Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1923 and eventually deported, but he remained a heroic figure to many future black nationalists.ĭuring the economic depression of the 1930s, Farrad Muhammad, a Detroit peddler, founded another significant organization of black nationalists, the NOI. Although 35,000 investors flocked to buy five-dollar shares of Black Star Line stock, the shipping firm and the UNIA’s other commercial ventures failed. One of the UNIA’s main efforts was to establish black-owned businesses, the best known being the Black Star Line, a firm that planned to transport people and goods to Africa. In an essay titled “The Future as I See It,” Garvey insisted that the UNIA was “organized for the absolute purpose of bettering our condition, industrially, commercially, socially, religiously and politically.” Garvey and the UNIA also promoted black emigration to Africa as a program of “national independence, an independence so strong as to enable us to rout others if they attempt to interfere with us” (“Speech by Marcus Garvey”). Twentieth-century black nationalism was greatly influenced by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant to the United States who founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914. Delany believed that this development would also uplift the status and condition of African Americans who remained, calling them “a nation within a nation … really a broken people” (Painter, “Martin R. The historical roots of black nationalism can be traced back to nineteenth-century African American leaders such as abolitionist Martin Delany, who advocated the emigration of northern free blacks to Africa, where they would settle and assist native Africans in nation-building. In his 1963 “ Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King described himself as standing between the forces of complacency and the “hatred and despair of the black nationalist” (King, 90). Reacting against white racial prejudice and critical of the gap between American democratic ideals and the reality of segregation and discrimination in America, in the 1960s black nationalists criticized the methods of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and other organizations that sought to reform American society through nonviolent interracial activism. Achieving major national influence through the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Black Power movement of the 1960s, proponents of black nationalism advocated economic self-sufficiency, race pride for African Americans, and black separatism.
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