15 Black Nationalist Women Who You Should Know
Table of Contents
What is Black nationalism?
Keisha N. Blain, who has studied Black intellectual traditions for the past decade, describes this phenomenon in her book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2018):
...What has distinguished Black nationalist thought in the United States from other political ideologies is a militant response to White supremacy, a recognition of the distinctiveness of Black culture and history, and an emphasis on how people who represent a "nation within a nation" ought to create for themselves autonomous spaces in which to advance their own social, political, and economic goals.
At the heart of Black nationalism is a recognition that integration, were it ever to be realized, cannot fully address the persistent challenges of people of African descent in the United States and other parts of the [African] diaspora.
Malcolm X, one of the most influential pioneers of the idea, defined Black nationalism as follows:
The political philosophy of Black nationalism means that the Black man should be in control of the politics in his own community - that the politicians in the community should be Black men answerable only to the people of that Black community...
The economic philosophy of Black nationalism means that the Black man in the Black community should be permitted to be re-educated to the point where he can see how to establish his own businesses and factories and control the economy of his own community whereby he can employ himself, clothe himself, and house himself instead of having to be a welfare recipient or constantly begging the White man downtown.
And the social philosophy of Black nationalism is that the Black man should be proud of his own society, he should be ready and willing at all times to eliminate the ills and evils of his own society, and thereby not having to force himself into White society where he is not wanted.
(emphasis added)
Malcolm X speaks at a news conference in New York on his concept of Black nationalism, March 12, 1964
Black nationalism is circumscribed by four key tenets: pride in Black racial identity or in Black people (and often in what they have accomplished in history), the redemption of Africa for African people (from exploitation by foreign powers), Black economic self-sufficiency, and Black political self-determination. For the last two to work most efficiently, many people who identify with Black nationalism have also advocated for racial separatism.
But it is important that we understand Black nationalism through a broad historical lens. ‘Similar to other ideologies,’ says Blain, ‘Black nationalism is neither static nor monolithic.’ There are still certain boundaries to consider. For example, there have been Black radicals who identify themselves with communism, but in her research, Blain found that Black women who embraced Black nationalism usually subscribed to a community-oriented brand of capitalism and adopted this as a framework for Black liberation.
On the basis of these two perspectives – Malcolm’s and Blain’s – Black women have contributed much to the development of Black nationalist theory all over the world.
Malcolm, from the view of a man, emphasizes the role of the Black man in the process of nation-building. But what did Black women have to say about the role of the Black woman in that process and what Black people on a whole should be doing to make Black collective progress a reality?
Let’s take a look.
15. Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Ida Bell Wells (1862-1931) was probably not the first name that came to mind when you saw the headline.
But given her long campaign against the terrors of lynching and its crippling effects on Black morale, it should come as no surprise that she was also a campaigner for Black unity and collective engagement in politics and economics for the progress of her people. Wells is a prime example of the fact that there were many activists and intellectuals among the Black masses who were ready and willing to join the pantheon of nationalists we know of today.
In an opinion column for the American Baptist titled “Race Pride,” Wells wrote the following:
Ida B. Wells
From The Story of the Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1920-1922 (1922?)
(Source: New York Public Library)
A proper self-respect is expected of races as [it is] of individuals. We need more race love - [a] tie of racehood should bind us [like a] tie of brotherhood, beget a tenderness and helpfulness for the weaknesses and failings, and [give us] a more hearty appreciation of each other.
United, we could withstand any foe, [and] break down any prejudice. As neither Byron's withered foot nor Milton's blindness prevented them becoming two of the world's greatest poets, neither will our color prevent us rising to as great heights as have been attained by any.
Unlike other, more militant proponents of Black nationalism such as her contemporary, Martin Delany, and later figures such as Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Elijah Muhammad, Wells was not in favor of Black people separating from White society and forming their own nation.
Unity among ourselves is desired but not isolation from those around us.
We are Negroes, but we are also Americans.
Wells’ stance is made all the more certain in the way that she aligned herself with British Quaker Catherine Impey (1847-1923) six years later. Impey was an advocate for interracial marriage as a solution to the race problem in America. Together with Wells, Impey formed The Society for the Recognition of the Universal Brotherhood of Man to oppose racial segregation. It is also important that we acknowledge Well’s own personal interactions with White people. Wells admits in her diary that on her passage to meet with Impey in England, she found the flirtations of ‘fifteen young Englishmen in one party’ not only a great shock to her American sensitivities, but thoroughly flattering. (Impey would not be as fortunate to escape public exposure for entertaining such behaviors. Her proposal of marriage to a mutual friend of East Indian heritage ended her civil rights career.)
So Wells was no Delany. Still, she articulated many of the same ideas being advanced by Black nationalists in her day.
Some of these ideas continue to resonate with thinkers of the present generation. It was her work, after all, that paved the way for modern campaigns for social justice like #BlackLivesMatter and, if Wells was around today, there is no doubt that she would have been a major supporter of the Buy Black movement.
Like her friend Frederick Douglass, Wells believed that civil rights concessions by White people was only half the battle. Hard work and self-defense were equally (if not more) fundamental to Black survival in America. They needed a certain amount of economic leverage in order to make political demands.
‘In numbers, wealth and intelligence is the strength necessary to a concession of our rights,’ she reasoned.
Against this truth, a charge was in order:
[Let's] get wealth among ourselves by dealing with each other, and prove our race by supporting and patronizing [our Black businesses].
Backed by the support of each other we can demand what we will.
Wells witnessed other groups making great strides in American society and she wanted the same for her people.
Social commentators in our time like Dr. Claude Anderson and Dr. Boyce Watkins constantly point to how White and Asian immigrant communities survived historically by pooling their resources together and committing themselves to their own businesses.
Wells was no different.
The unity existing among the Jews, Irish, and Germans in a community, is the secret of their wonderful success, in establishing themselves as American citizens.
They have their own houses of worship and social circles, yet those three factors, numbers, wealth and intelligence have opened all the avenues of trade, politics, civil and social equality to them, and in making up the teachers of our public schools, all these nationalities are represented.
In this town [Saint Paul, Minnesota] we have an Irishman and a Jew as editors of two of our dailies - also an Italian is representing America in the State Legislature.
The wealth, united effort, and intelligence of these different peoples together with their own brains placed them at the head of American institutions, as much American as any native.
For her passion in organizing Black men and Black women against White supremacy, Wells was branded a ‘Negro subversive’ by the establishment and barred by U.S. intelligence services from leaving the country to attend the First Pan-African Congress in 1919, organized by W.E.B. Du Bois from Paris. This was done in order to prevent any interference with the U.S. government’s full expressed support of the decisions being made during the Paris Peace Conference that same year (namely the continued colonial administration of former German territories in Africa under U.S. allies France and Britain following World War One). Du Bois had been seeking to defend the interests of colonized Africans before the various nations gathered at that conference.
Walter Loving, a Black man who served as an informant to the Military Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Department of War, requested in a special report to the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the FBI) that Wells and a number of other leading figures of the Black community be denied passports and have their travel records sealed.
I recommend this in the case of Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett especially. This subject is a known race agitator.
Another name on Loving’s hit list was millionaire and Black nationalist sympathizer Madame C. J. Walker.
Earlier in 1919, Well’s friend Walker founded a Black internationalist organization called the International League for Darker People (ILDP) at her Villa Lewaro mansion home in New York with Black nationalist icon Marcus Garvey, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, and Abyssinian Baptist Church leader Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. The purpose was to unite with other non-European people from other parts of the world in formulating an agenda based on their mutual interests and to present this agenda during the peace talks in Paris. But unlike Wells, Walker would make no public statements to associate herself with Black nationalist sentiments. Out of concern for her business standing and her social reputation, Walker soon resigned from her position as treasurer of the ILDP, thus ending its short run.
14. Louise Little
You’re probably wondering why a man, Malcolm X, appears in this article about the contributions of women to the development of Black nationalism. There is a common saying that behind every great man is also a great woman. The life of Malcolm X proves this statement to be 100% true.
Louise Little
From the book The Life of Louise Norton Little (2021) by Jessica Russell,
copyright Our Hidden Gem, LLC
(Source: Find A Grave)
*used with permission*
Malcolm’s great grandparents on his mother’s side were from a part of West Africa in what is now Nigeria. They instilled a sense of pride in their granddaughter, Louise Langdon, by teaching how their people in Grenada resisted the whims of White oppressors. They further demonstrated, through their own example, the importance of hard work and self-reliance.
Malcolm’s parents continued that tradition. Both became members of a Black nationalist organization called the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL for short, and referred to simply as the UNIA). The family has always held a firm belief that Malcolm’s father, Baptist minister Earl Little, was killed for his insistence on spreading UNIA messages while Malcolm was still a young child. Consequently, this left his mother to assume all household responsibilities. So, although his mother’s active role in the UNIA as a chapter secretary and as one of UNIA leader Marcus Garvey’s ‘closest confidants,’ according to Cambridge scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs, is eerily absent from his autobiography, the impetus for Malcolm’s vision of Black liberation can be attributed, in part, to his mother Louise (1894/1897-1991).
By Malcolm’s own admission, his mother ‘looked like a White woman’ and ‘her accent did not sound like a Negro’s,’ but what stood out most of all was her prideful African spirit – a spirit that he, too, would inherit.
My mother was, above everything else, a proud woman...
That pride would come in handy on more than one occasion. While her husband, Earl, was tasked with managing outreach efforts as president of a UNIA branch they helped to establish in Omaha, Nebraska, Louise was reporting to the head office on their progress.
Malcolm recalled his mother telling him of an incident one night in 1925 when an armed gang of White supremacists rode to the family’s home and threatened to kill her husband for ‘”spreading trouble” among the “good” Negroes of Omaha.’ But as they circled the house, breaking every window, Louise Little remained cool as ever. In Malcolm’s retelling of the story, she ‘went to the front door and opened it.’ Then, ‘standing where they could see her pregnant condition, she told them that she was home alone with her three small children.’ Malcolm was in her womb.
In that very moment, the essence of Black motherhood was on full display. By brandishing her belly – by answering their ‘shotguns and rifles’ with the holstered Malcolm – Louise Little was already calling her son to the deliverance of her people.
She wanted those hooded hoodlums to know that she had nothing to hide. Malcolm was not to be hidden, either. As young as he was then, it was his first lesson in social activism. Malcolm was learning not to hide in the face of adversity, but to meet his adversaries head-on. By further pelting them with the news that her husband was ‘away preaching, in Milwaukee,’ Malcolm’s mother was insinuating, in her own simple way, that there was nothing they could do to silence him.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that Louise’s letters to the editor of the official UNIA organ, the Negro World, were brought to light once more.
This trove of documents provides us with a window into the origins of Malcolm’s philosophy and the work of yet another Black nationalist heroine. They show us that Louise understood what was necessary for strong masculine leadership in the movement.
Her observations on the frontlines and by her husband’s side in the struggle gave her much-needed insight on the challenges of community organizing. From there, she learned how UNIA members could effectively support the efforts of their present patriarch and how she could be a pillar for future leaders.
But the system would ensure that her own highlight reel was a short one. For the crime of mothering another child without a father, she was dragged from her household, declared mentally ‘insane’ and locked away for almost 25 years.
And yet, her legacy speaks for itself. It tells us that her home was no “madhouse.” It was under the same roof that Marcus, on the run from the law, found shelter and Malcolm, in the prime of his youth, found sustenance.
Two of our greatest warriors – Marcus Garvey, through the UNIA, and Malcolm X, through the launch of another Black nationalist organization called the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) – they sought to bring us on the path to Black unity; Louise Little was the bridge uniting them.
An article by Louise Little, the mother of Malcolm X
From the Negro World, September 26, 1925, page 10
(Source: New York Public Library)
Louise was a believer so that Malcolm could be an achiever.
The more that we research the history of Black nationalism, the more it becomes clear to us that without the faith, the encouragement, and the nurturing spirit of sister soldiers like Louise Little, we could not have had the brilliant bastion of Black brotherhood that we know today.
13. Adelaide Casely-Hayford
Adelaide Smith Casely-Hayford (1868-1960) was a Pan-Africanist and a self-proclaimed ‘race woman’ from Sierra Leone, then a British colony.
She was married in Britain, then separated from her husband of 11 years in 1914. After a brief sojourn in Ghana, she returned to Sierra Leone where she wrote and spoke publicly concerning the marginalization of women in African societies. As she encountered the Garvey movement in 1919, she began to incorporate Black nationalism into her own feminist perspectives on education and religion.
She recognized a need for African people to develop a deeper sense of race, to be more comfortable in their own Black skin, to have a greater pride in their pursuit of nationhood, and to appreciate the value of their own cultural expressions.
Her new-found philosophy is summarized in the following statement, recorded by her biographer and namesake Adelaide M. Cromwell (1919-2019):
The greatest need in Africa is to teach honesty, truth, purity, and uprightness, [and for Africans] to be proud of their color rather than ashamed of it.
In a matter of months, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, who had been serving as president of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), changed her allegiance. She was now the national president of the women’s section of the UNIA.
Even though she was forced to cut ties with Garvey’s organization the following year, the ideas that she absorbed in that short period continued to influence her work. Adelaide remained a staunch advocate for Black self-determination and for the rights of indigenous African women. She championed Black entrepreneurship and often emphasized the importance of developing and supporting Black-owned institutions that would provide employment and stability to the Black community.
Adelaide Casely-Hayford’s greatest legacy may be her push towards African-centered education, and her campaign to open a Girl’s Vocational and Training School, which best exemplified that purpose.
The inspiration for that idea came to her when a fellow African remarked upon the beauty of her home decor, which was designed by ‘native’ people. She responded to her friend by saying it had never once occurred to her that African art could be considered beautiful or that anything produced outside of Europe could be of any value at all. Right then, it dawned on her that this sort of thinking was something that was taught to her through the Western system of education. And she was not alone.
Instantly my eyes were opened to the fact that the education meted out to us had, either consciously or unconsciously, taught us to despise ourselves...We needed an education more adapted to our requirements...
In my mind's eye,...I could see the young mothers teaching the little children...that to be Black was not a curse nor a disgrace...[and] teaching their sons the glory of Black citizenship, rather than encouraging them to bewail the fact that they were not White...I could picture the sons and daughters of Africa's race 'looking the whole world in the face,' without any apology whatsoever for the color of their skin, and with such self-respect as to command the respect of all nations.
There was just one problem: who would support her?
She had tried soliciting UNIA members, but that was a bust. All the funds she thought she raised were Garvey’s and he had not sanctioned her work.
She decided that she would travel to the United States. Surely, she must have thought, the land of Marcus Garvey will be more forgiving. She visited many places with a chest full of artifacts, and proudly adorned with her niece in African style.
She even managed to visit Booker T. Washington’s world-renowned Tuskegee Institute, which she thought of as a prototype for her humble experiment.
Adelaide was not one to “shuck and jive” for White philanthropists. But somewhere along the way, she would come to the realization that the pockets of African America only went so deep. Her travel expenses had taken their toll and she soon lost the confidence of her continental sponsors. She returned from the land of promise, a prodigal daughter. Everywhere she turned, there was no one to receive her.
Due to her financial shortcomings, Adelaide first opened the school out of her own home. In time, her calls in the community brought a few dozen students. In addition to the standard English curriculum (to which she added an assortment of ‘domestic sciences’), this school taught African history, African culture, African literature, African languages, African music, and skills that were relevant to the development of the local economy. These skills included dyeing, weaving, woodwork, leatherwork, brickwork, and pottery. With help from her daughter Gladys, Adelaide also hosted shows for the public that incorporated traditional African folklore into songs, dances, plays, and poetry – all of which were performed by the students themselves.
In the midst of her struggles with the poverty of the indigenous masses, the reluctance of her American audiences, the bigotry of the European colonists, and the narrow-mindedness of the Creole elites (in which she too was numbered), it was in this project that Adelaide found a measure of success.
As one participant remembered it:
Everybody in Freetown who was anybody attended the shows - Europeans, Asiatics, Americans, and Africans crowded the Wilberforce hall for tickets and as patrons. Her plays were always based on African life and belief. They were unique. The paintings of the screens with the tough of African Village homes done by...two Sierra Leoneans who were trained as educationalists in America, were superb.
Casely-Hayford’s model of schooling was comparable to later forms implemented by Afrocentric scholars in America, especially those associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s. Among them were Haiba Karenga and Dorothy Jamal’s Us School of Afroamerican Culture in Los Angeles, California; David Hilliard, Brenda Bay, and Ericka Huggins’ Black Panther Intercommunal Youth Institute in Oakland, California; Amiri and Amina Baraka’s Spirit House and African Free School in Newark, New Jersey; and Owusu Sadaukai’s Malcolm X Liberation University in Durham and Greensboro, North Carolina.
12. Claudia Jones
From the Port-of-Spain to the ports of New York came Claudia Jones (1915-1964). Jones, a native of Trinidad, joined the Communist Party and spent 32 years fighting for the rights of Black workers and for fair wages on behalf of all Americans.
Jones started her career in activism rallying with communist protestors in defense of the Scottsboro Nine – a group of Black teenage boys who had been falsely accused of raping two White women. She later said that she was ‘impressed by the communist speakers…who related the Scottsboro case to the struggle of the Ethiopian people against fascism.’
Jones edited several papers and was soon appointed to the Communist Party’s Women’s Commission. She used that platform to amplify the voices of working women. But for Jones and other Black women, sexism was understood to be part of a larger struggle – a struggle that crossed racial lines as well. Trinidadian researcher A. Corey Gilkes notes that Claudia Jones was not afraid to call out her Party comrades for their prejudicial treatment of Black women, especially those who had been relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy.
For giving speeches and leading demonstrations in support of women’s rights, Jones was arrested three times. She was finally deported to England in 1955.
There, she continued her work with the Communist Party.
Jones quickly recognized that the politics of this new environment also required a new approach. The rights of the poor, or of women or of Black people were not the only issues at stake anymore, but also those of immigrant workers, and most of all, workers from the Global South. Jones rose to the challenge and co-founded the West Indian Workers and Students’ Association. This was an organization that paralleled the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association (NWCSA), which had been established over a decade prior by another labor organizer named Elma Francois back in her home country.
In 1958, Jones produced Britain’s first Black newspaper called the West Indian Gazette in which she called attention to the abuses of Caribbean people – especially Jamaicans – living in England. Her writings served to awaken the consciousness of the Afro-Caribbean community. After a series of race riots, Jones became one of the founding organizers of another important institution, the Notting Hill Carnival. Carnival is a cultural celebration with roots in Africa, and thus, a way for Africans abroad to reconnect with their heritage. An integral part of Claudia’s version was a beauty contest for the title of “Carnival Queen.”
In the last year of her life, Claudia Jones campaigned for the release of South African freedom-fighter Nelson Mandela and other anti-Apartheid activists. Though she never lived to see the full extent of her efforts, Jones can be regarded as a trailblazer of Black women’s advocacy and for human rights around the world.
Claudia Jones seated at her desk reviewing a copy of the West Indian Gazette
1960s
London, England
(Source: New York Public Library)
A collage of photographs showing Black women in the UK Women’s Rights Movement
Blain is careful to distinguish the political propaganda of Black women in the labor movements, which she describes as intersectional, with the race rhetoric of Black nationalist women who she describes as ‘more conservative.’
Still, there were certain similarities in the expressions that they gave to those ideas.
Both sought to expand the rights and privileges of women even as they struggled with men towards achieving common goals.
And both have their unsung heroes – thousands of radical women like Grace Campbell, Hermina Huiswoud, Ida Carter, Carrie Smith, Mattie Woodson, Maggie Jones, Maude White, Thyra Edwards, and Esther Jackson – who strove to forge a better society for all.
Jones sought to makes their names known.
She believed that Black women – those most adversely affected by the plans of the imperialist elites – were destined to be the most dynamic leaders of the resistance.
Once Negro women undertake action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition is greatly enhanced.
Trinidadian feminist scholar Carole Boyce Davies reads this as a challenge to the attitudes of both Black nationalists and White communists (who also recognized “Black America” as a sovereign nation). Here, Jones is saying that the one thing standing in the way of progress on both fronts is their mutual suppression of Black women. Black women, being the peons of poverty, prejudice, and patriarchy (first codified by Jones’ comrade Louise Thompson Patterson as ‘triple exploitation’), were the most powerless of people on the planet. In her own words, Jones calls them ‘the most oppressed stratum of the whole population.’ Once the struggle of this stratum is brought to center stage within these movements, Jones argued, and their chains stripped away, all else will follow. This line of logic was most eloquently echoed in later years by yet another communist and Black nationalist woman named Angela Davis.*
In her book, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (2017), U.S. historian Ashley D. Farmer notes that the Communist Party tended to deviate at times from the Black nationalist agenda in favor of more liberal, integrationist approaches to race issues. But Black women were not always on board with these policies. Jones, she says, was one of them.
Theorist and activist Claudia Jones was one of many Black women who refused to let the concept of Black nationhood and self-determination disappear from Party debate and discussion...Jones used her prominent position in the Communist Party to reinvigorate debates over Black nationhood and re-envision the role of Black domestic workers within this political frame.
Long after the Communist Party had already abandoned the cause of Black nationalism, Jones was collecting government statistics and publishing her research on wealth disparities in Party papers in order to demonstrate the need to place the plight of Black women first and foremost. Her argument was simple: As we lift up the Black woman, who is the moral and economic cornerstone of the Black community, the Black nation will rise as well, and with men and women of all shapes, sizes, textures, and colors on equal terms, the end of all oppression is in sight.
11. Ethel Maude Collins
Like Garvey, Ethel Collins hailed from Jamaica.
As a proud Black woman, she was drawn to his program by the opportunities it provided, not only for jobs, but for visual representation in positions of leadership (more on that later).
Collins opened a beauty supply store out of her apartment in Harlem and Blain believes that she used it to promote Garvey’s message of racial uplift.
By 1924, UNIA women were regularly preaching against White fashion trends in favor of their girls keeping a ‘natural’ look. Collins’ store is likely to have stocked alternative supplies for local hairdressers with connections to the UNIA.
The work of these radical women anticipated that of Black Power activists in the late 60s and early 70s – most notably Black Panther Party Communications Director Kathleen Cleaver – who advocated for a departure from Eurocentric standards of beauty and a return to a “more African” aesthetic.
Kathleen Cleaver and other members of the Black Panther Party speak to reporters on the significance of Black people embracing their natural beauty, c. 1968
As acting secretary of the UNIA and secretary of another organization Garvey started called Garvey Club, Inc., Collins joined other Black nationalist women in the work of organizing the masses for UNIA projects. In 1940, it was Secretary-General Collins who called upon Garveyites worldwide to support their ailing leader before his imminent death.
Collins was one of many Black nationalists who saw the need for Black people around the world to prioritize the development of a prosperous nation in Africa as the answer to their common problem of racism. Together, they could establish a country that was free of the terrors that they faced in places dominated by White supremacists (the United States for example). She pointed to the fact that African people have already assisted Europeans in building a nation that they could control as evidence for the possibility of African people doing the same thing for themselves.
America knows the story of our 300 years of suffering. We have watered her vegetation with our tears. We have built her cities and laid the foundations of her materialism with the mortar of our blood and bones. We have fought in all wars and die courageously.
...
We want the right to have a country of our own. Africa is the legitimate, moral, and righteous home of the Black peoples of the world.
...
The Pilgrim[s] and colonists did it for America, and [we] can do it for Africa.
10. Irene Moorman Blackstone
Irene Moorman Blackstone (1872 – ?) was a businesswoman from Harlem, New York. In 1917, she was listed in state records as a founding director of the newly incorporated UNIA. In this organization, she served as the president of the New York Ladies’ Division. Prior to that, she was the president of the Negro Women’s Business League.
Blackstone inspired Black women not to live in the shadow of women’s advocacy groups that were dominated by their White counterparts, but to form their own organizations or to push for change within existing organizations like the UNIA that gave them a proper platform from which they could air their grievances and develop solutions of their own.
Black Americans were in a constant state of fear and dependency. Blackstone believed, like Wells before her, that Black cooperative economics was essential in order for her people to stand on their own two feet. In a speech before an audience of UNIA members, she called for a boycott of White-owned establishments, which had been supporting the racist power structure all along, and for Black citizens to give their hard-earned dollars to Black business-owners instead.
Why should all the White men come up here on your main streets...and have all of the business places?...If you would boycott the White business man in Harlem, you would find Black businesses on the avenue[s].
Irene Blackstone
From the Colored American Magazine, Volumes 12-13 (1907), page 230
(Source: University of California
These words were reproduced by fellow Harlemite Malcolm X in his infamous speech “The Ballot or the Bullet.”
In one version of his speech, delivered on April 3, 1964, Malcolm said:
Why should White people be running all the stores in our community? Why should White people be running the banks of our community? Why should the economy of our community be in the hands of the White man? Why?
If a Black man can't move his store into a White community, you tell me why a White man should move his store into a Black community.
Let us never forget that a Black woman said it first.
9. Maymie Leonie Turpeau de Mena Aiken
Maymie de Mena (1891-1953), from Louisiana, joined the UNIA while living in Nicaragua.
Under the mentorship of famed actress-turned-activist and eventual UNIA president Henrietta Vinton Davis, de Mena sharpened her skills of oration until she became the national organizer of the UNIA. She traveled extensively on promotional tours as a speaker and translator, rallying other women to the cause.
During these travels, de Mena took Malcolm’s “by any means” mandate to a whole ‘nother level, periodically passing as White, Spanish, and Hispanic American in order to evade the watchful eyes of government authorities.
Women in the Garvey movement, says Blain, played a pioneering role in twentieth-century Black nationalism. It was women like de Mena who carried the baton after Garvey’s deportation in 1927. Her tours in both the United States and in Latin America helped rejuvenate the spirit of Garvey’s movement; crowds flocked from near and far to hear of his solution for the Black nation.
Even those who had left the organization were encouraged to return in large numbers.
Part of her political legacy is her call for the establishment of maritime trade between Black businesses in Central America and the Caribbean.
In the 1930s, Maymie de Mena moved to Jamaica and married a fellow Garveyite named Percival Aiken.
She continued to play a very active role in the UNIA, pledging to center her efforts on Jamaican society.
Madame Maymie Leonie Turpeau de Mena, as pictured on her visa
June 1925
(Source: New York Public Library
Maymie de Mena started her own paper called the Ethiopian World in 1934 in which members wrote on the collective predicament of Black people in the United States and agitated for a mass exodus to Africa, and to Liberia in particular.
She also started a ladies column in Kingston’s New Negro Voice, another paper loyal to the cause. De Mena dedicated this platform to the writings and activities of Black women around the world.
Her “women’s nights,” which were held on a monthly basis brought Black women from all walks of life under one roof for intellectual conversations on the standing of women in Jamaican society and in the movement. As these women listened to talks by established leaders and organizers, they were able to cultivate their own ideas of femininity and were equally motivated to challenge the manifestations of patriarchy in their daily lives.
8. Henrietta Vinton Davis
Henrietta Davis (1860-1941) was a very accomplished woman and well before her acquaintance with the potency Garvey offered to women of her race. Still, she saw it fit to leave her burgeoning career in showbiz to apply her wealth and her talents in the struggle for racial progress.
She became the breathing embodiment of Black nationalism for both men and women of the UNIA. This was especially true for the women, who were determined at the international UNIA convention for the year 1922 to grant her powers of executive authority to the fullest extent imaginable so that she alone could manage their affairs, with the ultimate say on how far they could take their activities, and would be answerable to no man (not even Garvey himself).
Henrietta Vinton Davis
From Women of Distinction: Remarkable in Works and Invincible in Character (1893)
(Source: State Library of North Carolina via the Internet Archive)
Garvey had crowned Henrietta their matriarch just two years prior with these words:
Those of you who know Henrietta Vinton Davis know that she is the greatest woman of the Negro race today. (Cheers) Truly we can say that Henrietta Vinton Davis is the jewel of the Negro race. (Renewed cheers)
But for Garvey, these demands for unconditional autonomy were far too radical, even for one who was regarded as the quintessential Black nationalist.
In spite of that glass ceiling and Garvey’s extensive record of discounting her achievements, Davis’ contributions to the standing of women in the UNIA is undeniable.
From 1921, Davis had formed a contingent of women within the UNIA called the Black Cross Nurses, which was based on the American Red Cross.
The Black Cross Nurses were tasked with providing quality care and health education for Black communities, many of which had been shut off from public services.
In addition to preventative medicine and emergency relief, they were also involved in the preparation of food and the distribution of used clothing for those in need.
The impact of the Black Cross Nurses transcended class and race in countries like Belize, where nurses often used their positions to reinforce color politics and to secure greater privileges for members of their own caste. But, for the most part, the Black Cross Nurses, like the Universal African Motor Corps – another women’s auxiliary group within the UNIA – were a boon to Black society.
The African Motor Corps was the women’s counterpart to the African Legion, a militant body of male members who stood ready at all times to defend their people. But the Black Cross Nurses provided a broader, and more practical function. These women, clad in their modest, White uniforms were a welcome sight in the streets of major cities as they marched in UNIA parades.
In this simple, yet extravagant manner, they too were an inspiration to future generations of women everywhere.
7. Maria W. Stewart
Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879) was one of the earliest known espousers of Black nationalist ideologies in the United States. Stewart was engaging public audiences at a time when many White women dared not do so.
She appealed for others to do the same.
If other races can agitate for their freedom, why can’t we?
All the nations of the Earth are calling out for liberty and equality. Away, away with tyranny and oppression! And shall Afric's sons be silent any longer?
We have suffered ourselves to be considered as dastards, cowards, mean, faint-hearted wretches; and on this account, (not because of our complexion), many despise us and would gladly spurn us from their presence.
She called on the brothers:
This is the land of freedom...Every man has a right to express his opinion...God...hath bestowed upon you reason and strong powers of intellect. He hath made you to have dominion...He hath crowned you with glory and honor; hath made you but a little lower than the angels; and according to the Constitution of these United States, he hath made all men free and equal.
I am sensible of exposing myself to calumny and reproach; but shall I, for fear of feeble man, who shall die, hold my peace? Shall I, for fear of scoffs and frowns refrain my tongue? Ah no! I speak as one that must give an account at the awful bar of God; I speak as a dying mortal to dying mortals.
We seem to enjoy our suffering, she mused. We seem to be content with the power that they hold on us, their ownership of everything, and their monopoly on information.
Is it possible, I exclaim, that for the want of knowledge, we have labored for hundreds of years to support others, and been content to receive what they chose to give us in return? Cast your eyes about-look as far as you can see-all, all is owned by the lordly White, except here and there a lowly dwelling which the man of color, midst deprivations, fraud and opposition, has been scarce able to procure.
Naturally, the onus fell to those with the greatest opportunities to improve the conditions of the race – the men.
If you are men, convince them that you possess the spirit of men...Have the sons of Africa no souls? Feel they no ambitious desires? Shall the chains of ignorance forever confine them? Shall the insipid appellation of "clever Negroes," or "good creatures;" any longer content them?
Where can we find amongst ourselves the man of science, or a philosopher, or an able statesman, or a counselor at law? Show me our fearless and brave, our noble and gallant ones. Where are our lecturers on natural history, and our critics in useful knowledge? There may be a few such men amongst us, but they are rare.
It is true, our fathers bled and died in the revolutionary war, and others fought bravely [in the War of 1812] under the command of [General Andrew] Jackson, in defense of liberty. But where is the man that has distinguished himself in these modern days by acting wholly in the defense of African rights and liberty?
I am sensible that there are many highly intelligent gentlemen of color in these United States, in the force of whose arguments, doubtless, I should discover my inferiority; but if they are blest with wit and talent, friends and fortune, why have they not made themselves men of eminence, by striving to take all the reproach that is cast upon the people of color, and in endeavoring to alleviate the woes of their brethren in bondage?
Talk, without effort, is nothing; you are abundantly capable, gentlemen, of making yourselves men of distinction; and this gross neglect, on your part, causes my blood to boil within me. Here is the grand cause which hinders the rise and progress of the people of color. It is their want of laudable ambition and requisite courage.
Notice the placement of the word ‘gentlemen.’ In no uncertain terms, it was to the privileged heterosexual – the most genteel of all – that she so desperately appealed. Every known stereotype of his species was summoned. These were the parameters by which he questioned the manhood of others. It was against these very standards that his own manhood was interrogated.
The juxtaposition of the word ‘gentlemen’ with the words ‘capable’ and ‘distinction’ is like a deep canyon between two tall mountains. The implication is clear. In Stewart’s estimation, they had shown themselves to be more gentle than men.
She called on the sisters, too:
O ye daughters of Africa, Awake! Awake! Arise! No longer sleep nor slumber, but distinguish yourselves. Show forth to the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties.
O ye daughters of Africa! What have ye one to immortalize your names beyond the grave? What examples have ye set before the rising generation? What foundation have ye laid for generations yet unborn? Where are our union and love [for one another]?
Black women, she argued, were part of the problem. She scorned them for adopting immoral attitudes and immodest fashions. If more of them would seek to beautify themselves internally with the same energy that they expended emulating secular standards of outward adornment, they would be giving their brothers all the more reason to love, to respect, and to defend their people like White men do for theirs. That kind of motivation, she quipped, does not come from ‘the belle void of intellectual knowledge.’
At the height of slavery – a very desperate time for the majority of Blacks in America, few were willing to voice their support for such desperate measures as open resistance to White terror – a terror which most Whites believed was a necessary function of their society. How could Stewart, who was essentially a nobody, make any difference in America?
Stewart acknowledged:
I...was classed as a lady among my race all my life, and never exposed to any hardship.
But, some time after she moved out on her own, things took a turn for the worst. A personal mismanagemnt of finances combined with the onslaught of the Civil War for a downward spiral.
The times began to be hard, and I began to be poor.
Things improved when she met her husband, who was a very prosperous man. But three years after their marriage, tragedy struck again. Her husband died. White speculators took his will away and cheated her out of an inheritance. It was then, in the context of this storm, that she set out, writing and preaching her do-for-self philosophy. ‘Our money…for our children.’ This won her much praise from her community, but little fame, it seems, beyond a small circle of Northern sympathizers.
A re-published collection of her written works from the time of her death in 1879 is prefaced by a brief autobiography in which she tells readers:
The work was suppressed for forty-six years; and the author was struggling during that time in widowhood and sorrow to maintain her dignity and standing as a woman and a Christian in poverty's dark shade.
She defied every major barrier – class, sex, and race – in order to promote what her society held to be the greatest of evils – Black liberation. Given her life’s limitations, she was still successful in sharing her story and spreading her truth.
For these reasons, Maria Stewart was arguably one of the most radical Black nationalists in all of history, on par with such stalwarts as her contemporary David Walker – a martyr (or quasi-martyr) for the cause. As a matter of fact, Walker and Stewart knew each other and exchanged ideas. When Walker and his wife left their home in Boston, Stewart and her husband moved in to live there.
The news of David Walker – found dead at his door – was too much to bear. She was still reeling from the loss of her partner; she was devastated by the murder of her friend.
If indeed, the passing of revolutionary zeal was from Walker to Stewart and not vice versa, as some accounts would seem to suggest, Stewart was the worthy incubator. It was she who passed the torch along to such esteemed women as Sojourner Truth and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Her work was also an inspiration to the renowned race leader Frederick Douglass. Lavonda Kay Broadnax, a research specialist at the U.S. Library of Congress, has gone as far as to draw parallels between her radical convictions and those of Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were of the persuasion that a moral crusade for social justice and racial equity was in alignment with God’s plan of salvation for humanity as outlined in the Christian Bible. Both believed that their cause was one worth dying for.
Like King, Stewart’s conception of Christianity had a marked influence on the development of her resolve. It motivated her to confront the injustices of her day and to calculate the total weight of her duty to her society and to her people. Reflecting on her baptism, Stewart wrote:
I...now posses that spirit of independence, that were I called upon, I would willingly sacrifice my life for the cause of God and my [African] brethren.
Elsewhere, she had this to say:
Many will suffer for pleading the cause of oppressed Africa, and I shall glory in being one of her martyrs; for I am firmly persuaded, that the God in whom I trust is able to protect me from the rage and malice of mine enemies, and from them that will rise up against me; and if there is no other way for me to escape, he is able to take me to himself, as he did the most noble, fearless, and undaunted David Walker.
Unlike Walker, Stewart stopped short of advocating for violence as a strategy of survival in America. Rather, she ‘strongly’ recommended that Black American cultivate their talents in order to prove themselves equals to the (White) world.
In spite of her humble beginnings as an indentured servant, Stewart was later known to be a gifted writer and orator. (In fact, U.S. intellectual historian Marilyn Richardson identifies Stewart as America’s first political writer and the first woman of any race to address an audience of both sexes.) Stewart knew that these were rare and valuable attributes for someone of her standing and used them in the hopes that more of her people would gain access to the same opportunities that she had attained for herself.
The U.S. National Park Service assures us that no photos of Stewart are known to exist. However, there are a few first-hand descriptions that do survive.
The White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison recalled that she had ‘a graceful form and a pleasing countenance’ at the height of her activist years. He further noted that she was ‘complexionally identified’ with her race, meaning that anyone who saw her could readily identify her as a Black woman.
Others from her community remembered her as ‘one of the most beautiful and loveliest of women.’ After a series of misfortunes and personal losses, her natural expression was of ‘a quiet sadness and melancholy…sorrowful and mysterious.’ But, with all that she suffered in her personal life, she was still ‘a remarkable woman’ in the eyes of her many benefactors.
6. Mittie Maude Lena Gordon
Mittie Maude Lena Gordon (1889-1961) was a towering giant in the Black nationalist movements of the early 20th century.
Much of her childhood education was built on the teachings of African Methodist Episcopal Church leader Henry McNeal Turner (1834-1915), who urged African Americans to seek better opportunities in the land of their ancestors. She was further spurred into action after witnessing the mob lynching of a Black man near the Louisiana capital in 1898 and the death of her ten-year-old son from injuries suffered as a result of the East St. Louis Race Riot of 1913.
From her own account, Gordon aligned herself with ‘every movement…that claimed to better [our] race’s condition.’
She advanced within the UNIA until she became the lady president of a division in Chicago. Recognizing her potential, Garvey endorsed Gordon for leadership over all Chicago branches of the UNIA. Other male leaders sought to stifle her progress. So she left the UNIA in 1929.
But it would not be the end of Gordon’s career in community organizing.
In response to the Great Depression, Gordon combined elements of Garvey’s UNIA programs with the philosophy of Muslim minister Noble Drew Ali‘s (1886-1929) Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA), which had been established in Newark, New Jersey and incorporated where she lived in Chicago, Illinois, to form a powerful network of activists called the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME).
The PME was the culmination of virtually all of the components of Black nationalist theory and its branches, including Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, Garveyism, Afrocentrism, African Orthodox Christianity, and Afro-Asiatic Islam. Thus, Blain tells us that Gordon’s brand of Black nationalism had ‘widespread appeal’ at a time when most movements were focused on just one thing or another. People were looking for hope at a time of desperation. Black Americans were still largely shut out from mainstream labor unions on account of their race. And some saw within the PME, the fulfillment of promises made by Garvey’s embattled UNIA.
Their numbers swelled and, pretty soon, the PME became ‘the largest Black nationalist organization established by a woman in the United States.’ Gordon and her followers recognized that America was facing a crisis. At the same time, the nation to which they belonged would not be willing for a Garvey or any other member of their community to determine what they could do to help and to protect themselves. They believed that for them to have the privileges of ‘nationality‘ and the ‘economic power‘ that Noble Drew Ali spoke of, they needed to form a nation of their own. In August of 1933, none months after its founding, Gordon presented a petition to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt containing 400,000 signatures of Black citizens who wished to emigrate and join the West African colony of Liberia ‘or some other place or places in Africa where [we] could work out [our] own destiny independently of White people.’ Though Roosevelt elected to take no decisive actions in that regard, he must have recognized the PME petition as a serious challenge to the series of financial solutions then being implemented by his administration. It said that Black America didn’t care for what Roosevelt called his ‘new deal for the American people.’ From then on, they would be dealing with their own problems on their own terms.
Mittie Maude Lena Gordon
(Source: Duke University Libraries)
Our aim is to return to our motherland, to our true name, to our own language and to our true religion.
Therefore, let Africa be free for Africans, those at home and those abroad. We believe in the National-Hood of all Races, and the right of all national movements.
By 1942, the PME recorded that they had over 4,000 members all across the nation from the northwest corner in Washington to the southeast corner in Florida. Gordon’s work was bolstered by the mainstream media, which reported on her eventual success at securing the Virginia Assembly’s financial support for Black citizens emigrating to Liberia and the introduction of the 1939 Greater Liberia Bill (dubbed by some in the community as the ‘Back to Africa bill’) in the U.S. Senate.
What was now on the table was a scheme for the resettlement of Black emigrants in West Africa through the administration of the U.S. military. It took a series of moral compromises to get this far, but the bill was seen by many in the Garveyite movement as a magnificent victory.
Although there were more male members in the PME, women held key positions of leadership. Gordon, for example, was president all on her own. Black women served as national organizers, board members, and chapter supervisors. Blain notes that unlike the UNIA, leadership positions were not gender specific, women presidents in the PME were not relegated to matters of women alone, and Black women were not under direct Black male leadership. All persons in the organization ultimately answered to Gordon, who took an active role in the decision-making processes of each chapter. However, there was an explicit male preference for the position of chapter president and the PME’s UNIA-inspired Protective Corps, was all-male. Both of these policies were a reflection of Gordon’s own mindset on gender roles in a Black nation, which Blain says was that of a traditionalist.
While PME women often demonstrated a resistance to this mindset, the precedent of their leader was one generally embraced by women in the Black Muslim movements – especially those who joined the MSTA’s successor, the NOI – as UC Berkeley professor Ula Yvette Taylor explains at length in her book The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (2017).
5. Audley "Queen Mother" Moore
Audley Moore (1898-1997) was greatly influenced by Garveyism.
Moore’s foray into the world of Black nationalism began when she and others threatened police officers with guns until they bashfully agreed to allow Garvey to speak at a meeting in New Orleans.
Those were fond memories for Moore.
Garvey brought something very beautiful to us...He made us conscious of the fact...that we were somebody...that we had a right to be restored to our proper selves.
From 1951 to 1952, Moore was a leading member of the Sojourners For Truth and Justice, a group that was concerned primarily with the issues of Black women. Other members included the aforementioned communists Louise Patterson and Claudia Jones, plus three further names you might recognize: Beulah Richardson, Alice Childress, and Lorraine Hansberry.
Moore was never one to sit on the sidelines when it came to discussions about the conditions of her people.
She demonstrated this zeal for leadership when she was first introduced to the Communist Party at a protest to free the Scottsboro Boys.
I’ve never in my life seen such an outpouring of people. I saw signs: “Death to the Lynchers!” Oh! That inspired me to no end. And I saw a young White woman carrying the sign — “Death to the Lynchers!” — I walked up to her, I said, “No, you give me that sign,” I said, “You can walk beside me but I must carry the sign. I am the — I am the Black woman. I must carry that sign.” So, I took the sign from her and I walked around, all over, during the parade...I didn’t need any coaching, I didn’t need anything. This was what I wanted: freedom for my people. “Free the nine Scottsboro Boys!” and “Death to lynchers!”
Queen Moore remembered the relationship between Black communists and Black nationalists as something akin to oil and water. She longed for the day that they could reconcile their ideological differences and form a united front. Although both sides claimed to provide a path to liberation, there were always inconsistencies along issues of race or gender, and crossing the lines proved to be a struggle in itself!
Moore had already decided that she was an African through and through. ‘I entered the Party as a Negro,’ she said. But, for the most part, there was no real Black agenda in the Party – only what appeared to be a White agenda for Black people.
Like Claudia Jones, she bemoaned the Communist Party’s decision to vacate Garvey’s battle for an independent state. She also recognized that not only was the leadership ‘all-White,’ but it was always required that the Black Commission have Whites in it. Meanwhile, other nationalist arms of the Party were allowed to develop their own platforms all by themselves. The result was that critical issues of racial identity and of racism in the Party were considered outright and implicitly taboo.
A brief segment of Audley Moore’s interview with civil rights activist Mark Naison in 1972
Moore had gone from the Garvey movement to the Communist Party due to her perceptions of widespread misogyny within UNIA leadership. As she observed shifting trends in women’s visibility, she turned once more to her first love, Garvey.
She must have pondered her prospects at their glorious reunion; that Black star beaming, ‘accomplish what you will!‘
Still, she knew Garvey well, and a certain inconvenient truth about the way he ran his UNIA would cause her to reconsider. For King Garvey and his Negro nobility, the “U” stood for unity, but there was no throne room for Queen Improvement in their association. So she decided that whatever she would do would be done on her own terms.
In 1957, Moore tapped an existing network of UNIA supporters in her home state for help in forming a new organization. They called it the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women (UAEW). This became an outlet for the dissemination of Moore’s philosophy that Black Americans were not simply Americans who happened to be “Black,” but ‘Africans born in the United States.’ Their platform combined Garvey’s mission of racial uplift with the Communist Party’s programs for social justice. On the wings of Moore’s involvement in the earlier Scottsboro campaigns, one of the main projects of the UAEW was providing for the legal defense of Black men who were accused of raping White women. The right of poor Black women to welfare benefits was another important focus for the UAEW. It is also necessary to highlight one of their landmark achievements: their national reparations campaign during the 100th anniversary celebrations of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1963.
Farmer, who refers to Audley Moore as the undisputed “Queen of Black Nationalism” (in the title of her next book), writes that Moore’s legacy encompasses a significant portion of the Black Power and Pan-African movements.
She mentored many Black power radicals including members of the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, and the Revolutionary Action Movement. Each of these groups incorporated reparations into their political program and many credit Moore with helping them develop their reparations framework.
(These programs were different from the reparations that Gordon was seeking.
Gordon’s reparations plan, which was essentially drafted by White supremacists, mandated that funding be used for travel to Africa and for settlements abroad. Moore’s reparations were additionally intended to improve conditions at home.)
In the summer of 1972, Moore attended the All-Africa Women’s Conference in Tanzania. For the past ten years, the attendance was continent-exclusive. Speaking on behalf of African women in the diaspora, Queen Mother Moore warned her compatriots not to lose themselves in the politics of their tribe or their nation, but to ‘eliminate all tendencies towards internal divisiveness.’ She further reminded them that it was their shared responsibility with continental men to ‘rebuild [their] social, political, and economic culture in such a way that Black people [in the diaspora] will know and feel that it was worth all [their] years of suffering and racial degradation to be once again a part of [their] great African ancestral tradition.’
Moore returned two years later as a member of the North American Delegation to the Sixth Pan-African Congress. Her rousing words at the AAWC set the stage for resolutions at both events, affirming the various ways that Black women contributed to the development of human societies – from ancient times to the present – and charting the path to their continued leadership in future developments.
At both meetings, Moore introduced the issue of reparations, inviting continental Africans to support their brothers and sisters in the diaspora seeking redress for their grievances.
Despite Moore’s fluctuation between integrationist and nationalist movements, she never wavered in her commitment to the Black struggle for self-determination.
There was a period when I wasn't a nationalist. I became an integrationist. But still I was out there as a nationalist, fighting. You see, that's one thing. I never did lose all of my nationalism.
4. Laura Adorker Kofey
Laura Kofey (1875-1928) was a prominent UNIA organizer.
Her powers of persuasion enabled her to amass a large following of Garveyites. While Garvey was in prison, she canvassed the South, rallying thousands to the cause. As a result, new chapters were formed in three states. One branch alone registered over 300 members.
In 1927, she established the African Universal Church and Commercial League (AUC), combining spiritual persuasions with her prescriptions for racial improvement. African culture was the foundation for much of its teachings, as evidenced by a surviving copy of a “Bantu grammar book” for children. Like Adelaide Casely-Hayford, Kofey herself was known to carry African artifacts to show to her audiences on her travels. However, her work came under close scrutiny from leaders in the UNIA. When she began to solicit funds from UNIA members for an unapproved project to send a sawmill to Africa and to purchase ships so she could send her own followers to the continent, they questioned her motives. They also questioned her claims that she was an African princess from what is now Ghana.
She was ostracized and eventually excommunicated from the organization.
Laura Adorka Koffey (Kofi)
(Source: lauraakofi.org)
Part of the reason why Kofey was villainized by Garvey and his inner circle was because of his refusal to associate his organization with any particular religious denomination. Former UNIA Chaplain-General George Alexander McGuire was banned from the UNIA after it was discovered that he had embezzled from the organization and was exploiting his status in order to convert members to his African Orthodox Church. Such plans were seen as divisive. They set a precedent for a crisis of leadership as adherents to these groups could splinter and form offshoots, weakening the greater movement.
Just over a year after her church was organized, Kofey was shot to death while speaking to a group of 200 followers in Miami, Florida. In stark parallel to the murder of Malcolm X (almost a year after he founded Muslim Mosque, Inc.) and the subsequent investigation of the Nation of Islam, which had also disowned him, suspicion fell on the UNIA. The alleged assailants of both Malcolm and Laura were confirmed to have been members of their respective ex-communities, but, while Malcom’s case resulted in a series of convictions, no leads were pursued on Kofey’s behalf.
Garvey was in Jamaica at the time, having been deported three months earlier. Garvey, it seemed, had other items on his radar. Jamaican author Colin Grant writes that the fate of the estranged Kofey was only a fresh source of fuel for his daunting preoccupation: salvaging what was left of his sinking ship. He summoned his American stand-in, Knox, to reinforce his expectations for the strength of UNIA leadership.
According to research by Richard Newman (1930-2003) of the New York Public Library,
Kofey’s church carried on her legacy in the United States and in West Africa. There are even connections as far as the Philippines. But, due largely to infighting and schism, membership has decreased considerably over the years from a height of over 25,000.
3. Alice Kinloch
Remember that saying about a great Black woman behind every great Black man?
Well sometimes, that woman was beside him.
Indeed, as Trinidadian historian and gender studies professor Rhoda Reddock has recently highlighted, it was a Black South African woman named Alice Victoria Alexander Kinloch, who inspired one of the founding fathers of Pan-Africanism, Henry Sylvester-Williams (1869-1911) to venture into a field in which she had already been working. Kinloch, the wife of a mining engineer who labored in the Kimberley mines, deplored the stories she heard about the conditions of Black miners. She traveled to England in 1895 and served as a speaker for the Aborigines Protection Society. It was there that Williams found her, airing the grievances of Black Africans in the hopes that the exploitation of Africa’s people and their resources would come to an end.
Williams joined Kinloch from Trinidad and together, they agreed to form an organized body for Africa people, by Africans people. They called it the African Association.
On July 23, 1900, the African Association hosted a Pan-African Conference in Westminster Hall – the first of its kind. The aim of this assembly was to deliberate upon the future of African people around the world. About 30 individuals from Africa, Canada, the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean accepted their invitation. Among them were women, including Ana Julia Cooper and Anna H. Jones, who represented the United States with W.E.B. Du Bois. Both of these women spoke at the conference.
After the conference, the African Association changed its name to the Pan-African Association.
If W.E.B. Du Bois is truly the father of Pan-Africanism, a distinction he shares with Williams and Liberian ambassador Edward Blyden (1832-1912), Alice Kinloch was unquestionably the mother.
2. Amy Jacques Garvey
Pan-Africanist and community feminist (as per her biographer Ula Yvette Taylor) Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey (1895-1973) was a very active member of the UNIA, serving first as secretary of the organization. In 1922, she married Marcus Garvey, just months after attending his previous wedding as the maid of honor. Amy wore many hats, including spokesperson and archivist. She was the unofficial leader of the organization during Garvey’s imprisonment for mail fraud.
While, at first, Amy was not one for the spotlight (though she ardently developed into an exemplary keynoter), she commanded the power of the pen as both editor of the UNIA’s official organ, the Negro World (in which she maintained a special section for women’s news and views), and editor of The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, a work that she compiled in three volumes. Through both of these avenues, Amy brought Garvey’s message to worldwide audiences.
She, too, was a Garvey, so within the Garvey message was her message as well.
But, as Jamerican sexosopher Zalaika Hepworth Clarke noted in her research on Amy, that voice, at times, was a challenge to her husband’s machismo, and both understood this dynamic as necessary to what Amy called ‘the life of the organization.’
Marcus regularly consulted his wife, Amy, for her analyses on the top stories of the day. With this information, he was able to engage more effectively with the press and the people.
In Garvey and Garveyism, (1963) A.J. Garvey claimed that the significant portion of the speeches, writings, and even thoughts of Marcus was the result of her efforts. She described how Marcus asked her to read through magazines and newspapers for important articles and then explain their content and significance to him. He would in turn use this material as the basis for his speeches and frontpage articles and would seek A.J. Garvey’s “opinions before going to the press” Much content from the articles written by A.J. Garvey in the Negro World was incorporated into his speeches.
She had a profound impact on Marcus’ thought and “was the cocreator if not the creator, of aspects of Garveyite philosophy.”
Clarke crowns Amy ‘the most important and [most] influential woman in Garveyism.’ As such, Amy Jacques Garvey was a mainspring of radical minds – the likes of which include American activists Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Louis Farrakhan; African luminaries Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya; and Caribbean visionaries George Padmore, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Mutabaruka.
We can add to them John Henrik Clarke, Huey Newton, George Jackson, Tupac Shakur, and Bobby Seale.
Amy’s influence is evident in this sampling of her writings:
Africa must be for Africans, and Negros everywhere must be independent, God being our helper and guide.
Whether we be Black Mohammedans or Black Christians, we all believe in the same God-the Father of all. Our forms of worship may differ, but the basic principles are the same. We worship in spirit and in truth. Our racial interests are identical. We are all struggling under the same yoke, and by the help of God, Allah, the First Cause, or the omnipotent, we will join forces and throw off the common oppressor, and live up to the high calling of out Creator and in obedience to His injunction -
YE ARE THE LORDS OF CREATION!”
There is too much ignorance among us as to what our men and women...have accomplished. Our children, our young men and women [have] become White hero worshippers; they see White; they imitate White.
There is no doubt that the men whom she inspired applied themselves to addressing these issues. But Amy perceived a scarcity of such men in her day.
Negro women are the acknowledged burden bearers of their race. Whether this is due to the innate laziness of Negro men, or to their lack of appreciation for their noble women, we are not quite sure.
Perhaps both of these reasons are contributing factors. Yet the results are the same - an overburdened womanhood and a backward race...
Garvey must have read these lines, because he seemed to addressing them in an admonition to his male listeners.
Take down the pictures of White women from your walls and elevate your own women into that place of honor. They are for the most part the burden bearers of the race.
He further acknowledged that one measure of unity within the race was the commitment of Black men to marriage relationships with Black women. In his opinion, Black men had been doing rather well in this regard.
There are hundreds of millions of us Black men who are proud of our skins...The men of the highest morals, highest character, and noblest pride are to be found among the masses of the Negro race who love their women with as much devotion as White men love theirs.
But two years later, Amy insisted that, based on her observations, the opposite was more true.
White women have greater opportunities to display their ability because of the standing of both races, and due to the fact that Black men are less appreciative of their women than White men. The former will more readily sing the praises of White women than their own; yet who is more deserving of admiration than the Black woman, she who has borne the rigors of slavery, the deprivations consequent on a pauperized race, and the indignities heaped upon a weak and defenseless people? Yet she has suffered all with fortitude, and stands ever ready to help in the onward march to freedom and power.
Be not discouraged Black women of the world, but push forward, regardless of the lack of appreciation shown you. A race must be saved, a country must be redeemed, and unless you strengthen the leadership of vacillating Negro men, we will remain marking time until the Yellow race gains leadership of the world, and we be forced to subserviency under them, or extermination...
We are tired of hearing Negro men say, "There is a better day coming," while they do nothing to usher in the day. We are becoming so impatient that we are getting in the front ranks, and serve notice on the world that we will brush aside the halting, cowardly Negro men, and with prayer on our lips and arms prepared for any fray, we will press on and on until victory is over.
...
Mr. Black Man, watch your step! Ethiopia queens will reign again, and her Amazons protect her shores and people. Strengthen your shaking knees and move forward or we will displace you and lead to victory and to glory”
Since the days of mass enslavement, Black women had been struggling to fend off physical and psychological threats to their personal well-being. As one of them herself, Amy would not allow anyone to intimidate or silence her – regardless of their height, their weight, their lung capacity, or their sexual orientation. And she was ready to stand her ground: she carried a gun with her to work every day at her inner-city Harlem office.
In the wake of the Gilded Age, the Harlem Renaissance offered new opportunities for Black Americans to “reinvent” themselves as movers and shakers of their society. While Black men were still prophesying the birth of a New Negro, Amy’s army of intellectuals were already welcoming the rise of a New Negro Woman.
Saydee E. Parham outlined the many ways that men sought to leave women at the margins in their common quest for social development. But in this, they could never succeed.
In all great movements for the redemption of the oppressed masses, she is always ready and responsive to the great appeal...
Women, she posited, were the ‘power’ that ‘generated’ each and every last one of these movements and ‘the new woman’ would continue to be the ‘great civilizer of all future civilization.’
The New Negro Woman would not be left behind. She was proving her potential right then and there in the Garvey movement. They only needed to identify the various channels through which they could use that potential for the good of their own society.
One article by Eunice Lewis was on the need for Black women ‘to work on par with men in the office as well as on the platform.’ Another by Carrie Mero Leadett spoke to the need for Black women to combine their efforts as mothers and teachers in order ‘to produce girls who could surpass those of all other races, socially, industrially and morally.’ She argued that Black women should not content themselves with following in the paths that men and other women have trod, but must set their own standards of excellence for the next generation to follow.
Amy’s husband was imprisoned a full year after she first started running her page under the heading “Our Women and What They Think.” ‘Imprison a leader and you boost his cause,’ she crooned. But in his absence, the Negro World was not simply a space for “Free Garvey” editorials. It continued to report on the role of women in liberation struggles at home and across the globe, and to provide routine counsel for everyday women on how they, too, can navigate in a changing world.
Garvey’s absence provided the more radical rank-and-file women of the UNIA a rare opportunity to expand their sphere of influence. And Amy was not discouraged, even as she wrestled with a debilitating illness. Blain tells us that as time went on, she only intensified her protests against gender inequalities within the UNIA.
Amy still allowed opinions in her page that stood in contrast to those quoted previously, which were more in alignment with her own views. On the other hand, contributions from women such as Amelia Sayers and Vera emphasized that Black women must support their people primarily as nurturers and homemakers, which was a reflection of mainstream ideas concerning the role of women in a male-dominant society. These were more so ideas that Marcus Garvey believed in .
In opening this forum to competing viewpoints, Amy allowed her fellow members to define womanhood for themselves and the part they were meant to play in the struggle.
1. Amy Ashwood Garvey
Amy Ashwood was a co-founder of the UNIA, along with her future husband, Marcus Garvey. She served as secretary of the organization and as the director of the Black Star Line (BSL), the steamship company that was created in order to establish a system of commerce between Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. She was also a Pan-Africanist.
Amy Ashwood’s formative years were spent in Panama then at a prestigious integrated private school for girls in Trelawny, Jamaica. It was another woman – Amy’s great-grandmother Boahimaa Dabas – who she says introduced her to her African roots and instilled in her a sense of pride for her people. Dabas told her about the ways of her Akan ancestors from the powerful Asante kingdom in West Africa, her own capture by English traders on the ‘Gold Coast,’ and her life under slavery in White society. Amy later recalled the feelings this lesson impressed upon her soul.
I was proud of myself [and] proud of my ancestry.
She met Garvey at a Baptist church in Kingston and together, the young lovers sharpened each other’s zeal for the betterment of the Black masses. Soon, they agreed to form an organization that would meet that very purpose.
The first UNIA meetings were held at the Ashwood family home, a sure indication of Amy’s initiative in the development of the movement. After the UNIA was relocated and incorporated in New York in 1917, Amy continued to be active in the planning and promotion of the organization. She also funded much of the organization’s development through her father’s wealth. She and her partner both distributed copies of the Negro World in Black neighborhoods. They took turns preaching the Garveyite gospel on the streets of Harlem.
Their efforts were a great success. Within two years, they had amassed a local following of over 35,000.
While Mark had been focused on reminding his fellow men of their traditional role of leadership in the community, Amy saw to it that UNIA chapters had both male and female heads of office at all levels – there was always a male and a female president as well as a male and a female vice-president.
These positions of leadership within the Garvey’s movement appealed to Black suffragist women like Irene Moorman Blackstone and Mary Sharperson Young at a time when leadership within mainstream women’s circles were largely withheld from them. By 1914, White women could participate in elections for 11 states. Five years later in 1919, only they and their people could fully exercise the rights that were available to everyone on paper. It would be another 46 years before Black women were fully enfranchised as U.S. citizens along with their Black brethren. But Black women found an open seat at the table of Black nationalism where their voices carried a measure of social and political influence.
Amy Ashwood and Marcus Garvey closed out the year 1919 with a grand wedding. Although her marriage to Garvey was short-lived, and followed by a bitter campaign of slander, the love that Amy had for her people did not falter.
She moved to England in 1922 and there, she helped form another anti-colonial organization called the Nigerian Progress Union (NPU). Later, she opened a restaurant and a nightclub with her new partner Sam Manning (1898-1960), a calypso musician from Trinidad. Each of these spaces served as a hub of activity for Black intellectuals from all walks of life. Many of them hailed from West Africa and the Caribbean. Some undoubtedly became Black nationalists themselves and among their ranks were Black nationalist women.
Of these individuals, Ashwood and Manning linked up with Trinidadians C.L.R. James and George Padmore alongside a few other associates in forming the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA). The purpose of this organization was to muster up widespread support for the people of Ethiopia in their fight against the Italians, who invaded their lands in 1935.
All of these persons were subsequently involved in the Fifth Pan-African Congress – the most significant of all – which Du Bois had organized in Manchester, England for the year 1945 at the urging of two Jamaican activists (one being Amy Jacques Garvey, who did not attend, and the other, a doctor named Harold Moody). They were joined by Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, who would later play critical roles in African struggles for independence. Padmore and Guinian delegate T. Ras Makonnen went on, respectively, to serve as their advisors when both became heads of state.
Nnamdi Azikiwe, who also attended the Congress, became the first president of Nigeria.
It was partly through the mechanism of Pan-Africanism that the modern-day African Union came to be.
And much of the groundwork that enabled these connections was thanks to the diligence of a proud Black woman.
Amy Ashwood Garvey with group of Africans in native and European dress
1946
(Source: New York Public Library)
This is just a small selection of the women who championed race pride for Black people and aspirations towards nationhood.
Blain refers to the earliest of these warrior women as “proto-feminists” – that is, activists and thought-leaders who challenged the male-supremacist status quo of their time, paving the way for the larger feminist movements of the 1960s up to the 21st century. Contrary to the aims of the wider women’s movements, they were not merely pushing for integration within the existing Eurocentric chauvinist structure. They pressed for more equality in the leadership and decision-making processes of Black nationalist movements and organizations. They sought inspiration from ancient sources to affirm for their followers the possibilities ahead. They warned against the dangers of conforming unquestionably to White conventions. And they challenged us to be courageous in the face of our adversities.
These were often everyday working-class women with mouths to feed and bills to pay. Among them were singers like Lucy Lastrappe (a member of the Chicago UNIA who wrote for the Negro World), teachers like Betty Shabazz (the wife of Malcolm X), students like Gerlin Bean (the Jamaican activist who spawned several Black women’s groups within the UK’s Black Power Movement), hairdressers like Ethel Waddell (Gordon’s secretary, who started a rival offshoot of her organization), and housemaids like Clara Poole Muhammad (the wife of NOI founder Elijah Mohammad).
They were true to their community and firm to the end.
A page from Shrew containing the transcript of an interview with Gerlin Bean
1971
What could we do without these women?
Garvey said it best.
No great nation and no great cause was ever nurtured or made any sort of progress without the inspiration of a woman.
The success of the Negro race thus far has been largely due to the sympathy and support which our women have given to the cause.
UK historian Stella Dadzie, who played an active role in the Women’s Rights Movement of the 70s and 80s, charges us to honor these freedom fighters by emulating their examples.
So where are the Black nationalist women of today?
Gilkes is of the opinion that women of the same ilk as Queen Nzinga of Angola, Queen Nanny of the Jamaican Maroons, and their reincarnations, Queen Francois and Queen Moore, are largely lacking in the here and now.
Professor Farmer is more hopeful. Amidst some of the very same demons that disrupted our past leaders and stifled their freedoms – leaders like Gordon, Jones, Wells, and Moore – she points to modern divergences in the discourse around the Black Lives Mater Movement as evidence that the spirit of the Malaika (our angels) is alive and well in our time.
They continue that great work, which has held us together through times of outright terror and covert racism.
They continue to light the way from our male-centered myopia.
Let us continue to acknowledge them for their historic efforts and their continual commitment to Black power.
*Davis’ ‘triple jeopardy’ (racism, classism, and sexism) was also the name of the official paper for a Marxist feminist organization run by Black women from 1968 to 1979 called the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA). It would seem that the editor, Frances Beale took inspiration from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) of which she was a member before Davis came to use that term in her book Women, Race and Class (1981).
Credit to Philip Thorne of the Facebook group Grenada Genealogical and Historical Society Online and to Albert Edwards of the Facebook group Exploring Caribbean History for the tip on the article by Louise Little in the Negro World.
A special thanks also to BRU Facebook group member Alia Alexis for her insight on Ted Vincent’s research article about the lives of Malcolm X’s parents.
Omri Coke
Omri is a history and science buff with a passion for research.
Through his research, he hopes to inspire others like himself on their own path of self-education and self-development.
References
On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (2002) by A’Lelia Bundles
Feminism: A Very Short Introduction (2005) by Margaret Walters
U.S. National Park Service – Maria W. Stewart, February 19, 2021
Black Past – (1833) Maria W. Stewart, “An Address at the African Masonic Hall,” October 24, 2011
The New York Public Library – Laura Adorkor Kofey Research Collection, 1926-1981
Black Power and Black Religion: Essays and Reviews (1987) by Richard Newman
History is a Weapon – “Women As Leaders” by Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey (1925)
The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (2002) by Ula Yvette Taylor
The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (2017) by Ula Yvette Taylor
Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (2008) by Colin Grant
WRFG Atlanta 89.3 FM – The Amazing Life of Fulani Sunni Ali, March 29, 2020
Claudia Jones School for Political Education – Black Women, Back Radicalism, and the Black Midwest
National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago – Claudia Jones: Trinidadian-Born UK Activist
Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008) by Carole Boyce Davies
TriniCenter – Women and Activism: Where Have The Women Gone? by A. Corey Gilkes, August 16, 2005
A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance (2020) by Stella Dadzie
Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (2017) by Ashley Farmer
Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism (2015) by Sarah L. Silkey