African Zionism

Garvey's philosophy of racial loyalty expressed in the School of African Philosophy as well as in his other speeches and writings, was earlier influenced by the Zionist movement. At the Fourth UNIA International Convention in New York in August 1924, for example, a reporter for a Hebrew Zionist newspaper was heard to exclaim across the press table, "This is Negro Zionism."  The Dahomean protonationalist Kojo Tovalou-Houénou declared at the same convention that "your association, Mr. President . . . is the Zionism of the Black Race."

Identification of Garveyism with Zionism is a theme that runs throughout commentaries on the Garvey phenomenon. In a November 1922 interview, Claude McKay stated that the Garvey "movement has all the characteristic features of the Jewish Zionists." The same ideological identification persisted after World War II. In the classic statement of the theory and practice of postwar pan-African liberation, Pan-Africanism or Communism, George Padmore addresses the prehistory of the movement and describes the phenomenon of what he defines as "Black Zionism or Garveyism."  Amy Jacques Garvey also described Garveyism in her 1963 memoir as "Black Zionism."

The political parallels between Garveyism and Zionism were remarkable. As irredentist phenomena, the twin movements were spawned in significant ways by territorial and diplomatic developments during World War I and by the perfervid debate surrounding the settlement of the nationalities question and the issue of national self-determination, matters that were important parts of the protracted peace negotiations. The ground-swell of feeling on the part of black people toward Africa and of Jews toward Palestine occurred within the same twelve months following the Armistice, the period that many historians believe registered the greatest change in attitudes of Jews and persons of African descent toward the question of national independence.

When interviewed by Michael Gold in August 1920, Garvey informed Gold, "Many white men have tried to uplift them [the Negroes], but the only way is for the [N]egroes to have a nation of their own, like the Jews, that will command the respect of the world with its achievements."  The men of the American volunteer Jewish Legion---the first contingent of which was raised in New York in February 1918---became identified as a kind of Jewish national guard for Palestine, while the men of Garvey's uniformed Universal African Legion (UAL), organized the following year, symbolized the armed detachment of African liberation. At Garvey's mail-fraud trial the former UAL head Emmett L. Gaines was asked by the government prosecutor whether the UNIA had a military branch. He answered, "It has a uniform rank . . . like the Masons and Odd Fellows and any other organization." To elucidate the character of his African legion, Garvey then interjected the simple declaration---"Zionists."

In the case of both the Garvey and the Zionist movements, the center of political organization was the United States, specifically New York. Garvey launched a series of construction loans in 1920 that were analogous to the Palestine Restoration Fund promoted by the Zionist Organization of America for the avowed purpose of developing the "Jewish commonwealth of Palestine."  The various reconstruction funds that formed so intrinsic a feature of the organizing efforts of both movements were a reflection of their shared concepts of exodus and preparation. The Negro World of 8 August 1922, in providing a summary of one of Garvey's speeches, reported that Garvey asked his audience "if the Jews could have Palestine, why not the Negroes another Palestine in Africa?" The hoped-for African Palestine, as conceived by Garvey, was to have been Liberia. "We are asking the world for a fair chance to assist the people of Liberia in developing that country," he announced, "as the world is giving the Jew a fair chance to develop Palestine."

Similarly, a proposal presented at the September 1919 Chicago convention of the Zionist Organization of America to transfer "all central Zionist Administrative Institutions and activities" to Palestine was mirrored by Garvey's announcement, in a Liberty Hall speech on 14 December 1919, that "after the [UNIA] convention to be held next August the headquarters of the association must be transferred to Monrovia, Liberia."