The Roots of Diaspora
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manu- scripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. “W.E. Burghardt Du Bois” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1925. Originally published in AphroChic magazine Issue 2, Winter 2019.
In the first installment of this series, we explored questions pertaining to the nature of the African Diaspora. The concept as we currently understand it emerges from the much longer history of Pan-Africanism - a massive body of individuals, organizations, movements, thinkers, creatives and artists that worked on all levels across many nations to improve the lives and lots of Black people around the world.
It was the hope, tenacity, creativity, genius and ultimately the success of the many Pan-Africanist movements that paved the way for what we now know as the African Diaspora, changing the world several times along the way. In this article, we will begin to explore the history of Pan-Africanism as a social, political and cultural force from the first coining of the phrase through the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance.
The Birth of Pan-Africanism
It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that communities born from dispersal across oceans quickly developed an international interest. Even before the turn of the 19th century, the victories of Toussaint L’Ouverture had become the personal triumph of nearly every member of the yet-to-be-named diaspora. At the same time, in Britain, a community of former slaves turned intellectuals, including Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, “developed a body of ideas and an intellectual tradition which provided the basis for Pan-Africanism in [the 20th] century,” according to German historian Imanuel Geiss. These foundations would come to fruition less than four decades after the beginning of emancipation in the United States when Pan-Africanism would take its first formal steps at a conference held over three days in London, in the summer of 1900.
The Pan-African Conference held by Henry Sylvester-Williams in 1900 and the later “congresses” that lasted until 1974 under W.E.B. DuBois and others set the stage during a period of intense intellectual, cultural, and political commerce between dispersed communities on several continents. By the time he arrived in England in 1896, experience with the varying conditions of blackness in both his native Trinidad and the United States had provided Williams, a lawyer and lecturer, with ample reason to believe that the political fortunes of Black communities across national borders were interconnected. In 1897, Williams founded the African Association which became the Pan-African Association following the first conference. Though the organization would prove to be short-lived beyond the close of the conference, the meeting itself was not without result. As historian Saheed Adejumobi states, “For the first time, opponents of colonialism and racism gathered for an international meeting...The conference...attracted global attention, placing the word ‘Pan-African’ in the lexicon of international affairs and making it part of the standard terminology of black intellectuals.”
It was also at the close of this pivotal event that W.E.B. DuBois would deliver his famous, “Address to the Nations of the World,” which marked the first public utterance of his most noted phrase: “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Though far from being the only medium or framework for interaction between Black intellectuals, the Pan-African congresses provide a useful timeline along which to assess the emergence and evolution of what would become the African Diaspora concept. Other complimenting and often competing ideals were forwarded by the Back-to-Africa movements of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), as well as a host of Black Nationalist movements.
From the beginning, the international nature and outlook of these conferences was clear. Geiss notes that, “Afro-Americans and Afro-West Indians were most prominent in it, but the [continental] African element was by no means negligible. The African Association, the Pan-African Association, and the Pan-African Conference were noticed and welcomed in the press of West Africa.” Nearly 20 years passed between the first and second conferences, a span of time no doubt lengthened by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Nevertheless, Black intellectuals, led by DuBois, found occasion in 1919 for a Paris-based conference to run parallel to the peace conference being held in Versailles by the previously warring powers.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. “The Brown Madonna” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1925.
With funds drawn from organizations ranging from the NAACP to the Elks and Masons, the second Pan-African Conference (also called the first Pan-African Congress) brought together some sixty intellectuals from around the world. Resolutions coming out of this event included a host of demands levied against the colonial powers. Yet Adejumobi relates that, “While congress attendees insisted that [Africans] should be allowed...to participate in their own government, they did not demand African self-determination. [Yet] despite the moderate nature of the demands, the European and American powers represented at the Versailles Peace Conference remained noncommittal.”
The Mechanisms of Pan-Africanism
During the interval separating the first and second Pan-African conferences, events continued to unfold that would impact both the direction and scope of internationalist activity. Notable among these was the London publication of the African Times and Orient Review by Duse Mohamed Ali. Described by the Chicago Defender in 1922 as a “dramatist, traveler, and financier,” among other trades, Ali was deeply interested in the financial impact of racial discrimination around the world.
One of a number of truly fascinating characters from this period, Ali began as the child of an Egyptian father and a Sudanese mother. Losing contact with his impoverished family and thus his knowledge of Arabic, Ali adopted the name Duse in addition to his given Mohamed Ali. His life’s resume included periods of journalism, acting, editing, plagiarized books and failed plays along with continuing business speculation in the trading and banking industries. An ardent Pan-Africanist in addition to supporting Islam as the spiritual alternative to Christianity for Black people around the world, Ali was influential in the founding of both the Moorish Science Temple of America, and the Nation of Islam. The African Times and Orient Review ran intermittently and under various titles between 1912 and 1928. In every incarnation, according to historian, Robert Hill, the paper was intended to be, “a Pan-Oriental, Pan-African journal at the seat of the British Empire which would lay the aims, desires and intentions of the Black, Brown, and Yellow Races — within and without the Empire — at the throne of Caesar.”
Despite the care taken to express loyalty to the monarchy in whose seat the paper operated, the enterprise was regarded with suspicion by British authorities for its open support of “Pan-Ethiopianist” ideals. Nevertheless, the paper enjoyed wide distribution, finding itself in locales as varied as India, New Zealand and Australia, as well as Oklahoma, New York, and a host of other North American cities. It also drew the attention of several notable contributors and correspondents. Among them were Booker T. Washington and J.E. Casely Hayford. Also included was renowned journalist and advocate of Black self-defense, Bruce Grit. Yet perhaps the greatest impact would be made by the young Marcus Garvey, who worked for a period in 1913 as a messenger and handyman at the magazine’s offices in London.
By the time of the convening of the 1919 conference, Garvey had, after meeting with initial disappointments in his native Jamaica, established his own Pan-African movement in the United States. The UNIA would become one of the largest organizations of its time, establishing several hundred branches with thousands of members. The impact and influence of the UNIA stretched beyond the United States and the Caribbean to make itself felt in Canada and throughout Africa as well.
The massive international appeal of “Garveyism” illustrated not only the need, but also the potential of combining various perspectives on blackness that emerged from the disparate corners of the diaspora, as well as the divergent social and political demands of the varying populations. The rise of the UNIA represented just such a juxtaposition as Robert Hill points out, because, “at the simplest level, Marcus Garvey and the UNIA symbolize the historic encounter between two highly developed socioeconomic and political traditions: the social consciousness and drive for self-governance of the Caribbean peasantry and the racial consciousness and search for justice of the Af- ro-American community.” The combination would strike a nerve at a time that would prove pivotal for the formation and direction of Black political leadership in the United States. On the international level, the combined effect of Garvey’s unrelenting insistence on Black equality and African nationalism with the “new metaphysic of success” caused the movement to ascend, for a time, to the level of a religion.
The New Negro
Four years after the third Pan-African Congress was convened by DuBois in 1923 in Lisbon, he held the fourth in New York City in 1927. By that time, New York had established itself as the unofficial center of the Black avant-garde. The 1920’s opened the door on a period of cultural rebirth, innovation, and most of all, reinvention. Intellectuals of every stripe and school seemed to flock to the city. Nationalists quarreled with integrationists while Garveyists and Black Muslims — ostensible cousins through the influence of Duse Mohamed Ali — preached self-determination and self-defense. All the while a new generation of authors, poets, playwrights, actors and artists produced a body of work that would alter, and in many cases, set the standard for years to come.
The cultural epitome of this moment was embodied in the New Negro Movement, itself epitomized in an eponymous book. The New Negro was edited by Alain Locke and published first in 1925. The opening words of Locke’s introduction encapsulate the gestalt and driving worldview of both the book and the time that it was meant to symbolize. From the very first words of his introduction, Locke describes a moment of great and surprising transition. Proclaiming that the coming of the New Negro is the result of a series of phenomena that occurred, “beyond the watch and guard of statistics,” Locke warns that this new notion of blackness will be as unpredictable in its presence as it had been in its arrival.
In effect, the New Negro functions for Locke as the direct antithesis of the “Old” Negro paradigm set up by myriad works of fact and fiction ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to W.E.B. Du Bois’, Souls of Black Folk. This marks its emergence as an act of defiance not only against the widely held views attending considerations of, “The Negro Problem” in the mainstream, but even against those who had, since eman- cipation, taken up the overseer’s role of shepherding the race. The result, as Locke relates, is that:
The Sociologist, the Philanthropist, the Race-leader are not unaware of the New Negro, but they are at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be swathed in their formulæ. For the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the professional observers is transforming what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary Negro life.
In New York, Locke’s statements were given form by intellectuals with scores of complementing and competing ideas on how to meet the issues of their time. Yet, they were all united in the spirit (if not the rhetoric) of the New Negro movement by the single driving goal that animated them all: to become - and to be seen as - something other than what they had been.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. “The New Negro : an interpretation” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1925.
Despite his mention of the sociologist, philanthropist, and race-leader as political as well as social elements in the life of “The Negro,” Locke steadfastly avoids overt political speech in both the introduction and the content of The New Negro as a whole — a decision which gained him the ire of some contributors. Nevertheless, both the contributors to the anthology and the movement that it represented were staunchly political as fit the tenor of the time. Meanwhile, the political positions of its contributors were made clear in the work that they produced on both sides of the editor’s desk for the numerous Black publications that flourished, often briefly, during this time of furious activity. These journals would prove profoundly important to the dissemination and development of Black cultural content and political thought, simultaneously stimulating and chronicling the movement even as it occurred. In fact, as Demetrius Eudell remarks:
The whole of the New Negro Renaissance could actually be summed up in the titles of the journals produced in Harlem: The Voice, Crisis, Opportunity, The Messenger, The Crusader, The Negro World. In these titles, the objectives of the movement are clearly defined—and dialectically so, for at the same time that Blacks found themselves in crisis, the situation also presented itself as an opportunity for the establishment of a new message—one... relevant to the entire Negro world.
In addition to those listed above, several noted authors of the Harlem movement, including contributors to the New Negro anthology such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston, attempted to put forth their own views on Black life and art in the aptly named journal, Fire!, the content of which was intentionally designed to fly in the face of what its authors felt to be the propagandist stance of older figures like Locke.
Harlem in the 1920s was as alive with journalistic and scholarly writing as it was with fiction and poetry. However, the “Negro World” did more than just listen to the messages emanating from the United States. It formed them, providing both content and context, as likeminded thinkers from around the Diaspora provided Harlem with messages of their own. The birth of Pan-Africanism was not the beginning of international awareness in Black people. But the convening of liberation-minded Black thinkers from all over the globe was the spark and recognition of a new moment both for those colonized on the African continent and those internally-colonized in the, “New World”. This intense period of international collaboration came at a time when Black populations all over the world were facing similar kinds of oppression under various guises and names. It was their mutual recognition of their shared plight as well as their common history that encouraged them to look across borders and oceans for help they could not find anywhere else.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manu- scripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. “Alain Locke” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1925.