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8. Reconfiguring the Roots and Routes of New Negro Activism: The Garvey Movement in New Orleans
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205 Reconfiguring the Roots and Routes of New Negro Activism: The Garvey Movement in New Orleans CLAUDRENA HAROLD 8 Late in fall 1946, W. E. B. Du Bois delivered a moving address at the Southern Negro Youth Congress in Columbia, South Carolina. In it he positioned the U.S. South as a key battleground not only in African Americans’ revolutionary quest for political empowerment but also in the global struggle to free all oppressed nations. The South, Du Bois informed his captivated audience, “is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly.”1 Frequently, when engaging this particular passage from Du Bois’s poignant speech, “Behold the Land,” my thoughts turn to a lesser known activist, John B. Cary, who, during an earlier period in African American history, harbored similar thoughts about the South’s radical potential. A New Orleans–based trade unionist actively involved in New Negro era politics, Cary believed strongly that the native sons and daughters of the “Black South” had a pivotal role to play in securing a more empowering modernity for the world’s dispossessed. To realize his political goals, he invested a tremendous amount of time and energy into the organization that, in his view, best embodied the independent spirit of the New Negro: Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Occupying several leadership positions within the New Orleans UNIA during the 1920s, Cary regarded the regional expansion of the Garvey movement from the Northeast to the Jim Crow South as a critical development in African Americans ’ ongoing fight against racial capitalism and American imperialism. His deep commitment to the organization’s pan-African agenda was readily apparent in his organizing work in New Orleans as well as in his vital role in establishing UNIA chapters in the states of Alabama and Mississippi. Notwithstanding his extensive involvement in the UNIA, Cary remained an active participant in local trade 206 CLAUDRENA HAROLD union politics. In fact, he envisioned his activist work with both the UNIA and the New Orleans Carpenters Union as complementary components of his larger political agenda of improving the lives of “those of the rank and file who labor with their hands and thereby produce the wealth of the land.”2 If nothing else, Cary’s organizational profile underscores a theme articulated throughout this volume: the ideological complexity and diversity of New Negro activism. Not exclusively beholden to any one political movement, Cary embraced organizations viewed by several theorists of the New Negro era as possessing diametrically opposed political sensibilities and goals. In the pages of The Messenger, for example, A. Philip Randolph routinely denounced the UNIA for distracting black laborers from serious engagement in working-class politics: “The whites in America don’t take Garveyism seriously,” noted Randolph. “They dub Garvey a ‘Moses of the Negro’ in order to get Negroes to follow him, which will wean them away from any truly radical economic program. They know that the achievement of his program, the redemption of Africa is unattainable, but it serves the purpose of engaging the Negroes’ brains, energy and funds in a highly nebulous, futile and doubtful movement so far as beneficial results to Negroes are concerned.”3 If we accept Randolph’s assessment of the UNIA’s influence on black workers as accurate, then how do we make sense of the fact that the labor organizer Cary was a key player in the expansion of the UNIA throughout the U.S. South? How do Cary’s political alliances and their implications force us to rethink New Negro politics in the age of Jim Crow? To be more precise, what does Cary’s simultaneous embrace of labor politics and black nationalist organizing tell us about the transformed psychology that permeated the New Negro masses? With an eye toward these and other questions, this essay centers its focus on southern-based activists, such as John Cary, who endorsed the pan-African agenda of the UNIA as a viable strategy of racial uplift and economic advancement. Sensing that the political moment was ripe for revolutionary change, thousands of black southerners embraced the opportunity to ally themselves with politically engaged blacks in other parts of the world.4 “There is one way,” reasoned one southern Garveyite, “in which we can improve ourselves...