McDuffie, Garveyism in Cleveland, African Identities, May 2011

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Garveyism in Cleveland, Ohio and
the history of the diasporic Midwest,
1920–1975
Erik S. McDuffie
a
a
Department of African American Studies and Department of
Gender and Women's Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America
Available online: 11 Jul 2011
To cite this article: Erik S. McDuffie (2011): Garveyism in Cleveland, Ohio and the history of the
diasporic Midwest, 1920–1975, African Identities, 9:2, 163-182
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Garveyism in Cleveland, Ohio and the history of the diasporic
Midwest, 1920–1975
Erik S. McDuffie*
Department of African American Studies and Department of Gender and Women’s Studies,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America
(Received 7 July 2010; final version received 1 December 2010)
This article explores the history of the Garvey movement in Cleveland, Ohio (United
States). Captivated by Jamaican Marcus Garvey’s message of race pride and black self-
determination, thousands of working-class black Clevelanders joined his transnational
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). At its peak in the early 1920s, the
UNIA claimed 6 million members worldwide. Following Garvey’s death in 1940, the
UNIA relocated its world headquarters to Cleveland, placing the city at the centre of
the transnational Garvey movement. Black Clevelanders came to see themselves
through Garveyism as connected to the global African diaspora, with women playing a
visible role in fostering these transnational linkages. Simultaneously, the UNIA
recognized the Midwest as a central player in this worldwide black movement.
Recovering this largely unknown story provides insight a broader history of what I call
the ‘diasporic Midwest’. I use the term as an empirical and theoretical framework for
examining black Midwestern life and history through a transnational approach.
Garveyism enabled blacks in Cleveland to forge a diasporic oppositional consciousness
and pursue their freedom dreams often under seemingly intractable obstacles from the
1920s through the 1970s. The history of Garveyism in Cleveland provides useful
lessons for thinking about contemporary black diasporic struggles for freedom.
Keywords: Cleveland; Garveyism; diasporic Midwest; oppositional consciousness;
African redemption; gender; working-class
Introduction
Marcus Garvey electrified blacks in Cleveland, Ohio (United States). According to a
Bureau of Investigation report, the Jamaican president general of the Universal Negro
Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) first spoke in
Cleveland in May 1920 before 400 jubilant supporters at the Cory Methodist Episcopal
Church. Introduced as ‘the negro’s savior’, Garvey received rousing applause for
‘demanding the freedom and independence of Africa’ (Hill 1983, p. 340). The audience’s
exuberant response illustrates how Garvey’s Pan-African message captured the political
imaginations of blacks in this major industrial city in the Midwestern United States.
Garvey made several visits to Cleveland before federal authorities arrested him in New
York and incarcerated him in February 1925 for mail fraud. After his deportation in 1927
ISSN 1472-5843 print/ISSN 1472-5851 online
q 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2011.556793
http://www.informaworld.com
*Email: emduffi@illinois.edu
African Identities
Vol. 9, No. 2, May 2011, 163–182
Downloadedby[UniversityofIllinois]at19:5213July2011

and until his death in 1940, Garvey maintained regular contact with Cleveland Garveyites
(Hill 1983).
Garvey envisioned Midwestern cities such as Cleveland as important organizational
sites for building the UNIA. At its peak in the early 1920s, the UNIA claimed 6 million
members worldwide (Martin 1976). He viewed recently arrived southern black migrants,
who fled to the urban Midwest in search of freedom from Jim Crow and a new life, as some
of his most loyal followers (Division 59 1923a, b, 1924a–d). Underscoring the city’s
importance to the worldwide Garvey movement, the UNIA’s Parent Body, the group’s
international executive council, relocated its headquarters in 1940 from Harlem to
Cleveland. This move placed the city at the centre of the transnational Garvey movement.
Black Clevelanders enthusiastically embraced Garveyism. Captivated by Garvey’s
call for race pride, redeeming Africa from European colonialism and black self-
determination, thousands of mostly working-class black Clevelanders from the 1920s
through the 1970s joined Cleveland UNIA Division 59 and its successor, Division 133.
Infusing the city with a visible Pan-African politics, Garveyites built a dynamic social
movement that linked Cleveland to the African diaspora. Through holding formal
positions within Division 59 and their community work, women played a key role in
leading the Garvey movement in Cleveland and forging transnational linkages. The
Cleveland UNIA, however, began to decline by the mid 1920s. By the Depression,
Garveyites began moving into new local black protest groups such as the militant Future
Outlook League (FOL). Although it enjoyed renewed visibility within the worldwide
Garvey movement in the early 1940s after the Parent Body moved to Cleveland, the local
UNIA never again reached the prominence it once enjoyed. By the Civil Rights–Black
Power era of the 1960s, the Cleveland UNIA was a weak presence locally; however,
Garveyism did not die in the city. Rediscovering Garveyism in the late 1960s, young black
nationalists adopted and applied it to their struggles for black economic and political
power in Cleveland.
By examining the history of the Garvey movement in Cleveland from the early 1920s
through the 1970s, this article seeks to recover the broader history of what I call the
‘diasporic Midwest’. I use the term as an empirical and theoretical framework for
examining black Midwestern life and history through a transnational approach. This
paradigm highlights the political, ideological, subjective and migratory connections
between the Midwest, the industrial heartland of the United States, and the global African
diaspora.1
Black Clevelanders, I argue, came to see themselves through Garveyism as
inextricably connected to the African diaspora, with women playing a visible role in
fostering these transnational linkages. Simultaneously, the UNIA recognized the Midwest
as a central player in this worldwide black movement. This story – one that appreciates the
impact of Garveyism on local black life, prominence of women in the local UNIA and
the visibility of Cleveland in the worldwide Garvey movement – remains largely untold in
the fields of African American history and African Diaspora Studies.
Historiography on early and mid twentieth-century African American Midwestern
urban life by Joseph William Trotter (2007), Thomas Sugrue (2005), Victoria Wolcott
(2001) and Davarian Baldwin (2007) analyses black life in the region primarily through
the framework of the US nation state, overlooking the Midwest’s linkages to the black
diaspora. This work looks at how proletarianization, racism, structural forces, public
policy, black southern traditions and modern consumerism informed African American
Midwestern life. These scholars focus on black struggles for equality in civil rights and
black leftist groups, women’s clubs, the church and trade unions, with little discussion of
Garveyism (Sugrue 2005, Wolcott 2001, Baldwin 2007, Trotter 2007). Moreover, studies
E.S. McDuffie164

on early and mid-twentieth-century black Cleveland by Kenneth L. Kusmer (1976),
Kimberly L. Phillips (1999), and William W. Giffin (2005) devote cursory attention to
Garveyism.
In terms of transnational research on black life, studies on the ‘Black Atlantic’ largely
neglect the history of Garveyism in Cleveland in particular and the Midwest generally.
Popularized by black cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, the Black Atlantic paradigm describes a
modern political and cultural formation forged through intellectual exchange and travel by
English-speaking black people in the United States, Caribbean and UK, who came to reject
European racism (Gilroy 1993). By focusing primarily on the Anglophone North Atlantic
rim, the Black Atlantic paradigm erases the black urban Midwest from scholarly inquiry
(Zeleza 2003).
Similarly, scholarship on Garveyism in the United States has until recently overlooked
Cleveland and the urban Midwest from close study, instead paying overwhelming attention
to Harlem and the South (James 1998, Rolinson 2007). This, however, is beginning to
change. The work on 1920s Midwestern Garveyism by Mark Christian (2004) and Ronald
Stephens (2008) provides useful ethno-historical and micro-level analyses of the UNIA in
Columbus, Ohio, and Idlewild, Michigan, respectively. Closely examining these divisions’
day-to-day work, Christian and Stephens appreciate these UNIA locals as vibrant
community organizations and protest groups. However, these articles are mostly silent
about how gender and class structured relations of power within these branches. When the
Cleveland UNIA does appear in studies on Garveyism, scholars typically dismiss its
importance both to local black politics and the international UNIA. Garvey historian Judith
Stein (1986), for instance, argues: the ‘[Cleveland] UNIA was marginal, its membership
small, and its presence insignificant’ both locally and internationally (p. 241). A closer
examination of the archival record reveals that this was not the case.
In this essay, I argue that the history of the Garvey movement in Cleveland provides a
case study for understanding the complexities of how Garveyism operated on the ground,
shaped its participants’ identities and tied the city to the African diaspora. Paying careful
attention to the key role women played in building this local Garveyite movement, I show
how the Cleveland UNIA was a visible centre in the international UNIA and helped to lay
the groundwork for black struggles from the 1930s Depression to 1970s-era Black Power
in this city. In the conclusion, I consider how the history of Garveyism in Cleveland
provides useful lessons for forging black diasporic movements in the new millennium.
Methodologically, I use an interdisciplinary framework to chart how black
Clevelanders, through Garveyism, came to envision their lives as inseparably connected
with those of black people around the world. In his work on black radicalism, the historian
Robin D.G. Kelley (2002) emphasizes the significance of hope and the imagination, not
racism, misery and oppression, as the catalyst for drawing black people to social
movements committed to building a new world radically different from the one they
inherited. These ‘freedom dreams’, he argues, propelled black movements across the
African diaspora since the nineteenth century and helped them to understand the struggle
for black liberation in global terms (Kelley 2002) The work of the cultural theorist Chela
Sandoval (2000) is also useful for explicating the saliency of the imagination in inspiring
radical resistance by people of colour. For Sandoval, forging an ‘oppositional
consciousness’, a libratory sensibility that imagines ‘forms of resistance outside of
those determined by the social order itself’, was crucial for inspiring 1970s US feminist of
colour movements (p. 44).
The theoretical concept of collective identity is especially useful for understanding the
connections between women’s group consciousness and feminist collective action. Collective
African Identities 165

identity holds that, through participating in social movement activities, individuals can gain a
sense of belonging, which, in essence, both transcends the individual’s identity and transforms
it. For instance, the work of the sociologists Verta Taylor and Nancy E. Whittier (1992) on
US lesbian feminist movements calls attention to how subordinated groups forge collective,
oppositional identities through resisting and reinterpreting the dominant society’s cultural
symbols that demarcate differences between the elite and oppressed. Meanwhile, research
on women’s labour activism in southern Africa by the social anthropologist Pnina Werbner
(2009) is insightful for analysing the gendered agency and subjectivities of female and male
activists. Emphasizing how subaltern subjectivities must ‘be grasped in temporal and creative
terms – they are made and remade dialogically through tests and ordeals overcome’ (p. 302),
she calls attention to how women activists in early twenty-first century Botswana forge
political imaginaries through struggles for personal dignity and ethical leadership.
Questions about the role of agency, class and hegemony in shaping twentieth-century
urban African American freedom movements have received fresh attention in recent work
by the historian Clarence Lang (2009). Arguing that the black working-class was the
vanguard of twentieth-century US black freedom struggles, Lang emphasizes how intra-
racial class fissures and competing political agendas deeply divided African American
urban communities. Moreover, scholars of the African diaspora recently devoted careful
attention to ‘diasporization’ and racial difference (Makalani 2009, Neptune 2007). The
former describes the complex political, cultural and migratory encounters between black
people based on a perceived commonality, while the latter emphasizes how black
diasporic communities form within specific historical, national, transnational and local
settings. Political and cultural tensions between diasporic communities are also critical
to these formations. Notes the historian Minkah Makalani (2009): ‘The various locals
forming the constituent elements of diaspora, those places where diaspora emerges and
gets created, are processed, social structures, relationships of domination, modes of
imagination and affect that are simultaneously ordered by the local and the global’ (p. 4).
For these reasons, it is imperative for scholars to historicize the meanings of difference
across social, linguistic, national and political lines.
Drawing from these scholars, I show in this article how Garveyism was crucial in
helping blacks in Cleveland forge an oppositional consciousness and collective identity that
understood their lives as inseparable from the redemption of Africa and the self-
determination of black people everywhere. These diasporic identities were neither fixed nor
innate, but rather shifting and always in the making in response to local and transnational
events, Garveyites’ active engagement in struggle and the interplay amongst gender, class,
sexuality, nationality and politics within the Garvey movement in Cleveland. I am especially
concerned with how sexism within the Cleveland UNIA played a crucial role in crippling the
movement. Paying attention to sexism within the movement speaks to the general sexism in
African American life and political activity at the time. Tracing the history of the Garvey
movement in Cleveland from the 1920s through the 1970s, then, not only excavates a
fascinating story. It provides a lens for appreciating the dynamic yet largely unknown history
of the diasporic Midwest and offers lessons for black diasporic struggles today.
The origins and heyday of Garveyism in Cleveland
The origins and heyday of the Cleveland UNIA during and immediately after World War
I highlight the emergent diasporic sensibilities of black Midwesterners and the region’s
visibility in the transnational Garvey movement. A combination of local, national
and international events explains the UNIA’s rise in Cleveland. The Great Migration
E.S. McDuffie166

(1916–1930), which witnessed the exodus of more than 1 million African Americans from
the South to the urban North, was an important factor in making Cleveland fertile ground
for Garveyism. Dreams of finding good paying jobs in the city’s booming war-time
industries in addition to escaping Jim Crow prompted the influx of thousands of black
southerners to Cleveland. Between 1910 and 1920, the city’s black population swelled
from roughly 8500 to 34,000 people, making it the largest African American community
in the state and the fifth largest in the Midwest. By 1930, Cleveland’s black population
doubled to 71,000 (Work 1922, Phillips 1999).
However, the realities of living in the urban Midwest often dashed migrants’ dreams
for securing a better life. Cleveland’s growing black population lived almost entirely in the
Central Area, the city’s black belt located on the East Side, along Central Avenue near
downtown. Like Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, the Central Area was densely populated
and impoverished. On the labour front, Cleveland industrialists backed the open-shop drive,
a campaign designed to block unionization of factory workers. Additionally, the city’s
unions stridently maintained the colour line in factories. The open shop and union colour
line largely relegated black men to the most menial, dirtiest jobs. Similarly, most black
women toiled in domestic service. Intra-racial tensions also deeply divided black
Clevelanders. The established black elite often viewed migrants as lazy and immoral
intruders who discredited the race. By 1920, black Cleveland was in transition. Thousands
of southern migrants had arrived in the city within a short period of time, with older and
newer black residents viewing the other with distrust (Phillips 1999).
Although black Clevelanders faced serious challenges both from within and without
the community, they did not passively accept the racial status quo. They were swept up in
the New Negro Movement (1890–1935), a national black protest movement committed to
racial uplift, a middle-class ideology that upheld the belief that African American material
and moral progress would advance black freedom (Bush 1999, Gaines 1996). Given their
belief that they best represented the race’s potential and agents for civilizing the black
masses, black middle-class advocates of racial uplift espoused self-help and service to the
race (Gaines 1996). Parallel with developments elsewhere, blacks in Cleveland formed
fraternal and mutual aid societies, churches and women’s clubs committed to racial uplift.
Black middle-class professionals led the city’s chapter of the National Association of the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Negro Welfare Association, the city’s
local branch of the Urban League. The NAACP pursued a legalistic strategy for gaining
black civil rights, while the Negro Welfare Association worked closely with white
reformers and industrialists to improve black Cleveland life. The city’s two black
newspapers, the Cleveland Advocate and the Cleveland Gazette, championed racial
equality. Also, Thomas W. Fleming, the city’s only black councilperson during the war
years, was immensely popular in the Central Area for his outspoken race politics and
ability to win jobs and social services for his constituents through city government
(Phillips 1999, Kusmer 1976, Cleveland branch bulletin 1920).
At the same time, some black Clevelanders – like elsewhere in the United States –
adopted ‘New Negro radicalism’, a more militant New Negro tendency, spawned by racial
and labour unrest across the United States and a global black revolt during and
immediately after World War I. As a political and cultural movement comprised of the
UNIA, the leftist, Harlem-based African Blood Brotherhood and other protest groups, as
well as news and literary journals, New Negro radicalism promoted a more expansive
vision of uplift as social advancement and linked African American struggles for self-
determination with postwar, anti-colonial revolts in Africa and across the world. Certainly,
the World War I years were neither the first time blacks in the United States identified with

Africa nor embraced a militantly separatist agenda. Blacks since the nineteenth century –
and earlier – had done so. However, the very term ‘New Negro radicalism’ captured a
new, militant oppositional consciousness that was historically and spatially contingent
upon local and transnational events during World War I (Kelley 1999).
In Cleveland, disgust with the bloody 1917 East St Louis riot was critical in fueling
New Negro radicalism. Like African Americans across the country the disturbance, which
left scores of blacks dead after whites rampaged through the city’s black community,
horrified black Clevelanders. Still, black Clevelanders took pride in Dr Leroy Bundy, a
native Clevelander and prominent black dentist, who moved to East St Louis before the
unrest. He emerged as a national hero in black communities for his leading role in
defending blacks during the riot. For black Clevelanders, East St Louis and Bundy’s
resolve were a call for action in demanding black freedom locally and internationally.
Distraught with the grinding poverty and virulent racism they encountered in their new
home and observed around the world, black Clevelanders would both identify with and
look to global Garvey movement as a fulcrum of change (Phillips 1999).
From its very beginnings, Garveyism in Cleveland generated immense excitement in
Africa and helped stoke diasporic, oppositional consciousness amongst Garvey’s local
followers. Apparently, a man named Mr Fuller helped to start the branch prior to Garvey’s
first visit to the city in March 1920. According to a Bureau of Investigation report, he was a
former member of the syndicalist International Workers of the World intrigued with
Garvey’s call for African redemption. Mr Fuller’s enlistment in the UNIA is revealing.
As in other cities, black labour radicals were often some of Garvey’s first recruits. This
suggests they envisioned the UNIA as a powerful force for liberating black working
people and promoting a more radical vision of racial uplift ideology than black elites (Hill
1983, Opie 2009).
Other black Clevelanders were receptive to Garvey’s call for building a global black
empire and excited by what they believed Garveyism had to offer black working-class
people. As one observer recalled:
I remember as a lad in Cleveland during the hungry days of 1921, standing on Central Avenue,
watching a parade one Sunday afternoon when thousands of Garvey Legionaries, resplendent
in their uniforms marched by. When Garvey rode by in his plumed hat, I got an emotional lift,
which swept me above the poverty and prejudice by which my life was limited. (Levine 1982,
p. 121)
This passage is significant. The parade transformed this observer’s consciousness. The
pageantry and symbolism of Garveyism stimulated his racial pride and nurtured his
diasporic sensibility. He apparently became aware of his connection to a larger black world
through watching Garvey and the African Legions, the UNIA’s uniformed paramilitary
force, proudly march through the segregated, impoverished Central Area. The parade, most
of all, affirmed his humanity and offered him a sense of hope, suggesting that Garveyism
was critical to helping black Clevelanders weather the racism and poverty they found in this
Midwestern city.
Underscoring the Midwest’s significance to the transnational Garvey movement, Garvey
recognized black Clevelanders’ enthusiasm for his Pan-African message and regularly
dispatched his leading lieutenants from New York to Cleveland. Garvey hoped these leaders
would galvanize local support for the UNIA (Division 59 1924a–d). In January 1922, 1500
people packed the prestigious Lane Metropolitan CME church in Cleveland to hear Rudolph
E. Smith, the UNIA’s third assistant president general. During his address, Smith’s
reference to the red, black and green flag, conceived by Garvey and formally adopted in
1920 as the official banner of black people globally, prompted an immediate, jubilant
E.S. McDuffie168

response (Cleveland gazette 1922, Hill 1983). In February 1922, another audience filled
Lane Metropolitan CME church to hear addresses by UNIA leader Dr James W. H. Eason
and Frederick A. Toote, director of the Black Star Line (BSL), a commercial fleet of black-
owned ships Garvey envisioned as the capstone for black economic independence and
African redemption. Given blacks’ desire to live free from global white supremacy and
poverty, the UNIA’s banner and BSL deeply resonated with Garvey’s followers in
Cleveland – and around the world (Martin 1976).
In addition to visits by top UNIA officials to Cleveland, the group’s official newspaper,
the Negro world, regularly featured news about the Cleveland UNIA, signaling the
Midwest’s visibility in the transnational Garvey movement (Negro world 1921, 1922,
1923a). Published in Harlem from 1918 to 1933, the Negro world reported news in
English, French, and Spanish about black people everywhere. During the 1920s, the Negro
world was the most widely sold newspaper across the African diaspora (Martin 1976).
Information about Division 59 frequently appeared alongside news about UNIA branches
from around the world. Moreover, the newspaper listed the names of Cleveland Garveyites
who contributed to the UNIA’s ‘African Redemption Fund’, established to assist in the
repatriation of diasporan blacks to Liberia (Negro world 1923b, c, Martin 1976). Surely
reading about Division 59 in the Negro world, gave black Clevelanders a sense of pride
and confidence, knowing that they were part of a transnational movement of black people
struggling to be free. Likewise, black people around the world could read about the
Midwest and its centrality to the UNIA. As a result of the excitement generated by
Garveyism, the Cleveland UNIA at its peak in 1922 claimed 5000 members (Taylor 1922).
While there is no archival evidence to verify this figure, we can conclude that Garveyism
captured the imaginations of thousands of black Clevelanders and briefly transformed
Division 59 into arguably the largest black social movement in the city and one of the
largest UNIA branches in the world. Indeed, black Clevelanders endorsed the UNIA’s
racially separatist, transnational programme and many undoubtedly became aware of
their place in a larger black world through Garveyism. This enthusiasm underscores the
diasporic dimensions within Midwestern life and the region’s visibility in the global Garvey
movement.
At the same time, black Clevelanders’ interest in Garveyism revealed the contradictions
within their diasporic politics and identities. Garvey subscribed to a civilizationist view of
Africa. Framing diasporan blacks as enlightened and modern, who would uplift ‘the
backward tribes of Africa’, as UNIA’s official programme put it, Garvey’s Pan-African
vision often strikingly resembled the white supremacist arguments he sought to refute (Hill
1983). Given their strong support for Garveyism, many black Clevelanders upheld this
civilizationist sensibility. This suggests that their oppositional consciousness did not
represent a complete break from the hegemonic ideals of white supremacy. While it enabled
black Clevelanders to dream of a new world, this vision remained, in part, circumscribed by
their contemporary historical moment.
Gender, class, and Cleveland UNIA membership
The varied responses to Garveyism and the membership of Division 59 revealed the
saliency of class and gender in shaping the diasporic politics and identities of black
Clevelanders. The Cleveland UNIA’s meteoric rise, for example, troubled some local
black elite, many of whom who were closely connected to the city’s white leadership. In a
1920 letter to White F. White, then the national assistant secretary of the NAACP,
Cleveland NAACP head Harry E. Davis blasted the UNIA for its unwarranted ‘hostility’

towards the NAACP. Davis did not state his specific grievances with the UNIA (NAACP
1922), but like NAACP officials across the country, Davis likely viewed the UNIA with
contempt for its demands for racial separatism and emigration to Africa (Martin 1976).
While some black Cleveland middle-class leaders despised the UNIA, others endorsed
it. The most prominent of these figures was Leroy Bundy, the black national hero of the
East St Louis riot. Recognizing his national stature with the African American community,
Garvey shrewdly enlisted him into the UNIA. Elected as the UNIA’s first assistant
president general at the 1922 UNIA convention in New York, Garvey knighted Bundy as
commander of the Distinguished Service Order of Ethiopia (Hill 1985). Bundy’s decision
to support the UNIA, in essence, signaled that segments of the black Cleveland middle-
class took the Garvey movement seriously. Recognizing it as a major force in the Central
Area that spoke directly to the hopes and dreams of the black masses, black elites
understood that they needed to work with the UNIA if they hoped to maintain their
position as community leaders.
Bundy’s support for Division 59 provides a lens for understanding the social
composition of the Cleveland Garvey movement and the reasons why blacks joined the
branch. From the beginning, upwardly mobile, middle-class ministers, small business
owners, school teachers and other white collar professionals, many of whom were
migrants, enlisted in the organization and held most of the division’s top posts. Given the
black middle-class’s assumption that they were best suited to lead the race helps explains
their motivations for enlisting in Division 59.
Although middle-class professionals joined the Garvey movement, the Cleveland
UNIA from its beginning was primarily a working-class migrant organization. Working-
class women and men propelled it. Common labourers and domestic workers, most of
whom were married, recently arrived in the city and living in the Central Area’s poorest
areas, comprised the bulk of the division’s membership (Phillips 1999).
Gender played a key role in mediating why and how black working-class women and
men joined the Cleveland UNIA and constructed an oppositional consciousness. Black
Clevelanders enlisted in a movement that adhered to prevailing, socially constructed
heteronormative ideas about the alleged ‘natural’ roles of women and men in the public
and private spheres.2
Viewing gender roles in binary and complementary terms, men were
to be, the UNIA charged, husbands and fathers who provided for and protected their
families. Women were to be faithful wives, nurturing mothers and caretakers of the home
(Bair 1990, Taylor 2002). Garvey’s call for self-reliance and his masculinist framings of
black freedom spoke profoundly to black working-class men in Cleveland. Donning the
military uniforms of the African Legions and participating in drills and parades gave
members a tremendous sense of pride and confidence. For chronically unemployed black
men, however, Garveyism meant more than race pride and redeeming Africa. The UNIA
meant jobs. Desiring to become family breadwinners, Cleveland Garveyite men hoped to
secure good-paying, dignified jobs through the division’s numerous commercial ventures,
but the UNIA never created these good jobs. Still, their dreams of becoming economically
independent and family providers speaks both to how Garveyite men subscribed to
prevailing notions of American manhood and how Garveyism did not completely
transcend the gender and sexual politics of its day (Division 59 1923a, Division 1924a,
Kimmel 2005).
Cleveland UNIA women were critical in Division 59 and in forging a diasporic
Midwest. Reflecting a broader trend in which early twentieth-century black women in the
United States and globally asserted their role as leaders of the ‘race’, African American
women in Cleveland espoused Garveyism and attempted to make it their own
E.S. McDuffie170

(White 1999). This was evident in an article in the Negro world by Lavinia D.M. Smith
(1921), a Garveyite and Cleveland public school teacher. Arguing that no people could
rise higher than its women, Smith claimed women appreciated Garveyism because it
‘gav[e] Negro women an equal . . . opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with the
men in the great cause for the redemption of Africa’ (p. 8). Given the violent history of
sexual assault of black women by white men, and the former’s economic exploitation
and political disfranchisement, the UNIA’s valorization of black women and the
opportunities it afforded them to lead a transnational black movement provided Smith
and other black women with a sense of confidence and possibility in securing black
freedom.
However, while Smith asserted that Garveyism afforded women equal opportunity to
lead the UNIA, gender was critical to defining unequal relations of power within the
Cleveland UNIA. Like elsewhere, Division 59 was a masculinist, hierarchal organization,
with men dominating the branch’s leadership. And like the broader movement, the
Cleveland UNIA constructed an internal organizational structure understanding gender
relations as ‘separate and hierarchal’, notes the historian Barbara Bair (1990, p. 155).
In accordance with the UNIA constitution, the Cleveland UNIA elected a ‘male president’,
who was given charge of leading the local branch, and a ‘lady president’, who oversaw the
division’s work amongst women and children.3
Cleveland Garveyite women performed
community service work through the Black Cross Nurses, the UNIA auxiliary that carried
out similar duties as the Red Cross (Taylor 2002, Hill 1983, McDuffie 2010).
Although the UNIA subordinated women within the organization, Cleveland
Garveyites women forged an oppositional consciousness and often found creative ways
to challenge the sexism of male leaders and to uplift black communities. These women
practised what historian Ula Y. Taylor has termed ‘community feminism’, a distinct black
feminist politics and subjectivity formulated by Garveyite women combining feminism and
nationalism. Believing women were best suited for nation-building, Garveyite women
rejected masculinist claims of women’s intellectual inferiority to men and oppressive
power relations between women and men. Amy Jacques Garvey, Garvey’s second wife and
a major Pan-Africanist thinker in her own right, adopted this sensibility (Taylor 2002).
Bessie A. Bryce, the Cleveland UNIA’s executive secretary during the mid 1920s,
subscribed to community feminism as well. Married, confident and charismatic, she refused
to acquiesce to the group’s male leadership and demanded a voice for women in the
organization (Division 59 1924b). Resembling a trend in other locales, women were critical
to building, leading and sustaining the Cleveland UNIA throughout its entire history and in
cultivating transnational linkages (Taylor 2002, Duncan 2009, McDuffie 2010).
The Cleveland UNIA’s movement culture
The Cleveland UNIA’s movement culture helped to advance a diasporic oppositional
consciousness and connect the Midwest to the African diaspora. Division 59, like UNIA
branches everywhere, was as much a social organization and cultural phenomenon as it was
a political movement. The UNIA’s unique movement culture and community work played a
key role in nurturing the branch’s mostly working-class southern migrants commitment to
African redemption. Key to this process was Garvey’s philosophy of ‘African funda-
mentalism’, a civic religion he conceived and incorporated into the UNIA’s organizational
life. Drawing from a variety of black religious credos, African fundamentalism claimed God
was black, categorically rejected white supremacy, and demanded the full freedom of black
people (Burkett 1978, Martin 1983).

The ecstatic components of African fundamentalism and the church-like chara-
cteristics of Cleveland UNIA meetings appealed to its members’ imaginaries, helped
cultivate community, and tied them to the black diaspora. Typically, Division 59 held its
large mass meetings at the Lane Metropolitan CME Church or Cory Methodist Episcopal
Church. It was no accident that Garvey and his lieutenants usually spoke at these churches
when they were in town. While established, black middle-class churches often
disapproved of southern-styles of worship, both Lane Metropolitan and Cory earned
reputations as welcoming church homes for southern migrants. Garvey appreciated this.
Recognizing ‘the South [as] the character-making center of Negroes’, as Garvey wrote, he
was keenly aware that galvanizing migrants in large cities like Cleveland around his Pan-
African message would significantly advance the cause (Rolinson 2007, p. 2).
Cleveland UNIA meetings, like elsewhere, resembled southern black church services.
Division 59 meetings began with the singing of ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’, the
popular nineteenth-century abolitionist hymn adopted by the UNIA as its official opening
anthem for all events. The song’s opening stanza vividly reveals the essence of African
fundamentalism as both a political and religious credo for black liberation.
From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand
Where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand
From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain
They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain. (Hill 1983)
Prayer frequently followed the song. Then came fiery, sermon-like addresses about
African redemption, current events and black history. Spontaneous shouts of ‘amen’,
thunderous applause and foot stamping from the audience often punctuated these
addresses. Meetings closed with prayer and the singing of ‘Ethiopia, land of my fathers’,
the UNIA’s official anthem (ibid.). For newly arrived southern migrants, these meetings
surely reminded them of home, provided a welcoming sense of community in new urban
surroundings, and a link to black people everywhere.
Another key component of the Cleveland UNIA’s mission was its emphasis on
providing mutual aid. Like elsewhere, the active rank-and-file membership in Cleveland
religiously paid their dues and ‘taxes’ to the branch and Parent Body. It was largely
through the rank-and-file’s small donations that the Cleveland UNIA was able in 1923 to
purchase a stately, three-storied mansion at 2200 East 40th St as its new headquarters,
known as Liberty Hall. Located in the heart of the Central Area, Liberty Hall served for
decades as a bustling African American community centre committed to uplifting black
people in Cleveland and globally (Jacob Goldsmith House n.d., Hobbs 1988).
By 1923, less than three years after its founding, the Cleveland UNIA enjoyed its apex
of local influence. Black Clevelanders’ exhilaration for Garveyism, together with the
UNIA’s distinct movement culture and community work, explains the group’s rapid rise,
but the group’s halcyon days came to an abrupt end.
The decline of the Cleveland UNIA, 1923–1929
Although the Cleveland UNIA initially enjoyed considerable support with black workers,
Division 59 by the latter half of the 1920s was unable to sustain the group’s initial
momentum nor build a movement that could actualize working people’s dreams of building
a new world. Several factors explain the group’s decline, including Garvey’s deportation and
local political conditions. Factionalism, financial instability and tensions between African
Americans and Afro-Caribbeans within the local and international UNIA, as well as sexism
and class divisions within the Cleveland UNIA, contributed to its undoing.
E.S. McDuffie172

Like elsewhere, Garvey’s legal persecution and the anti-radical backlash were tremen-
dous blows from which the Cleveland UNIA never recovered. In addition, ineffective
leadership and discord between Garvey and Division 59 leaders fractured the Cleveland
UNIA. Frequently, Division 59 members accused the Parent Body of financial impropriety
and Cleveland UNIA officers of stealing money, leading to the exit of members (Division 59
1924d, Division 59 1925).
Meanwhile, tension around local autonomy from the Parent Body and strife between
African American and Afro-Caribbean Garveyites weakened Division 59. Some Cleveland
UNIA members openly complained about the Parent Body’s tendency to appoint outsiders,
many of whom were Caribbean and close friends of Garvey, to head Division 59. For
example, George Williams, a Jamaican and the branch’s executive secretary appointed by
Garvey, claimed he lost his re-election bid in 1925 because the Cleveland UNIA
membership thought he was Caribbean. There is no evidence, other than Williams’s claim,
that his Jamaican nationality affected the election’s outcome. It is telling that Williams
perceived his Caribbean background as an issue. His belief reveals how intra-racial
difference between African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans could prove divisive within
the Cleveland UNIA, as it did across the black diaspora (Division 59 1924d).
Ongoing power struggles within the worldwide Garvey movement further weakened
the Cleveland UNIA during the late 1920s. Following Garvey’s deportation to Jamaica, he
reorganized the international UNIA at its 1929 convention in Kingston, Jamaica, forming
the Universal Negro Improvement Association–African Communities League August
1929 of the World. His intention was to reassert his authority over the organization from
his new home base in Kingston. However, some US Garveyites refused to accept his
authority and formed the rival UNIA Inc. based in Harlem (Hill 1983). The Cleveland
UNIA remained loyal to Garvey and received its new charter as Division 133 from the
Parent Body in 1930. The archival record provides little insight into how this strife played
out within the Cleveland UNIA, cut the years of internecine fighting helped drive some
Cleveland Garveyites out of the organization (Division 59 1929).
While tension within the local and international UNIA contributed to the decline of
Division 59, so did local political conditions in Cleveland. The Central Area was a home to
flourishing community institutions visibly independent from white control. Given the
UNIA’s problems, Garveyites joined the NAACP and streamed into new churches open to
ecstatic southern-styled worship and other community organizations. In short, Cleveland
Garveyites found organizational outlets outside of the UNIA to build community and
struggle for their rights and dignity on the eve of the Depression (Phillips 1999).
Sexism and class divisions within the Cleveland UNIA were key factors in explaining
the group’s decline. Reflecting the general sexism in African American life and political
activity at the time, as well as Garvey’s male chauvinism, Cleveland UNIA’s male
leadership ran Division 59 with a dictatorial grip and expected unquestioning obedience
from the membership, especially the women. As a result, the Cleveland division saw a
revolving door of officers and the silencing of dynamic women leaders who refused to
acquiesce to male leaders. This was the case of Bessie A. Bryce, the Cleveland UNIA’s
popular executive secretary during the mid 1920s. Bryce’s defiance troubled George
Williams, the branch’s executive secretary. Objecting to her alleged unwillingness to show
deference towards him and to earning the same salary as Bryce, Williams demanded her
removal from office before a Division 59 officers meeting. Sexism was an issue here. In
the end, Bryce retained her office in response to an outcry of rank-and-file support for her.
Her victory was short-lived. Insecure with her popularity, Louis Van Pelt, the Cleveland
UNIA president, forced Bryce out of the group in 1926 on the grounds that she allegedly

was cantankerous (Division 59 1926a, b). Her departure cost the division one of its most
respected leaders. Incidents such as this reveal how sexism drove some talented women
leaders out of the organization, weakening it in the process. Bryce’s departure signalled
what was to come for other women leaders within the Cleveland UNIA.
Given the importance of religion to the organization, leisure activities were an
additional persistent source of strife within the Cleveland UNIA. This fissure revealed larger
conflicts within the organization around gender, class, female respectability, modern
sexuality and commercialized forms of entertainment in early twentieth century urban
communities across the black diaspora. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, contentious
debates within the division raged around dancing, drinking, smoking and women’s
behaviour. The black middle-class often associated dancing, drinking and fighting with the
alleged licentiousness of the black urban working-class (Kelley 1994).
This was apparent when Division 59 under the leadership of president Louis Van Pelt,
a Tennessee migrant and socially conservative Baptist minister, who regularly denounced
drinking, smoking and dancing and called for more preaching at division meetings. Given
this stance, Van Pelt expelled a man in 1926 from Division 59 for being allegedly
intoxicated at a branch meeting (Division 59 1926b). This expulsion was not an isolated
incident. In 1934, Cleveland UNIA officers disciplined its lady president for ‘conduct
unbecoming to a lady’. Officers claimed she intentionally struck an elderly Garveyite
woman (Division 133 1934). Cleveland Garveyites both adhered to and challenged
prevailing ideas about female and middle-class respectability.
The organization’s disciplinary actions illustrate how the Cleveland UNIA’s middle-
class leadership sought to stem working-class forms of leisure, promote respectability and
regulate and discipline the bodies of its membership. Unfortunately, self-generated
records from those disciplined by Cleveland UNIA officials do not seem to exist, but the
leadership’s unease with modern leisure and sexuality may have alienated some rank-and-
file members who did not adhere to the organization’s middle-class cultural politics.
Without question, tensions within Division 59 around gender, class, sexuality and culture
helped to fracture the Cleveland UNIA and prevented the group from forging a collective
identity over an extended period of time.
The Depression, 1929–1940
If the 1920s saw the Cleveland UNIA’s steady decline, then the Depression witnessed the
group’s free-fall and the end of the New Negro Movement – locally and nationally. The
Depression devastated black Cleveland. Unemployment and misery were commonplace in
the Central Area. In response to these upheavals, blacks in Cleveland – like those
in HarlemandChicago – tooktothe streetsdemandingjobs,racialequalityandsocialreliefin
new militantblack and interracial socialmovements. Through participatinginDepression-era
mass protests, black working people forged a new oppositional consciousness that imagined a
new social order (Solomon 1998).
In Cleveland, the Future Outlook League (FOL) was the most visible organization in
leading these campaigns. Founded in 1935, working-class migrants mostly led and
comprised the FOL. The group’s slogan – ‘The Future is Yours’ – captured the burgeoning
militant, oppositional consciousness and agency of Depression-era black Clevelanders.
Rejecting what the group saw as the racial accommodationism of earlier black groups, the
FOL successfully used boycotts and pickets for securing jobs, civil rights and mobility for
blacks and understood black freedom in global terms. Given the group’s militancy and its
E.S. McDuffie174

willingness to publicly support the Communist Party and labour militants, the city’s black
middle-class establishment initially shunned the FOL (Leob 1947, Phillips 1999).
As the FOL built mass campaigns, the Cleveland UNIA sat on the sidelines. Its strident
self-help, entrepreneurial ideology, which in essence espoused black capitalism as the
basis for realizing black freedom, discouraged the organization from participating in mass
actions, supporting trade unionism, and working with Communists (Stein 1986). Hence,
the Cleveland UNIA’s membership further dwindled. Although Division 133 did not
participate in new mass campaigns, many former Garveyites did. While an account from
ex-UNIA members explaining their decisions for enlisting in new groups does not exist,
the defection of Garveyites into new organizations suggests they continued searching for
groups such as the Future Outlook League that spoke to their political imaginaries (Phillips
1999). This movement of Garveyites in and out of the UNIA, and the willingness of groups
such as the FOL to fight for the rights of black working people, moreover, illustrates the
racial and class identities and politics of black Clevelanders were hardly fixed, but rather
shifting and contingent upon both local and transnational social, economic and political
developments.
The Cleveland UNIA during the 1940s
Although the Cleveland UNIA had witnessed years of decline, in June 1940 Garvey’s
death unexpectedly thrust the city and Midwest back into the international spotlight within
the global Garvey movement. In August 1940, the Parent Body held an Emergency
Conference in New York to select a new leader (Hill 1990). Delegates elected James R.
Stewart as acting president general. A Mississippi native and an ambitious leader in the
mould of Marcus Garvey, Stewart became president of Cleveland Division 133 in 1933
and UNIA commissioner of Ohio in 1937. Owing to his dedicated service to the UNIA,
Stewart caught Garvey’s attention and earned his trust. Upon Stewart’s election as UNIA
acting president general, he moved the Parent Body in October 1940 from its temporary
headquarters in Harlem to Cleveland (Hill 1990).
From Cleveland, Stewart attempted to rebuild the UNIA and promote its programme
of African redemption during World War II. The city hosted the UNIA’s Ninth Inter-
national Conference in August 1942. Delegates from the United States, Canada, and the
Caribbean converged in the city, unanimously electing Stewart as UNIA president general.
From Cleveland, Stewart edited and published the Parent Body’s official magazine, the
New Negro world. By moving the UNIA’s headquarters to Cleveland and publishing
the internationally focused New Negro world from the city, the UNIA tied Cleveland to the
black diaspora and signified the Midwest’s continued visibility within the transnational
Garvey movement (Hill 1990, New Negro world 1943, Call and post 1942).
A key component of the UNIA’s wartime programme was its call for voluntary
African American repatriation to Liberia. Like Garvey, Stewart believed that repatriation
would assist in civilizing Africa and solving the American race problem. During the war,
he urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to support Mississippi US Senator Theodore
G. Bilbo’s Greater Liberia Bill. Introduced to the senate in 1939, the bill called for federal
government support for African American emigration to Liberia. An arch segregationist,
Bilbo believed racial separation was in blacks’ and whites’ best interests. Stewart’s and
Bilbo’s belief in racial separatism explained how these apparent foes could find common
ground. Stewart was not the only Garveyite who backed Bilbo’s bill. Garvey lauded it
before his death. Although the bill never made it out of committee, the UNIA continued
advocating emigration through the war (Stewart 1941, Hill 1983, Fitzgerald 1997).

Despitehisauspiciousstart asUNIAhead,persistentproblemswithintheorganization –
factionalism, the group’s autocratic political culture, the sexism of some male Garveyite
leaders, and the growing militancy of other black protest groups – prevented Stewart from
rebuilding the Cleveland and international UNIA. Garveyites frequently accused Stewart of
stealing money, while others never recognized him as the group’s rightful leader because
they believed he had abandoned the principles of Marcus Garvey (Western Reserve
Historical Society 1986).
Another contributing factor to the decline of the wartime Cleveland UNIA and Parent
Body was the sexism of the group’s male leadership. The bitter tension between James
Stewart and Ethel M. Collins is a case in point. A Jamaican and one of Garvey’s most
trusted lieutenants, Collins served as the UNIA secretary general from 1937 until 1942.
She was instrumental in sustaining the movement during the transition period between
Garvey’s death and the relocation of the Parent Body to Cleveland (Hill 1983). In late
1942, Stewart viciously denounced Collins as a traitor in the New Negro world after he
learned of her disapproval of his leadership. Infuriated by his accusations, she broke from
the UNIA soon after (Stewart 1943, Taylor 2002).
Stewart’s autocratic style of leadership and sexism seemingly motivated his
denouncement of Collins. Like Garvey, Stewart believed that women’s proper role in the
UNIA was to serve as obedient wives and virtuous mothers. Under his editorship, the New
Negro world (1942) featured articles framing women’s proper role in the UNIA in these
terms. Collins did not fit this feminine ideal. Adhering to community feminism, she
demanded respect from UNIA male officials and expected those who were in her charge to
carry out her directives. Chronically insecure and egotistical, Stewart viewed Collins as a
powerful rival. Her departure was a blow to the UNIA. Following her exit, Parent Body
reports became noticeably shorter and more sporadic, and the Cleveland UNIA became
less visible in the local political scene. Collins’s exit is another example of how sexism
within the UNIA drove out visible black women leaders and hurt the movement in the
process.
The key factor in explaining the Cleveland UNIA’s decline was the emergence of a
new militant, diasporic oppositional consciousness adhered to by intellectuals and black
working people locally and across the world. The historian Penny Von Eschen calls
World War II a ‘diaspora moment’. She defines it as ‘a time when wartime agitation
and discussion about colonial independence reached fruition’ (Von Eschen 1997, p. 69).
African American protest groups such as the NAACP, Council on African Affairs, and the
March on Washington Movement adopted this position. These organizations loathed
segregationists such as Theodore Bilbo, dismissing emigration as a racist scheme to deny
black freedom (Fitzgerald 1997). Instead groups such as the Council on African Affairs
looked to Africa like never before as the vanguard of Pan-Africanism. Moreover, they
believed that expanding the New Deal social welfare system and labour rights, as well as
forging political coalitions with progressive whites and other people of colour, were
essential to securing black rights and a more democratic world. These positions spoke
directly to millions of African Americans (Von Eschen 1997). In contrast, the UNIA still
viewed Africans as uncivilized and remained wedded to emigration and entrepreneuri-
alism. By any measure, the UNIA’s programme was behind the times and no longer
reflected the contemporary political imaginaries of most African Americans.
In Cleveland, most African Americans – like elsewhere – were more concerned with
attaining full citizenship rights and economic security than emigrating to Africa. While
African Americans remained second-class citizens, their cautious optimism that the war
would end Jim Crow and colonialism explains their determination to attain better jobs,
E.S. McDuffie176

housing and political power at home. Staunchly opposed to emigration and segregation and
understanding black freedom in global terms, the Future Outlook League captured black
working people’s oppositional consciousness and channelled it into building the most
dynamic movement for racial justice and equality in wartime Cleveland through boycotts,
pickets, trade unionism and electoral politics (Future Outlook League 1938, 1942). So
while the FOL galvanized black Clevelanders into action, Division 133 spoke mainly to a
small group of die-hard Garveyites by the war’s end. Still holding Garvey’s 1920s dream of
redeeming Africa, Stewart in 1949 repatriated to Liberia and moved the Parent Body with
him to Monrovia, Liberia’s capital. The city remained the UNIA’s headquarters until his
death in 1964 when it then moved to Chicago (Phillips 1999, Hill 1990).
Garveyism in Cleveland during the Civil Rights–Black Power era
As Civil Rights and Black Power campaigns erupted in Cleveland during the 1960s,
Division 133 remained marginal in local black affairs and played no visible role in the
historic mayoral campaign of Carl B. Stokes in 1967, making him the first black mayor of
a major US city (Moore 2003). In 1975, the Parent Body returned to Cleveland after
Mason A. Hargrave, Division 133 president, was elected UNIA president general. This
move did not reverse the Cleveland UNIA’s decline (Western Reserve Historical Society
1986, Hobbs).
Focusing narrowly on Division 133’s demise, however, overlooks how Garveyism
continued to thrive in the city and inform black Clevelanders’ oppositional, diasporic
identities during the Civil Rights–Black Power era. Garveyism survived in new, local
Black Power organizations comprising young, working-class black nationalists who
consciously saw themselves as Garveyites. Like their predecessors during the World War
I years, a combination of local and global developments explains the resurgence of
Garveyism during the 1960s. Cleveland, like other large Midwestern cities, was undergoing
massive de-industrialization (Moore 2003, Sugrue 2005). Scores of local factories shut
down, depriving young blacks of good paying jobs and the prospects of upward mobility.
Moreover, many black youth felt that civil rights failed to significantly improve their lives.
Inspired by Garvey’s defiant call for black self-determination and captivated by burgeoning
African nationalism, young Cleveland black nationalists formed groups such as the House
of Israel and Afro-Set during the late 1960s. Committed to the Black Power programme of
self-determination, black pride, and Pan-African unity, these organizations were visibly
involved in local struggles for black economic and political power (Moore 2003, Joseph
2006). This new generation of Garveyites was largely unaware of the history of the local
UNIA and had no connections to it. Many had come to Garveyism through the neo-
Garveyite, religiously unorthodox Nation of Islam founded in 1930 and exchanges with
veteran black nationalists. Irrespective of what path they followed to Garveyism, Black
Power militants in Cleveland adopted Garveyism as their political identity and programme
and applied it to local struggles for black rights during the late 1960s and 1970s (F.C. Perry
Smith, personal community, 2 October 2009).
Conclusion
Garveyism in Cleveland had a dynamic, complex history. Comprising primarily working-
class migrants, the Cleveland UNIA served as a powerful vehicle for advancing black
rights, fostering community and cultivating a diasporic, oppositional consciousness. For
a brief moment in the early 1920s, the Cleveland UNIA was the largest social movement
in the city and highly visible within with the transnational Garvey movement. Like

elsewhere, the Cleveland UNIA largely owed its success to the efforts of women. However,
intraracial and class divisions, authoritarianism, and sexism within the organization,
together with local and international events, affected the viability of the Cleveland
UNIA during the 1930s and 1940s. The relocation of the UNIA’s world headquarters in
1940 did not reverse the Cleveland’s UNIA decline. However, Garveyism found new
organizational homes in 1960s-era local Black Power groups and transformed the
subjectivities of black Clevelanders. Also, Cleveland Garveyism highlights the challenges
facing scholars interested in excavating the organizational life of the Garvey movement in
the urban Midwest. Given the gaps in the archival record, there is much we may never
know about the Cleveland UNIA, particularly the experiences of its working-class rank-
and-ﬁle.
Conceptually and more broadly, a study of the Garvey movement in Cleveland
elucidates the overlooked history of a diasporic Midwest and the region’s visibility in the
larger black world. Given this, Garveyism in Cleveland requires African Americanists to
look beyond US boundaries and appreciate the transnational dimensions of black life and
history in the Midwest. Black Clevelanders came to see themselves through Garveyism as
diasporic subjects while at the same time Garvey recognized the Midwest as an integral
part of this worldwide black movement. At the same time, the history of Garveyism in
Cleveland requires scholars of the African diaspora to dispense with the ‘Black Atlantic’
as a useful analytical framework for appreciating the complex histories and lives of the
African descended. The Black Atlantic paradigm overlooks the Midwest – and other
regions of the world for that matter – and fails to acknowledge the diverse geographic
localities where black people forged diasporic identities and pursued transnational politics.
Finally, the Garvey movement in Cleveland contains important organizational lessons
and conceptual possibilities for contemporary black politics in the United States and
across the diaspora. From the economically ravaged East Side of Cleveland to the favelas
in Rio de Janeiro to Port-au-Prince’s Cite´ Soleil slum ravaged by the 2010 earthquake, to
post-Katrina New Orleans and London’s Brixton neighborhood, to the war-torn eastern
Democratic Republic of Congo and Darfur, black peoples are in a state of crisis. White
supremacy is on the move in the United States and globally. Globalization, neo-liberalism
and neo-colonialism are tightening their grip on the Caribbean and Africa, with women
and children disproportionately suffering from poverty. HIV/AIDS is literally threatening
the survival of the African-descended (Christian 2009).
Certainly, black people around the world are organizing against injustice, but there is
no protest organization today that is galvanizing into action the African-descended around
the world like the Garvey movement during its heyday. For those of us interested in
advancing black freedom everywhere, we neither want to romanticize the UNIA nor
replicate its missteps, namely its undemocratic, sexist, heteronormative tendencies and
uncritical understanding of blacks and their relation to capitalism. Neither is it likely nor
desirable for any one organization today or in the future to speak on behalf of all black
people. Still, the unprecedented Garvey phenomenon enabled black people globally to
dream of a new world in which the African-descended were free. What an inspiring vision
for our times.
Notes
1. I use the term ‘the Midwest’ to describe the region that includes states between the Appalachian
Mountains to the Rocky Mountains and north of the Ohio River.
2. I use the term ‘heteronormative’ to describe systems of power, institutions and cultural practices
that frame human sexuality into two distinct and complementary genders (male and female),
E.S. McDufﬁe178

posit heterosexuality as natural and the only form of human sexuality, and understand marriages
between men and women as the only appropriate for site for sexual relations.
3. Women never served as division presidents in Cleveland as they occasionally did in other
locales (Harold 2007).
Notes on contributor
Erik S. McDuffie is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies and the
Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He
is the author of the forthcoming book Sojourning for freedom: black women, American communism,
and the making of black left feminism (Duke University Press). He is currently developing a
monograph, ‘Garveyism in the urban Midwest: the making of diaspora in the American Heartland’.
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