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

by Mary G. Rolinson

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.

Genres: History, American, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 2007

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had always heard that the Garvey movement wast popular in the US South. This pulled together documentation, including member records and correspondence with headquarters, with references in memoirs and periodicals to give a sense of the movement's scope. I found it oddly thin on story: what were grassroots Garveyists doing, what were there relations like with neighbors. I suppose that is inevitable given the focus on "grassroots."