The Universal Negro Improvement Association Conference

TODAY'S gUEST POST IS BY WILLIAM J. MAXWELL, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN SAINT LOUIS. (SEE FULL BIO BELOW.)

One hundred years ago today … the international Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) conference commenced with a convocation of approximately 10,000 delegates and observers packed into the single story of Liberty Hall, a 17,000 square-foot structure on West 138th Street that had once been the Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle. 

Several weeks earlier, Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born Black nationalist at the head of the UNIA, had sent W.E.B. Du Bois, the Massachusetts-born dean of African American intellectuals and the editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, an abrupt but flattering personal invitation related to the mass meeting. “Dear Dr. Dubois [sic],” Garvey’s note began, “[a]t the International Convention of Negroes to be held in New York during the month of August, the Negro people of America will elect a leader by the popular vote of the delegates from the forty-eight States of the Union. This leader as elected . . . will be the accredited spokesman of the American Negro people.  You are hereby asked to be good enough to allow us to place your name in nomination for the post.” Within four days, Du Bois had replied to Garvey with an equally terse but less complimentary note of his own. “I beg to say thank you for the suggestion but under no circumstances can I allow my name to be presented,” Du Bois instructed. “However, I desire to publish in The Crisis some account of you and your movement. For some time [,] The Crisis has been in receipt of inquiries concerning you and your organization. To these we have simply answered that we had no reliable information at hand.”

[Editor's note: see our July 22 post for an image of Du Bois' letter and see our several other entries devoted to UNIA]

Garvey’s convention would thus have to do without Du Bois’s candidacy for a position of racial spokesmanship long filled through less formal means. But the month-long meeting succeeded in drawing Du Bois and his journal’s concerted attention to Garvey and his flourishing UNIA movement—the latter headquartered on West 135th Street, just a subway ride from the NAACP’s office near Union Square. Before the last gavel, in fact, the UNIA’s August 1920 convention had not only placed Garveyism on mainstream maps of African American life, but had also confirmed Harlem’s status as an emerging world capital of Pan-Africanism.  

On August 1, Garvey’s great meeting began. “Promptly at 10:00 o’clock” in the morning, reported the convention’s official bulletin, “the combined bands of the U.N.I.A. and the Black Star Line,” the latter Garvey’s symbolically rich yet quickly bankrupt shipping fleet, “played the Star-Spangled Banner. This concluded…, the hymn, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ was sung by the audience to the accompaniment of the two bands.” The first of many addresses by Garvey, a dramatic, persuasive, and untiring public speaker, followed. But the main event of the convention’s first day was a procession of “5,000 members and delegates” through Harlem. Stretching “in length from 130th to 140th street,” the line of march proceeded from Liberty Hall to Lenox Avenue. At its head was the “Hon. Marcus Garvey and other high dignitaries,” including the Mayor of Monrovia, the capital of never-colonized Liberia, sitting high in polished automobiles, “all in their robes of office.”  UNIA auxiliaries including the women of the “Black Cross Nurses, with the insignia of the black cross on their caps,” followed in ranks.

The August 1 parade through Harlem reflected the UNIA’s growing reputation for grand display.  At the same time, however, the event tipped its plumed hat to an earlier, memorably somber demonstration organized largely by the NAACP. On July 28, 1917, thousands of Black New Yorkers had marched steadily up 5th Avenue to protest the brutal East St. Louis race riots suffered earlier that summer, white violence responsible for the death at least forty African Americans amid interracial labor tension. As with the NAACP’s earlier march, the UNIA’s August 1, 1920 parade was conducted in silence. No chants or songs lifted spirits along the way. Instead, as in 1917, unadorned black-on-white placards did all the talking: “Africa for the Africans,” “The Negro Wants Liberty,” “Negroes Helped Win the War,” “The New Negro Has No Fear.”  Though the UNIA is now better remembered for its reliance on showy spectacle, its August 1 parade unveiled the group as—among other things—an inheritor of the Du Boisian politics of careful public dignity.  And it kicked off a convention at which Garvey and company conducted the most serious if performative kind of democratic political business: electing an international slate of racial representatives and adopting a “UNIA Declaration of Rights” modeled on the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution as well as the covenant of the League of Nations signed in June 1919.  “Be It Resolved,” the opening of the “UNIA Declaration of Rights” thundered, “[t]hat the Negro people of the world, through their chosen representatives in convention in Liberty Hall, in the City of New York . . . protest against the wrongs and injustices they are suffering at the hands of their white brethren, and state what they deem their fair and just rights.”  W.E.B. Du Bois, not on Garvey’s ballot, was rumored to have slipped into Liberty Hall as the “Declaration” was read.   

WRITTEN BY WILLIAM J. MAXWELL. AUGUST 1, 2020.

WILLIAM J. MAXWELL IS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES AT WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS.  HE IS THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKS F.B. EYES: HOW J. EDGAR HOOVER’S GHOSTREADERS FRAMED AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (2015), WHICH WON AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD IN 2016, AND NEW NEGRO, OLD LEFT: AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITING AND COMMUNISM BETWEEN THE WARS (1999).  HE IS THE EDITOR OF THE COLLECTION JAMES BALDWIN: THE FBI FILE (2017); OF CLAUDE MCKAY’S COMPLETE POEMS (2004; 2008; 2013); AND, ALONG WITH GARY EDWARD HOLCOMB, OF MCKAY’S PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED NOVEL ROMANCE IN MARSEILLE (2020).

TAGS: African American history, UNIA, Garvey, Du Bois, Madison Square Garden, black nationalism, Harlem Renaissance