Page 53 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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Court by its decision of Brown v. Board of Education Topeka, Kansas, ruled against the
segregated public school systems in 1954. Commenting on this decision, Manning
Marable says, “No one could realize completely the new phase of American history
that would dawn on 17 May 1954, in a legal decision which would mark the real be-
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ginning of the Second Reconstruction.”
Historically, since the NAACP legal actions and the National Urban League moral
persuasion against American apartheid had limited effects in solving the problems of
the Black people during the 1920s, the masses paid more attention to the Garvey
Movement. Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA) in 1914 in Jamaica and established eight nationalist goals that he extended to
the United States.The main goals of the UNIA were to establish a Black nation, to
create “racial” consciousness, to fight for self-determination, to promote racial self-
help, to make Blacks world conscious through the media, and to build “racial” respect
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Because the Garvey Movement advocated the liberation of the Black
and solidarity.
peoples all over the world from White oppressors, more than three million individu-
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Hence, the
als became members of this organization from more than 19 countries.
UNIA was a manifestation of an implicit Black transnational collectivity. Magubane
notes that this movement “arose and flourished in the conditions created by imperi-
alism. It spread and became an anti-imperialist movement with incredible vigor and
elan.At its peak [in the U.S.] in the early 1920s the Garvey movement was the great-
est outbreak of black political activity since the Civil War.” 158 Garvey also understood
clearly the linkage between the economy and politics; hence, he encouraged the de-
velopment of Black business.The UNIA organized a chain of restaurants, groceries,
laundries, hotels, and printing plants and encouraged African Americans to support
Black business.Although unsuccessful, the UNIA attempted “to establish a commer-
cial link between the United States, the West Indies, and Africa” by influencing some
Blacks to buy stock in the UNIA’s Black Star Steamship Line. 159
Although Garvey was criticized for his call, Back to Africa, he brought nationalist
hope to the frustrated and disillusioned Black masses.Explaining why the Black masses
were more attracted to the Garvey Movement than to the NAACP or the National
Urban League, E. Franklin Frazier argues that the NAACP “has never attracted the
crowd because it does not give the crowd an opportunity to show off in colors, pa-
rades, and self-glorification. . . . The same could be said of the Urban League....
Those who supported this movement pay for it because it gives them what they
want—the identifications with something that makes them feel like somebody among
white people who have said they were nobody.” 160 For the first time, the Garvey
Movement attempted to lead the Black struggle without depending on progressive
Whites.This movement provided hope for the Black proletariat, but it could not pro-
vide freedom.However,Garveyism became the first ideological weapon for Black cul-
tural and revolutionary nationalism.
In the 1940s and the 1950s, the Black people were further disillusioned and frus-
trated.African Americans were convinced that court actions could not destroy Amer-
ican apartheid without protest and revolutionary action.The founding of the Congress
of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942 by Black elites,White liberals, socialists, and paci-
fists contributed to the development of the nonviolent direct action strategy to fight
against segregation in public facilities. 161 The direct actions of this organization in-
cluded sit-ins and freedom rides to desegregate the interstate public transportation sys-
tem. In the 1950s and the 1960s, CORE eventually combined its nonviolent struggle