Abstract
Following America’s brief but significant military adventure in the First World War, the nation was abuzz with an odd and dizzying energy. On the cusp of a new decade, the United States had become a major world power that had, to paraphrase President Woodrow Wilson’s famous quote, allegedly made “the world safe for democracy.” In the process, American society was thrust into the heady realm of world politics without the benefit of fair warning or adequate preparation for such a transition from its long tradition of isolationism. Nevertheless, the United States was now responsible for charting the course for a “new world order.” Despite the unabashed failure of Wilson’s political maneuvers during the Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations, America’s role as a global leader was firmly in place by the start of the 1920s.
The Negroes of America—those of them who think—are suspicious of everything that comes from the white people of America. They have seen that every movement for the extension of democracy here has broken down as soon as it reached the color line. Political democracy declared that “all men are created equal”, meant only all white men; the Christian church found that the brotherhood of man did not include God’s bastard children… So that they can hardly be blamed for looking askance at any new gospel of freedom.
—Hubert H. Harrison, When Africa Awakes1
Woe to the rebellious children, saith the Lord, that take counsel, but not of me; and that cover with a covering, but not of my spirit, that they may add sin to sin: That walk to go down into Egypt, and have not asked at my mouth; to strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow of Egypt! Therefore shall the strength of Pharaoh be your shame and the trust in the shadow of Egypt your confusion.
—Isa. 30:1–3 AV
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Notes
Hubert H. Harrison, When Africa Awakes (New York: Porro Press, 1920; Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1997), 41.
J.A. Rogers, World’s Great Men of Color 2 (New York: 1947), 611.
Ibid., 9–12; Wilfred D. Samuels, Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture, 1917–1929, 35; Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, 30.
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 211.
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), 82.
Andrew Ross, No Respect Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 74; Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, 81–82.
Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, 154–189; Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 83, 288.
Robert H. Weibe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), xiii.
Mattson, “The Struggle for an Urban Democratic Public: Harlem in the 1920s”, 310.
Ibid., 311.
Chip Rhodes, “Writing Up the New Negro: The Construction of Consumer Desire in the Twenties”, Journal of American Studies 28:2 (August 1994), 199.
Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 8.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; New York: Continuum, 1994); Deborah Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 27–50; Tommy L. Lott, The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 67–83; Ellis Cashmore, The Black Culture Industry (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).
Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1976), 22–40; Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism, 296–297; Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, 45; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 38.
E. Ethelred Brown, address to the UNIA, 9 February 1915, as quoted in Robert A. Hill, ed. Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 111.
Marcus Garvey to T.A. McCormack, May 12, 1916, in Hill, ed. Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, 529.
W.A. Domingo to the Editor, “Mr. W.A. Domingo’s Connection with the UNIA”, Daily Gleaner, June 15, 1925.
E. Ethelred Brown, “Garveyism, A Dispassionate, Unprejudiced Appraisement”, Jamaica Times, May 20, 1922 as quoted in Robert A. Hill, ed. Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 4 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 635.
Ibid.
Ibid., 636.
Ibid.
Ibid., 637.
E. Ethelred Brown, “Garveyistic Devotion” (sermon on August 12, 1923, n.p. New York), Egbert Ethelred Brown Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.
Ibid.
“Sabers Used in Fight of Negro Factions”, New York Times, June 24, 1929; Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 125.
Ibid.
Eric Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean (New York: Haskell House, 1942), 92–93.
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E. Ethelred Brown, “Labor Conditions in Jamaica Prior to 1917”, Journal of Negro History 4:4 (October 1919), 349–360.
Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 290–292; Eric Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean (1942; New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1971), 93–98.
Vivienne France, Minutes of the American-West Indian Defence Committee, July 5, 1938, 1, Richard B. Moore Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 283.
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Woodruff D. Smith, European Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), 4–5; Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism 2nd ed. (New York: Hollmes and Meier, 1983), xv.
Wilson J. Moses, “Introduction”, in Wilson J. Moses, ed., Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), 2.
Rodney Carlisle, The Roots of Black Nationalism (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975), 5.
Richard B. Moore, Statement of the West Indies National Emergency Committee on the Address delivered by Cordell Hull, Secretary of State of the USA, to the Pan-American Foreign Ministers’ Conference at Havana, Cuba, July 22, 1940 in Respect to the Status of European Possessions in the Western Hemisphere, Richard B. Moore Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.
Ibid.
Richard B. Moore, Speech on Caribbean Federation at the Luncheon Meeting for Lord Listowel, February 3, 1953, Hotel Theresa, New York.
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© 2008 Juan M. Floyd-Thomas
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Floyd-Thomas, J.M. (2008). In the Shadow of Egypt: Racial Consciousness and Pan-Caribbean Nationalism in the Harlem Unitarian Church. In: The Origins of Black Humanism in America. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615823_5
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