The Rise of the New Negro History

From a racist society emerges a racist historiography.Footnote ⁷ The establishment of the American historical profession in the last decades of the nineteenth century coincided with the high tide of romantic nationalism, with the era of sectional reconciliation and Lost Cause mythologies, with an age of imperial expansion and white man's burdens. Leading historians of the day accepted the conclusions of scientific racism—that, as Columbia University's John W. Burgess put it, a “black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason; has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.”Footnote ⁸ Rather than consider African Americans as historical actors, American historians played their part in the ongoing construction of the “Negro”—an invented non-agent, as Cedric J. Robinson observes, who existed outside of time and space, who “had no civilization, no cultures, no religion, no history, no place, and finally no humanity that might command consideration.”Footnote ⁹ W. E. B. Du Bois ruefully observed that “one fact and one alone” could explain the attitude of his white historian contemporaries: “they cannot conceive Negroes as men.”Footnote ¹⁰

The exclusion of African American history from the profession had obvious consequences for black historians. Before World War II, only two black scholars—W. E. B. Du Bois and Monroe Work—presented papers at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Of the nearly two thousand doctorates awarded in history at white universities before 1935, only six were granted to black students. By 1960, that number had risen to only seventeen.Footnote ¹¹ Black scholars pursued their own strategies of professionalization. Many of the pioneering black historians of the twentieth century—Benjamin Brawley, Leila Amos Pendleton, Drusilla Dunjee Houston, John Henrik Clarke, Lerone Bennett, Jr.—were self-trained. Carter G. Woodson's Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH; now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, or ASALH), established in 1915, and its publications, the Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African American History) and the Negro History Bulletin (now Black History Bulletin) provided a dynamic collaborative ground for the sharing and dissemination of their work.Footnote ¹² Scholars like Merze Tate, Ellen Irene Diggs, and Charles Wesley built a complementary institutional foundation at the nation's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). As Robin D. G. Kelley has shown, the tenuous space occupied by black historians—both as citizens and as scholars—fostered a dynamic counter-historiography, shorn of the racial chauvinism of the white academy and distinguished by its global and diasporic focus. In this space, radical black scholars like Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Oliver Cox—along with a handful of white allies like Herbert Aptheker—published visionary works that were either ignored or derided in their time and have only come to be celebrated decades later by the mainstream profession.Footnote ¹³

For most black professional historians in the first half of the twentieth century, the aim of their work was not to defy the established standards of the white profession but to redirect those standards to anti-racist ends. This was a classic integrationist strategy, a politics of respectability. In legitimizing their field in the late nineteenth century, American historians had adopted three founding ideologies: a faith in the “scientific method” of German historian Leopold von Ranke and the conceit of the objective, dispassionate researcher; an adoption of the nation-state as the proper unit of analysis; and a belief in universalism, in a “great stream,” as Columbia professor William M. Sloane fashioned it, of human civilization that followed from the same source and culminated in the emergence of Western society.Footnote ¹⁴ Black historians argued that an honest commitment to this three-pronged methodology would reveal the valuable historical contributions of African Americans, as well as the impossibility of understanding the nation's past without accounting for the role played by black men and women. The reclamation of the African and African American past would shatter the invention of the Negro and demonstrate the fitness of African Americans for full citizenship in a modern Western society. Woodson carefully courted interracial and philanthropic support, and aligned his organization with the conservative wing of black politics. The association would not employ “spectacular propaganda or fire-eating agitation,” explained Woodson: “The aim of this organization is to set forth facts in scientific form, for facts properly set forth will tell their own story.”Footnote ¹⁵

The work of Woodson and his disciples was mostly ignored by white scholars before World War II. But by the 1950s and 1960s the struggle against Nazi Germany—and, subsequently, the propagandistic demands of the Cold War—had eroded the intellectual legitimacy of the most extreme varieties of racism. Gunnar Myrdal's influential study, An American Dilemma (1944), completed with the heavy assistance of black scholars like E. Franklin Frazier, Ralph Bunche, and Charles S. Johnson, elevated to public policy prescription what Woodson and his allies had been saying all along: that Americans, white as well as black, would greatly benefit by shedding their ancient prejudices and reinvesting in the nation's egalitarian creed.Footnote ¹⁶ “The task,” wrote John Hope Franklin in his landmark synthesis, From Slavery to Freedom (1947), is “to tell the story of the process by which the Negro has sought to cast his lot with an evolving American civilization.” By 1957, Franklin was cheering the arrival of a “New Negro History.” The nation's major (white) historical associations, he observed, were finally giving serious attention to the study of the black past. Path-breaking monographs by white scholars like Kenneth Stampp and C. Vann Woodward were beginning to confront the old racist historiography. “For the first time,” wrote Franklin, “there is a striking resemblance between what historians are writing and what has actually happened in the history of the American Negro.”Footnote ¹⁷ In 1956, Franklin sanctified the shift by accepting a position at Brooklyn College, becoming the first black historian to receive a regular faculty position at a predominantly white institution. In 1966, he joined the editorial board of the Journal of American History, a first for one of the three major white historical journals.Footnote ¹⁸

The New Black History

This is where things stood when the revolutionary tremors of the 1960s shook the academic world to its core. At the start of the decade, as Houston A. Baker recalls, American college campuses had largely been “pastoral gardens of Western knowledge indoctrination … quiet, decorous, white.” But the political pressures and legislative victories of the civil rights movement opened the doors of predominantly white institutions (PWIs) to unprecedented numbers of black students, many from working-class or migrant families. “No one had imagined that if blacks were admitted to the university, they would be anything other than grateful for such an ‘opportunity,’” writes Baker. “It was assumed that blacks, like compliant colonial subjects, would swear allegiance to Western civilization and quickly take up the business of assimilating white behavioral codes and intellectual fare.” To the contrary, black students at PWIs, joined by their brethren at HBCUs, demanded an overhaul of departmental curriculums, campus culture, and student life that would more adequately center—rather than marginalize—their experiences and needs. Departments rushed to hire faculty members to teach new courses in African American history and literature. The Ford Foundation pledged its support for the new field of Black Studies as programs, departments, and centers emerged across the country. Publishers rushed to capitalize on the burst of interest in African American history. In 1969, more than eighty CBS affiliates aired Black Heritage: A History of Afro-Americans, a remarkable series of 108 thirty-minute lectures, many delivered by leading figures in what series mastermind Vincent Harding called the new “Black History.”Footnote ¹⁹

Black Studies programs, departments, and centers were the product of hard-won, sometimes dramatic struggles fought by black students and their allies. In turn they became dynamic staging grounds for the pursuit of a more complete rethinking of the university itself.Footnote ²⁰ One of the primary intellectual interventions pursued by scholars aligned with the Black Studies movement was a multi-pronged critique of the American historical profession. Harding, who in addition to his duties with the Black Heritage series was founder and director of the influential Atlanta-based collective, the Institute of the Black World, viewed the new black history as an enterprise that would offer a fuller and richer investigation of the black experience. Paying homage to “our fathers of Negro history,” such as John Hope Franklin, Harding nevertheless argued that their historical vision had been limited by a blind faith in the nation's founding promises. Just as the civil rights struggle (of which Harding had been a part) was propelled by a push for black people “to be accepted on the terms by which this nation defined itself,” “Negro History,” going back to the days of George Washington Williams in the late nineteenth century, sought to “reveal the ‘contributions’ of blacks to the American saga.” The new black history had been emancipated from this framework by political momentum: by the transition in the United States from a struggle for “inclusion in America as America defined itself” to a “political struggle for power of self-definition and self-determination”; by “the rising surge of anticolonialism throughout the nonwhite world”; and by the identification of African Americans with “the formerly colonized, the wretched of the earth.” An honest study of “our bleeding countrymen through the widely scattered documents of American history,” argued Harding, suggested “that the American past upon which so much hope has been built never really existed, and probably never will.” Only by a “hard and unromantic reading of the experiences of black people in America,” he wrote, only by setting “our own vision upon the blindness of American historiography,” might a more hopeful future, a new nation, be glimpsed.Footnote ²¹

The new black history pioneered by Harding and his allies—Sterling Stuckey, Mike Thelwell, Julius Lester, John Henrik Clarke, Lerone Bennett, Jr., and others—attacked the root of established historical practice. Objectivity, they argued, was not foundational to the discipline but delusional, given the lie by the racist erasure of black agency from American history since the founding of the profession. Just as the prevailing historiography was inherently political, so too must be its redefinition. Many of the new black historians went further, arguing that the conventions of the profession were rooted in an “Ivory Towerism” that erected artificial barriers between academics and the communities they wrote about. Rather than valorizing impartiality, scholars had a responsibility to their “human sources.” “We cannot,” urged Harding, “write with detachment from the agonies of our people.”Footnote ²²

The new black historians challenged not only the idea of historical objectivity, but also the primacy of the nation-state as a unit of analysis. Harding called on scholars to place their work “firmly in the context of the larger Pan-African scene,” to conceive of history in the tradition of Du Bois and C. L. R. James, who had drawn no hard boundaries around nations, and who viewed their work from the perspective of a global liberation struggle. New black historians firmly rejected the “narrow particularism” of the Western perspective and strove to reveal the “false universality of white concepts.” Prevailing “intellectual instruments” had been designed expressly to keep us from seeing,” wrote Lerone Bennett, Jr. “We must abandon the partial frame of reference of our oppressors and create new concepts which will release our reality, which is also the reality of the overwhelming majority of men and women on this globe.”Footnote ²³

Some assumptions, of course, still stood. The new black historians accepted without question the primacy of male scholars and perspectives in the profession. If the new black history offered a new framework with which to center the black experience, it decidedly imagined that experience through the prism of black men and their work. Of the forty-one participating lecturers in the Black Heritage series, only five were women, and only three—Joanne Grant, Elsie M. Lewis, and Linda Housch (then a student)—were historians.Footnote ²⁴ It did not occur to the leading figures of the new black history that an “honest” reassessment of the American past required not only a spirited challenge to white presumptions, but a rethinking of the profession's gendered assumptions as well.Footnote ²⁵

In the late 1960s, the insurgency of the new black historians sparked a series of personal and institutional clashes within the historical profession. At a conference at Wayne State University in May 1969, and then at the annual meeting of ASNLH that October, white historians were shouted down and challenged about their ability to effectively write black history.Footnote ²⁶ Critical of the exclusionary leadership of the African Studies Association (ASA), John Henrik Clarke led a group of black historians out its annual meeting that same year and into the newly formed African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA). Members of the AHSA attacked the neo-colonial implications (and interrelationships) of Cold War–era area studies and the tendency of African studies to examine emergent nation-states and localities divorced from their broader diasporic and global contexts. They called for the study of Africa to “be undertaken from a pan-Africanist perspective,” one that “negates the tribalization of African peoples by geographical demarcations on the basis of colonialist spheres of influence.”Footnote ²⁷

For many scholars watching these developments, the new black history was inseparable from Black Power; immediately discredited by the association with a partisan black nationalist perspective; and viewed as monolithic, emotional, and irresponsible. This was a troubling and revealing reaction. As Martha Biondi has shown, Black Studies scholars at the time were engaged in lively and thoughtful disagreements about the intellectual direction and proper form their discipline should take. They were pioneers in interdisciplinary study and in promoting global and diasporic perspectives that would only later be “discovered” by other American historians during the “transnational turn” of the late 1990s. By centering black people in their interdisciplinary work, Black Studies scholars “aimed to unmask the pretense of universalism in Euro-American intellectual thought and teaching.” Along with pioneers in gender and women's studies and ethnic studies, Black Studies scholars helped “marginalized experiences, perspectives, and identities to find their own space in higher education.” Indeed, as Robert Allen noted, the demand for Black Studies was “in essence democratic and even integrationist.” It was a call for “a widening of American democracy” by “widening educational democracy.”Footnote ²⁸

What these scholars wanted, however, was a truly expansive and egalitarian vision of integration—a commitment that extended beyond simply opening doors for black faculty and black students. The wanted, as Houston Baker put it, “a revocabularization of academic discourse to reflect a genuine redistribution of space, time, and energy.” What occurred instead “was moral panic as a function of territorial contestation.” Indeed, if many of the new black historians who aligned with Black Studies were sympathetic to black nationalist perspectives, it was because their personal and professional experiences, as well as their intellectual exploration, had led them to doubt that, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, the master's tools would be able to dismantle the master's house. They believed that an appeal for fairness within the context of an unjust system was futile. They believed that the promise of “integration” being offered in the post–civil rights era was an integration that granted entry to “mainstream” American society on terms defined by the dominant—and in their view, colonial—culture.Footnote ²⁹

And indeed, the reaction to Black Studies from established members of the academic community did much to prove their point. It demonstrated that a push for a model of integration shorn of Eurocentric hegemony and universalist pretense was indeed a revolutionary demand in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and that the articulation of a truly interracial democracy, at the very least, remained a distant prospect. Facing significant challenges (not the least of which, the immediate need to hire hundreds of qualified faculty members to staff the new programs in a country where less than one percent of the Ph.D. holders were black), and needing patience and support, Black Studies programs instead endured volleys of attacks from critics at the first sign of strain or weakness. A single poor hire became evidence of a critical lack of standards across the entire field. The demand by black students for standing committees and other forms of input in departmental governance was likewise deemed by critics to threaten the intellectual integrity of the faculty and the university. The whiff of violence—at Cornell, Harvard, and much more seriously at UCLA—served as evidence of the recklessness of the new crop of black students arriving on college campuses. Scattered calls for the exclusion of white students from certain courses, for the exclusion of white professors from Black Studies departments, or for all-black dormitories, was viewed as evidence of creeping black-on-white racism, of “apartheid,” of a new “Jim Crow.”Footnote ³⁰

The most vocal and successful critics of the Black Studies movement tended to be established scholars, black and white, who shared a genuine commitment to the success of the young field but desired to tame its more radical impulses. These critics—Martin Kilson at Harvard, John Blassingame at Yale, Sir Arthur Lewis at Princeton, Eugene Genovese at the University of Rochester, Kenneth Clark at the City College of New York, and others—warned that without the proper guidance, the young programs would slide into the muck of ideological purity, serve as bastions of psychological escape, and offer a second-class, substandard education for their students. The threat, most critics agreed, was black nationalism—an ideology, in Kilson's telling, defined by “anti-intellectualism and antiachievement,” stifling healthy intellectual discourse in favor of a kind of “black magic,” the “idea that miracles are possible if blacks display fidelity to black nationalism and its antiwhite attitudes and rituals.” Black Studies had been “seized,” argued Kilson, by the newly arriving black students, “the typical lower-class Negroes,” who had found the “rigor and discipline of academic competition” with white students “quite alien,” suffered “emasculation,” and thus turned to black nationalist ideologies and “rebellious postures” to repair their wounded egos. For Kilson, black nationalist perspectives offered nothing more than “therapeutic” relief. They allowed black youth “to salve wounds stemming from dehumanizing encounters with white racism” without asking them to adapt to “frustrating and confusing situations on white campuses.”Footnote ³¹

The only path forward, these critics argued, was the path back to respectability. Black Studies promised to bring important new voices to campuses, to bring important new courses to curriculums, and could do so effectively only by demonstrating its legitimacy as an academic discipline. This meant foregoing the “politicization” that was associated with a black nationalist perspective, deemphasizing experimental and community-based pedagogies, and making peace with the accepted standards of the status quo. “Black studies is too serious an intellectual sphere, has too many exciting possibilities of finally liberating the racially shackled American mind, for intellectuals to shirk their responsibility to organize academically respectable programs,” argued John Blassingame. Black Studies, Eugene Genovese agreed, had an opportunity to correct past injustices on American campuses, provided that universities were not compelled to surrender “basic standards of competence.” Sir Arthur Lewis, the Princeton economist, cheered the arrival of courses on “African life” and “Afro-American life” to campus, but argued that these courses should enroll mostly white students. Black students, Lewis reasoned, would make much better use of their time refocusing their attention and studying business or engineering or medicine or law. The university, he argued, was not a place for black students to learn more about “the neighborhood side of American life” but rather “the integrated part of American life.”Footnote ³²

Academic historians responded to the challenge of the new black historians by engaging in similar acts of gatekeeping. White and black supporters and practitioners of African American history cheered what I. A. Newby described as “the white man's new awareness of Negro history”—the willingness to examine with clarity and honesty the nation's dark history of racial oppression. But whereas the new black historians viewed this acknowledgment as a starting point, a wedge that would occasion a broader rethinking of the field, powerful voices within the academy insisted that the arrival of black history was an end in itself, a necessary historiographical course correction. The failure of “objective” research to account for black Americans in the past was not a reason to abandon the concept of objectivity; the illumination of the sins of the American past was all the more reason to affix the study of black history to the study of the nation. Rather than accept the interventions of the new black historians as an occasion for intellectual discourse and debate, leading members of the profession simply refused to begin the conversation. To do so, argued Benjamin Quarles, would be to entertain the “polemics” of the “revolutionary black nationalists,” the “exponents of functional research, issue laden and action oriented.” It would be surrendering the integrity of the profession, concurred John Hope Franklin, to “narrow political purposes.” It would, in Blassingame's thinking, “swap realism for mythology.” Faced with black nationalist perspectives deeply critical of the profession's founding paradigms—objectivity, the nation-state as the natural unit of analysis, and the conceit of Western universalism—established historians retreated to their bunkers. The long overdue arrival of African American history affirmed—rather than called into question—the best practices of the discipline.Footnote ³³

The outlines of this rebranded consensus were traced by two of the great stalwarts of the profession: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and C. Vann Woodward. In a keynote speech, titled “Nationalism and History,” at ASNLH's annual meeting in the fall of 1968, Schlesinger, a member of the Journal of Negro History’s executive council, hailed the end of the shameful era of black history's neglect and the dawn of a new era in which it would be possible “to know in its majesty and terror the real history of the United States.” But in an age when nationalism “is the most powerful political emotion in the world,” great caution was warranted. If one could abide a “rational nationalism”—the “affirmation of the identity and integrity of one's own people,” of which the “invocation of history” formed an organic part—historians must be on guard for expressions of the “aggressive nationalism” such as Nazism and communism. In the United States this also meant repelling the “mystical nationalism” of black nationalism “which yearns for an American system of apartheid.” If the desire to vindicate one's people by utilizing mythmaking is understandable, Schlesinger argued, historians must be careful to differentiate the “noble lie” from “historical truth.” As “custodians” of “the ideals of critical analysis, accuracy, and objectivity,” they had an obligation not to respond to bad history with “more bad history written from a different viewpoint.” Historians must stand tall against the “spread of irrationality” and “preserve the integrity of the historical discipline.” They must never “degrade history” by using it “merely as a weapon in political struggles.”Footnote ³⁴

Woodward was even more direct in his presidential address at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians the next spring. Observing a “certain moral obtuseness and intellectual irresponsibility regarding the Negro people … in our most respectable historical literature,” like Schlesinger, he welcomed the arrival of “Negro critics or colleagues” who might look “over one's shoulder” and preempt “embarrassing” expressions of white supremacy or “ethnocentric gaffes.” If black historians properly took advantage of their “opportunity” and their “duty” to offer an “essential corrective in line with the tradition of countervailing forces in American historiography,” the profession would greatly benefit from this “infusion of ‘soul.’” But temptations abounded and needed to be resisted: the urge to overstate the achievements of a people who “were kept in chains and illiteracy and subject thereafter to crippling debasement and deprivation”; impulses among white historians “of self-flagellation and guilt that encourage the deprecation of all things European or white”; and among black historians “the temptation to gratify the white liberal's mashochistic cravings.” But most of all, he argued, black historians must resist the “cults of black nationalism” that are “seeking lodgement in the academies,” defined by their rejection of the “White Devil,” their valorization of the “mystique of skin color and exclusiveness, of alienation and withdrawal,” and their yearning for “an inverted segregation, a black apartheid.”Footnote ³⁵

What is notable here is not that proponents of black nationalism came under attack. Like all political formations or ideologies, black nationalism is rent with blind spots and contradictions, and should be subject to rigorous interrogation.Footnote ³⁶ What is significant is that black nationalism came under attack in a manner that achieved intellectual censure. Prominent historians did not merely disagree with the arguments of the new black historians; they rendered those arguments outside of the boundaries of rational discourse, expressions of emotional and politicized irrationality that served as a foil for the supposedly hard-headed and dispassionate rigor of their own historical praxis. During the 1960s and 1970s, African American history was granted the legitimacy for which its proponents had steadfastly fought. But its acceptance into mainstream historiography was brokered on exacting terms. In the bargain, students of black nationalist perspectives found themselves precisely where nearly all proponents of African American history had resided before the Second Reconstruction—historiographically exiled.

The Madness of Marcus Garvey

Attitudes toward Marcus Garvey and his movement during the 1920s prefigured these later arguments. Garvey's contemporaries in the black intelligentsia viewed him as a “demagogue” who attracted “the lowest type of Negroes” by appealing to their “emotional nature.”Footnote ³⁷ For W. E. B. Du Bois, Garvey's movement was a tragedy because it diverted attention away from the more “practical” pursuits of the NAACP and his own Pan-African Congresses.Footnote ³⁸ For leftists like Chandler Owen, A. Philip Randolph, and C. L. R. James, Garvey was a “reactionary,” and his program “pitiable rubbish” and a distraction from the supposedly more scientific rigors of socialism.Footnote ³⁹ For black radicals associated with the international communist movement, the UNIA was a movement to be co-opted or a threat to be defeated. “The struggle against Garveyism,” wrote George Padmore while he was the leading black spokesperson for the Comintern, “represents one of the major tasks of the Negro toilers in America and the African and West Indian colonies.”Footnote ⁴⁰

After Garvey's death, the most dogged and important chronicler of his life and work was his second wife and leading Garveyite, Amy Jacques Garvey. From her base in Jamaica, Jacques Garvey generously sat for long interviews and shared her records with the white American historian E. David Cronon, who was researching what became the first published biography of Garvey, Black Moses. But when Cronon's book appeared in print in 1955, Jacques Garvey was shocked by Cronon's interpretation of the material she had shared.Footnote ⁴¹ Garvey, argued Cronon, sold “an unrealistic escapist program of racial chauvinism” to “the unsophisticated and unlettered masses.” He was “a tragic, even a pathetic figure,” who had big dreams but no “practical accomplishments.” Garvey, argued Cronon, failed because he did not understand the race problem in the United States. He “sought to raise high the walls of racial nationalism at a time when most thoughtful men were seeking to tear down these barriers.” By viewing Garvey's movement as an exercise in escapism, Cronon rendered meaningless the mass following that Garvey had acquired. The masses, apparently, had their dreams of liberation figured out wrong.Footnote ⁴² When Jacques Garvey responded with her own history of the movement, Garvey and Garveyism, she was unable to find a publisher, and was ultimately forced to self-publish the volume. In one of the only reviews commissioned for this now-classic book, Cronon dismissed the volume as a “book of reminiscence” and “not a work of scholarship.”Footnote ⁴³

Cronon's work, in many ways, flowed logically from the assessment of Garveyism presented by Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma. Working from a memorandum composed by Ralph Bunche, Myrdal argued that Garveyism presented two lessons: one, that “the Negro masses can best be stirred into unity by an irrational and intensively racial, emotional appeal”; and two, that such movements had no chance of success. Deeming it “an evident matter of fact” that “the power situation is such in America that Negroes can never hope to break down the caste wall except with the assistance of white people,” Myrdal counseled African Americans to place their faith in the NAACP and the Urban League, and a “more effective version” of the southern Commission on Interracial Cooperation. The success of Garveyism at attracting a mass audience thus became not a building block for political engagement but a barrier to progress; not reflective of a vibrant tradition of black resistance but rather of fatalism and chauvinism that worked against the “interests of the Negro people in winning unabridged citizenship in American society.”Footnote ⁴⁴

The political and intellectual climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s generated renewed interest in Garveyism and ensured that its study would become a flashpoint in the emerging African American historiography. This was a good moment to revisit old assumptions about that movement, which had mobilized masses of women and men against colonial rule and white supremacy across the Americas, Europe, and Africa, and which had left a legacy that deeply affected successful liberation struggles across Africa and its diaspora. As Tony Martin sardonically observed in his groundbreaking study, Race First (1976), “no one could have organized and built up the largest black movement in Afro-American history, in the face of continuous onslaughts from communists on the left, black reactionaries on all sides, and the most powerful governments in the world, and yet be a buffoon or a clown, or even an overwhelmingly impractical visionary.” After decades of accounts written by Garvey's political and ideological opponents, Race First was a deeply researched, sympathetic brief for Garvey and his myriad accomplishments. It became a widely respected standard bearer for the nascent field of Garveyism studies.Footnote ⁴⁵

Among non-Garvey scholars, however, Race First made little impact. Critics acknowledged the “extraordinary” nature of Martin's research but determined the author's partisanship not merely limiting but entirely disqualifying. Elliott Rudwick deemed the book “a disappointing backward step” because it “places Garvey on a pedestal,” suffers from “distortions and exaggerations,” and thus cannot be considered “a serious history of his movement.” Rayford Logan found Martin “imprisoned by his determination to prove” Garvey's greatness. August Meier dismissed Race First as “filiopietistic” cheerleading “rather than a truly scholarly monograph.”Footnote ⁴⁶

More generally speaking, the emerging field of Garveyism studies was impugned (and thereby set aside) for its partisanship. The accusation, of course, revealed a different type of partisanship—a reflection of the discipline's redoubled commitment to Garveyism's irrationality and impossibility. Surveying works on Garveyism in 1990, the historian Judith Stein argued that the work of pioneering Garvey scholars—Martin, Rupert Lewis, Emory Tolbert, and others—was a product of the “political sensibilities” emerging from “the resurgence of black nationalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.” Echoing Meier, Stein argued that this “unanalytic” work could be ignored because it was guided by “passionate advocacy” and in search of “simplistic answers” rather than “evidence and careful argument.” Stein's own volume, The World of Marcus Garvey (1986), sidestepped the work of Garveyism scholars and instead joined Myrdal's thesis with the old Comintern line. Stein's Garvey was an unscrupulous striver whose movement owed its success to “the fatalism of the powerless, the utopias of hustlers and charlatans, the promises of mass movements, and the ideologies generated by the new social transformations of World War I and the 1920s.” Garveyism did not demonstrate the racial consciousness of the black masses, but rather the bourgeois roots of black nationalism and the uniform impracticality of such appeals as mass politics. (“However much the mass of blacks were outraged by racial injustices and atrocities such as lynching, discrimination in the United States Army, race riots in other cities, and imperialism in Africa,” writes Stein in a remarkable passage, “these phenomena were not directly connected with their daily lives.”) Garveyism stood in her portrait as a reactionary break on productive politics in the United States and the Caribbean, and made “limited inroads” in Africa. It was “swept away” in the 1930s, thankfully, “by the historical tide of black class formation.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The reception of Stein's book, like the reception of Martin's, was deeply revealing of the conceptual divide it illuminated between Black Studies and Garveyism scholars on the one hand, and those working within the currents of mainstream historiography and aligned with history departments on the other. Garveyism scholars Rupert Lewis and Tony Martin excoriated Stein's work for its presentation of Garveyites as gullible dupes, for its revival of the Garvey-as-buffoon thesis, for its doctrinaire class analysis, and for its lack of appreciation of race as a dynamic category of identity and analysis. Her portrait of Garvey, observed Lewis, repeated “many of the stock racial and social prejudices against the movement” and it ignored “the basic fact that post-Emancipation Blacks in the Americas and colonized Africans had to forge instruments to re-control their lives.” By contrast, most reviewers hailed Stein's work as the first serious scholarly monograph on the subject, a welcome departure from the work of Garvey scholars who “brought to their work a strong ideological charge.” “Future discussions and polemics about Garveyism's role and character undoubtedly will have to contend with Stein's skillful analysis of its class basis and ideological orientation,” argued Eric Arneson. “To a field of study colored by intense emotional commitments,” explained John Higham, an author like Stein “who wields a scalpel instead of a paintbrush brings an invigorating intellectual challenge.” The World of Marcus Garvey, viewed as deeply flawed by scholars of the movement, became the most-cited and most highly regarded work on the subject among non-specialists. It also became the last monograph on Garveyism published by an American academic press in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁸

By this time professional historians were dancing on the graves of the new black historians. In their history of the professionalization of black history, August Meier and Elliott Rudwick noted with satisfaction that the perspective of Vincent Harding and others had made little lasting impact on mainstream scholarship.Footnote ⁴⁹ The “nationalist impulse” that had seemed so threatening in the 1960s had proven transient; black scholars were now replacing ideology with professionalism—trading the “nationalist position” for “the more complex realities” of historical analysis. In a passage that was quite a bit more revealing than Meier and Rudwick intended, the authors indicated that the “socialization experienced by the younger black publishing scholars in predominantly white history departments” had encouraged them to adopt “a more universalist outlook.” The “very legitimization and institutionalization of black history encouraged a shift away from radical objectives to non-ideological and professional ones.” Based on their interviews with black historians, Meier and Rudwick believed they had discovered the strategy. “Today a black nationalist position is no longer considered ‘professional,’” they observed. “That is, it neither accords with the self-image of scholarly competency that all historians desire to have nor helps one get ahead in the predominantly white professional world that is by now largely committed to affirmative action but is also desirous of hiring blacks with scholarly credentials.” By the 1980s—that “golden age” of African American history—black nationalist perspectives had been excised from history departments, sustained in black studies departments which were themselves disdained for the association, and largely missing from the historiography of the African American experience.Footnote ⁵⁰ When the rise of Afrocentrism in the 1990s rehashed many aspects of these struggles, and Afrocentrists once again challenged the universalistic pretensions of Western intellectualism, opponents summarily dismissing them as a descending into fantasy, mythmaking, and anti-intellectualism. Once again, rather than being engaged in debate, the intellectual bearers of the black nationalist tradition were denied legitimacy, placed beyond the boundaries of reason, and rendered “unthinkable.”Footnote ⁵¹

The foreclosure of perspectives on black nationalism has obvious consequences for how historians think and write about the black freedom struggle today. Despite the importance of black nationalist activism and ideology across the centuries of slavery and freedom, and despite its continuing importance in shaping what political scientist Michael Dawson calls the “black counterpublic,” historical expressions and manifestations of black nationalism remain, in Dawson's words, “systematically underrepresented.”Footnote ⁵²

In recent years, proponents of the “long civil rights movement” thesis have sought to deepen our understanding of Black Power by extending its chronology, by broadening its application beyond the “riots and rebels” declension narrative, and by blurring the boundaries and stressing the overlap between civil rights and Black Power activists and activism.Footnote ⁵³ This literature has revealed much about the diversity of Black Power initiatives, particularly at the local level, and it has given voice to previously obscure activists, many of them women. But “long movement” historians have also made the mistake, as Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang have argued, of reducing Black Power to a subset of a broader and eclectic national struggle, of defining it as a collection of tactics rather than the product of its own intellectual tradition.Footnote ⁵⁴ Most of all, long movement historians have fashioned the outlines of the struggle in a way that obscures black nationalist varieties of Black Power, those which encouraged civil rights activists not merely to shift strategies but to embrace a different conception of the problem: to reject the universalizing premises of integration in both their reformist and their radical varieties. In the hands of some long movement proponents, in other words, Black Power is legitimized by exorcising its black nationalist manifestations. If long movement historians have productively encouraged us to think of Black Power as something far broader and deeper than “apocalyptic visions of black revolution,” they have also asked us to view it as something far less than some of the movement's most audacious members had hoped.Footnote ⁵⁵

This impulse is also evident in Peniel Joseph's groundbreaking work in the young subfield of Black Power studies. As with long movement histories, the impact of Black Power studies has been monumentally positive, illuminating the breadth, depth, and multiplicity of the Black Power movement. It has replaced the association of Black Power with declension and tragedy with richness and ingenuity. It has highlighted voices and agents working in the shadows of the movement's charismatic (and mostly male) figureheads. It has moved Black Power from the dark recesses of the nation's past to the center of its political drama, where it properly belongs.Footnote ⁵⁶ Once again, however, the effect of offering what Joseph calls a “more holistic account of the period,” of seeing Black Power manifest in “virtually every facet of African American political life in the United States and beyond,” has too often been to minimize the association of the movement with its black nationalist formulations. The legacy of the movement is rooted, in Joseph's telling, not in its philosophical rejection of the American national project but the part it played in “a larger struggle for radical democracy in postwar America.” In this rendering, Black Power is granted significance and respectability not because it reveals, once again, the vitality and endurance of the much-maligned “racial separatism,” but precisely because Black Power is found to be hardly about racial separatism at all. Instead Black Power becomes a radical variety of the long civil rights movement, a return to the more uncompromising and militant politics of the 1930s and 1940s, before the chilling effects of the Cold War set in. It becomes not a brake on the integrationist project but a more effective iteration of it.Footnote ⁵⁷

Given the occlusion or minimization of black nationalist perspectives in long civil rights and Black Power movement narratives, it is unsurprising that the chronologies of both begin in the 1930s and 1940s. For long civil rights movement scholars in particular, this periodization lends weight to the animating claim, as Jacqueline Dowd Hall puts it, that the “link between race and class lay at the heart of the movement's political imagination.” This framing broadens the old Montgomery-to-Memphis narrative by including the voices of unions, laborers, and leftist coalitions at the peak of their influence in the black freedom struggle. It also affixes the story of the black freedom struggle, as Hall eagerly notes, to the story of “the rise and fall of the New Deal Order”—in other words, to the project of state building. By ignoring the crucial years of black nationalist ascendancy that preceded the Great Depression, and that witnessed the rise of the UNIA, the largest mass-based organization of African Americans in the post-emancipation era, nationalism is reduced to an “impulse” (in Thomas Sugrue's words) to be marshaled and tamed by the more practical politics of “civil rights unionism.” The central ideological and political hinge in the long movement narrative is not rooted in the tension between integrationist and nationalist worldviews that has long characterized black politics, but rather in the tension between interracial coalitions of liberals and radicals. In both cases, interracial coalition building is presented as a prerequisite for the mobilization of transformative politics. If the long movement narrative tells an important story about the black freedom struggle, it imagines liberation in a manner that codifies the black nationalist perspective as ancillary and eventually obsolete.Footnote ⁵⁸

Black nationalism in general, and Garveyism in particular, have also been given short shrift in studies associated with the transnational turn. This literature has done wonderful work braiding African American history into broader global currents, adding geographical breadth to familiar stories, uncovering new ones, and inviting productive rethinking of the field as a whole.Footnote ⁵⁹ In particular, the transnational turn has enriched our understanding of the connections that emerged from the encounter between international Communism and the African diaspora.Footnote ⁶⁰ It has also traced the radical formulations of pan-Africanism and black feminism that developed inside the cauldron of the global Left.Footnote ⁶¹ And yet Brenda Gayle Plummer's now twenty-year-old observation—that “scholarly literature often fails to link black nationalism to vital world-historical currents”—remains.Footnote ⁶² The recent literature on pan-Africanism renders Garveyism as antecedent to a story whose heart lies in 1930s London and Paris—and too often frames the movement as a phase to overcome rather than a building block of pan-African praxis. James Meriwether thus explains his decision to begin his study of black American engagements with Africa in 1935 by arguing that Garveyism was a backward-looking movement that trafficked in the “symbolism” of Africa's “glorious past” rather than “the reality of the colonized present.” Cynthia Young's study of the American “Third World Left” identifies the roots of the Bandung moment broadly in the efforts of “countless workers, intellectuals, and organizers who worked within Communist Party chapters, New Deal–era unions, civil rights groups, and grassroots organizations,” but not in the global mass movement organized by the followers of Marcus Garvey.Footnote ⁶³ In many of the studies inspired by the transnational turn, Garveyism is only briefly present, disembodied—a phantom that stalks the past.

Making Black Nationalism Thinkable

In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), Harold Cruse famously argued that “American Negro history is basically a history of the conflict between integrationist and nationalist forces in politics, economics, and culture, no matter which leaders are involved and what slogans are used.” Cruse warned that our understanding of this history is compromised because of “a lack of recognition that the conflict even exists.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Since then, scholars have noted the limitations of Cruse's dialectic, but have failed to grapple with its enduring relevance; they have participated in the very processes of historical silencing that Cruse sought to identify. If black intellectual history is fluid and porous, and if black identity is multiple and overlapping, it continues to be shaped in powerful ways by a series of questions that divide integrationists and nationalists: do you believe that white people are capable of making the sacrifices necessary to achieve racial equality? Do you believe that convincing white people in this direction is the best hope for racial equality or a fool's errand? Do you believe that a world system constructed by slavery, racism, and capitalism is adaptable enough to fulfill its universalist rhetoric? Or must a new center—an Afro-center—be devised as a countervailing force?Footnote ⁶⁵ Is there a path to decolonization that builds upon the last five hundred years of global history, or must that foundation be radically overthrown? Would such a revolution be possible?

Garveyism emerged as a mass movement in the years following World War I by giving powerful voice to the black nationalist side of this debate. During the war, leaders of the black intelligentsia, most famously W. E. B. Du Bois, had enjoined African Americans to “close ranks” and give support to the war effort—part of a strategic calculation that patriotism in this moment of crisis was at worst pragmatic, and at best liable to erode white resistance to democratic reforms.Footnote ⁶⁶ The racist reaction and violence that met black citizens and soldiers both at home and abroad gave legitimacy to the firebrands of the New Negro movement, who declared that the time for appealing to whites for fair consideration was over.Footnote ⁶⁷ Marcus Garvey began his rise to the leadership of the New Negro movement by delivering a blistering speech condemning the United States following the massacre at East St. Louis.Footnote ⁶⁸ Garvey's articulation of “African for the Africans”—his argument that black women and men would never achieve freedom working within the labyrinth of the Eurocentric world-system, but must establish a competing center of power and authority as a precondition to true relations of equality—drew on a long and rich history that Cedric Robinson has called the Black Radical Tradition and that was rooted in a rejection of the West. This tradition looked backward: to marronage and slave rebellion, to African resistance to colonial encroachment. And it looked forward: to négritude and Rastafarianism, to the Afrocentrism of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Micere Githae Mugo, and Maulana Karenga.Footnote ⁶⁹

Bringing Garveyism to the center of modern American history thus forces an acknowledgment of the legitimacy of black nationalism. It re-emphasizes what the transnational turn has demonstrated, and what scholars working in the diasporic tradition of Du Bois and C. L. R. James have long understood: that the African American struggle has always been bound to the anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles of Africa, its diaspora, and the non-white world. Such an acknowledgment might push us to start our story not in the 1930s but in 1917, the inaugural year of what James understood as “a period of world-wide revolutionary change.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This was the year of Garvey's emergence, of the Russian Revolution, of the United States’ decisive entry into World War I. The migrations, congresses, and horrors of the wartime era sparked a new phase of mass organization and anti-colonial resistance and changed the calculus of empire building, as European states moved to shore up their crumbling foundations. The global networks established by the Comintern and by black internationalists—of which Garveyites were among the most prominent—converged in the 1930s to form a refashioned revolutionary pan-Africanism, catalyzed by the Italo-Ethiopian War and triumphant at the historic Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945. The aspirations of this revolutionary age were partially met in the decolonization of Africa and the Caribbean and in the overthrow of Jim Crow in the United States. Global Black Power, as Michael O. West puts it, “came to demand their completion.”Footnote ⁷¹ Instead, the radical aspirations of the 1960s and early 1970s met with defeat in the face of state repression and a newly constituted neo-colonial order. Revolutionary enthusiasm persisted—in southern Africa, Guyana, Grenada—but with rapidly narrowing prospects. The fall of Grenada's New Jewel Movement in 1983, and the U.S. invasion that followed, decisively brought this period of global reorganization to a close.

Work on Garveyism has demonstrated the ways that this story can be narrated—and perhaps should be narrated—at the local level. The spread of Garveyism was made possible not merely by the propagandistic brilliance of Marcus Garvey but more crucially by the space the movement opened for the articulation and negotiation of local knowledge and strategies of defiance. The growing number of local studies on Garveyism have demonstrated the movement's flexibility on the ground, and its appeal across the boundaries of nation, colony, language group, class, and gender.Footnote ⁷² This is not, as Garvey argued, because of the fundamental unity of the race, but because of the manner in which diaspora acquires political valence in practice. As diaspora theorists like Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Kesha Fikes, and Tina Campt have argued, diasporic ideas and identities gathered meaning through their local articulations, structured by their contact with dense relations of privilege, discourse, and exchange, molded by the unfolding dynamics of knowledge and power.Footnote ⁷³ Garveyism in this reading was a vessel through which local actors could see their struggle in a global context and envision new opportunities for victory. Like other critical interventions, big and small—imperial wars, millennial revivals, slave rebellions, anti-colonial resistance, labor organizing, subversive rumor—it shifted the axis of power relations in the minds of its adherents. The diversity of Garveyism's manifestations was not a mark of its ideological weakness, but rather a reflection of where its ideological center resided: in the places where Garveyism traveled and took root. As Michael O. West and William Martin have argued, Garveyism was a “pan-African potter's clay” that “could be molded any which way,” a crucial articulation of a much longer tradition that drew its strength and vitality from the communities it claimed.Footnote ⁷⁴

From this perspective, it is not surprising that some of the best work on Garveyism has focused on the gender dynamics within the movement. Viewed from a top-down perspective, Garvey's movement bears the hallmarks of a chauvinistic, misogynistic nationalism, dominated by male voices, male leadership, and male perspectives, organized into gender-segregated roles that, as Barbara Bair writes, were “not separate and equal but separate and hierarchical.”Footnote ⁷⁵ And yet scholars have observed something far more interesting in the places where Garvey's organization grew—spaces where such hierarchies were challenged, debated, and sometimes subverted. Shifting the terrain of intellectual production in the “black international” from the formulations of leaders to the contested terrain in which ideas took root reveals a field in which women resided at the center.Footnote ⁷⁶ The study of Garveyism thus offers useful lessons for scholars who have begun the necessary work of gendering the political production of the African diaspora.Footnote ⁷⁷

Amid the insurgency of the new black historians in 1969, Sterling Stuckey observed that a “careful study of the history of Pan-Africanism has yet to be written.” Stuckey called for work that rooted the movement in “nineteenth-century Pan-Negroism,” and which routed the idea not only through political formulations but also through cultural theories like négritude and the African personality.Footnote ⁷⁸ Stuckey's formulation requires an appreciation of pan-Africanism as something more and much deeper than an Marxist-derived strategy of black liberation mobilized to defeat the challenge of twentieth-century colonialism and racism. It roots the movement instead in the emergence of Black Radical traditions mobilized in response to the inauguration of the modern world system—to the slave trade, colonization, capitalism, and white supremacy. In this story, as Michael O. West has argued, Garveyism was not a sidebar but a crucial pivot. It announced the birth of a new age of black internationalism even as it served as an apotheosis of the old.Footnote ⁷⁹ The transnational turn has finally brought Garveyism into focus in the American historical profession, providing an opportunity for scholars to mend a serious breach. By rethinking our narratives to more adequately respond to the interventions of black nationalism—Garveyism key among them—we can fulfill the aspiration of the new black history to write the history of African Americans fully centered in the black experience.