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6 Transition It may be that even though [Garvey] has been banished to Jamaica the seed planted here will yet spring up and bring forth fruit which will mean the deliverance of the black race—that cause which was so dear to his heart.—Ida B. Wells Although the strategies and objectives of the unia appeared diametrically opposed to those of organizations that were seeking legal equality and American citizenship for black people, the unia’s organizational success and popularity in the South helped rival groups by teaching them important lessons. In the 1920s Garvey’s unmatched ability to organize rural and urban laborers demonstrated the potency of ‘‘assimilating his own program to the religious experience of the Negro.’’ The unia also highlighted the priorities and sentiments of a great many black people who felt alienated from American ideals of equality and justice . In 1926, as E. Franklin Frazier compared the unia and naacp, he also noted, ‘‘The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has fought uncompromisingly for equality for the Negro, has never secured, except locally and occasionally, the support of the masses.’’∞ The dominance of the unia and Garvey in the 1920s convinced competing associations that they must organize at the grassroots level and take seriously the most basic needs and impulses of laboring blacks, many of whom had been reared in the rural South. Consequently, leaders of groups like the naacp and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (stfu) carefully culled what they found useful from what they perceived as the strictly unacceptable aspects of Garveyism. Despite Garveyism’s appeal, the majority of influential black editors and intellectuals who opposed Garvey ridiculed the idea of an exodus to Africa and the acceptance of the United States as a ‘‘white man’s country.’’ These rival leaders believed that Garvey ’s racialist rhetoric went too far and that his interest in class conflict stemmed only from the fact that most blacks were impoverished . And while many may have liked the idea of African redemption, few of his critics believed it could be achieved, especially through colonization or militarization. Self-defense remained a popular strategy and was most often employed in rural areas, but it, too, was problematic. Urban leaders viewed it as extralegal and inconsistent—a step backward, not 162 | transition a way to make America live up to its creed. Preparation for self-protection also had proved its potential to precipitate violence, lynching, rioting, and massacres . Elite black leaders preferred a responsive application of law over dangerous and costly individual and group e√orts toward self-policing—including popular justice within a separate black sphere. In addition, Garvey’s antimiscegenation ideas stirred explosive intraracial controversy. Yet blacks who saw whites’ antimiscegenation position as simply a way to institutionalize the second-class citizenship of blacks were less likely to be those whose wives and daughters were in greatest danger of being raped and exploited. On the other hand, the unia’s emphasis on economic independence already had many black adherents and beneficiaries, especially businessmen in the segregated South. Booker T. Washington paved the way on the principle of economic independence; then Garveyites perpetuated this ideal through their ‘‘New Negro’’ leader. Black economic self-reliance made perfect sense to the still-dependent tenant farmer and often precariously independent black landowner .≤ Development of race pride and organization seemed universally accepted as worthy strategies, but the issue of separatism and its close relationship to segregation made Garveyism especially di≈cult to reconcile with other organizations’ class-conscious or biracial outlooks. Since the unia had universal popularity, and there was substantial overlap of the Garvey movement and subsequent e√orts for racial improvement, why is the unia viewed by many as outside of the mainstream? Perhaps it is because so much of what we have heard about the Garvey movement has been influenced by interpretations drawn from the descriptions, critiques, and opinions of the black intellectual elite of the 1920s and 1930s. Some of these social commentators were a≈liated with strictly class-conscious (yet whitedominated ) socialist groups, predominantly in the urban North, while most of the rest aligned themselves ideologically with integrationist and social equality organizations like the naacp. Much of the black press from which we derive information about the Garvey movement perpetuated anti-Garvey sentiment and ignored or dismissed the loyalty to unia ideology of the less-represented voices of the black working class. Despite the ways they ridiculed and dismissed Garvey, black intellectuals were both keenly...

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