Black Nationalist

n.
A member of a group of militant Black people who urge separatism from white people and the establishment of self-governing Black communities.

Black Nationalism Black Nationalism n.

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black nationalism

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U.S. political and social movement aimed at developing economic power and community and ethnic pride among African Americans. It was proclaimed by Marcus Garvey in the early 20th century, when many U.S. black nationalists hoped for the eventual creation of a separate black nation in Africa. In the 1960s and '70s, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X preached the ideal of black nationalism as an alternative to assimilation into the predominantly white culture of the U.S.

For more information on black nationalism, visit Britannica.com.

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Black Nationalism

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The idea that black people should establish a nation-state that would manifest their social and cultural aspirations can be located in the thought of African Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the particulars of the nationalist idea have changed with shifts in the political and social climate, four elements consistently surface in dialogue about the proposition: assumptions about racial traits and black identity, the prospect of a territorial homeland, the self-help emphasis, and antiwhite ideology.

As white hostility toward free blacks increased throughout the North during the first half of the nineteenth century, black communities launched many self-help institutions such as churches, schools, and benevolent associations. But as political steps taken to disenfranchise free blacks in Northern states spread rapidly, many blacks abandoned the hope of meaningful freedom in the United States and turned their attention to the possibility of migration to Africa, Canada, or other countries.

Expressions of nationalism in this period were grounded in the contemporary ideas about "race" and "nation." Proponents of emigration and a sovereign state assumed that certain inherent values, abilities, and temperaments of black people would provide the cultural and social cohesion necessary to mold a new and just nation. From the perspective of the theories about racial traits characteristic of Western social thought at the time, the goal of a sovereign state seemed logical, if not practical. But leaders like Frederick Douglass rejected the claim that there were inherent differences between blacks and whites and questioned the notion of a nation organized around racial group membership. Douglass conceded the need for blacks to act collectively and aggressively against racial oppression, but he held forth for racial justice on American soil.

The annual Negro Conventions that met from 1830 to 1861 thoroughly debated the merits of colonization and racial separatism. Blacks in several Northern cities launched programs to relocate blacks outside of the United States. In 1816 an ideologically eclectic group of whites formed the American Colonization Society (ACS) to promote and orchestrate colonization of the free black population in Africa. The ACS could claim limited success when, in 1821, despite strong opposition in urban black communities, 17,000 blacks voluntarily migrated to Liberia on the west coast of Africa.

Through the abolitionist 1850s, few blacks opted to seek well-being abroad. Yet some of the best-educated blacks, including Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander Crummel, and Martin Delaney, continued to press for a black nation on African soil. Emancipation and the defeat of the slaveholding South produced a surge of optimism in black America. A significant number of blacks elected to acquire land in the Midwest and establish all-black towns, under the rubric of state and regional authorities. But as political and economic conditions worsened for blacks at the end of the nineteenth century in the North and South, the ideological seed of racial nationalism found an effective host in Marcus Garvey.

Garvey, born in Jamaica, was an activist for workers' rights and racial justice in his native land and later in London. He formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 in Jamaica to promote black self-help programs in the West Indies, Africa, and in the United States, to which he moved in 1916.

Garvey found a receptive audience for his race pride and self-help message. The virulent racism of the first decades of the twentieth century heightened the racial consciousness of the urban black masses. Many Southern blacks had migrated to the industrial North seeking economic gains, yet found themselves relegated to low-paying and irregular employment. Black soldiers returned from World War I and the European theater only to again confront racial hostility. The contrast between the degree of liberty black soldiers enjoyed in Europe and the social climate they were expected to weather in the United States was dramatic. The agendas of mainstream black organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reflected priorities of the nascent black middle class, rather than the concerns of laboring black masses. The UNIA spoke to these needs. It became the largest black mass organization in American history.

Garvey confronted the "race"/"nation" conundrum in an interesting way. He urged that blacks every where consider themselves part of a black nation and take aggressive steps to build institutions and enterprises to enhance the well-being of blacks. This formulation dodged the question of a sovereign territory, yet encouraged a "race-first" or Pan-Africanist development. Garvey's foray into territorial separatism led to his downfall. A project to organize a steamship line to build trade with Africa and relocate blacks in Africa ran into management difficulties. Garvey's foes—black and white—pressed to remove him from the political equation in America. He was convicted for mail fraud and served three years in federal prison before receiving a pardon from President Calvin Coolidge and agreeing to leave the country. When the charismatic Garvey was deported, the UNIA declined in both membership and impact

The next forceful expression of racial nationalism came from the Nation of Islam (NOI) under Elijah Muhammad. The NOI (whose members are often referred to as Black Muslims) blended key elements of the Garvey self-help program and demanded land in the South on which to found a black nation. They considered the requested land as reparation for the economic and social subjugation of blacks during slavery. Unlike Garvey, Muhammad's nationalism was religiously grounded in Islam and contained a robust strain of antiwhite ideology that appealed to poor urban blacks. Buoyed by the potential of racial self-sufficiency, the NOI created farms, fisheries, and other businesses designed to break links of dependency with "the white devils." Elijah Muhammad's protégé Malcolm X emerged in 1962 as a militant and charismatic voice for NOI-style nationalism.

In the mid-1960s, the optimism of the Southern civil rights movement collapsed in the face of white indifference. Youthful black-consciousness advocates steered many blacks and intellectuals away from the integrationist ideals of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights campaigns. The term "black nationalism" quickly made its way into the American lexicon, but unlike the earlier land-based nationalism, the term spread into literature, music, and the arts. Paralleling the pan-racial vision of Garvey, cultural nationalists like Amiri Baraka spoke about the "oneness" of African people wherever they were. Arguments about the existence of a black aesthetic leavened the social and cultural thought of the period.

At the start of the twenty-first century, black nationalists had all but abandoned hope for a sovereign state. Yet blacks from across the political spectrum endorse the idea of group self-help even as they debate the government's obligation to ameliorate black disadvantage. Continuing patterns of racial inequality and oppression guarantee that a significant number of black people will remain estranged from white society. The national dialogue has now shifted away from polarizing approaches to "blackness" and its meaning, but racial pride and consciousness have veered toward nationalism in times of sharp social conflict. The future of black nationalism is uncertain.

Bibliography

Evanzz, Karl. The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad. New York: Pantheon, 1999.

Franklin, Vincent P. Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of the Faith of the Fathers. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1984.

Fredrickson, George M. Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

McCartney, John. Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African-American Political Thought. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992

Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, ed. Classical Black Nationalism: The American Revolution to Marcus Garvey. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Vincent, Theodore G. Black Power and the Garvey Movement. Rev. ed. Berkeley, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1972.

—William M. Banks

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Cultural Movements, Events, and Institutions - black nationalism: advocacy of establishment of separate black nation in United States

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Black nationalism

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It has been suggested that African nationalism be merged into this article or section. (Discuss) Proposed since January 2012.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2008)

The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page. (December 2010)

Black nationalism (BN) advocates a racial definition (or redefinition) of indigenous national identity, as opposed to multiculturalism. There are different indigenous nationalist philosophies but the principles of all African nationalist ideologies are unity, and self-determination or independence from European society. Martin Delany is considered to be the grandfather of African nationalism.^[1]

Inspired by the apparent success of the Haitian Revolution, the origins of African indigenous nationalism in political thought lie in the 19th century with people like Marcus Garvey, Henry McNeal Turner, Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Paul Cuffe, etc. The repatriation of African American slaves to Liberia or Sierra Leone was a common African nationalist theme in the 19th century. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association of the 1910s and 1920s was the most powerful black nationalist movement to date, claiming 11 million members.

According to Wilson Jeremiah Moses in his famous work Classical Black Nationalism, African nationalism as a philosophy can be examined from three different periods giving rise to various ideological perspectives for what we can today consider what African nationalism really is.

The first period was pre-Classical African nationalism beginning from the time the Africans were brought ashore in the Americas up to the Revolutionary period. The second period began after the Revolutionary War, when a sizable number of Africans in the colonies, particularly in New England and Pennsylvania, were literate and had become disgusted with the social conditions that arose out of Enlightenment ideas. We find in such historical personalities as Prince Hall, Richard Allen, and Absalom Jones a need to found certain organizations as the Free African Society, African Masonic lodges and Church Institutions. These institutions would serve as early foundations to developing independent and separate organizations. The third period of African nationalism arose during the Post-Reconstruction Era, especially among various African-American clergy circles. Separate circles had already been established and were accepted by African-Americans because of the overt oppression that had existed since the inception of the United States. This latter phenomenon led to the birth of modern African nationalism which stresses the need to separate and build separate communities that promote strong racial pride and which collectivize resources. This ideology has become the philosophy of groups like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. Although, the Sixties brought on a heightened period of religious, cultural and political nationalism, African nationalism would later influence afrocentricity.

Contents

1 Background
2 Black Power
3 Uhuru Movement
4 Criticism
5 See also
6 References
7 Further reading

Background

Marcus Garvey

Main article: Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey encouraged African people the world around to be proud of their race and to see beauty in their own kind. A central idea to Garveyism was that African people in every part of the world were one people and they would never advance if they did not put aside their cultural and ethnic differences and contrast. He was heavily influenced by the earlier works of Booker T. Washington, Martin Delany, and Henry McNeal Turner.^[2]

Although Garvey was a supporter of racial separatism, he made it clear that he held no hostility towards whites and believed in the equality of all human beings. Garvey set the precedent for subsequent African nationalist and pan-Africanist thought including that of Kwame Nkrumah (and several other African leaders) the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X and most notably, Carlos Cooks (who is considered the ideological son of Marcus Garvey) and his African Nationalist Pioneer Movement as manzi maringo prove it.

Marcus Garvey's beliefs are articulated in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey as well as Message To The People: The Course of African Philosophy.

Malcolm X

Between 1953 and 1965, while most African leaders worked in the civil rights movement to integrate African people into mainstream American life, Malcolm X was an avid advocate of black independence and the reclaiming of black pride and masculinity. He maintained that there was hypocrisy in the purported values of Western culture--from its Judeo-Christian religious traditions to American political and economic institutions--and its inherently racist actions. He maintained that separatism and control of politics, and economics within its own community would serve blacks better than the tactics of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and mainstream civil rights groups such as the SCLC, SNCC, NAACP, and CORE. Malcolm X declared that nonviolence was the "philosophy of the fool," and that to achieve anything, African Americans would have to reclaim their national identity, embrace the rights covered by the Second Amendment, and defend themselves from white hegemony and extrajudicial violence. In response to Rev. Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, Malcolm X quipped, "While King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare."

Malcolm X believed that African Americans must develop their own society and ethical values, including the self-help, community-based enterprises, such as the Alcoholics Anonymous, that the black Muslims supported. He also thought that African Americans should reject integration or cooperation with Caucasians until they could achieve internal cooperation and unity. He prophetically believed there "would be bloodshed" if the racism problem in America remained ignored, and he renounced "compromise" with whites. After participation in a Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), Malcolm found himself restructuring his views and recanted several extremist opinions in favor the doctrine of mainstream Islam. Before he could begin taking his campaign in a new direction, he was assassinated on February 21, 1965 during a speech held at The Audubon Ballroom, NYC.

Upon his return from Mecca, Malcolm X abandoned his commitment to racial separatism; however, he still supported black nationalism and advocated that African Americans in the United States act proactively in their campaign for equal human rights, instead of relying on Caucasian citizens to make concessions. The tenets of Malcolm X's new philoposphy are articulated in the charter of his Organization of Afro-American Unity (an African nationalist group patterned after the Organization of African Unity), and his inspiration of the Black Panther movement.

Frantz Fanon

While in France Frantz Fanon wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Mask, an analysis of the impact of colonial subjugation on the African psyche. This book was a very personal account of Fanon’s experience being black: as a man, an intellectual, and a party to a French education. Although Fanon wrote the book while still in France, most of his other work was written while in North Africa (in particular Algeria). It was during this time that he produced his greatest works, A Dying Colonialism and perhaps the most important work on decolonization yet written, The Wretched of the Earth.. In it, Fanon lucidly analyzes the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for national liberation. In this seminal work Fanon expounded his views on the liberating role of violence for the colonized, as well as the general necessity of violence in the anti-colonial struggle. Both books firmly established Fanon in the eyes of much of the Third World as the leading anti-colonial thinker of the 20th century. In 1959 he compiled his essays on Algeria in a book called L'An Cinq: De la Révolution Algérienne.

Black Power

Black Power was a political movement expressing a new racial consciousness among African people in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The slogan, "Black Power", was popularized by Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael.

Black Power represented both a conclusion to the decade's civil rights movement and an alternative means of combating the racism that persisted despite the efforts of African activists during the early 1960s. The meaning of Black Power was debated vigorously while the movement was in progress. To some it represented African-Americans' insistence on racial dignity and self-reliance, which was usually interpreted as economic and political independence, as well as freedom from White authority.

These themes had been advanced most forcefully in the early 1960s by Malcolm X. He argued that African people should focus on improving their own communities, rather than striving for complete integration, and that black people had a duty to defend themselves against violent assaults. The publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) created further support for the idea of African-American self-determination and had a strong influence on the emerging leaders of the Black Power movement.

Other interpreters of Black Power emphasized the cultural heritage of black people, especially the African roots of their identity. This view encouraged study and celebration of African history and culture. In the late 1960s African American college students requested curricula in African-American studies that explored their distinctive culture and history.

Still another view of Black Power likened it to Anti-imperialism which called for a revolutionary political struggle to reject racism, economic exploitation and colonialism globally. This interpretation encouraged the alliance of non-whites, including Hispanics and Asians, to improve the quality of their lives.

Uhuru Movement

The Uhuru Movement is the largest contemporary African American movement advocating African nationalism and was founded in the 1980s in St. Petersburg, Florida. Composed mainly of the African People's Socialist Party, the Uhuru Movement also includes other organizations based in both Africa and the United States. These organizations are in the process of establishing a broader organization called the African Socialist International. "Uhuru" is the Swahili word for freedom.

Criticism

Critics charge that African nationalism is simply black supremacism in disguise, and some argue that the implication of inherent cultures or unity based on race (a central idea of African nationalism) is itself racist.

Norm R. Allen, Jr., former executive director of Council for Secular Humanism, calls African nationalism a "strange mixture of profound thought and patent nonsense".

On the one hand, Reactionary African Nationalists (RBNs) advocate self-love, self-respect, self-acceptance, self-help, pride, unity, and so forth - much like the right-wingers who promote "traditional family values." But - also like the holier-than-thou right-wingers - RBNs promote bigotry, intolerance, hatred, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, pseudo-science, irrationality, dogmatic historical revisionism, violence, and so forth.^[3]

Allen further criticizes black nationalists' strong "attraction for hardened prisoners and ex-cons", their encouragement of African American-on-African American violence when African American individuals or groups are branded as "Toms", traitors, or "sellouts", the blatantly sexist stance and the similarities to white supremacist ideologies:

Many RBNs routinely preach hate. Just as white supremacists have referred to African Americans as "devils," so have many RBNs referred to whites. White supremacists have verbally attacked gays, as have RBNs. White supremacists embrace paranoid conspiracy theories, as do their African counterparts. Many white supremacists and RBNs consistently deny that they are preaching hate and blame the mainstream media for misrepresenting them. (A striking exception is the NOI's Khallid Muhammad, who, according to Gates, admitted in a taped speech titled "No Love for the Other Side," "Never will I say I am not anti-Semitic. I pray that God will kill my enemy and take him off the face of the planet.") Rather, they claim they are teaching "truth" and advocating the love of their own people, as though love of self and hatred of others are mutually exclusive positions. On the contrary, RBNs preach love of self and hatred of their enemies. (Indeed, it often seems that these groups are motivated more by hatred of their enemies than love of their people.)^[3]

Nigerian-born professor of History and Director of the African American Studies program at the University of Montana, Tunde Adeleke, argues in his book "UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century African Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission" that 19th-century African American nationalism embodied the racist and paternalistic values of Euro-American culture and that African nationalist plans were not designed for the immediate benefit of Africans but to enhance their own fortunes.^[4] Adeleke further criticizes the imperial motives and the concept of a "civilizing mission" operating within the African nationalist thought which aided in "shaping and legitimizing European imperialism of Africa".

References

^ Libraries.wvu.edu
^ Skyers, Sophia Teresa (1982). Marcus Garvey and the philosophy of black pride (M.A. thesis) Wilfrid Laurier University
^ ^a ^b Document sans titre
^ University Press of Kentucky

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Black Nationalist