Pan-Africanism.

« (in New York City).

These congresses were attended by increasing numbers of representatives from the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.

Severalimportant factors affected the growing popularity of the congresses.

First, many delegates were sponsored by international labor movements, which were growing insize and power in the 1920s.

A second factor was the growth of the black nationalist movement of Marcus Garvey.

The Garvey movement was important in the UnitedStates as a popular expression of the sentiments of African unity and redemption among working-class blacks.

His followers contrasted with the more elite black groupscultivated by Du Bois.

Garvey, a Jamaican, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 to promote black pride, political and economicimprovements for blacks everywhere, and the repatriation of blacks to Africa (often called the “Back to Africa” movement). The institutional growth of the Garvey movement was swift and international in scope.

Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro World, achieved wide distribution, and chapters of UNIA sprung up all over the Americas, as well as in Europe, Australia, and South Africa.

Garvey also established a steamship company, the Black Star Line, with whichhe hoped both to enter international trade and to transport blacks to Africa.

Garvey hoped to oversee the repatriation of tens of thousands of American blacks to theWest African nation of Liberia, which had been founded by freed American slaves in the early 19th century.

The Garvey movement declined when Garvey was arrestedand imprisoned in 1925 on charges of mail fraud relating to the operation of the Black Star Line, and his repatriation scheme was never fulfilled. Influenced by Garvey’s ideas, young Africans studying in London founded the West African Student Union (WASU) in the late 1920s.

WASU became a focal point foryounger, more politically aggressive blacks from Africa and the Caribbean who agitated for African independence from colonialism. In the late 1920s and the 1930s, public awareness of the plight of peoples of African descent grew as black cultural movements such as the Harlem Renaissance in theUnited States gained recognition.

The Harlem Renaissance, centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, disseminated the works of black writers such asClaude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Du Bois himself, along with other black artists espousing black pride and challenging racial injustice.

In France, asimilar movement, called the négritude movement, followed the Harlem Renaissance.

The movement developed in Paris among French-speaking African intellectuals andactivists whose works affirmed the integrity of African civilization, defending it against charges of African inferiority.

Noted proponents of négritude included the authorsLéopold Sédar Senghor (who later became the first president of Senegal), Aimé Césaire, Alioune Diop, and Léon-Gontran Damas. IV AFRICAN INDEPENDENCE In the 1930s and 1940s, global forces such as the Great Depression (the worldwide economic slump of the 1930s) and the development and onset of World War IIsignificantly hampered the efforts of the Pan-African movement.

Nevertheless, concern for Africa among people of African descent remained strong in the United Statesand Britain.

American and British Pan-African groups mounted substantial protests when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935.

In 1937 African American groups formed theCouncil on African Affairs, the first American lobby organization led by blacks.

The council worked to raise awareness in the United States about the plight of Africansliving under colonialism and advocated the liberation of African colonies.

It was headed by the internationally renowned black singer and film star Paul Robeson andincluded such important black scholars and activists as W.

E.

B.

Du Bois, educator Alphaeus Hunton, future congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and educator MaryMcLeod Bethune.

The council also attracted African American artists such as singer and actor Lena Horne, who helped raise funds for projects. In the early 1940s Kwame Nkrumah, a native of the British-ruled Gold Coast (now Ghana) in West Africa, founded the African Student Organization in the United States.At the time, Nkrumah was a student in the United States.

In 1944 Nkrumah left America for London, where he joined an important group of Pan-Africanists led byJamaican activist George Padmore and Trinidadian author C.

L.

R.

James.

Also in the group were Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, who,like Nkrumah, would eventually become leaders of their countries.

In 1945 this group sponsored the fifth Pan-African Congress, which brought together numerousAfrican nationalists and trade unionists.

The meeting, held in Manchester, England, gave great impetus to the movement for African independence and fostered Africanleadership of the Pan-African movement. In 1957 Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African state to gain independence, and Nkrumah became its first prime minister.

Nkrumah held the Pan-Africanist viewthat the independence of Ghana would be incomplete without the independence of all of Africa.

To work toward this goal, he appointed Padmore to establish a Pan-African Secretariat within the Ghanaian government.

The secretariat pursued the twin goals of total African independence and continental political union in two series ofinternational conferences, held between 1958 and 1961: First, the All-African Peoples’ Conferences were held to stimulate independence movements in other Africancolonies.

Second, Nkrumah organized the Conferences of Independent African States to establish a diplomatic framework for the political union of Africa.

By invitingrepresentatives from independent North African states to the conferences and by holding the 1961 All-African Peoples’ Conference in Cairo, Egypt, Nkrumah’s intentwas clearly to unite the entire African continent. In 1960 Nkrumah invited W.

E.

B.

Du Bois to live in Ghana to act as an adviser and to initiate a project that Du Bois had proposed, the Encyclopedia Africana , a comprehensive encyclopedia of the culture and history of African peoples.

Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963 with this project incomplete.

However, the publication ofseveral books during this period made Continental Pan-African philosophy more widely known.

Notable among these books were Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956) and Nkrumah’s Africa Must Unite (1963). In 1960, 17 African countries gained independence.

By the end of 1963, approximately 80 percent of the African continent was independent.

Nkrumah’s goal ofestablishing a United States of Africa with a centralized power structure was opposed by the leaders of many of the new African countries, who resisted giving up theirnations’ newfound autonomy.

In May 1963 representatives from 32 African nations of both North and sub-Saharan Africa met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and founded theOrganization of African Unity (OAU, now African Union) as a loose federation of independent African states committed to continent-wide cooperation.

The unfinishedAfrican independence movement, political differences among the independent nations, and the poverty of the African continent kept political union from becoming areality. V PAN-AFRICANISM AND CIVIL RIGHTS The concept of Pan-Africanism as a political force reemerged in the Diaspora with the beginning of the Black Power movement in the United States.

In the early 1960sMalcolm X, a charismatic and forceful leader of a black Muslim group called the Nation of Islam, began publicly to espouse an aggressive philosophy of racial unity andself-reliance that came to be known as Black Power (or black nationalism).

In 1966 civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael became head of the Student NonviolentCoordinating Committee (SNCC), an influential civil rights organization, and then led SNCC and other groups to adopt Black Power as a guiding principle.

In the UnitedStates, Pan-Africanism came to be regarded as the international expression of Black Power and Malcolm X as the American voice of Pan-Africanism. In early 1964 Malcolm X traveled to Africa, giving well-received speeches to the governments and universities of Ghana and Nigeria.

In his talks, Malcolm X expressedthe theme of Pan-African unity by declaring that American blacks would not be free as long as they experienced racism in America and as long as Africa was not free.On a second trip to Africa later that year, Malcolm X became the first black American to speak before the OAU.

On that occasion he asked for the assistance of Africanleaders in bringing charges of racism by the American government before the United Nations (UN).

(The charges were never heard before the UN.) Back in the UnitedStates, Malcolm X counseled American blacks to acknowledge their kinship to Africa as a part of the civil rights movement. VI LATER DEVELOPMENTS. »