Black Nationalism

By: Jeffrey O. G., Jeffrey O. Ogbar

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

Black Nationalism

Black nationalism is the belief system that endorses the creation of a black nation-state. It also supports the establishment of black-controlled institutions to meet the political, social, educational, economic, and spiritual needs of black people, independent of nonblacks. Celebration of African ancestry and territorial separatism are essential components of black nationalism. Though not fully developed into a cogent system of beliefs, the impulse of black nationalism finds its earliest expression in the resistance of enslaved Africans to the Atlantic slave trade from the sixteenth century. Various groups of Africans, who felt no particular organic connection as “black” people, were forced into a new racialized identity in a brutal and dehumanizing process of enslavement. The transportation and forced amalgamation of hundreds of different African nationalities resulted in Creolized communities in the Americas; enslaved Africans revolted and established new societies, which functioned autonomously on the outskirts of colonial towns and cities. These were locked in conflict with colonial authorities, which sought their destruction and the reenslavement of their inhabitants. Known by various names, including cimarrones, Maroons, and, in the United States, outliers, these groups were largely subsistence farmers who sometimes raided white farms, liberated enslaved Africans, and intermixed with indigenous peoples. Largely by default these societies embraced the fundamental tenets of black nationalism: armed self-defense, self-determination, and territorial separatism. Communities of outliers were found in Louisiana, Virginia, and Florida, among other places; none were so large or powerful, though, as the Maroons in Jamaica or Palmares in Brazil. Maroons participated in the successful insurrection against enslavers in the Haitian Revolution (1794–1803), which resulted in the first black republic in the western hemisphere. The most successful group of outliers in the United States was the group of escaped Africans who insinuated themselves into the Seminole nation in Florida; after a series of wars with the U.S. military in the early nineteenth century, many of these Africans remained in Florida rather than be enslaved or removed to Indian Territory.

The first organized expressions of black nationalism found among free blacks in the American colonies developed in the late eighteenth century. By the Revolutionary era African Americans were developing relatively large free communities in American cities. Denied access to white churches, schools, and social organizations, black people created their own organizations. Though the principle of self-determination is clearly present in these efforts, it would not be correct to call these efforts nationalistic; like those of Africans who escaped slavery into autonomous communities, they were by default black controlled. Most African Americans expressed little desire to establish a black nation-state or move to Africa, and opposition to racial integration was not expressed by the organized black leadership of the era.

Paul Cuffe, a wealthy black shipbuilder in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts, endorsed the belief that many black people would enjoy a better life in Africa than in the United States. This was the earliest organized expression of emigrationism in the country. Working with the white supremacist American Colonization Society (ACS), Cuffe helped send African Americans to Africa. Many whites who funded the ACS believed that free black people were dangerous to the stability of the country, that free blacks could encourage unrest among slaves, or that free blacks were simply not wanted among whites.

Increasingly, legislation preventing black people from voting, attending schools, getting jobs or housing, or enjoying basic protections of the law fomented cynicism among African Americans. In 1829 David Walker published his Appeal, which implied that black armed resistance could destroy white America if white supremacy did not end. The Appeal also suggested that America could be the most powerful nation on earth if whites and blacks were united in brotherhood; it was not nationalistic in the strict sense. It was however an early written expression of a core nationalist belief in black self-defense and racial pride. Two years later an enslaved Baptist minister in Southampton County, Virginia, led the best-known slave insurrection in U.S. history. “Prophet” Nat Turner galvanized enslaved people around the belief that God spoke to him through visions of good black spirits engaged in battle against evil white ones. According to Turner, God wanted “His people” freed from bondage against the “Serpent” enslaver. Though an iconic act of resistance to slavery, this revolt was organized around an inchoate form of religious black nationalism. It was not until Martin R. Delany, in the 1850s, that a mature, explicit endorsement of black nationalism is found among the written work of African Americans.

A journalist for the abolitionist Frederick Douglass's North Star, Delany broke with Douglass over the issue of emigration. Born free in Virginia, he had experienced bitter racism and grown intolerant of the belief that whites could be collectively convinced to be fair and just. Unable to entertain emigration to mostly white Canada, Delany recommended South or Central America as possible homes for African Americans in his 1852 book The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Delany later insisted that black people create a nation in Africa, one separate from the auspices of the white-controlled ACS. He visited Africa in 1859, establishing a treaty with local leaders in what is now Nigeria. Not only did Delany support a black nation-state as essential to black liberation but he also extolled the first explicit celebration of cultural nationalism found among African American leaders. Upon his return to the United States he donned African garb in an attempt to refute racist assumptions of African savagery, and claimed deep pride in being of African ancestry, speaking of knowledge of a rich African history systematically denied by white supremacists. His return from Africa coincided with the beginning in 1861 of the U.S. Civil War, which convinced Delany to reconsider his nationalist politics in hope that the war could result in the abolition of slavery. He enlisted in the Union army, becoming a major and the highest-ranked black person in the armed forces. Following the Civil War, the decline of Reconstruction in the 1870s, and the rise of new white supremacist laws, Delany once again endorsed black nationalism, even working in alliance with whites who insisted on removing black people from the country.

What marked Delany as different from many of his contemporaries was his celebration of black pride and black self-determination and his deep distrust of white people. Despite the latter, he embraced white America's ideas of culture and religion. On the one hand he stressed that the historic glory of Africa had been denied by Europeans to reinforce white supremacy; on the other he insisted that it was necessary for African Americans to “regenerate” Africa “morally, religiously, socially, politically, and commercially,” instilling Western values.

There were other emigrationists who intersected with Delany on fundamental issues. Most black nationalists deep into the twentieth century insisted that Africans in the diaspora had crucial skills—or were simply “civilized”—and had a duty to establish links with their “despoiled” people in Africa. The late nineteenth-century black nationalists Alexander Crummell and Edward Wilmont Blyden argued that Africans were incapable of producing the technology necessary to develop without values and resources from the West; in fact it was necessary to evoke a cultural rebirth in Africa.

Pan-Africanism.

By the turn of the twentieth century a new expression of black self-determination was developing under the term “Pan-Africanism.” Not as concerned with moving blacks in the diaspora back to Africa, it was originally focused on resisting racial subjugation where black people lived. In 1900 the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams organized a Pan-African Conference in London, which assembled representatives from the three independent black states of Haiti, Ethiopia, and Liberia, as well as colonized countries and the United States. Among the participants from the United States was W. E. B. Du Bois, an emerging activist and scholar. Pan-Africanism, as articulated by its earliest exponents, was not nationalist but insisted on worldwide liberation of black people and the international solidarity of people of African descent. The fusion of Pan-Africanism's international politics and black nationalism's territorial separatism would be found in the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which emerged in the 1920s as the largest mass movement of black people.

Marcus Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 in Jamaica. The UNIA was incorporated in the United States in 1918, two years after its founder immigrated. Espousing a mix of militant black nationalism and self-reliance, Garvey created a massive organization headquartered in Harlem but extending to forty-one countries and including millions of members. His aim to “civilize the backward tribes of Africa” was yet another example of the nineteenth-century nationalist civilizing mission. Like his predecessors he was a Christian, but the Christianity he endorsed replaced European-looking images of divinities in churches and homes with African ones. The African Orthodox Church, headed by Archbishop George Alexander McGuire, affiliated with the UNIA, and advocated a black God for black people.

Garvey's efforts appealed to huge numbers of black people. The UNIA's grocery stores, apartment buildings, and cleaners; the highly militarized African Legion and Black Cross Nurses; and the most widely read black newspaper in history, the Negro World, made the UNIA highly visible and attractive to many. Its adoption of the red, black, and green tricolor flag in 1920 introduced what has remained the iconic expression of black nationalism, influencing the formation of flags for emerging African countries in the 1960s. The UNIA employed and celebrated the history and sanctity of black life in ways people had never seen; it also provided important psychological space in which to vent at the pressing force of white supremacy. Garvey articulated the distrust many blacks had of white-controlled institutions, warning against involvement with any whites who appeared to be friends of blacks. Though he did not believe in innate racial difference, he held that the white liberal was just as prone to join a lynch mob as was a Georgia Klansman.

Many African American leaders joined with radicals such as black communists to denounce Garvey for allowing Klan members to speak at UNIA meetings, where they encouraged blacks to leave the white man's country. With the support of Du Bois and others, the federal government arrested Garvey on mail fraud charges and sentenced him to prison in 1925. He was released and deported in 1927. The African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), founded by leftist black nationalists in Harlem after World War I, was a product of the “New Negro” defiance of the era and the general radical politics that circulated in New York City. Created in 1919 by Cyril Briggs, a communist and journalist, the ABB was composed of men from throughout the United States, many of whom had served in the war. Many others were Caribbean-born radicals who flirted with the UNIA and/or the Communist Party. They embraced self-defense and were sensitive to the need to collaborate with radicalized whites. Members of the Brotherhood considered their semiclandestine, paramilitary organization the “Pan-African Army” of the black world. Membership ranged from three to five thousand at its height. Briggs's monthly magazine, The Crusader, became the official organ of the ABB and reached a peak circulation of 33,000. The group had fifty branches, including those in Chicago, Baltimore, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Africa, and the West Indies. The ABB utilized a Marxist class analysis that emphasized working-class consciousness. This was in fact the first significant fusion of Marxism, black nationalism, and Pan-Africanism. While its rhetoric regarding mass culture is largely unknown, it is clear that the ABB did not denounce black folk culture in the same ways as most nationalists. Heightening class consciousness, mobilizing workers, and establishing alliances with radicalized whites and “small oppressed nations” were the chief concerns of the ABB. Furthermore, it embraced notions of uplift, military efficiency, and other ideals celebrated by nationalists.

A number of local black nationalist organizations functioned in various capacities in the years before World War I through the emergence in the 1950s of the modern civil rights movement. Noble Drew Ali established the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) in 1913. The MSTA insisted that people of African descent in America were properly “Moors,” not to be called colored, Negro, black, or African. Though not adherents of any orthodox form of Islam, MSTA members considered themselves Muslims, and attached “El” or “Bey” to their surnames to represent their proper identity. Ali insisted that Marcus Garvey was an ideological kindred spirit. Spreading from Newark to Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago, the organization required “clean living” among its members. Black people were to view themselves as central to their own spiritual world: God spoke to them specifically as a people. Moreover, when anthropomorphized, benevolent divinities took the form of black people. A number of other nationalists found inspiration in the UNIA; few however would be national in scope. Harlem, the former headquarters of the UNIA, became a hotbed of black nationalist activity in the years following the 1927 deportation of Marcus Garvey. The former UNIA member Carlos Cooks established the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement and organized “Buy Black” campaigns in New York, boycotts, and preparation for armed defense against white terrorists. Eddie “Porkchop” Davis, Audrey “Queen Mother” Moore, Charles Kenyatta, Major Thornhill, Oba O. Adefumi, Robert Harris and others were some of the many local nationalists in New York from the 1940s through the 1960s.

The Civil Rights Movement and Black Nationalism.

By the mid-1950s the modern civil rights movement had introduced a new language and practice of mass mobilization of African Americans. The challenge for nationalists to successfully appeal to the mass of African Americans remained the same in some regards, while drastically changing in others. In fact it was the rise of the civil rights movement that proved to be the greatest recruiting tool for the Nation of Islam (NOI or the Nation), which had functioned with relatively small temples in midwestern and northeastern cities until the late 1950s.

Formed by a mysterious itinerant peddler, W. D. Fard Muhammad, in Detroit in 1930, the Nation built on the legacies of the UNIA and the MSTA by developing various institutions, including businesses, farms, and schools. Like the UNIA, it extolled territorial separatism, racial pride, and religious nationalism. Like the MSTA, it insisted on a spiritual renewal and a new identity as Muslims, complete with new names. Unlike either earlier organization however, the NOI insisted on the absolute devilry of whites.

Led by Elijah Muhammad from 1934 until his death in 1975, the Nation of Islam called for a complete separation from white people and the establishment of an independent black nation-state in either North America or Africa. Whites were genetic mutants who were evil by design and could not be expected to be fair, just, or anything other than evil. They had inhabited caves in the Caucasus Mountains, where they lived on all fours and developed amorous relations with canines. In fact dogs are the “closest relatives to the white man”; that is why modern whites refer to the dog as their “best friend.” The Nation had done what no major national organization had: formulated a belief system that systematically undermined white supremacy by declaring whiteness a biological, innate evil. It openly ridiculed whites as inferior, crude, vicious, and beastlike. Calling whites “pale things,” “dogs,” “crackers,” and “devils,” black nationalists had taken a bold turn to meet some of the deep psychological consequences of being black in a virulently antiblack country. They had taken whites off their pedestal, while building up black people. Moreover the Nation was distinct from other nationalist groups in its position on integration: it supported integration with Asians, Native Americans, and all other people of color, who were considered “black.” In essence this was not integration but unification with a community of black people who had been divided by a common enemy.

By 1959 Malcolm X, the prominent national spokesman for the Nation, was teaching audiences that the proper term for the people was “black.” A Negro was one who was ignorant, shiftless, deaf, dumb, and “blind.” The most interviewed black person in America in 1962, Malcolm X with his militancy and vitriol could not be ignored by white or black people. Even civil rights activists were affected, some moving closer to black nationalism.

At the center of this ideological evolution was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Founded in 1960 SNCC was closely affiliated with the older Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by Martin Luther King Jr. The most prominent leader of the civil rights movement, King was an adamant proponent of its notion of nonviolence and racial reconciliation. By 1966 a new variant of black nationalism was developing among activists, which became known as the Black Power movement. The term “Black Power” meant different things to different people; fundamentally, it demanded the empowerment of black people, politically, socially, and economically. Although it did not require territorial separatism as had the UNIA or NOI, it insisted on black pride, self-determination, self-defense, and dignity. Like Pan-Africanism, Black Power was not synonymous with black nationalism, but complemented it.

It was at a 1966 march led by the Congress for Racial Equality, the SCLC, and SNCC, that the fissure between the traditional civil rights language and the ideas of Black Power was crystallized. The SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael told a crowd of supporters that black people should stand up and demand Black Power throughout the state and country. The following night Willie Ricks, a leading SNCC organizer, reiterated Carmichael's demand when he galvanized the crowd and, in his typical charismatic fashion, declared that black people must demand Black Power.

The popularization of the phrase Black Power created considerable trepidation among mainstream civil rights activists; to many it implied antiwhite violence that would tear the movement asunder. King tried in vain to dissuade the crowd from using what he considered divisive words. For him the call for Black Power was “unfortunate because it tends to give the impression of black nationalism.”

Black militants and nationalists throughout the country however, frustrated by what they considered the tragic failure of nonviolent integration and by continued racist aggression, welcomed the call for Black Power. For King, black nationalism and Black Power were part and parcel of a “nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can't win. It is, at bottom, the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within.” Carmichael however asserted that Black Power was the proper articulation of the needs of the masses of black people. “Black power,” he explained, “is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the racist institutions and values of this society.” The Lowndes County, Alabama, Freedom Organization (LCFO) was a true manifestation of this idea, he claimed. Its symbol, the Black Panther, gave the group its nickname, the Black Panther Party.

Across the nation, scores of organizations emerged that viewed themselves as Black Power groups. Several adopted the LCFO name, Black Panther Party. There were independent organizations with this name in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. There were the Organization Us in Los Angeles, the Congress of African People in Newark, the Republic of New Africa and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement of black workers in Michigan. Other nationalist groups included the Shrine of the Black Madonna, formed by the Reverend Albert Cleage in Detroit, the African Descendents Nationalist Independence Party, formed in Philadelphia, and the Afro-American Association, formed by Donald Freeman in the California Bay Area.

The Reverend Albert B. Cleage Jr. Addressing the crowd at the March on Detroit, 23 June 1963.

Virtual Motor City Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

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Black Power also precipitated an unprecedented expression of black art, scholarship, political activism, professional organization, and intellectual discourse. Poets, writers, and other intellectuals, such as Larry Neal, Robert Chrisman, Askia Touré, Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, Amiri Baraka, Robert L. Allen, John Henrik Clark, James Turner, and Nikki Giovanni, constructed new intellectual interrogations of race and America. The Organization Us founder and leading cultural nationalist Maulana Karenga developed a new celebration, Kwanzaa. Advocates on college campuses demanded black studies programs, black cultural centers, and the hiring of black faculty and staff by white universities long hostile to hiring people of color. In music James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Donald Byrd, and the Last Poets demonstrated the musical contours of Black Power. Black professionals with unprecedented access to white professional associations chose to develop new black associations rather than concentrate their activities solely in majority white groups. Between 1968 and 1975 dozens of professional groups such as those of sociologists, political scientists, social workers, journalists, police officers, and engineers were formed. Fashion and language were altered by Black Power. Stemming from the Nation of Islam's rejection of the word “Negro” and the embrace of “black”, the Black Power movement helped retire the term “Negro” in the Anglophone world as a reference to people of African descent.

International connections with Black Power were many and complex. Julian Mayfield joined the expatriate community of African Americans in Ghana (which had included Du Bois and his wife) and worked as a communications aide to the Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah from 1962 to 1966. Though he worked in Ghana before the Black Power movement, Mayfield remained connected to the African American community and embraced the new slogan as it spread through the black world. From 1971 to 1975 Mayfield worked as an adviser to Forbes Burnham, the prime minister of Guyana, home to the Black Power radical Walter Rodney. Newly independent countries in the Caribbean struggled over the direction of Black Power, which tended to lean toward leftist, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist politics. In Trinidad, Jamaica, and Barbados political elites attempted to marginalize Black Power advocates. Rodney was assassinated in Guyana after he was banned from Jamaica, where he had been a professor. In South Africa the antiapartheid student leader Steve Biko was similarly affected by the slogan. He was killed by police in 1977. As in these countries black radicals witnessed considerable state repression in the United States. But no group experienced the same international attention or level of state repression as the Black Panther Party of Oakland, California.

The Black Panther Party began as a nationalist organization in 1966, but by late 1968 it had adopted a Marxist-Leninist ideological framework that considered racial or ethnic nationalism problematic; nationalism that did not consider connections with class was an effort to bolster bourgeois control of economic markets, while maintaining class oppression. The BPP, a self-described revolutionary nationalist organization, called for a United Nations–supervised plebiscite so black people could vote on whether to separate from the United States, and identified the three evils of capitalism, imperialism, and racism as universal enemies for revolutionaries. But, the Panthers reasoned, until capitalism was destroyed race and its consequences were very real. It was imperative therefore for black people to work in black communities for black self-determination. Though there were no white members, some Latino and Asian members were active in the BPP from its earliest years.

The Panthers created a revolutionary nationalism that was highly derivative but also suffused with the social criticism and intellectual contributions of its cofounders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and others like Eldridge Cleaver, their minister of information. The Party created a series of survival programs, including free breakfast, food giveaways, and free medical care to poor black communities. Between 1968 and 1970 the Panthers also had a series of shootouts and police raids. J. Edgar Hoover, the notorious director of the FBI, called the Panthers the “greatest threat to national security” and unleashed a massive campaign to disrupt the party, as well as other black nationalist groups, resulting in over twenty dead BPP members.

By 1975 the Black Power movement in its most activist form was in retreat. Organizations like the Nation of Islam, Congress of African People, Black Panther Party, Republic of New Afrika, and Organization Us were in decline. Many leaders had been jailed, killed, or exiled. Throughout the 1970s a growing black middle class, the rise of publicly elected black officials, and a decrease in the most explicit manifestations of white supremacy converged to create hopeful times for many black people. The increase in poverty, illicit drug trade, and spiraling crime rates of the late 1980s however precipitated renewed sense of alarm among many African Americans.

The Nation of Islam, under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan, tapped into the new mood of cynicism and anger. Farrakhan spoke to black audiences across the country about the need for black people to live responsible lives free of drugs, alcohol, gambling, welfare, or unhealthy diets. His message of personal responsibility and industriousness resonated with classic black nationalist values; these were not particularly different from African American core cultural values, making his appeal powerful. And unlike political conservatives who had begun to coopt the idea of “personal responsibility,” the Nation offered a vitriolic attack on the institutionalized nature of white supremacy. Calling whites devils and other racial pejoratives, the Nation generated considerable hostility from the mainstream media and black intellectuals alike. But the organization grew in visibility and resources as the attacks against it increased. The NOI provided security for high-crime housing projects nationwide, reducing crime precipitously in most cases. A longtime supporter of capitalist enterprise, the Nation expanded its business empire, employing many poor and working-class people, while also looking outward in entirely new ways. In fact it endorsed voting for the first time when Jesse Jackson ran for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in 1984. Despite the accusations that the organization was racist, sexist, and homophobic, it continued to expand its appeal, culminating in the organization of the largest gathering of black people in history, the Million Man March in 1995. In 1998 the Nation became the only known Muslim body in the world to allow women to serve as imams or ministers. During the civil war in Yugoslavia Farrakhan publicly recognized white Muslims; he officiated at white-black marriages at the Million Family March in 2000, and offered support for gay participants at the 2005 Millions More March, demonstrating that he was ideologically dynamic and willing to insist on “black unity.”

The landscape of the United States is indelibly marked by the many and varied efforts of black nationalists. The legacies of Black Power are ubiquitous. The National Black United Front, Prisoners of Conscious Committee, and New Afrikan Peoples Organization are some of many black nationalist groups that maintain grassroots campaigns. From reparations for the descendants of former slaves to attention to the poor and the prison-industrial complex, nationalists’ concerns often intersect with those of other groups, giving them continued visibility and a voice to a large segment of the black community.

[See also Africa, Idea of; Black Panther Party; Black Power Movement; Black Radical Congress; Black Towns; Congress of African People; Nation of Islam; Republic of New Afrika; Universal Negro Improvement Association; and biographical entries on figures mentioned in this article.]

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