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

by Mary G. Rolinson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807872789
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/01/2012
Series:	The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Mary G. Rolinson is lecturer of history at Georgia State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction: Rediscovering Southern Garveyism     1
Antecedents     24
Lessons     48
Growth     72
Members     103
Appeal     131
Transition     161
Epilogue: Legacy     192
UNIA Divisions in the Eleven States of the Former Confederacy     197
Numbers of Southern Members of UNIA Divisions by State     200
Numbers of Sympathizers Involved in Mass Meetings and Petitions for Garvey's Release from Jail and Prison, 1923-1927     201
Phases of Organization of UNIA Divisions in the South by State     202
Ministers as Southern UNIA Officers, 1926-1928     203
Profiles of UNIA Members in Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi, 1922-1928, and NAACP Branch Leaders in Georgia, 1917-1920     204
Women Organizers in the UNIA in the South, 1922-1928     214
Notes     217
Bibliography     251
Index     269

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Poor, black southern supporters constituted the bedrock of Garveyism in the United States. They are now given—belatedly and for the first time—their rightful due in the development and sustaining of this extraordinary movement. Grassroots Garveyism is a richly detailed and compelling portrait of the lives and struggles of these Garveyites in the rural South. It is also a gripping epic, profoundly illuminating and moving. Rolinson's is a most remarkable achievement and a wonderful tribute to the previously unsung.—Winston James, University of California, Irvine, and author of Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America



This is an extremely important piece of scholarship. Rolinson takes up a subject that has been all but ignored, and not only excavates it in remarkable ways, but also demonstrates that it was a social and political movement of great significance. Grassroots Garveyism deserves our attention.—Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

Editorial Reviews

Recommended.—CHOICE



Offers fascinating glimpses into heretofore hidden corners of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. . . . A welcome addition to the Garvey literature.—American Historical Review



Technically solid, with clear writing and organization, and would be ideal for classroom use with undergraduates. . . . Nicely balances more general social history with well-timed accounts from inside and outside the UNIA.—Historian



In addition to providing a new angle to the historiography on Marcus Garvey, Rolinsons's monograph contributes another link in the black freedom struggle.—North Carolina Historical Review



Not only shines much needed light on an overlooked segment of Garveyites but also illuminates the interior lives of rural black Southerners. . . . A welcome addition to the scholarship of Garveyism.—Arkansas Historical Quarterly



Makes valuable contributions to our understanding of the Garvey movement and black Southern life, bringing gender analysis to bear on these topics in new and productive ways.—Journal of American Studies



Should be required reading for anyone interested in African-American or southern history in the twentieth century. . . . A valuable study of a neglected aspect of the Garvey movement.—Georgia Historical Quarterly



A brilliant, compelling, and completely convincing revision of the meaning of Garveyism as a whole.—Church History

From the Publisher