the material and spiritual weight of white supremacy, members repurposed ceremonies intended to dominate and humiliate them into rituals of self-assertion and rites of renewal. If colonizers could find “virtue in being spectacular,” Garvey wrote in the summer of 1922, then black people should “try out” those virtues. ¹⁰³ When he donned a viceroy’s uniform, he transfigured an emblem of imperium into a symbol of black power. The act derived its force from the fact that colonized subjects were regularly forbidden from wearing uniforms and carrying swords without permission from colonial officials. ¹⁰⁴ Keenly aware that authority lies in ritual as well as in force, Garvey created a national anthem and a flag for the UNIA. Indeed—and this is the critical point—in using these symbols and spectacles to represent and constitute black stateliness, UNIA members reversed the hierarchy of authority and legitimacy. When they wore uniforms, conducted military drills, participated in processions, sang the UNIA national anthem, and waved its flag, they were subverting the authority and legitimacy of the states that claimed dominion over them and simultaneously affirming the authority and legitimacy of the UNIA as an independent political community, the one that held their allegiance. However, despite the democratic structure of the UNIA, these rituals did little to dispel the view of Garvey as a fascist. ¹⁰⁵

Garvey’s grassroots and democratic response to white supremacy departed from two predominant forms of African American politics in his time. Booker T. Washington authored (and most black southerners practiced) the first. His strategic accommodation (which publicly espoused self-help, moral uplift, and hard work while turning inward to black institutions and building up the social, civic, and economic capacity needed to cope with and combat white supremacy) is best understood as a protracted struggle for citizenship waged by vulnerable combatants. ¹⁰⁶ This realist outlook recognized that black institutions would not be entirely free from the whims of whites. The survival of a black university or business in rural Alabama required its associates to allay southern whites’ fears of black people’s advancement and to solicit philanthropy from northern whites to aid such progress. For Garvey, Washington exemplified an institutional politics from below. But as a constructivist who drew a parallel between an institution’s structure and the subjectivities of its members, Garvey believed that a form of institutional life that encouraged black people to strategically acquiesce to their denigration would produce either go-betweens or ruthless pragmatists. Moreover, Garvey considered white supremacy an international problem requiring a global solution. “We are not engaged in domestic politics, in church building or in social uplift work,” Garvey explained, “but we are engaged in nation building.” ¹⁰⁷ African Americans were drawn to Garvey’s consistent radicalism and global vision.

Du Bois and the NAACP are commonly identified with the second form of African American politics—a coalition politics predicated on black and white social reformers agitating through propaganda, lobbying, and litigation for civil rights. Garvey outlined three arguments against this form of coalition politics. The first two focused on how its structure undermines the value of self-determination, even if its ends are unobjectionable. First, he argued that white philanthropy undercuts black leaders’ autonomy. In a January 1921 editorial, he explained that liberal white donors elevate only those leaders they believe safe, and they withdraw financial and institutional support if those black leaders depart from that assumption. ¹⁰⁸ They attain with checks what southern racists achieve with terror—the suppression of a radical black politics from below. ¹⁰⁹ There is some truth behind Garvey’s vitriol. ¹¹⁰ Second, Garvey argued that the NAACP promoted an elitist politics antithetical to self-rule, that it consulted “drawing room aristocrats” who did not have the popular support of the masses. ¹¹¹ The claim was that Du Bois relied on the wisdom of the “Talented Tenth,” whereas he looked to the people, the “[H]oi Polloi.” ¹¹² Third, he charged that the association wrongly assumed that black transnationalism is incompatible with the struggle for civil rights. On the contrary, Garvey believed that a sovereign black state could aid the struggle for civil rights for black people in majority white countries and, in the interim, offer diplomatic protection through transnational citizenship.

The grassroots and participatory politics that Garvey promoted attracted broad support among African Americans. By 1933, there were over nine hundred UNIA divisions worldwide ¹¹³ with forty-one chapters in Ohio and sixty-two in Pennsylvania. ¹¹⁴ A single division in Cleveland, Ohio, had five thousand members. ¹¹⁵ Many of Garvey’s followers had defected from the NAACP. John Henry Ryan, an African American member of the State Legislature of Washington, wrote to Du Bois in 1923 explaining that there was “a bitter internal strife” in the black community in Tacoma and the NAACP had lost favor with many. ¹¹⁶ Garvey had an even larger following in the American South: fifty-six chapters in Mississippi, sixty-one in North Carolina, and seventy-five in Louisiana. A meeting in the region would draw hundreds of people from surrounding areas. Fifteen hundred attended a gathering in Marigold, Mississippi, for instance, and ten thousand followers came to one in Pelham, Georgia. ¹¹⁷ It is difficult to accurately count membership because some of those who regularly attended meetings were too poor to pay dues, and others—the most vulnerable—had to practice their political faith in secret to avoid racist reprisals by employers, landlords, or mobs. ¹¹⁸ While people joined the UNIA for many reasons, over time most came to embrace the organization’s transnationalist vision—one that did not force them to choose between a better life at home and the quest for a sovereign black state.

By contrast, some scholars argue that a diaspora cannot be a suitable aspirant for self-determination because its members, by definition, lack a common territory for sustaining the sort of cooperative political project that would qualify them as a nation. ¹¹⁹ In assuming that only successful and territorially bounded groups can be self-determining, this view sidesteps how dispersed political communities like the UNIA could come into being through a form of transnational institutionalism. As a practical matter, the UNIA could not execute laws for societies throughout its “jurisdiction” if those societies were based in an established territorial state. Still, it and similar institutions remain rich, untapped historical sites for philosophical reflection. When mined, they reveal a moral framework based on minimal justice and subjective legitimacy. This is clearly seen in the UNIA’s constitution: a politically cooperative relationship that partially realized the protection of basic rights and the promotion of social welfare. It is therefore reasonable to interpret the relationship as having constituted a people in a partial sense of the term or a protonation that expressed an active desire for political autonomy and, in doing so, established the group as a plausible candidate for self-determination. But even if we grant this premise, the right to self-determination does not, by itself, create a right to an independent state.

Universal Oppression and National Self-Determination

Sovereignty is a remedial right that comes into effect only when two further conditions are met—the legitimacy of the regime under which the group lives fails systematically and there are no viable sub-statist forms of realizing independence available, including internal forms of autonomy such as federalism. ¹²⁰ If we grant that Afro-diasporic people of the early twentieth century comprised a nation living under colonization or Jim Crow and that no viable sub-statist forms of autonomy were available, then Garvey stood on solid ground when he argued that they had a right to an independent state in order to realize self-rule.

As we have seen, Garvey framed his movement around the principle of national self-determination. “When an American President began to talk about making the world safe for democracy and about the self-determination of peoples and nations, he gave voice and expression to the pent-up thoughts and feelings of men, and oppressed classes, races and nations,” Garvey wrote in 1920. ¹²¹ Later, he censured Woodrow Wilson’s partial application of the principle. In 1921, Garvey initiated a public campaign to get the United States Congress to reject the League of Nations Constitution as then drafted. Garvey explained that,

[in] the nineteenth clause of this very constitution is embodied the character of pillage, robbery, wholesale exploitation, with the concurrent evil of human slaughter on the continent of Africa. I hereby beg to quote that section of the constitution, which reads as follows: “To those colonies and territories . . . which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization. . . . The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be intrusted to advanced nations . . . [and] especially those of Central Africa are at such a stage that the mandatory must be responsible for the administration of the territory.” ¹²²

The draft constitution, specifically clause nineteen, outlined a legal and a moral basis for denying some colonized people the right to autonomy. Garvey underscored its implications. First, the constitution aimed to safeguard the rapacious imperialism of the day by allowing European powers to continue to raid, exploit, and butcher African people. Second, it offered racist and paternalist justification for colonial rule by asserting that black and other people of color were inherently incapable of being free in a modern world and should therefore remain in the “sacred trust” of white authority. The constitution sought to enshrine white supremacy into international law in the name of extending freedom.

Interestingly, and despite his constructivist outlook, Garvey, like many nationalists and progressives, found Darwinian evolutionary theory a persuasive explanation for the resilience of racial conflict. The simplicity of the theory enthralled conservatives and liberals alike. ¹²³ Political Zionists were hardly immune to its appeal. Leo Pinsker, for example, argued that political struggles result from a “natural antagonism” between races and nations. ¹²⁴ Theodor Herzl insisted that such conflicts were “essential to man’s highest efforts.” ¹²⁵ Jacob Klatzkin, who concluded that a natural struggle for power made assimilation impossible, also feared that his conclusion found “support in the theory of race.” ¹²⁶ Garvey’s was the vernacular form of the theory embraced by porters and politicians. “You must remember that we are living in an age of keen competition. Nation rivaling nation, race rivaling race, individual rivaling individual in the great battle of the survival of the fittest,” he wrote in September 1921. ¹²⁷ For him, social Darwinism boiled down to a single insight—that politics was “material [and] soulless.” ¹²⁸

Garvey’s Darwinism can be read as a relational view that explains the intractable nature of ethnic conflict and racial oppression and the unlikeliness of their being halted by internal solutions in multiethnic states. Group solidarity in pursuit of individual and collective interests, not essential racial affinities, motivates and maintains such conflict. “Not only has humanity divided itself along racial lines; but it has become more suspicious,” Garvey explained in 1920. ¹²⁹ Cooperation among coethnics simultaneously decreases distrust and hostility between individuals and increases suspicion and enmity between groups. For Garvey, it was instinctive for people to cooperate with those who shared their ethnic identity because the average person advances his true interest only by making “co-operative interest” with others and would likely do so with someone “who looks like him in every detail.” ¹³⁰ Whites, he argued, strategically pooled their power and resources “to safeguard and protect” their interests and to harm and undermine the interests of real or perceived rivals. ¹³¹ From different premises, Max Weber drew similar conclusions: “Usually one group of competitors takes some externally identifiable characteristic of another group of (actual or potential) competitors—race, language, religion, local or social origin, descent, residence, etc.—as a pretext for attempting their exclusion,” he argued. The “purpose is always the closure of social and economic opportunities to outsiders,” Weber explained. ¹³² In the same way, Garvey viewed the struggle for esteem, power, and wealth as the root cause of group hostility and racial ideology.

Economic competition explained a good deal of anti-black violence, argued Garvey. “Every unemployed white man looks upon the Negro as a dangerous competitor for possible employment,” he explained, “and in that case he loses all reason and respect for law, and will go to any extent, even to that of scaring and lynching the Negro so as to keep him away from the possibility of getting the job he wants.” ¹³³ The genocide of Native Americans was an ominous warning to groups who dared compete with white Americans within the continental United States. ¹³⁴ In 1922, Garvey wrote that the “stage [was] set” for another such “holocaust.” ¹³⁵ If black people’s interests “clash with those of the ruling faction,” Garvey observed, then they would “have absolutely no rights” the former would recognize and enforce. ¹³⁶ Given that the use of force often requires some rationalization, the state and social institutions are likely to transform their “whims and caprice” into authority and legitimacy. ¹³⁷ Under those circumstances, members of the majority group would become “citizens of first claim.” ¹³⁸ Weber drew the same conclusion when he said that social closure inevitably results in a “legally privileged group.” ¹³⁹ For Garvey, that meant black people being persecuted so long as they lived in states where white majorities or colonial authorities exercised sole control.

Although Garvey derived many of his conclusions about conflict from Darwinian social thought, the underlying ideas did not depend on its truth. He believed politics sprang from mistrust, that “universal suspicion” caused “nation to distrust nation, and race to distrust race.” ¹⁴⁰ This idea has roots centuries deep. Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and James Madison all agreed that human beings live in ceaseless competition and conflict with one another and that natural distrust leads to friction that sometimes erupts into war. Acceptance of Darwinism is not necessary to appreciate Garvey’s proposition that politics is a conflict over power, often waged for and through institutions. It is also unnecessary to accept his inference that such conflict will always take the form of ethnic clashes or that states are incapable of protecting minority rights when under the control of a rival majority. What we should accept, however, is that, contrary to the statist view, Garvey offered nonessentialist and secular reasons why he thought there were no plausible sub-statist solutions to white supremacy, a conclusion that made it necessary for a sovereign state to secure and improve the lives of the diaspora.

We are now in a position to see how Garvey’s view of universal antipathy as the taproot of racial oppression relates to his broader argument for national sovereignty. The lack of viable sub-statist solutions to perpetual oppression, he believed, gave the African diaspora a pro tanto claim to a state of their own. Garvey observed that, as American “citizens” or as colonial subjects, black people lived under systemic domination—political disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, and social marginalization. Gradually, many joined the ranks of the UNIA. There, they expressed an aspiration for self-determination, often through local practices of self-governance. ¹⁴¹ But to survive, this politically cooperative relationship required an independent state. ¹⁴² Since its members lived under persistent persecution, the group believed it should have the right to form one.

Scholars who elevate Garvey’s transnationalism and demote his nationalism omit the relationship between the two ideals. From his relational view of social closure and political oppression, Garvey concluded that so long as Afro-diasporic people are denied the right to a sovereign state, they would remain permanent wards of states ruled by whites and thus subjected to the violent whims of those in power. Under such conditions, integration provides temporary relief at best. “No Negro with all his success,” he warned, “is secure in any community where the Government is vested in an opposite race, when that opposite race is prejudiced to the Negro. There is no guarantee to the safety of any such Negro, because by mob violence and by lynch law, the outcome of race prejudice, one’s success can be overthrown overnight, and one transformed from a prosperous subject or citizen, to a refugee.” ¹⁴³ Garvey spoke from experience as a migrant. Wherever he wandered, he saw black people facing similar cruelties with few protections from the states in which they lived. That being the case, he argued that the “best thing” for Afro-diaspora people to do was “to unite and fortify” themselves through an independent state. ¹⁴⁴ For Garvey, transnational politics was vital to acquiring a sovereign state, the ends of which include securing the lives and advancing the interests of the black diaspora. “No race is free until it has a strong nation of its own—its own system of government and its own order of society,” he declared. ¹⁴⁵

The choice of where to realize the right to national self-determination requires independent normative justification. Founding a new state in Africa would have serious consequences for the inhabitants of the territory and existing institutions. Garvey countered that European colonies in Africa are based in oppression and terror. ¹⁴⁶ Insofar as “natives are compelled to surrender their lands to aliens and are treated in most instances like slaves,” colonial regimes are illegitimate. ¹⁴⁷ Moreover, Garvey argued, black people in the United States, West Indies, and South and Latin America retained their right to occupy and cogovern their historical homeland. “From Africa our parents were robbed three hundred years ago,” he explained. “Nevertheless, when they were robbed from Africa, they never gave over their rights of ownership in the land to any other race or any individual. By right of heritage therefore,” he concluded, “each and every Negro in the Western world has a moral and a legal claim to Africa.” ¹⁴⁸ Garvey was right to argue that European colonization is morally and legally indefensible.

Garvey thought that the right of Afro-diasporic people to national self-determination in their historical homeland did not, by itself, violate the territorial rights of native Africans. He argued from the fundamental value of political freedom that indigenous Africans have compelling normative and practical reasons to endorse and value a sovereign black state in Africa. For one, the state would be based on the UNIA’s constitution, which protects the basic rights and promotes the welfare of the entire black diaspora, including those residing within and outside its territory. Also, the constitution guarantees political equality, meaning native Africans would comprise the majority. Exercising their democratic strength in regular constitutional conventions would ensure that they, as a group, would largely determine the state’s basic structure. This form of rule is contrary to the “autocratic and despotic control” others have exercised over Africans for centuries, argued Garvey. ¹⁴⁹ A sovereign black state would territorially anchor “a common partnership,” a politically cooperative relationship, among black people around the world. ¹⁵⁰ Clearly, Garvey’s commitment to democratic self-rule sets his thought apart from settler colonial projects of the day.

Although Garvey viewed a sovereign black state as necessary to preserving a transnational black community, it would be an “Africa for the Africans at home and abroad.” ¹⁵¹ This position also runs counter to both transnationalist and nationalist readings; Garvey always assumed there would be an African diaspora. His was never a “back to Africa” program. “I am not saying that all the Negroes . . . should go to Africa,” wrote Garvey. ¹⁵² Garvey always placed moral and strategic emphasis on the fate of the diaspora. The “best thing for every one to do is to unite, and so fortify ourselves by building up a strong Government in Africa, that as citizens of that Government we can claim protection in any part of the world we happen to find ourselves.” ¹⁵³ Garvey therefore assumed the persistence of a diaspora—that many would, and even should, remain where they were because they had property interest or other compelling reasons for doing so. For this reason, he stressed the importance of a strong state, one capable of protecting those who chose to remain outside of a black territorial state.

Garvey envisioned national sovereignty as a complex form of nonterritorial citizenship capable of securing black lives around the world. This view closed the seeming distance between agitating for civil rights, on the one hand, and struggling for sovereignty on the other. Garvey believed they were mutually reinforcing ends. African Americans, for example, have practical reasons to fight for equal citizenship, but they should recognize that it would take generations to attain equal rights in America. They should therefore simultaneously struggle for a sovereign black state. ¹⁵⁴ Such a state would grant citizenship to all members of the diaspora regardless of where they reside in the world. As citizens of the black republic—though residing outside its territory—members of the diaspora would vote via mail and be able to appeal to their state for protection as citizens at local consulates. At a UNIA meeting in 1920, Garvey observed that French or English citizens could live in peace anywhere in the world because they knew their government would intervene to protect them from oppression but that black people did not have the same sense of security or reassurance. ¹⁵⁵ In Garvey’s vision, however, an African state would intervene on their behalf.

Still, there are significant justifications for why native Africans should oppose the diaspora’s right to return. In August 1922, James Weldon Johnson argued that if the continent is to be liberated, the “initiative will have to be taken by Africans in Africa instead of by any society or organization in the United States.” ¹⁵⁶ That is because the current inhabitants, who live under colonial oppression, are likely to view a black diaspora state in their territory as another form of alien rule, an attempt at “overlording or governing [Africans] on the part of the Negroes from the United States or the West Indies.” ¹⁵⁷ In January 1923, A. Philip Randolph extended the criticism. He contended that such a state would override the popular will of current occupants. Being “opposed to alien rule,” they would not trade one imperium for another, he warned. “Black despotism is as objectionable as white despotism. A black landlord is no more sympathetic with black tenants than white landlords are,” he explained. ¹⁵⁸ Johnson and Randolph may have had in mind Liberia, one of only two independent states in Africa. Theodore Vincent tells us that the first African American colonists of Liberia realized their right to self-determination by forcing many indigenous Susu and Ghebo Liberians to work “as virtual slaves on plantations resembling those from which most of the colonizers had come.” ¹⁵⁹

Although the right to national self-determination in one’s historical homeland may be justifiable in principle, realizing that principle requires arrogating territory currently occupied by native Africans, thus forcing them to bear a disproportional burden for both the past and the present oppression of the diaspora. Therefore the diaspora’s right to self-determination and its historical right to return cannot justify a right to territorial sovereignty on the African continent. Realizing self-determination in Africa uproots people already living there and subjects them to foreign rule. ¹⁶⁰ “Given the scarcity of resources and space in the world,” argues Chaim Gans regarding the cost Jewish Zionism wrests from Palestinians, “basing sovereignty rights and their scope on historical rights could endanger the livelihood and autonomy of many peoples.” ¹⁶¹ There are further objections. First, there was no international institution in place to ensure that the diaspora did not usurp territory belonging to native Africans. Second, even if the black diaspora has a right to realize self-determination in Africa, realizing that right exacted too great a price from native Africans when European colonizers and the United States should have shared the cost. Third, repatriation usurps the territorial rights of native Africans. Finally, native Africans viewed ethnicity, culture, and religion as more salient features of their political identity than race and would have therefore rejected a constructivist and transnational identity. The point is that Garvey’s argument for a black state is compelling, especially given the context of global white supremacy, but nonetheless undermines the rights and welfare of native Africans.

Conclusion

Contrary to the two prevailing views of Garvey, we have seen that his transnationalism and nationalism were mutually consistent and supporting. The nationalist interpretation advanced by Moses rightly emphasizes the moral weight Garvey placed on sovereignty but wrongly suggests that essentialist and theological premises ground his argument for a state. In fact, Garvey held a constructivist conception of diaspora identity, one that afforded him political reasons for considering Afro-diasporic people a single nation with the right to self-determination. For Garvey, associational life shapes the constitutions of its members. Moreover, he imagined national sovereignty as inherently and instrumentally valuable. A sovereign state would afford the black diaspora an opportunity to realize the value of self-determination. It is also a vital means for securing the lives and promoting the interests of a transnational black community. When revisionists divorce Garvey’s transnational politics from his aspiration for sovereignty, they omit the moral and strategic importance of national sovereignty for the black diaspora. In his specific context, one in which white supremacist and colonial states treated black lives as disposable, Garvey, like Herzl, shifted the struggle for freedom onto the international arena.

Despite eliciting his contemporaries’ contempt for doing so, Garvey had an immense influence on black political movements in the twentieth century. The moral weight and strategic importance he gave to robust and autonomous institutions in securing the lives and interests of Afro-diasporic people resonated with many in the more radical tradition of black politics. The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X and his followers, the Black Panther Party, and the New Republic of Afrika all sought to emulate the UNIA efforts to nurture solidarity, encourage sacrifice, and realize self-rule through a dialectical politics between autonomous institutions on one hand and the active participation of black people on the other. For many, Garvey modeled a form of politics that avoided both the compromises of strategic accommodation and the paternalism of coalition politics. Garvey embodied a politics that mobilized the dominated and pursued radical change—and it did so democratically across borders.

When those eleven Italian citizens were lynched in New Orleans, an entire state cried out for justice and took legal action. But reparations are still outstanding for the families of thousands of African Americans who met a similar fate, including the 169 lynched that same year. Garvey maintained that when justice is denied to a black man or woman “on account of his race or color such denial is an insult to the race as a whole and should be resented by the entire body of Negroes.” ¹⁶² A black state would put power behind transnational protest.