The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society

After reading Adolph Reed's essay on Stein's work last week, I decided to pick up her Marcus Garvey book, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society. Since it is usually worthwhile to explore studies of Garvey or other black historical figures which are not works of hagiography, Stein's book grabbed my attention. She applies a class analysis of Garvey and the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) to elucidate its growth, meteoric rise, and fall, taking the reader along the way across the US, the West Indies, and Africa. According to Stein, Garvey's petty bourgeois origins and initial base inherited bourgeois notions of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism from the 19th century. Thus, according to Stein, differences between the UNIA and other black organizations such as the NAACP or elite African associations in British West Africa, were rather slight and all eschewed mass-based tactics (that is, until conditions in the 1930s favored them). 

During an economic boom and period of expanding economic opportunities for blacks in the US in industrial workplaces, as well as the growth of black-owned businesses, many saw the UNIA's message of racial enterprise and the Black Star Line as the future steps for the race's development of Africa and liberation. Stein outlines the rise and fall of the BSL through incompetence, poor planning, and economic conditions in the shipping industry of the 1920s, which indicates that Garveyism was already falling apart independently of sabotage from the US government. Her chapter on Liberia similarly argues that the UNIA's failures to establish settlements in the only independent West African state were due to Americo-Liberian elite opposition. Furthermore, given the lack of capital and resources possessed by the UNIA, it's unlikely their impact on Liberian development would have been great. 

However, the most important question of the book, the role of class and historical materialist history, can be misleading. She painstakingly demonstrates that Garveyism in the US and the Caribbean never really embraced working-class politics, but sometimes one cannot help but feel that Stein did not let the black working-class peoples of the US or the West Indies speak for themselves. Of course, due to the paucity of sources for much of the black working-class at this time, one can applaud how Stein finds the few sources she can. Furthermore, she is likely correct that as working conditions and prospects declined for the black working-class, especially with the Great Depression and the decimation of black businesses and employment, fewer would retain interest in the UNIA as it was largely irrelevant to their quotidian material needs. 

Moreover, as fans of Adolph Reed will know, most of these racial leaders were self-proclaimed and often condescendingly presumed to speak for or represent black constituencies which did not actually exist. For Garvey, despite being a mass movement for a time, the Parent Body in New York squabbled with the locals (not to mention internal dissension among the Parent Body) and did not necessarily have a strong say on how locals conducted themselves. Stein uses for examples of this the UNIA locals in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Gary. So, considering the UNIA's intellectual debt to 19th century black nationalist thought, within the context of urbanization and immigration, perhaps it's best scene as a transitional movement that endeavored to graft elite/bourgeois vision with a mass base, which it would lose due to the spectacular mismanagement of the BSL and other ventures of racial enterprise. 

But as a transitional type of organization, and with its charismatic leader whose transcontinental reach influenced subsequent Pan-Africanists and anti-colonial activists, the UNIA does appear significant for shaping subsequent black working-class views of nationalism in the years after his death. Sometimes, I cannot help but think leftists refuse to acknowledge how the black working-class, like others, could support and endorse some of the elite or petite bourgeois notions of progress and uplift without identifying class conflict as a major factor. This does not mean there were no tensions, or that class consciousness excludes racial or color consciousness. Some of the key figures in the annals of Harlem radicalism who appear in the book, such as Hubert Harrison, or members of the African Blood Brotherhood, combined a class-consciousness with racial and Pan-Africanist politics or sympathies.