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Garveyism in Cleveland, Ohio andthe history of the diasporic Midwest,1920–1975Erik S. McDuffie aa Department of African American Studies and Department ofGender and Women's Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America

Available online: 11 Jul 2011

To cite this article: Erik S. McDuffie (2011): Garveyism in Cleveland, Ohio and the history of thediasporic Midwest, 1920–1975, African Identities, 9:2, 163-182

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Garveyism in Cleveland, Ohio and the history of the diasporicMidwest, 1920–1975

Erik S. McDuffie*

Department of African American Studies and Department of Gender and Women’s Studies,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America

(Received 7 July 2010; final version received 1 December 2010)

This article explores the history of the Garvey movement in Cleveland, Ohio (UnitedStates). Captivated by Jamaican Marcus Garvey’s message of race pride and black self-determination, thousands of working-class black Clevelanders joined his transnationalUniversal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). At its peak in the early 1920s, theUNIA claimed 6 million members worldwide. Following Garvey’s death in 1940, theUNIA relocated its world headquarters to Cleveland, placing the city at the centre ofthe transnational Garvey movement. Black Clevelanders came to see themselvesthrough Garveyism as connected to the global African diaspora, with women playing avisible role in fostering these transnational linkages. Simultaneously, the UNIArecognized the Midwest as a central player in this worldwide black movement.Recovering this largely unknown story provides insight a broader history of what I callthe ‘diasporic Midwest’. I use the term as an empirical and theoretical framework forexamining black Midwestern life and history through a transnational approach.Garveyism enabled blacks in Cleveland to forge a diasporic oppositional consciousnessand pursue their freedom dreams often under seemingly intractable obstacles from the1920s through the 1970s. The history of Garveyism in Cleveland provides usefullessons for thinking about contemporary black diasporic struggles for freedom.

Keywords: Cleveland; Garveyism; diasporic Midwest; oppositional consciousness;African redemption; gender; working-class

Introduction

Marcus Garvey electrified blacks in Cleveland, Ohio (United States). According to a

Bureau of Investigation report, the Jamaican president general of the Universal Negro

Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) first spoke in

Cleveland in May 1920 before 400 jubilant supporters at the Cory Methodist Episcopal

Church. Introduced as ‘the negro’s savior’, Garvey received rousing applause for

‘demanding the freedom and independence of Africa’ (Hill 1983, p. 340). The audience’s

exuberant response illustrates how Garvey’s Pan-African message captured the political

imaginations of blacks in this major industrial city in the Midwestern United States.

Garvey made several visits to Cleveland before federal authorities arrested him in New

York and incarcerated him in February 1925 for mail fraud. After his deportation in 1927

ISSN 1472-5843 print/ISSN 1472-5851 online

q 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2011.556793

http://www.informaworld.com

*Email: emduffi@illinois.edu

African Identities

Vol. 9, No. 2, May 2011, 163–182

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and until his death in 1940, Garvey maintained regular contact with Cleveland Garveyites

(Hill 1983).

Garvey envisioned Midwestern cities such as Cleveland as important organizational

sites for building the UNIA. At its peak in the early 1920s, the UNIA claimed 6 million

members worldwide (Martin 1976). He viewed recently arrived southern black migrants,

who fled to the urban Midwest in search of freedom from Jim Crow and a new life, as some

of his most loyal followers (Division 59 1923a, b, 1924a–d). Underscoring the city’s

importance to the worldwide Garvey movement, the UNIA’s Parent Body, the group’s

international executive council, relocated its headquarters in 1940 from Harlem to

Cleveland. This move placed the city at the centre of the transnational Garvey movement.

Black Clevelanders enthusiastically embraced Garveyism. Captivated by Garvey’s

call for race pride, redeeming Africa from European colonialism and black self-

determination, thousands of mostly working-class black Clevelanders from the 1920s

through the 1970s joined Cleveland UNIA Division 59 and its successor, Division 133.

Infusing the city with a visible Pan-African politics, Garveyites built a dynamic social

movement that linked Cleveland to the African diaspora. Through holding formal

positions within Division 59 and their community work, women played a key role in

leading the Garvey movement in Cleveland and forging transnational linkages. The

Cleveland UNIA, however, began to decline by the mid 1920s. By the Depression,

Garveyites began moving into new local black protest groups such as the militant Future

Outlook League (FOL). Although it enjoyed renewed visibility within the worldwide

Garvey movement in the early 1940s after the Parent Body moved to Cleveland, the local

UNIA never again reached the prominence it once enjoyed. By the Civil Rights–Black

Power era of the 1960s, the Cleveland UNIA was a weak presence locally; however,

Garveyism did not die in the city. Rediscovering Garveyism in the late 1960s, young black

nationalists adopted and applied it to their struggles for black economic and political

power in Cleveland.

By examining the history of the Garvey movement in Cleveland from the early 1920s

through the 1970s, this article seeks to recover the broader history of what I call the

‘diasporic Midwest’. I use the term as an empirical and theoretical framework for

examining black Midwestern life and history through a transnational approach. This

paradigm highlights the political, ideological, subjective and migratory connections

between the Midwest, the industrial heartland of the United States, and the global African

diaspora.1 Black Clevelanders, I argue, came to see themselves through Garveyism as

inextricably connected to the African diaspora, with women playing a visible role in

fostering these transnational linkages. Simultaneously, the UNIA recognized the Midwest

as a central player in this worldwide black movement. This story – one that appreciates the

impact of Garveyism on local black life, prominence of women in the local UNIA and

the visibility of Cleveland in the worldwide Garvey movement – remains largely untold in

the fields of African American history and African Diaspora Studies.

Historiography on early and mid twentieth-century African American Midwestern

urban life by Joseph William Trotter (2007), Thomas Sugrue (2005), Victoria Wolcott

(2001) and Davarian Baldwin (2007) analyses black life in the region primarily through

the framework of the US nation state, overlooking the Midwest’s linkages to the black

diaspora. This work looks at how proletarianization, racism, structural forces, public

policy, black southern traditions and modern consumerism informed African American

Midwestern life. These scholars focus on black struggles for equality in civil rights and

black leftist groups, women’s clubs, the church and trade unions, with little discussion of

Garveyism (Sugrue 2005, Wolcott 2001, Baldwin 2007, Trotter 2007). Moreover, studies

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on early and mid-twentieth-century black Cleveland by Kenneth L. Kusmer (1976),

Kimberly L. Phillips (1999), and William W. Giffin (2005) devote cursory attention to

Garveyism.

In terms of transnational research on black life, studies on the ‘Black Atlantic’ largely

neglect the history of Garveyism in Cleveland in particular and the Midwest generally.

Popularized by black cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, the Black Atlantic paradigm describes a

modern political and cultural formation forged through intellectual exchange and travel by

English-speaking black people in the United States, Caribbean and UK, who came to reject

European racism (Gilroy 1993). By focusing primarily on the Anglophone North Atlantic

rim, the Black Atlantic paradigm erases the black urban Midwest from scholarly inquiry

(Zeleza 2003).

Similarly, scholarship on Garveyism in the United States has until recently overlooked

Cleveland and the urban Midwest from close study, instead paying overwhelming attention

to Harlem and the South (James 1998, Rolinson 2007). This, however, is beginning to

change. The work on 1920s Midwestern Garveyism by Mark Christian (2004) and Ronald

Stephens (2008) provides useful ethno-historical and micro-level analyses of the UNIA in

Columbus, Ohio, and Idlewild, Michigan, respectively. Closely examining these divisions’

day-to-day work, Christian and Stephens appreciate these UNIA locals as vibrant

community organizations and protest groups. However, these articles are mostly silent

about how gender and class structured relations of power within these branches. When the

Cleveland UNIA does appear in studies on Garveyism, scholars typically dismiss its

importance both to local black politics and the international UNIA. Garvey historian Judith

Stein (1986), for instance, argues: the ‘[Cleveland] UNIA was marginal, its membership

small, and its presence insignificant’ both locally and internationally (p. 241). A closer

examination of the archival record reveals that this was not the case.

In this essay, I argue that the history of the Garvey movement in Cleveland provides a

case study for understanding the complexities of how Garveyism operated on the ground,

shaped its participants’ identities and tied the city to the African diaspora. Paying careful

attention to the key role women played in building this local Garveyite movement, I show

how the Cleveland UNIA was a visible centre in the international UNIA and helped to lay

the groundwork for black struggles from the 1930s Depression to 1970s-era Black Power

in this city. In the conclusion, I consider how the history of Garveyism in Cleveland

provides useful lessons for forging black diasporic movements in the new millennium.

Methodologically, I use an interdisciplinary framework to chart how black

Clevelanders, through Garveyism, came to envision their lives as inseparably connected

with those of black people around the world. In his work on black radicalism, the historian

Robin D.G. Kelley (2002) emphasizes the significance of hope and the imagination, not

racism, misery and oppression, as the catalyst for drawing black people to social

movements committed to building a new world radically different from the one they

inherited. These ‘freedom dreams’, he argues, propelled black movements across the

African diaspora since the nineteenth century and helped them to understand the struggle

for black liberation in global terms (Kelley 2002) The work of the cultural theorist Chela

Sandoval (2000) is also useful for explicating the saliency of the imagination in inspiring

radical resistance by people of colour. For Sandoval, forging an ‘oppositional

consciousness’, a libratory sensibility that imagines ‘forms of resistance outside of

those determined by the social order itself’, was crucial for inspiring 1970s US feminist of

colour movements (p. 44).

The theoretical concept of collective identity is especially useful for understanding the

connections between women’s group consciousness and feminist collective action. Collective

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identity holds that, through participating in social movement activities, individuals can gain a

sense of belonging, which, in essence, both transcends the individual’s identity and transforms

it. For instance, the work of the sociologists Verta Taylor and Nancy E. Whittier (1992) on

US lesbian feminist movements calls attention to how subordinated groups forge collective,

oppositional identities through resisting and reinterpreting the dominant society’s cultural

symbols that demarcate differences between the elite and oppressed. Meanwhile, research

on women’s labour activism in southern Africa by the social anthropologist Pnina Werbner

(2009) is insightful for analysing the gendered agency and subjectivities of female and male

activists. Emphasizing how subaltern subjectivities must ‘be grasped in temporal and creative

terms – they are made and remade dialogically through tests and ordeals overcome’ (p. 302),

she calls attention to how women activists in early twenty-first century Botswana forge

political imaginaries through struggles for personal dignity and ethical leadership.

Questions about the role of agency, class and hegemony in shaping twentieth-century

urban African American freedom movements have received fresh attention in recent work

by the historian Clarence Lang (2009). Arguing that the black working-class was the

vanguard of twentieth-century US black freedom struggles, Lang emphasizes how intra-

racial class fissures and competing political agendas deeply divided African American

urban communities. Moreover, scholars of the African diaspora recently devoted careful

attention to ‘diasporization’ and racial difference (Makalani 2009, Neptune 2007). The

former describes the complex political, cultural and migratory encounters between black

people based on a perceived commonality, while the latter emphasizes how black

diasporic communities form within specific historical, national, transnational and local

settings. Political and cultural tensions between diasporic communities are also critical

to these formations. Notes the historian Minkah Makalani (2009): ‘The various locals

forming the constituent elements of diaspora, those places where diaspora emerges and

gets created, are processed, social structures, relationships of domination, modes of

imagination and affect that are simultaneously ordered by the local and the global’ (p. 4).

For these reasons, it is imperative for scholars to historicize the meanings of difference

across social, linguistic, national and political lines.

Drawing from these scholars, I show in this article how Garveyism was crucial in

helping blacks in Cleveland forge an oppositional consciousness and collective identity that

understood their lives as inseparable from the redemption of Africa and the self-

determination of black people everywhere. These diasporic identities were neither fixed nor

innate, but rather shifting and always in the making in response to local and transnational

events, Garveyites’ active engagement in struggle and the interplay amongst gender, class,

sexuality, nationality and politics within the Garvey movement in Cleveland. I am especially

concerned with how sexism within the Cleveland UNIA played a crucial role in crippling the

movement. Paying attention to sexism within the movement speaks to the general sexism in

African American life and political activity at the time. Tracing the history of the Garvey

movement in Cleveland from the 1920s through the 1970s, then, not only excavates a

fascinating story. It provides a lens for appreciating the dynamic yet largely unknown history

of the diasporic Midwest and offers lessons for black diasporic struggles today.

The origins and heyday of Garveyism in Cleveland

The origins and heyday of the Cleveland UNIA during and immediately after World War

I highlight the emergent diasporic sensibilities of black Midwesterners and the region’s

visibility in the transnational Garvey movement. A combination of local, national

and international events explains the UNIA’s rise in Cleveland. The Great Migration

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(1916–1930), which witnessed the exodus of more than 1 million African Americans from

the South to the urban North, was an important factor in making Cleveland fertile ground

for Garveyism. Dreams of finding good paying jobs in the city’s booming war-time

industries in addition to escaping Jim Crow prompted the influx of thousands of black

southerners to Cleveland. Between 1910 and 1920, the city’s black population swelled

from roughly 8500 to 34,000 people, making it the largest African American community

in the state and the fifth largest in the Midwest. By 1930, Cleveland’s black population

doubled to 71,000 (Work 1922, Phillips 1999).

However, the realities of living in the urban Midwest often dashed migrants’ dreams

for securing a better life. Cleveland’s growing black population lived almost entirely in the

Central Area, the city’s black belt located on the East Side, along Central Avenue near

downtown. Like Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, the Central Area was densely populated

and impoverished. On the labour front, Cleveland industrialists backed the open-shop drive,

a campaign designed to block unionization of factory workers. Additionally, the city’s

unions stridently maintained the colour line in factories. The open shop and union colour

line largely relegated black men to the most menial, dirtiest jobs. Similarly, most black

women toiled in domestic service. Intra-racial tensions also deeply divided black

Clevelanders. The established black elite often viewed migrants as lazy and immoral

intruders who discredited the race. By 1920, black Cleveland was in transition. Thousands

of southern migrants had arrived in the city within a short period of time, with older and

newer black residents viewing the other with distrust (Phillips 1999).

Although black Clevelanders faced serious challenges both from within and without

the community, they did not passively accept the racial status quo. They were swept up in

the New Negro Movement (1890–1935), a national black protest movement committed to

racial uplift, a middle-class ideology that upheld the belief that African American material

and moral progress would advance black freedom (Bush 1999, Gaines 1996). Given their

belief that they best represented the race’s potential and agents for civilizing the black

masses, black middle-class advocates of racial uplift espoused self-help and service to the

race (Gaines 1996). Parallel with developments elsewhere, blacks in Cleveland formed

fraternal and mutual aid societies, churches and women’s clubs committed to racial uplift.

Black middle-class professionals led the city’s chapter of the National Association of the

Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Negro Welfare Association, the city’s

local branch of the Urban League. The NAACP pursued a legalistic strategy for gaining

black civil rights, while the Negro Welfare Association worked closely with white

reformers and industrialists to improve black Cleveland life. The city’s two black

newspapers, the Cleveland Advocate and the Cleveland Gazette, championed racial

equality. Also, Thomas W. Fleming, the city’s only black councilperson during the war

years, was immensely popular in the Central Area for his outspoken race politics and

ability to win jobs and social services for his constituents through city government

(Phillips 1999, Kusmer 1976, Cleveland branch bulletin 1920).

At the same time, some black Clevelanders – like elsewhere in the United States –

adopted ‘New Negro radicalism’, a more militant New Negro tendency, spawned by racial

and labour unrest across the United States and a global black revolt during and

immediately after World War I. As a political and cultural movement comprised of the

UNIA, the leftist, Harlem-based African Blood Brotherhood and other protest groups, as

well as news and literary journals, New Negro radicalism promoted a more expansive

vision of uplift as social advancement and linked African American struggles for self-

determination with postwar, anti-colonial revolts in Africa and across the world. Certainly,

the World War I years were neither the first time blacks in the United States identified with

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Africa nor embraced a militantly separatist agenda. Blacks since the nineteenth century –

and earlier – had done so. However, the very term ‘New Negro radicalism’ captured a

new, militant oppositional consciousness that was historically and spatially contingent

upon local and transnational events during World War I (Kelley 1999).

In Cleveland, disgust with the bloody 1917 East St Louis riot was critical in fueling

New Negro radicalism. Like African Americans across the country the disturbance, which

left scores of blacks dead after whites rampaged through the city’s black community,

horrified black Clevelanders. Still, black Clevelanders took pride in Dr Leroy Bundy, a

native Clevelander and prominent black dentist, who moved to East St Louis before the

unrest. He emerged as a national hero in black communities for his leading role in

defending blacks during the riot. For black Clevelanders, East St Louis and Bundy’s

resolve were a call for action in demanding black freedom locally and internationally.

Distraught with the grinding poverty and virulent racism they encountered in their new

home and observed around the world, black Clevelanders would both identify with and

look to global Garvey movement as a fulcrum of change (Phillips 1999).

From its very beginnings, Garveyism in Cleveland generated immense excitement in

Africa and helped stoke diasporic, oppositional consciousness amongst Garvey’s local

followers. Apparently, a man named Mr Fuller helped to start the branch prior to Garvey’s

first visit to the city in March 1920. According to a Bureau of Investigation report, he was a

former member of the syndicalist International Workers of the World intrigued with

Garvey’s call for African redemption. Mr Fuller’s enlistment in the UNIA is revealing.

As in other cities, black labour radicals were often some of Garvey’s first recruits. This

suggests they envisioned the UNIA as a powerful force for liberating black working

people and promoting a more radical vision of racial uplift ideology than black elites (Hill

1983, Opie 2009).

Other black Clevelanders were receptive to Garvey’s call for building a global black

empire and excited by what they believed Garveyism had to offer black working-class

people. As one observer recalled:

I remember as a lad in Cleveland during the hungry days of 1921, standing on Central Avenue,watching a parade one Sunday afternoon when thousands of Garvey Legionaries, resplendentin their uniforms marched by. When Garvey rode by in his plumed hat, I got an emotional lift,which swept me above the poverty and prejudice by which my life was limited. (Levine 1982,p. 121)

This passage is significant. The parade transformed this observer’s consciousness. The

pageantry and symbolism of Garveyism stimulated his racial pride and nurtured his

diasporic sensibility. He apparently became aware of his connection to a larger black world

through watching Garvey and the African Legions, the UNIA’s uniformed paramilitary

force, proudly march through the segregated, impoverished Central Area. The parade, most

of all, affirmed his humanity and offered him a sense of hope, suggesting that Garveyism

was critical to helping black Clevelanders weather the racism and poverty they found in this

Midwestern city.

Underscoring the Midwest’s significance to the transnational Garvey movement, Garvey

recognized black Clevelanders’ enthusiasm for his Pan-African message and regularly

dispatched his leading lieutenants from New York to Cleveland. Garvey hoped these leaders

would galvanize local support for the UNIA (Division 59 1924a–d). In January 1922, 1500

people packed the prestigious Lane Metropolitan CME church in Cleveland to hear Rudolph

E. Smith, the UNIA’s third assistant president general. During his address, Smith’s

reference to the red, black and green flag, conceived by Garvey and formally adopted in

1920 as the official banner of black people globally, prompted an immediate, jubilant

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response (Cleveland gazette 1922, Hill 1983). In February 1922, another audience filled

Lane Metropolitan CME church to hear addresses by UNIA leader Dr James W. H. Eason

and Frederick A. Toote, director of the Black Star Line (BSL), a commercial fleet of black-

owned ships Garvey envisioned as the capstone for black economic independence and

African redemption. Given blacks’ desire to live free from global white supremacy and

poverty, the UNIA’s banner and BSL deeply resonated with Garvey’s followers in

Cleveland – and around the world (Martin 1976).

In addition to visits by top UNIA officials to Cleveland, the group’s official newspaper,

the Negro world, regularly featured news about the Cleveland UNIA, signaling the

Midwest’s visibility in the transnational Garvey movement (Negro world 1921, 1922,

1923a). Published in Harlem from 1918 to 1933, the Negro world reported news in

English, French, and Spanish about black people everywhere. During the 1920s, the Negro

world was the most widely sold newspaper across the African diaspora (Martin 1976).

Information about Division 59 frequently appeared alongside news about UNIA branches

from around the world. Moreover, the newspaper listed the names of Cleveland Garveyites

who contributed to the UNIA’s ‘African Redemption Fund’, established to assist in the

repatriation of diasporan blacks to Liberia (Negro world 1923b, c, Martin 1976). Surely

reading about Division 59 in the Negro world, gave black Clevelanders a sense of pride

and confidence, knowing that they were part of a transnational movement of black people

struggling to be free. Likewise, black people around the world could read about the

Midwest and its centrality to the UNIA. As a result of the excitement generated by

Garveyism, the Cleveland UNIA at its peak in 1922 claimed 5000 members (Taylor 1922).

While there is no archival evidence to verify this figure, we can conclude that Garveyism

captured the imaginations of thousands of black Clevelanders and briefly transformed

Division 59 into arguably the largest black social movement in the city and one of the

largest UNIA branches in the world. Indeed, black Clevelanders endorsed the UNIA’s

racially separatist, transnational programme and many undoubtedly became aware of

their place in a larger black world through Garveyism. This enthusiasm underscores the

diasporic dimensions within Midwestern life and the region’s visibility in the global Garvey

movement.

At the same time, black Clevelanders’ interest in Garveyism revealed the contradictions

within their diasporic politics and identities. Garvey subscribed to a civilizationist view of

Africa. Framing diasporan blacks as enlightened and modern, who would uplift ‘the

backward tribes of Africa’, as UNIA’s official programme put it, Garvey’s Pan-African

vision often strikingly resembled the white supremacist arguments he sought to refute (Hill

1983). Given their strong support for Garveyism, many black Clevelanders upheld this

civilizationist sensibility. This suggests that their oppositional consciousness did not

represent a complete break from the hegemonic ideals of white supremacy. While it enabled

black Clevelanders to dream of a new world, this vision remained, in part, circumscribed by

their contemporary historical moment.

Gender, class, and Cleveland UNIA membership

The varied responses to Garveyism and the membership of Division 59 revealed the

saliency of class and gender in shaping the diasporic politics and identities of black

Clevelanders. The Cleveland UNIA’s meteoric rise, for example, troubled some local

black elite, many of whom who were closely connected to the city’s white leadership. In a

1920 letter to White F. White, then the national assistant secretary of the NAACP,

Cleveland NAACP head Harry E. Davis blasted the UNIA for its unwarranted ‘hostility’

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towards the NAACP. Davis did not state his specific grievances with the UNIA (NAACP

1922), but like NAACP officials across the country, Davis likely viewed the UNIA with

contempt for its demands for racial separatism and emigration to Africa (Martin 1976).

While some black Cleveland middle-class leaders despised the UNIA, others endorsed

it. The most prominent of these figures was Leroy Bundy, the black national hero of the

East St Louis riot. Recognizing his national stature with the African American community,

Garvey shrewdly enlisted him into the UNIA. Elected as the UNIA’s first assistant

president general at the 1922 UNIA convention in New York, Garvey knighted Bundy as

commander of the Distinguished Service Order of Ethiopia (Hill 1985). Bundy’s decision

to support the UNIA, in essence, signaled that segments of the black Cleveland middle-

class took the Garvey movement seriously. Recognizing it as a major force in the Central

Area that spoke directly to the hopes and dreams of the black masses, black elites

understood that they needed to work with the UNIA if they hoped to maintain their

position as community leaders.

Bundy’s support for Division 59 provides a lens for understanding the social

composition of the Cleveland Garvey movement and the reasons why blacks joined the

branch. From the beginning, upwardly mobile, middle-class ministers, small business

owners, school teachers and other white collar professionals, many of whom were

migrants, enlisted in the organization and held most of the division’s top posts. Given the

black middle-class’s assumption that they were best suited to lead the race helps explains

their motivations for enlisting in Division 59.

Although middle-class professionals joined the Garvey movement, the Cleveland

UNIA from its beginning was primarily a working-class migrant organization. Working-

class women and men propelled it. Common labourers and domestic workers, most of

whom were married, recently arrived in the city and living in the Central Area’s poorest

areas, comprised the bulk of the division’s membership (Phillips 1999).

Gender played a key role in mediating why and how black working-class women and

men joined the Cleveland UNIA and constructed an oppositional consciousness. Black

Clevelanders enlisted in a movement that adhered to prevailing, socially constructed

heteronormative ideas about the alleged ‘natural’ roles of women and men in the public

and private spheres.2 Viewing gender roles in binary and complementary terms, men were

to be, the UNIA charged, husbands and fathers who provided for and protected their

families. Women were to be faithful wives, nurturing mothers and caretakers of the home

(Bair 1990, Taylor 2002). Garvey’s call for self-reliance and his masculinist framings of

black freedom spoke profoundly to black working-class men in Cleveland. Donning the

military uniforms of the African Legions and participating in drills and parades gave

members a tremendous sense of pride and confidence. For chronically unemployed black

men, however, Garveyism meant more than race pride and redeeming Africa. The UNIA

meant jobs. Desiring to become family breadwinners, Cleveland Garveyite men hoped to

secure good-paying, dignified jobs through the division’s numerous commercial ventures,

but the UNIA never created these good jobs. Still, their dreams of becoming economically

independent and family providers speaks both to how Garveyite men subscribed to

prevailing notions of American manhood and how Garveyism did not completely

transcend the gender and sexual politics of its day (Division 59 1923a, Division 1924a,

Kimmel 2005).

Cleveland UNIA women were critical in Division 59 and in forging a diasporic

Midwest. Reflecting a broader trend in which early twentieth-century black women in the

United States and globally asserted their role as leaders of the ‘race’, African American

women in Cleveland espoused Garveyism and attempted to make it their own

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(White 1999). This was evident in an article in the Negro world by Lavinia D.M. Smith

(1921), a Garveyite and Cleveland public school teacher. Arguing that no people could

rise higher than its women, Smith claimed women appreciated Garveyism because it

‘gav[e] Negro women an equal . . . opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with the

men in the great cause for the redemption of Africa’ (p. 8). Given the violent history of

sexual assault of black women by white men, and the former’s economic exploitation

and political disfranchisement, the UNIA’s valorization of black women and the

opportunities it afforded them to lead a transnational black movement provided Smith

and other black women with a sense of confidence and possibility in securing black

freedom.

However, while Smith asserted that Garveyism afforded women equal opportunity to

lead the UNIA, gender was critical to defining unequal relations of power within the

Cleveland UNIA. Like elsewhere, Division 59 was a masculinist, hierarchal organization,

with men dominating the branch’s leadership. And like the broader movement, the

Cleveland UNIA constructed an internal organizational structure understanding gender

relations as ‘separate and hierarchal’, notes the historian Barbara Bair (1990, p. 155).

In accordance with the UNIA constitution, the Cleveland UNIA elected a ‘male president’,

who was given charge of leading the local branch, and a ‘lady president’, who oversaw the

division’s work amongst women and children.3 Cleveland Garveyite women performed

community service work through the Black Cross Nurses, the UNIA auxiliary that carried

out similar duties as the Red Cross (Taylor 2002, Hill 1983, McDuffie 2010).

Although the UNIA subordinated women within the organization, Cleveland

Garveyites women forged an oppositional consciousness and often found creative ways

to challenge the sexism of male leaders and to uplift black communities. These women

practised what historian Ula Y. Taylor has termed ‘community feminism’, a distinct black

feminist politics and subjectivity formulated by Garveyite women combining feminism and

nationalism. Believing women were best suited for nation-building, Garveyite women

rejected masculinist claims of women’s intellectual inferiority to men and oppressive

power relations between women and men. Amy Jacques Garvey, Garvey’s second wife and

a major Pan-Africanist thinker in her own right, adopted this sensibility (Taylor 2002).

Bessie A. Bryce, the Cleveland UNIA’s executive secretary during the mid 1920s,

subscribed to community feminism as well. Married, confident and charismatic, she refused

to acquiesce to the group’s male leadership and demanded a voice for women in the

organization (Division 59 1924b). Resembling a trend in other locales, women were critical

to building, leading and sustaining the Cleveland UNIA throughout its entire history and in

cultivating transnational linkages (Taylor 2002, Duncan 2009, McDuffie 2010).

The Cleveland UNIA’s movement culture

The Cleveland UNIA’s movement culture helped to advance a diasporic oppositional

consciousness and connect the Midwest to the African diaspora. Division 59, like UNIA

branches everywhere, was as much a social organization and cultural phenomenon as it was

a political movement. The UNIA’s unique movement culture and community work played a

key role in nurturing the branch’s mostly working-class southern migrants commitment to

African redemption. Key to this process was Garvey’s philosophy of ‘African funda-

mentalism’, a civic religion he conceived and incorporated into the UNIA’s organizational

life. Drawing from a variety of black religious credos, African fundamentalism claimed God

was black, categorically rejected white supremacy, and demanded the full freedom of black

people (Burkett 1978, Martin 1983).

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The ecstatic components of African fundamentalism and the church-like chara-

cteristics of Cleveland UNIA meetings appealed to its members’ imaginaries, helped

cultivate community, and tied them to the black diaspora. Typically, Division 59 held its

large mass meetings at the Lane Metropolitan CME Church or Cory Methodist Episcopal

Church. It was no accident that Garvey and his lieutenants usually spoke at these churches

when they were in town. While established, black middle-class churches often

disapproved of southern-styles of worship, both Lane Metropolitan and Cory earned

reputations as welcoming church homes for southern migrants. Garvey appreciated this.

Recognizing ‘the South [as] the character-making center of Negroes’, as Garvey wrote, he

was keenly aware that galvanizing migrants in large cities like Cleveland around his Pan-

African message would significantly advance the cause (Rolinson 2007, p. 2).

Cleveland UNIA meetings, like elsewhere, resembled southern black church services.

Division 59 meetings began with the singing of ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’, the

popular nineteenth-century abolitionist hymn adopted by the UNIA as its official opening

anthem for all events. The song’s opening stanza vividly reveals the essence of African

fundamentalism as both a political and religious credo for black liberation.

From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strandWhere Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sandFrom many an ancient river, from many a palmy plainThey call us to deliver their land from error’s chain. (Hill 1983)

Prayer frequently followed the song. Then came fiery, sermon-like addresses about

African redemption, current events and black history. Spontaneous shouts of ‘amen’,

thunderous applause and foot stamping from the audience often punctuated these

addresses. Meetings closed with prayer and the singing of ‘Ethiopia, land of my fathers’,

the UNIA’s official anthem (ibid.). For newly arrived southern migrants, these meetings

surely reminded them of home, provided a welcoming sense of community in new urban

surroundings, and a link to black people everywhere.

Another key component of the Cleveland UNIA’s mission was its emphasis on

providing mutual aid. Like elsewhere, the active rank-and-file membership in Cleveland

religiously paid their dues and ‘taxes’ to the branch and Parent Body. It was largely

through the rank-and-file’s small donations that the Cleveland UNIA was able in 1923 to

purchase a stately, three-storied mansion at 2200 East 40th St as its new headquarters,

known as Liberty Hall. Located in the heart of the Central Area, Liberty Hall served for

decades as a bustling African American community centre committed to uplifting black

people in Cleveland and globally (Jacob Goldsmith House n.d., Hobbs 1988).

By 1923, less than three years after its founding, the Cleveland UNIA enjoyed its apex

of local influence. Black Clevelanders’ exhilaration for Garveyism, together with the

UNIA’s distinct movement culture and community work, explains the group’s rapid rise,

but the group’s halcyon days came to an abrupt end.

The decline of the Cleveland UNIA, 1923–1929

Although the Cleveland UNIA initially enjoyed considerable support with black workers,

Division 59 by the latter half of the 1920s was unable to sustain the group’s initial

momentum nor build a movement that could actualize working people’s dreams of building

a new world. Several factors explain the group’s decline, including Garvey’s deportation and

local political conditions. Factionalism, financial instability and tensions between African

Americans and Afro-Caribbeans within the local and international UNIA, as well as sexism

and class divisions within the Cleveland UNIA, contributed to its undoing.

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Like elsewhere, Garvey’s legal persecution and the anti-radical backlash were tremen-

dous blows from which the Cleveland UNIA never recovered. In addition, ineffective

leadership and discord between Garvey and Division 59 leaders fractured the Cleveland

UNIA. Frequently, Division 59 members accused the Parent Body of financial impropriety

and Cleveland UNIA officers of stealing money, leading to the exit of members (Division 59

1924d, Division 59 1925).

Meanwhile, tension around local autonomy from the Parent Body and strife between

African American and Afro-Caribbean Garveyites weakened Division 59. Some Cleveland

UNIA members openly complained about the Parent Body’s tendency to appoint outsiders,

many of whom were Caribbean and close friends of Garvey, to head Division 59. For

example, George Williams, a Jamaican and the branch’s executive secretary appointed by

Garvey, claimed he lost his re-election bid in 1925 because the Cleveland UNIA

membership thought he was Caribbean. There is no evidence, other than Williams’s claim,

that his Jamaican nationality affected the election’s outcome. It is telling that Williams

perceived his Caribbean background as an issue. His belief reveals how intra-racial

difference between African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans could prove divisive within

the Cleveland UNIA, as it did across the black diaspora (Division 59 1924d).

Ongoing power struggles within the worldwide Garvey movement further weakened

the Cleveland UNIA during the late 1920s. Following Garvey’s deportation to Jamaica, he

reorganized the international UNIA at its 1929 convention in Kingston, Jamaica, forming

the Universal Negro Improvement Association–African Communities League August

1929 of the World. His intention was to reassert his authority over the organization from

his new home base in Kingston. However, some US Garveyites refused to accept his

authority and formed the rival UNIA Inc. based in Harlem (Hill 1983). The Cleveland

UNIA remained loyal to Garvey and received its new charter as Division 133 from the

Parent Body in 1930. The archival record provides little insight into how this strife played

out within the Cleveland UNIA, cut the years of internecine fighting helped drive some

Cleveland Garveyites out of the organization (Division 59 1929).

While tension within the local and international UNIA contributed to the decline of

Division 59, so did local political conditions in Cleveland. The Central Area was a home to

flourishing community institutions visibly independent from white control. Given the

UNIA’s problems, Garveyites joined the NAACP and streamed into new churches open to

ecstatic southern-styled worship and other community organizations. In short, Cleveland

Garveyites found organizational outlets outside of the UNIA to build community and

struggle for their rights and dignity on the eve of the Depression (Phillips 1999).

Sexism and class divisions within the Cleveland UNIA were key factors in explaining

the group’s decline. Reflecting the general sexism in African American life and political

activity at the time, as well as Garvey’s male chauvinism, Cleveland UNIA’s male

leadership ran Division 59 with a dictatorial grip and expected unquestioning obedience

from the membership, especially the women. As a result, the Cleveland division saw a

revolving door of officers and the silencing of dynamic women leaders who refused to

acquiesce to male leaders. This was the case of Bessie A. Bryce, the Cleveland UNIA’s

popular executive secretary during the mid 1920s. Bryce’s defiance troubled George

Williams, the branch’s executive secretary. Objecting to her alleged unwillingness to show

deference towards him and to earning the same salary as Bryce, Williams demanded her

removal from office before a Division 59 officers meeting. Sexism was an issue here. In

the end, Bryce retained her office in response to an outcry of rank-and-file support for her.

Her victory was short-lived. Insecure with her popularity, Louis Van Pelt, the Cleveland

UNIA president, forced Bryce out of the group in 1926 on the grounds that she allegedly

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was cantankerous (Division 59 1926a, b). Her departure cost the division one of its most

respected leaders. Incidents such as this reveal how sexism drove some talented women

leaders out of the organization, weakening it in the process. Bryce’s departure signalled

what was to come for other women leaders within the Cleveland UNIA.

Given the importance of religion to the organization, leisure activities were an

additional persistent source of strife within the Cleveland UNIA. This fissure revealed larger

conflicts within the organization around gender, class, female respectability, modern

sexuality and commercialized forms of entertainment in early twentieth century urban

communities across the black diaspora. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, contentious

debates within the division raged around dancing, drinking, smoking and women’s

behaviour. The black middle-class often associated dancing, drinking and fighting with the

alleged licentiousness of the black urban working-class (Kelley 1994).

This was apparent when Division 59 under the leadership of president Louis Van Pelt,

a Tennessee migrant and socially conservative Baptist minister, who regularly denounced

drinking, smoking and dancing and called for more preaching at division meetings. Given

this stance, Van Pelt expelled a man in 1926 from Division 59 for being allegedly

intoxicated at a branch meeting (Division 59 1926b). This expulsion was not an isolated

incident. In 1934, Cleveland UNIA officers disciplined its lady president for ‘conduct

unbecoming to a lady’. Officers claimed she intentionally struck an elderly Garveyite

woman (Division 133 1934). Cleveland Garveyites both adhered to and challenged

prevailing ideas about female and middle-class respectability.

The organization’s disciplinary actions illustrate how the Cleveland UNIA’s middle-

class leadership sought to stem working-class forms of leisure, promote respectability and

regulate and discipline the bodies of its membership. Unfortunately, self-generated

records from those disciplined by Cleveland UNIA officials do not seem to exist, but the

leadership’s unease with modern leisure and sexuality may have alienated some rank-and-

file members who did not adhere to the organization’s middle-class cultural politics.

Without question, tensions within Division 59 around gender, class, sexuality and culture

helped to fracture the Cleveland UNIA and prevented the group from forging a collective

identity over an extended period of time.

The Depression, 1929–1940

If the 1920s saw the Cleveland UNIA’s steady decline, then the Depression witnessed the

group’s free-fall and the end of the New Negro Movement – locally and nationally. The

Depression devastated black Cleveland. Unemployment and misery were commonplace in

the Central Area. In response to these upheavals, blacks in Cleveland – like those

in Harlem and Chicago – took to the streets demanding jobs, racial equality and social relief in

new militant black and interracial social movements. Through participating in Depression-era

mass protests, black working people forged a new oppositional consciousness that imagined a

new social order (Solomon 1998).

In Cleveland, the Future Outlook League (FOL) was the most visible organization in

leading these campaigns. Founded in 1935, working-class migrants mostly led and

comprised the FOL. The group’s slogan – ‘The Future is Yours’ – captured the burgeoning

militant, oppositional consciousness and agency of Depression-era black Clevelanders.

Rejecting what the group saw as the racial accommodationism of earlier black groups, the

FOL successfully used boycotts and pickets for securing jobs, civil rights and mobility for

blacks and understood black freedom in global terms. Given the group’s militancy and its

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willingness to publicly support the Communist Party and labour militants, the city’s black

middle-class establishment initially shunned the FOL (Leob 1947, Phillips 1999).

As the FOL built mass campaigns, the Cleveland UNIA sat on the sidelines. Its strident

self-help, entrepreneurial ideology, which in essence espoused black capitalism as the

basis for realizing black freedom, discouraged the organization from participating in mass

actions, supporting trade unionism, and working with Communists (Stein 1986). Hence,

the Cleveland UNIA’s membership further dwindled. Although Division 133 did not

participate in new mass campaigns, many former Garveyites did. While an account from

ex-UNIA members explaining their decisions for enlisting in new groups does not exist,

the defection of Garveyites into new organizations suggests they continued searching for

groups such as the Future Outlook League that spoke to their political imaginaries (Phillips

1999). This movement of Garveyites in and out of the UNIA, and the willingness of groups

such as the FOL to fight for the rights of black working people, moreover, illustrates the

racial and class identities and politics of black Clevelanders were hardly fixed, but rather

shifting and contingent upon both local and transnational social, economic and political

developments.

The Cleveland UNIA during the 1940s

Although the Cleveland UNIA had witnessed years of decline, in June 1940 Garvey’s

death unexpectedly thrust the city and Midwest back into the international spotlight within

the global Garvey movement. In August 1940, the Parent Body held an Emergency

Conference in New York to select a new leader (Hill 1990). Delegates elected James R.

Stewart as acting president general. A Mississippi native and an ambitious leader in the

mould of Marcus Garvey, Stewart became president of Cleveland Division 133 in 1933

and UNIA commissioner of Ohio in 1937. Owing to his dedicated service to the UNIA,

Stewart caught Garvey’s attention and earned his trust. Upon Stewart’s election as UNIA

acting president general, he moved the Parent Body in October 1940 from its temporary

headquarters in Harlem to Cleveland (Hill 1990).

From Cleveland, Stewart attempted to rebuild the UNIA and promote its programme

of African redemption during World War II. The city hosted the UNIA’s Ninth Inter-

national Conference in August 1942. Delegates from the United States, Canada, and the

Caribbean converged in the city, unanimously electing Stewart as UNIA president general.

From Cleveland, Stewart edited and published the Parent Body’s official magazine, the

New Negro world. By moving the UNIA’s headquarters to Cleveland and publishing

the internationally focused New Negro world from the city, the UNIA tied Cleveland to the

black diaspora and signified the Midwest’s continued visibility within the transnational

Garvey movement (Hill 1990, New Negro world 1943, Call and post 1942).

A key component of the UNIA’s wartime programme was its call for voluntary

African American repatriation to Liberia. Like Garvey, Stewart believed that repatriation

would assist in civilizing Africa and solving the American race problem. During the war,

he urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to support Mississippi US Senator Theodore

G. Bilbo’s Greater Liberia Bill. Introduced to the senate in 1939, the bill called for federal

government support for African American emigration to Liberia. An arch segregationist,

Bilbo believed racial separation was in blacks’ and whites’ best interests. Stewart’s and

Bilbo’s belief in racial separatism explained how these apparent foes could find common

ground. Stewart was not the only Garveyite who backed Bilbo’s bill. Garvey lauded it

before his death. Although the bill never made it out of committee, the UNIA continued

advocating emigration through the war (Stewart 1941, Hill 1983, Fitzgerald 1997).

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Despite his auspicious start as UNIA head, persistent problems within the organization –

factionalism, the group’s autocratic political culture, the sexism of some male Garveyite

leaders, and the growing militancy of other black protest groups – prevented Stewart from

rebuilding the Cleveland and international UNIA. Garveyites frequently accused Stewart of

stealing money, while others never recognized him as the group’s rightful leader because

they believed he had abandoned the principles of Marcus Garvey (Western Reserve

Historical Society 1986).

Another contributing factor to the decline of the wartime Cleveland UNIA and Parent

Body was the sexism of the group’s male leadership. The bitter tension between James

Stewart and Ethel M. Collins is a case in point. A Jamaican and one of Garvey’s most

trusted lieutenants, Collins served as the UNIA secretary general from 1937 until 1942.

She was instrumental in sustaining the movement during the transition period between

Garvey’s death and the relocation of the Parent Body to Cleveland (Hill 1983). In late

1942, Stewart viciously denounced Collins as a traitor in the New Negro world after he

learned of her disapproval of his leadership. Infuriated by his accusations, she broke from

the UNIA soon after (Stewart 1943, Taylor 2002).

Stewart’s autocratic style of leadership and sexism seemingly motivated his

denouncement of Collins. Like Garvey, Stewart believed that women’s proper role in the

UNIA was to serve as obedient wives and virtuous mothers. Under his editorship, the New

Negro world (1942) featured articles framing women’s proper role in the UNIA in these

terms. Collins did not fit this feminine ideal. Adhering to community feminism, she

demanded respect from UNIA male officials and expected those who were in her charge to

carry out her directives. Chronically insecure and egotistical, Stewart viewed Collins as a

powerful rival. Her departure was a blow to the UNIA. Following her exit, Parent Body

reports became noticeably shorter and more sporadic, and the Cleveland UNIA became

less visible in the local political scene. Collins’s exit is another example of how sexism

within the UNIA drove out visible black women leaders and hurt the movement in the

process.

The key factor in explaining the Cleveland UNIA’s decline was the emergence of a

new militant, diasporic oppositional consciousness adhered to by intellectuals and black

working people locally and across the world. The historian Penny Von Eschen calls

World War II a ‘diaspora moment’. She defines it as ‘a time when wartime agitation

and discussion about colonial independence reached fruition’ (Von Eschen 1997, p. 69).

African American protest groups such as the NAACP, Council on African Affairs, and the

March on Washington Movement adopted this position. These organizations loathed

segregationists such as Theodore Bilbo, dismissing emigration as a racist scheme to deny

black freedom (Fitzgerald 1997). Instead groups such as the Council on African Affairs

looked to Africa like never before as the vanguard of Pan-Africanism. Moreover, they

believed that expanding the New Deal social welfare system and labour rights, as well as

forging political coalitions with progressive whites and other people of colour, were

essential to securing black rights and a more democratic world. These positions spoke

directly to millions of African Americans (Von Eschen 1997). In contrast, the UNIA still

viewed Africans as uncivilized and remained wedded to emigration and entrepreneuri-

alism. By any measure, the UNIA’s programme was behind the times and no longer

reflected the contemporary political imaginaries of most African Americans.

In Cleveland, most African Americans – like elsewhere – were more concerned with

attaining full citizenship rights and economic security than emigrating to Africa. While

African Americans remained second-class citizens, their cautious optimism that the war

would end Jim Crow and colonialism explains their determination to attain better jobs,

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housing and political power at home. Staunchly opposed to emigration and segregation and

understanding black freedom in global terms, the Future Outlook League captured black

working people’s oppositional consciousness and channelled it into building the most

dynamic movement for racial justice and equality in wartime Cleveland through boycotts,

pickets, trade unionism and electoral politics (Future Outlook League 1938, 1942). So

while the FOL galvanized black Clevelanders into action, Division 133 spoke mainly to a

small group of die-hard Garveyites by the war’s end. Still holding Garvey’s 1920s dream of

redeeming Africa, Stewart in 1949 repatriated to Liberia and moved the Parent Body with

him to Monrovia, Liberia’s capital. The city remained the UNIA’s headquarters until his

death in 1964 when it then moved to Chicago (Phillips 1999, Hill 1990).

Garveyism in Cleveland during the Civil Rights–Black Power era

As Civil Rights and Black Power campaigns erupted in Cleveland during the 1960s,

Division 133 remained marginal in local black affairs and played no visible role in the

historic mayoral campaign of Carl B. Stokes in 1967, making him the first black mayor of

a major US city (Moore 2003). In 1975, the Parent Body returned to Cleveland after

Mason A. Hargrave, Division 133 president, was elected UNIA president general. This

move did not reverse the Cleveland UNIA’s decline (Western Reserve Historical Society

1986, Hobbs).

Focusing narrowly on Division 133’s demise, however, overlooks how Garveyism

continued to thrive in the city and inform black Clevelanders’ oppositional, diasporic

identities during the Civil Rights–Black Power era. Garveyism survived in new, local

Black Power organizations comprising young, working-class black nationalists who

consciously saw themselves as Garveyites. Like their predecessors during the World War

I years, a combination of local and global developments explains the resurgence of

Garveyism during the 1960s. Cleveland, like other large Midwestern cities, was undergoing

massive de-industrialization (Moore 2003, Sugrue 2005). Scores of local factories shut

down, depriving young blacks of good paying jobs and the prospects of upward mobility.

Moreover, many black youth felt that civil rights failed to significantly improve their lives.

Inspired by Garvey’s defiant call for black self-determination and captivated by burgeoning

African nationalism, young Cleveland black nationalists formed groups such as the House

of Israel and Afro-Set during the late 1960s. Committed to the Black Power programme of

self-determination, black pride, and Pan-African unity, these organizations were visibly

involved in local struggles for black economic and political power (Moore 2003, Joseph

2006). This new generation of Garveyites was largely unaware of the history of the local

UNIA and had no connections to it. Many had come to Garveyism through the neo-

Garveyite, religiously unorthodox Nation of Islam founded in 1930 and exchanges with

veteran black nationalists. Irrespective of what path they followed to Garveyism, Black

Power militants in Cleveland adopted Garveyism as their political identity and programme

and applied it to local struggles for black rights during the late 1960s and 1970s (F.C. Perry

Smith, personal community, 2 October 2009).

Conclusion

Garveyism in Cleveland had a dynamic, complex history. Comprising primarily working-

class migrants, the Cleveland UNIA served as a powerful vehicle for advancing black

rights, fostering community and cultivating a diasporic, oppositional consciousness. For

a brief moment in the early 1920s, the Cleveland UNIA was the largest social movement

in the city and highly visible within with the transnational Garvey movement. Like

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elsewhere, the Cleveland UNIA largely owed its success to the efforts of women. However,

intraracial and class divisions, authoritarianism, and sexism within the organization,

together with local and international events, affected the viability of the Cleveland

UNIA during the 1930s and 1940s. The relocation of the UNIA’s world headquarters in

1940 did not reverse the Cleveland’s UNIA decline. However, Garveyism found new

organizational homes in 1960s-era local Black Power groups and transformed the

subjectivities of black Clevelanders. Also, Cleveland Garveyism highlights the challenges

facing scholars interested in excavating the organizational life of the Garvey movement in

the urban Midwest. Given the gaps in the archival record, there is much we may never

know about the Cleveland UNIA, particularly the experiences of its working-class rank-

and-file.

Conceptually and more broadly, a study of the Garvey movement in Cleveland

elucidates the overlooked history of a diasporic Midwest and the region’s visibility in the

larger black world. Given this, Garveyism in Cleveland requires African Americanists to

look beyond US boundaries and appreciate the transnational dimensions of black life and

history in the Midwest. Black Clevelanders came to see themselves through Garveyism as

diasporic subjects while at the same time Garvey recognized the Midwest as an integral

part of this worldwide black movement. At the same time, the history of Garveyism in

Cleveland requires scholars of the African diaspora to dispense with the ‘Black Atlantic’

as a useful analytical framework for appreciating the complex histories and lives of the

African descended. The Black Atlantic paradigm overlooks the Midwest – and other

regions of the world for that matter – and fails to acknowledge the diverse geographic

localities where black people forged diasporic identities and pursued transnational politics.

Finally, the Garvey movement in Cleveland contains important organizational lessons

and conceptual possibilities for contemporary black politics in the United States and

across the diaspora. From the economically ravaged East Side of Cleveland to the favelas

in Rio de Janeiro to Port-au-Prince’s Cite Soleil slum ravaged by the 2010 earthquake, to

post-Katrina New Orleans and London’s Brixton neighborhood, to the war-torn eastern

Democratic Republic of Congo and Darfur, black peoples are in a state of crisis. White

supremacy is on the move in the United States and globally. Globalization, neo-liberalism

and neo-colonialism are tightening their grip on the Caribbean and Africa, with women

and children disproportionately suffering from poverty. HIV/AIDS is literally threatening

the survival of the African-descended (Christian 2009).

Certainly, black people around the world are organizing against injustice, but there is

no protest organization today that is galvanizing into action the African-descended around

the world like the Garvey movement during its heyday. For those of us interested in

advancing black freedom everywhere, we neither want to romanticize the UNIA nor

replicate its missteps, namely its undemocratic, sexist, heteronormative tendencies and

uncritical understanding of blacks and their relation to capitalism. Neither is it likely nor

desirable for any one organization today or in the future to speak on behalf of all black

people. Still, the unprecedented Garvey phenomenon enabled black people globally to

dream of a new world in which the African-descended were free. What an inspiring vision

for our times.

Notes

1. I use the term ‘the Midwest’ to describe the region that includes states between the AppalachianMountains to the Rocky Mountains and north of the Ohio River.

2. I use the term ‘heteronormative’ to describe systems of power, institutions and cultural practicesthat frame human sexuality into two distinct and complementary genders (male and female),

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posit heterosexuality as natural and the only form of human sexuality, and understand marriagesbetween men and women as the only appropriate for site for sexual relations.

3. Women never served as division presidents in Cleveland as they occasionally did in otherlocales (Harold 2007).

Notes on contributor

Erik S. McDuffie is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies and theDepartment of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Heis the author of the forthcoming book Sojourning for freedom: black women, American communism,and the making of black left feminism (Duke University Press). He is currently developing amonograph, ‘Garveyism in the urban Midwest: the making of diaspora in the American Heartland’.

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