Abstract
In the late 1920s, George Francis McCray began to build his reputation in the black national press as a vigorous proponent of race consciousness and racial solidarity. Influenced by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), he promoted the themes in opinion pieces for the Chicago Defender newspaper. The establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935 resulted in a broadening of McCray’s activism. Paradoxically, he used his newspaper labor column to direct race consciousness toward the promotion of interracial labor unionism as a means of empowering workers, fighting discrimination, and opening up jobs to blacks. His political and civic work in this period revolved around labor education and research in service to movements for civil rights, labor rights, and social justice. PostSecond World War his work expanded to include themes of African liberation, pan-Africanism, and international labor solidarity.
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Notes
Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” in Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1994), 3.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Classic, 1903).
This term was coined by Rayford W. Logan in The Negro In American Life And Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954).
Yevette Richards, Conversations with Maida Springer (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 178–179.
McCray, “We Must Get Respect; Observations: The Trend of Current Thought and Discussion,” CD, February 2, 1929. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Boston, MA: Antislavery Office, 1845) 20.
William Seraile, “Henrietta Vinton Davis and the Garvey Movement,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 7 (July 1983): 7–24;
Errol Gaston Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
and Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986).
Theodore Kornweibel, Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns against Black Militancy, 1919–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 106–110, 124.
See the description of the protest of Arthur Reid and Ira Kemp against the Urban League’s influence in securing jobs for light-complexioned women only resulting from the 1930s Harlem Jobs Campaign. Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001).
McCray, “Inside the Color Line.” See Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” The Journal of Southern History 61, no. 1 (February 1995): 45–76;
and Obiagele Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Color Consciousness in African America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
McCray, “Chaos.” See C. Alvin Hughes, “The Negro Sanhedrin Movement,” The Journal of Negro History 69, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 1–13.
See David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 335–348.
McCray, “Late UNIA Leader.” See Sara Boulanger, “A Puppet on a String: The Manipulation and Nationalization of the Female Body in the ‘Female Circumcision Crisis’ of Colonial Kenya,” Wagadu (Women’s Activism for Gender Equality in Africa), vol. 6, 2008; Theodore Natsoulas, “Patriarch McGuire and the Orthodox Church to Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa, 12, no. 2 (1981): 81–104; and Robert A. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers: Africa for the Africans, 1923–1945, xcviii, 283 (google e-book).
See Yevette Richards, Maida Springer, Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 118–155.
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© 2012 Nico Slate
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Richards, Y. (2012). The Activism of George McCray: Confluence and Conflict of Pan-Africanism and Transnational Labor Solidarity. In: Slate, N. (eds) Black Power beyond Borders. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295064_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295064_3
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