The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925

"Black nationalism assumes the shape of its container and undergoes transformations in accordance with changing intellectual fashions in the white world."

As someone with a casual interest in African-American politics, history, and black nationalist "fringe" organizations such as the Moorish Science Temple, the Five Percenters, the Nation of Islam, and Malachi York's various outfits, and the black women club movement, I have long heard about Wilson Jeremiah Moses and his lauded work on black nationalism. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 lives up to the hype. Everything that ties together Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism, the "authoritarian collectivism" of Farrakhan, allegedly fascist tendencies of Garveyism, and black emigrationism is explained quite succinctly by Moses. The Ethiopianism strand of thought in African-American Christianity infuses all forms of black nationalism examined by Moses, and clearly has lived on despite the Islamic veneer of the Moors and Nation of Islam. All of these things, also explained in an interview by Cedric Johnson as black nationalism reflecting dominant trends in European philosophy and science of the time, prove beyond a doubt that black nationalism, black separatism, and notions of black identity cannot be understood as existing in a vacuum. 

Like the Haitian elite intellectuals who turned to folk culture under US Occupation, US African Americans turned to an embrace of the black lower classes around the time of the Harlem Renaissance, both cases indicating how shifting European opinion on the superiority of Western civilization led to primitivist phases and likely pressured Haitian and African-American intellectuals to embrace aspects of the lower classes and their culture, often based on essentialized notions of race and "blackness" in the case of African-Americans. Indeed, Moses book is Pan-African in scope, including West Indian and African black nationalists like Blyden and Garvey in his analysis, although Haiti or Latin American black nationalism is neglected, for the most part. 

More disturbing of an enlightening experience, Moses argues that James Theodore Holly, drawing on messianic and 'Anglo-African' Protestant black nationalism, believed African-Americans were necessary to guide Haiti to progress, much like Crummell, Garvey, and many more US black nationalists espoused a rather condescending vision of Africa and believed in their own role to improve or civilize Africa. These aspects of black nationalism, authoritarian collectivism, imperialism, and elitism, survive in varying forms today, but clearly illustrate some of the inherent problems with transnational black collaboration in the past. For instance, I always viewed Holly as a positive example of African-American solidarity with Haiti, but the religious, ethnic, and class biases of African-American black nationalists who ventured to the Caribbean or West Africa certainly poke holes in Pan-Africanism. Perhaps sentiment and skin color alone cannot forge meaningful politics or solidarity, certainly not any of the black nationalism modalities as defined by Moses. In addition to these problematic aspects of black nationalist projects of the 19th and early 20 centuries, troubling and religious understandings of black poverty and black family structure essentially paved the way for E. Franklin Frazier and Moynihan's troubling conclusions on the black family and black women, another indication that black nationalism is not, as Moses writes, invariably leftist or progressive.