Photograph © Kate Kelly Paul Prescod is a staff organizer and writer for Labor Notes. He is also a contributing editor for Jacobin Magazine, where his writing focuses on labor and civil rights history. Previously, he was a public school teacher and organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Two Strains of Black Politics

Roughly twenty years apart, two audacious spectacles took place in Harlem that defined black political life of that era. On August 1, 1920, around twenty-five thousand black delegates jammed into Madison Square Garden for the first convention of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). It was an international affair, with delegates in attendance from twenty-two different countries across North America, Africa, Latin America, and the West Indies.

No pageantry was spared; each session opened with a prayer and spirited song. Tens of thousands of delegates and supporters paraded down Lenox Avenue to the sounds of brass bands, featuring the Universal African Legion dressed in regal quasi-military uniform, the Black Nobility and Knight Commanders of the Distinguished Order of the Nile, and the Universal Black Cross Nurses. The new UNIA banners of red, black, and green blew proudly in the wind. Marcus Garvey, the founder and undisputed leader of the UNIA, rode in a limousine and was decked out with an admiral’s hat.

The convention drafted and approved a Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, which encompassed a sprawling set of international and domestic demands. Garvey was elected as the Provisional President of Africa. Other grand titles were dolled out like candy. Preaching a gospel of racial pride and a global economic empire, Garvey and his movement seemed to have achieved absolute hegemony within black political life. UNIA membership was growing around the world, along with their spin-off businesses like restaurants, laundromats, furniture stores, and of course the Black Star Line steamship company.

There were few if any close rivals. Asa Philip Randolph, then a Socialist Party member and fledgling union activist, was in attendance as an opposed but impotent onlooker. He was briefly allied with Garvey when he first arrived in Harlem a few years earlier, and even helped introduce him to Harlem’s soapbox speaking scene. Now, he was utterly hostile to Garvey but could only write about it to his relatively small audience in Messenger magazine. While he tried to organize counter meetings to denounce Garvey, these were scarcely attended.

Twenty-two years later on June 16, 1942 Madison Square Garden was packed again. In what the Chicago Defender described as a “decidedly working class atmosphere,” around 18,000 black people gathered for a mass rally under the auspices of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM). A. Philip Randolph, now a respected leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) union, had threatened to march tens of thousands of working people on Washington, D.C., if jobs in the defense industry were not opened up to black workers. After demonstrating he could rally mass support behind the cause, President Franklin D. Roosevelt blinked and signed Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in defense production. Randolph called off the march, but kept the MOWM in place “in order to watch and check how industries are observing the executive order.” The mass rally was one way of doing this.

The pageantry and symbolism of the Garvey days were still put to use. A small cast performed Dick Campbell’s playlet, The Watchword is Forward, which lambasted the contradiction of racial segregation in a supposed democracy. Hours of speeches were given by a Who’s Who list of black political figures, including Mary McLeod Bethune and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who used the occasion to announce his historic run for Congress. Randolph had no time to speak himself, but concluded the event by leading a lively procession of one hundred BSCP members in uniform, set to the Union army battle song “Hold the Fort for We are Coming.”

The Pittsburgh Courier described it as “the greatest race meeting in this city’s history.” Amsterdam News chose the eye-popping headline “20,000 Storm Madison Square Garden to Help Bury Race’s Uncle Toms.” Historian David Welky painted a picture of the mood in Harlem:

Around eighteen thousand African Americans streamed downtown in their Sunday best. Women wearing festive hats and men in solemn ties jammed buses and subway trains . . . Sixty blocks uptown, Harlem’s street culture fell silent out of respect for Randolph’s audacity.

Randolph and the MOWM had completely captured the political imagination of the black working masses.

Though the general atmosphere of the 1920 UNIA convention and the 1943 MOWM rally were similar, they represented radically different programs and theories for dealing with the issue of racial inequality. In twenty-three years, black politics had taken a long journey from the black nationalism of Marcus Garvey to the robust embrace of trade unionism and the New Deal encapsulated by the March On Washington Movement.

It’s a story not just of contrasting leaders and movements, but of how they took advantage of different and evolving structural conditions. The Garvey movement was at the peak of its powers in the early 1920s and reflected the desperate search out of the morass black people found themselves in. The Jim Crow system was firmly entrenched in the South, eliminating black political participation, reinforcing absolute economic subjugation, and producing all kinds of unbearable daily humiliations. Meanwhile, in the North, a limited and token form of political participation was allowed, but the persistent discrimination in industry, trade unions, housing, and education did not represent a viable alternative.

Photograph © Kate Kelly Paul Prescod is a staff organizer and writer for Labor Notes. He is also a contributing editor for Jacobin Magazine, where his writing focuses on labor and civil rights history. Previously, he was a public school teacher and organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Two Strains of Black Politics

Roughly twenty years apart, two audacious spectacles took place in Harlem that defined black political life of that era. On August 1, 1920, around twenty-five thousand black delegates jammed into Madison Square Garden for the first convention of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). It was an international affair, with delegates in attendance from twenty-two different countries across North America, Africa, Latin America, and the West Indies.

No pageantry was spared; each session opened with a prayer and spirited song. Tens of thousands of delegates and supporters paraded down Lenox Avenue to the sounds of brass bands, featuring the Universal African Legion dressed in regal quasi-military uniform, the Black Nobility and Knight Commanders of the Distinguished Order of the Nile, and the Universal Black Cross Nurses. The new UNIA banners of red, black, and green blew proudly in the wind. Marcus Garvey, the founder and undisputed leader of the UNIA, rode in a limousine and was decked out with an admiral’s hat.

The convention drafted and approved a Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, which encompassed a sprawling set of international and domestic demands. Garvey was elected as the Provisional President of Africa. Other grand titles were dolled out like candy. Preaching a gospel of racial pride and a global economic empire, Garvey and his movement seemed to have achieved absolute hegemony within black political life. UNIA membership was growing around the world, along with their spin-off businesses like restaurants, laundromats, furniture stores, and of course the Black Star Line steamship company.

There were few if any close rivals. Asa Philip Randolph, then a Socialist Party member and fledgling union activist, was in attendance as an opposed but impotent onlooker. He was briefly allied with Garvey when he first arrived in Harlem a few years earlier, and even helped introduce him to Harlem’s soapbox speaking scene. Now, he was utterly hostile to Garvey but could only write about it to his relatively small audience in Messenger magazine. While he tried to organize counter meetings to denounce Garvey, these were scarcely attended.

Twenty-two years later on June 16, 1942 Madison Square Garden was packed again. In what the Chicago Defender described as a “decidedly working class atmosphere,” around 18,000 black people gathered for a mass rally under the auspices of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM). A. Philip Randolph, now a respected leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) union, had threatened to march tens of thousands of working people on Washington, D.C., if jobs in the defense industry were not opened up to black workers. After demonstrating he could rally mass support behind the cause, President Franklin D. Roosevelt blinked and signed Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in defense production. Randolph called off the march, but kept the MOWM in place “in order to watch and check how industries are observing the executive order.” The mass rally was one way of doing this.

The pageantry and symbolism of the Garvey days were still put to use. A small cast performed Dick Campbell’s playlet, The Watchword is Forward, which lambasted the contradiction of racial segregation in a supposed democracy. Hours of speeches were given by a Who’s Who list of black political figures, including Mary McLeod Bethune and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who used the occasion to announce his historic run for Congress. Randolph had no time to speak himself, but concluded the event by leading a lively procession of one hundred BSCP members in uniform, set to the Union army battle song “Hold the Fort for We are Coming.”

The Pittsburgh Courier described it as “the greatest race meeting in this city’s history.” Amsterdam News chose the eye-popping headline “20,000 Storm Madison Square Garden to Help Bury Race’s Uncle Toms.” Historian David Welky painted a picture of the mood in Harlem:

Around eighteen thousand African Americans streamed downtown in their Sunday best. Women wearing festive hats and men in solemn ties jammed buses and subway trains . . . Sixty blocks uptown, Harlem’s street culture fell silent out of respect for Randolph’s audacity.

Randolph and the MOWM had completely captured the political imagination of the black working masses.

Though the general atmosphere of the 1920 UNIA convention and the 1943 MOWM rally were similar, they represented radically different programs and theories for dealing with the issue of racial inequality. In twenty-three years, black politics had taken a long journey from the black nationalism of Marcus Garvey to the robust embrace of trade unionism and the New Deal encapsulated by the March On Washington Movement.

It’s a story not just of contrasting leaders and movements, but of how they took advantage of different and evolving structural conditions. The Garvey movement was at the peak of its powers in the early 1920s and reflected the desperate search out of the morass black people found themselves in. The Jim Crow system was firmly entrenched in the South, eliminating black political participation, reinforcing absolute economic subjugation, and producing all kinds of unbearable daily humiliations. Meanwhile, in the North, a limited and token form of political participation was allowed, but the persistent discrimination in industry, trade unions, housing, and education did not represent a viable alternative.