Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920–1927 (review)

Grassroots Garveyism, by Mary G. Rolinson, is a valuable study of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in the South that enlarges our understanding of organizing and resistance among the “local people” who endured the worst of racist terrorism and formed the bedrock of the civil rights movement in later decades.

Rolinson’s premise is that the existing literature on the Garvey movement has unjustly neglected the South, where most members were located, focusing instead on the leader’s oversized personality or on his ill-fated Black Star shipping line. The author finds that the Garvey movement had the most chapters in rural areas of the South, in exactly the kind of places where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People failed to make substantial headway in the twenties and thirties. Whereas the NAACP, with its more elite and interracial membership, put faith in the legal process to ameliorate southern racism, Garveyites drew their support from black farmers who had been disenfranchised for generations and therefore put more stock in direct action.

The Garvey movement drew inspiration from prior African American political philosophies and built on existing networks of union organizing, especially in the coastal South. The book notably argues that racial separation was often welcomed by blacks in the rural South, for whom it offered a degree of independence and refuge from white sexual predation. She writes that “racial separatism was an assertive act on the part of black communities, a way to promote the dignity of the community, though not without consequences,” (141).

For women the acceptance of black patriarchal power was double-edged, but many welcomed the protection from white sexual aggression. As the author argues, “This assertion of the right to self-defense of the race by protecting the chastity of black women or preventing miscegenation through violence became the salient and compelling feature of Garveyism on which the movement could take hold and have purpose in local communities in the South,” (140). Indeed, the UNIA credo, reprinted under the heading “What We Believe,” lists opposition to miscegenation in four of its first five points.

Rolinson demonstrates that the color line was policed from both sides, and that groups of black vigilantes on a number of occasions whipped or even ax-murdered black women and white men caught in sexual activities. They sometimes even read the offenders Garvey’s treatise on racial purity while administering the floggings. It might seem surprising that black vigilantes targeted whites as well as blacks, but such actions were consonant with white vigilante efforts to create racial separation, and even found support from Klansmen. Garvey famously met with the head of the KKK and once called the Klan “heaven sent” for helping “the Negro to understand truly where he stood,” (143). Rolinson’s attempts to explain such statements are less successful than other aspects of the book.

For example, in an infamous 1922 speech at the Negro State Fair in Raleigh, North Carolina, Garvey reportedly thanked whites for “lynching race pride” into black people. Garvey’s black foes seized on these inflammatory remarks to condemn him, yet Rolinson claims that Garvey’s speech masterfully assuaged whites while sending coded messages to black southerners. This theory is not implausible, but Rolinson offers no evidence to support such a claim, not even a rereading of the reports of the speech itself.

Garvey’s shift from radical to increasingly conservative rhetoric after July 1921 cost him the support of northerners and West Indian immigrants but did not cost him as dearly among rural southerners. Nonetheless, Rolinson offers no evidence to support her central hypothesis that Garvey was pursuing an intentional southern strategy (159). If it were really true that “the UNIA leadership was constantly formulating a program and an organizational style with carefully modulated rhetoric in order to organize among black America’s largest constituency, southerners,” one would expect the author to offer examples of...