The black separatist movement led by Marcus Garvey has long been
viewed as a phenomenon of African American organization in the
urban North. But as Mary Rolinson demonstrates, the largest number
of Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) divisions and
Garvey's most devoted and loyal followers were found in the
southern Black Belt. Tracing the path of organizers from northern
cities to Virginia, and then from the Upper to the Deep South,
Rolinson remaps the movement to include this vital but overlooked
region.
Rolinson shows how Garvey's southern constituency sprang from
cities, countryside churches, and sharecropper cabins. Southern
Garveyites adopted pertinent elements of the movement's ideology
and developed strategies for community self-defense and
self-determination. These southern African Americans maintained a
spiritual attachment to their African identities and developed a
fiercely racial nationalism, building on the rhetoric and
experiences of black organizers from the nineteenth-century South.
Garveyism provided a common bond during the upheaval of the Great
Migration, Rolinson contends, and even after the UNIA had all but
disappeared in the South in the 1930s, the movement's tenets of
race organization, unity, and pride continued to flourish in other
forms of black protest for generations.