Ibrahim Sundiata

Many excellent works have dealt with the meteoric rise and fall of Marcus Garvey's (1887–1940) Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The organization rode the crest of post–World War I cries for the “self-determination” of peoples. Emigration to Africa, specifically Liberia, offered a place to “be somebody,” combined with the promise of untapped riches. Garveyism offered a most logical way out of the specifically American Dilemma. The abortion of Garveyism after 1924 has been attributed to many causes: the narrowness of its class aims; the opposition of the established African American elite; interference from the European colonial powers; harassment by the FBI. All of these played a part in the subversion of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA. None of them is, in and of itself, sufficient. The defeat (rather than the “failure”) of Garveyism does not rest on the inherent illogic of its program. It rests on a failure to disentangle the claims of a national minority from those of pan-ethnicity. In Liberia, the site of the proposed West African experiment, the UNIA ran into issues of class and ethnicity that belied the very unity it proclaimed as its raison d'être.This essay argues that Africa remained a potent force in the North American Diaspora until the advent of World War II. The continent was of concern to groups as divergent as the remnant UNIA and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).