Dictionary:
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.
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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
black nationalism
For more information on black nationalism, visit Britannica.com.
US History Encyclopedia:
Black Nationalism
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
Wikipedia:
black nationalism
Black Nationalism is the idea that Black people collectively have a common identity as Black people and should strive to develop an independent and self-reliant Black Nation (literally, or in the context of an independent 'community' or 'society'). There are different Black Nationalist philosophies but the principles of all Black Nationalist idealogies are 1) Black pride and 2) Black economic, political, social and/or cultural independence from White society. Marcus Garvey is considered to be the Grandfather of Black Nationalism.
The origins of Black Nationalism lie in the 19th century with people like Henry McNeal Turner, Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnett, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Paul Cuffe etc. The repatriation of Black American slaves to Liberia or Sierra Leone was a common Black Nationalist theme in the 19th century. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improve Association of the 1910s and 1920s was the most powerful Black Nationalist movement to date, claiming 11 million members. Although the future of Africa is seen as being central to black nationalist ambitions, some adherents to black nationalism are intent on the eventual creation of a separate black American nation in the U.S or Western hemisphere.
According to William Jermiah Moses in his famous work Classical Black Nationalism, black nationalism as a philosophy can be examined from three different periods giving rise to various ideological perspectives for what we can today consider what black nationalism really is.
The first being pre-Classical black nationalism beginning from the time the Africans were brought ashore in the Americas to the Revolutionary period. After the Revolutionary War, a sizable number of Africans in the colonies, particularly in New England and Pennsylvania, were literate and had become disgusted with their social conditions that had spawned from 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. By the time of Post-Reconstruction Era a new form of black nationalism was emerging among various African-American clergy circles. Separate circles had already been established and were accepted by African-Americans because of the overt oppression that been in existence since the inception of the United States. This phenomenon led to the birth of modern black nationalism which stressed the need to separate and build separate communities that promotes strong racial pride and also to collectivize resources. This ideology had became the philosophy of groups like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam and the latter Nation of Gods and Earths. Although, the Sixties brought on a heightened period of reglious, cultural and political nationalism, black nationalism would later influence afrocentricity .
Background
Lewis Woodson
Historian Floyd Miller wrote that Woodson utilized the pen name Augustine, and suggested that Woodson was the father of black nationalism.[1] During a four year period (1837-1841), as "Augustine," Woodson wrote a series of letters that were published in the Colored American newspaper. These letters advocated initiatives independent of the benevolence of whites to create institutions, including churches, newspapers, and schools. Woodson/Augustine advocated preparation for the time when the multitudes of American slaves would gain freedom, and require social, organizational, and financial assistance. Unlike most black abolitionists, who altered positions, Woodson never advocated emigration to Africa or a slave uprising. Woodson was ordained as an AME minister in Ohio in 1826. In 1830 he attended the first national convention of African American leaders in Philadelphia. He and Rev. Daniel Payne, two other blacks and a group of white clergy formed the founding Board of Directors of Wilberforce University in 1856.
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey encouraged Black people around the world to be proud of their race and to see beauty in their own kind. A central idea to Garveyism was that Black 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 unite. Black people, Garvey felt, should love and take care of other Black people. The principles of Garveyism are race first, self-reliance and nationhood. Race first is the idea that Blacks should support other Black people first and foremost, self-reliance is the idea that Black people should be politically and economically self-reliant (it was important to Garvey that Blacks develop businesses owned and operated by Blacks and that they patronize these businesses) and nationhood is the idea that Blacks should created a United States of Africa which would safeguard the interests of Black people worldwide. To disseminate the UNIA's program, Garvey founded the Negro World newspaper and to encourage Black economic independence, he founded the Black Star Line in 1919 as well as the Negro Factories Corporation. The UNIA also initiated the Universal African Legion, a paramilitary group, the Black Cross Nurses, the African Black Cross Society and the Black Cross Trading and Navigation Corporation. Garvey attracted millions of supporters and claimed eleven million members for the UNIA. Marcus Garvey, however, did not advocate that all blacks should leave the United States to emigrate to Africa (a strong United States of Africa would protect the interests of all Black people everywhere in the world so a physical migration of all Blacks in the West was unnecessary and, in some cases, undesirable). Although Marcus Garvey was an ardent supporter of racial separatism (he encouraged Blacks to separate themselves from Whites residentially, develop their own all Black businesses and schools, and preached against inter-racial marriage as 'race suicide'), 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 black 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 idealogical son of Marcus Garvey) and his African Nationalist Pioneer Movement. 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 black leaders worked in the civil rights
movement to integrate blacks into mainstream American life, Malcolm X preached
independence. He maintained that Western culture, and the Judeo-Christian religious
traditions on which it is based, was inherently racist. Constantly ridiculing mainstream civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X declared that nonviolence was the "philosophy of the
fool." In response to Reverend 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 black people must develop their own society and ethical values,
including the self-help, community-based enterprises that the black Muslims supported. He also thought that African Americans
should reject integration or cooperation with whites. Malcolm was increasingly moving towards a political response to racism, he
called for a "black revolution," which he declared would be "bloody" and would
renounce any sort of "compromise" with whites. After taking part in a Hajj (pilgrimage to
Mecca), he recanted such extremist opinions in favor of mainstream Islam and
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 black 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 analyses 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 blacks in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Black Power represented both a conclusion to the decade's civil rights movement and an alternative means of combatting the racism that persisted despite the efforts of black 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 blacks should focus on improving their own communities, rather than striving for complete integration, and that blacks had a duty to retaliate 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 blacks, especially the African roots of their identity. This view encouraged study and celebration of black history and culture. In the late 1960s black college students requested curricula in African-American studies that explored their distinctive culture and history. Still another view of black Power called for a revolutionary political struggle to reject racism and economic exploitation in the United States and abroad, as well as colonialism. This interpretation encouraged the alliance of non-whites, including Latina/os & Chicana/os and Asians, to improve the quality of their lives.
Uhuru Movement
The Uhuru Movement is the largest contemporary black movement advocating black nationalism. It 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.
A critical view
Critics charge that black 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 Black nationalism) is itself racist.
Norm R. Allen, Jr., executive director of African Americans for Humanism, calls black nationalism a "strange mixture of profound thought and patent nonsense".
On the one hand, Reactionary Black 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.[2]
Allen further criticizes black nationalists strong "attraction for hardened prisoners and ex-cons", their encouragement of black-on-black violence when black 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 blacks 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 black counterparts. RBNs and white supremacists bash white Jews and sell anti-Jewish literature.[...] 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 Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission" that 19th-century black American nationalism embodied the racist and paternalistic values of Euro-American culture and that black 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 black nationalist thought which aided in “shaping and legitimizing European imperialism of Africa”.
Although compelled to identify with and embrace Africa, these nationalists harbored strong reservations. Socialized in a Eurocentric environment, where they were imbued with negative conceptions of Africa, they approached Africa with the same paternalism and condescension that the Europeans had adopted [5]
See also
- Harry Haywood
- Back-to-Africa movement
- Black Muslim
- Ethnic nationalism
- Black anarchism
- Pacific Movement of the Eastern World
- Black supremacy
- Pan Africanism
- Romantic nationalism
- White nationalism
References
- ^ Floyd Miller, "The Father of Black Nationalism," Civil War History, vol. 17, no. 4 (December 1971)
- ^ http://perso.orange.fr/centralparkattacks/ref11.html
- ^ http://perso.orange.fr/centralparkattacks/ref11.html
- ^ http://www.kentuckypress.com/viewbook.cfm?Category_ID=1&Group=2&ID=644
- ^ http://www.westafricareview.com/vol2.2/walker.html
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| US History Encyclopedia. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Black nationalism". Read more |
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