Set the World on Fire

Keisha N. Blain's fabulous study of black nationalist women will shape the field for some time to come. This eminently readable book builds on the growing scholarship on Marcus Garvey's transnational movement and constructs new parameters for understanding black nationalist and internationalist activism in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Blain's cast of predominantly U.S.-based black nationalist women are both pragmatists and ideologues, “street scholars” who inspired and organized the black working poor from the cities of the North to rural communities of the Jim Crow South (p. 47). Able to adapt their strategies to suit local conditions and prepared to work with white supremacists to advance shared goals, many black nationalist women maintained an unshakable conviction that black self-determination was only available on the African continent. While historians of the Left have long challenged Cold War narratives that represent the middle decades of the twentieth century as prelude to an integrationist civil rights movement, few studies have been written of black nationalist organizations that were significant before the 1950s and originated by women. Blain argues that black nationalist women—well after the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Unia) fragmented following Garvey's deportation from the United States in 1927 and long before independence from colonial rule became an achievable goal on the African continent—developed programs and organizations designed to liberate diasporic Africans. Often centred on the emigration of diasporic Africans to the motherland, these projects deserve to be taken seriously for several reasons. They sustained grassroots organizations in the United States, helped forge new diasporic networks, and attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Fbi). While Blain offers interesting accounts of pan-African activists operating in the Caribbean and colonial metropoles, the most vivid portraits are of U.S.-born activists such as Mittie Maude Lena Gordon. A member of the Unia in the 1920s, Gordon launched the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (Pme), in December 1932. Headquartered in Chicago, the Pme gathered four hundred thousand signatories for a petition requesting that President Franklin D. Roosevelt appropriate federal funds to assist the voluntary emigration of black Americans to Africa. Although efforts to enlist federal government support were unsuccessful, Gordon and other black nationalists continued to insist that black liberation must offer something bigger and better than grudging integration into an American republic in which the constitution and customs were built on past enslavement and continued exploitation of Africans

Nationalism · Nationalist Movement · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Race, History, and American Society

• Marking Race

  Open Access•Marc Matera, Radhika Natarajan et al.•Twentieth Century British History•2023

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