"For the Freedom of the Race": Black Women and the Practices of Nationalism, 1929-1945

Abstract

"For the Freedom of the Race" examines how a vanguard of nationalist women leaders--Amy Jacques Garvey, Maymie De Mena, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, Ethel M. Collins, Ethel Waddell, and Celia Jane Allen, among them--engaged in national and global politics during the 1930s and 1940s. With the effective collapse of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)--the dominant black nationalist organization in the United States and worldwide in the immediate post-World War I era--these women leaders emerged on the local, national, and international scenes, at once drawing on Garveyism and extending it. As pragmatic activists, nationalist women formulated their own political ideas and praxis. They employed multiple protest strategies and tactics (including grassroots organizing, legislative lobbying, letter-writing campaigns, and militant protest); combined numerous religious and political ideologies (such as Freemasonry, Ethiopianism, Pan-Africanism, and Islam); and forged unlikely alliances--with Japanese activists, for instance--in their struggles against racism, sexism, colonialism, and imperialism. Drawing upon an extensive evidentiary base of primary sources including archival material, historical newspapers, and government records, my study reclaims the Great Depression and World War II as watershed moments in the history of black nationalism and sheds new light on the underappreciated importance of women in shaping black nationalist and internationalist movements and discourses during this period.