Chicago, Garveyism, and the history of the diasporic Midwest

Abstract

This article analyses the dynamic history of Garveyism in Chicago, Illinois (USA). The Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey's message of racial pride, African redemption, and black self-determination electrified black Chicagoans. Thousands of blacks in this Midwestern industrial city joined Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). At its peak in the early 1920s, the UNIA claimed six million members worldwide. Chicago was highly regarded in the transnational UNIA. Black women played a critical role in building this Pan-African movement in the Windy City. The Chicago UNIA spawned black nationalist political and religious movements in this city from the 1920s onward. Tracing the largely unknown story provides insight into the broader history of what I call the ‘diasporic Midwest’. I use the term as a theoretical and analytical framework to extend the geographical scope of the African Diaspora, to internationalize African-American history, to consider the gendered contours and paradoxes of Pan-Africanism and black nationalism, and to chart a genealogy of Black Power.

Keywords:

• Chicago
• diasporic Midwest
• Marcus Garvey
• Garveyism
• UNIA
• masculinism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Chicago Defender, 20 September 1919 [hereafter CD].

2. CD, 6 September 1919.

3. Guide to the Abbott-Sengstack Family Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago, IL.

4. https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab15.txt (accessed February 10, 2015).

5. The recent years have seen the publication of work focused specifically on Garveyism in the Midwest, see Jolly (2013).

6. For recent work on women.

7. (Chicago) Daily Inter-Ocean, 4 January 1878, 18 October 1906; The Illinois Writers Project: ‘Negro in Illinois’, box 44, folder, Vivian Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago, IL [hereafter IWS].

8. Flyer, ‘Big Mass Meeting’, March 1917, Amy Garvey Memorial Collection of Marcus Garvey, box 10, file 10, Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University, Nashville, TN [hereafter AJG Papers].

9. The divisions were located on the Southside and Morgan Park (Chicago), West Chicago, Chicago Heights, Illinois; Hill Crest, Illinois; Hodges Park, Illinois; East Chicago, Indiana; Gary, Indiana; Indiana Harbor, Indiana. Martin (1976, 363).

10. NW, 28 November 1925, 24 October 1925.

11. Interview with William A. Wallace, IWP, box 44, folder 2.

12. NW, 31 March 1923.

13. NW, 8 August 1925.

14. NW, 6 November 1920.

15. NW, 1 August 1925, 25 July 1925.

16. NW, 31 March 1923.

17. NW, 26 December 1925; 6 November 1920; 7 March 1925.

18. NW, 6 November 1920.

19. ‘Abysinnians’, (n.d.) Jack Conroy Papers, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, box 41b, folder 1863b.

20. CD, 26 June 1920; 2 July 1920; 3 July 1920.

21. http://hermetic.com/moorish/7koran.html (accessed, February 6, 2015); CD, 19 November 1927.

22. CD, 3 August 1929.

23. (Cleveland) Call and Post, 26 June 1954; J. Charles Zampty to Thomas W. Harvey, May 1970, UNIA Records MARBL, box 12, folder 8.

24. http://www.noi.org/noi-history/ (accessed March 2, 2014).

25. ‘Untitled Report on Nation of Islam’, n.d. IWP, box 45, folder 5; Dolinar, ed., Negro in Illinois, 205–207.

26. AJG, ‘The Source and Course of Black Power in America’, (October 4, 1966), AJG Papers, box 10, folder 9.

27. Quoted in Constitution of the PME, ESC Papers, Box 30, folder Peace Movement of Ethiopia, 2; Mittie Maud Lena Gordon [hereafter MMLG] to Ernest Sevier Cox, 27 October 1939, ESC Papers, box 5, folder 2.

28. Garvey's support for the Great Liberia Bill was not the first time Garvey had collaborated with white supremacists. During the early 1920s, Garvey met with the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (Fitzgerald 1997, 310–327).

29. International Convention (Cleveland, Ohio), August 15–20, 1941, program, UNIA Papers MARBL, box 15, folder 48.

30. UNIA Papers WRHS Finding Aid; ‘A Proclamation by the Universal Negro Improvement Association 1929 of the World’, UNIA Papers MARBL, box 15, folder 53.

31. ‘Minutes of the International Convention of the UNIA & ACL, Aug 26-Sept 3, 1951’, UNIA Papers MARBL, box 15, folder 93.

32. United States v. Mittie Maud Lena Gordon ESC Papers, box 34, 4.

33. Quoted in MMLG to ESC, 7 September 1947, ESC Papers, box 6, folder 5; MMLG and Alberta Spain to ESC, 3 March 1961, ESC Papers, box 14, folder 3.

34. Finding Aid, UNIA Papers WRHS.

35. Officers meeting with Commissioner General Mr. Charles L. James, Youngstown, Ohio, March 26, 1972; UNIA Papers MARBL, box 17, folder 12; Smith-Irwin (1989), 55, n. 1.

36. John H. Bracey, Jr., telephone interview by author, 20 December 2013.