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Epilogue Legacy The Garvey movement’s direct intellectual legacy appears more discreetly in the integrationist tendencies of the modern civil rights movement than in the discourse of black nationalism, yet its influences are an important part of both. Activists at the local, state, regional, and national levels have had direct personal and community ties to the unia, while the core tenets of Garveyism, black pride and self-determination, weave through the fabric of black popular culture and thought. The roots of these ideas are harder to identify because throughout American history, separatist agendas originated with the people and were adopted by their spokesmen, not the other way around. While black nationalism runs vigorously among ordinary and anonymous black people, from rural Georgia to Michigan and from New York to California, some of the twentieth century’s most influential African Americans have acknowledged the formative influence of Garveyism. Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam during its greatest period of growth in the 1950s and 1960s, was a product of rural Georgia during the unia’s heyday . Born Elijah Poole in Washington County, he spent his third through his twenty-first year (1900–1919) in Cordele, within a few miles of Worth County, the center of Garveyism in Georgia. His father, Willie Poole, was an itinerant minister, and Elijah often traveled with him as he o√ered the surrounding communities graphic sermons that included frightening portrayals of white people.∞ Elijah Poole moved to Macon, where he lived during the height of the Garvey movement. He married a Cordele woman named Clara, had two sons, and moved to Detroit during the period of Garvey’s incarceration.≤ According to one of his biographers , Elijah Muhammad denied having been a unia member , but he acknowledged Garvey’s strong influence.≥ Many of Muhammad’s followers at the Nation of Islam’s Temple No. 2 in Chicago in 1950 had a background similar to that of their leader, whom they called ‘‘the Messenger.’’ They also had migrated to Chicago from the rural South and had endured life at the bottom rungs of society in both places.∂ Many were quick to believe that whites were evil and that blacks needed to exist separately from a polluted and decadent white society. The unia message framed epilogue | 193 the same notion more positively. In Garveyism, antimiscegenation and antiassimilation beliefs and practices were demonstrations of love for one’s own race. Under Elijah Muhammad and his predecessor, Wallace Fard Muhammad , pride in blackness seemed as much an abhorrence of whiteness as anything else. Today, the Nation of Islam owns a large farm in Bronwood, Terrell County, Georgia. Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam’s current leader, repurchased 1,500 of nearly 5,000 acres that were formerly owned by Elijah Muhammad in the 1960s (then called the Temple Farms complex), which had been sold after his death in 1975. By coincidence, in the 1920s the unia’s busiest organizer, O. C. Kelly, owned a farm within ten miles of the Nation of Islam’s current Terrell County farm. Brother Al Muhammad, originally from Mississippi, is an adviser to the Muhammad Farms who acknowledges Garvey’s movement as a crucial predecessor to the organization to which he has devoted his life.∑ Ridgely Muhammad, the farm’s manager, has a Ph.D. from Michigan State University and M.A. and B.A. degrees from historically black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University, a leading institution for students involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Brother William Muhammad , who is over one hundred years old, sells vegetables grown on the farm locally, while the rest is trucked to the Nation of Islam’s restaurants in Chicago and Detroit or is available for purchase by black families and small business owners at distribution centers.∏ Ridgely operates a website and edits The Farmer, which provides a network for black farmers who want to participate in race-conscious cooperatives. The distrust of whites and the U.S. government , similarly but less openly expressed in Garvey’s heyday, is a theme of the newsletter.π Terrell County remains majority-black, yet the Nation of Islam seeks and receives little publicity there, similar to the habits of the unia divisions of the rural South in the 1920s. Another direct descendant of the unia, the Nation of Islam, and their mutual commitment to racial pride and self-determination was Malcolm X. The iconic black nationalist and Muslim was a first-generation northerner, born to Earl and Louisa...

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