Garveyism Root and Branch

Abstract

The Garvey movement was at once an end and a beginning. Although very much a product of its time – the immediate post-World War I era – Garveyism was an end in that it summarized much of the thought and struggle of nineteenth-century pan-Africanism and black nationalism. Marcus Garvey, not so much the man as the metaphor, and the United Negro Improvement Association, not so much the institution as the inspiration, sealed up a certain tradition (which included Toussaint Louverture’s Haitian Revolution and black revivalists) in the movement for black liberation in the modern world. At the same time, Garveyism was also a beginning, casting a long shadow on contemporary and subsequent movements against colonialism and white supremacy throughout the black world, including phenomena such as the Moorish Science Temple and Rastafari. This chapter places Garveyism at the center of a narrative spanning from the emergence of pan-Africanism in the eighteenth century to the Ethiopian crisis of 1935.