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

102Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly of slaves purchased were males typically an inch taller than most African Americans , a sign of greater strength and health. Planters also preferred slaves from South Carolina or Florida where similar heat and marshes acclimatized them to Louisiana. The gender imbalance and the grueling work in the cane fields forced planters to continuously replenish their workforce as natural increase could not offset the losses from death and injury. Occasionally, Follett's depiction of the hard-driving sugar masters appears too absolute, as when he declares diat the "slaveholding barons rarely cooperated for their mutual good" (p. 41). He points to the reluctance of planters to support either a state university other than a military academy or a railroad infrastructure. Military academies were much more dian mere devotion to "[h]onor and militarism" (p. 41). Such academies provided engineers that were vital to tasks such as levee construction not to mention providing a militia leadership capable of crushing potential slave rebellions. Likewise, railroad, canal, or plank-road companies often galvanized communities (as even Follett concedes) but then failed, not due to lack of support but because of the distances between southern towns interspersed by isolated plantations and die lack of traffic to make such ventures profitable. Follett stresses the industrial nature of the sugar plantation to such an extent that he occasionally falls into contradictions, as when he asserts that planters' "charade of benevolence and kindly paternalism was an act, but one in which he believed" (p. 152). While sugar plantations were "undeniably hellish," planters' belief in their benevolence deserves more critical attention (p. 8g). And slaves' efforts to assert themselves should not be dismissed as entirely subject to the planters' will. Furthermore, Follett largely ignores the racial and ethnic mix of the planters. Was the master-slave relationship a black-white affair in the sugar bowl? Though predominandy so, the issue deserves closer attention. Follett mentions one sugar-planter of color, Andrew Durnford, raising the unanswered question about the degree to which light-skinned San Domingue refugees and other cre- óles of color shaped sugar production in Louisiana. Despite these caveats, Follett provides a fresh and insightful study of sugar plantations in antebellum Louisiana. His highly readable work deservedly stands as a major reference both for scholars and lay readers interested in life and slavery in these cane fields. Queen's University BelfastAnthonyJ. Stanonis Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920—1927. By Mary G. Rolinson. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007, Pp. 286. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 9780807857953, $22.50, paper.) Scholars generally depict the Black Nationalist movement created after World War I by the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey as a Northern, urban phenomenon marginal to the Southern states where most African Americans lived 2??8Book Reviews103 in the early twentieth century. In an innovative, thoughtful, and exhaustively researched work, Mary Rolinson turns these assumptions on their head. Through creative use of the fragmentary archival record—including membership records of Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) , reports from local chapters published in Garvey's Negro World newspaper, and petitions sent to the White House and the United States Attorney General's office pleading for Garvey 's release from federal prison after he was convicted on mail fraud charges— Rolinson establishes the strongly rural and Southern character of the UNIA. Contrary to the stereotype, "the archetypal American Garveyite lived in a majority-black community, farmed cotton on someone else's land, and struggled to maintain a stable and safe family. Those UNIA supporters who left the countryside and farming behind for industrial labor and urban living carried their experiences and sensibilities beyond the Black Belt" (p. 103). Almost half of the UNIA's American divisions were in the South and these divisions overwhelmingly were in communities of less than 2,500 people. As Rolinson notes, Garvey found a receptive audience in that region because his separatist, self-reliance gospel was built on a foundation already laid by black Southerners like Henry McNeal Turner and even Booker T. Washington. Garvey's "program enjoyed broad popularity in the South because it also embodied the practical and spiritual aspirations of...