In the 30 years to 1918 some 2,552 Black folks had been murdered by lynch mobs in the US. Most of those killings befell within the South, house of the Invisible Empire, in any other case referred to as the Ku Klux Klan.
The KKK, born within the aftermath of Accomplice defeat within the American Civil Battle, was largely moribund earlier than the top of the nineteenth century; however D.W. Griffith’s 1915 movie Start of a Nation romanticised and resurrected it. Lynch mob tradition was Klannish to its core.
The Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Individuals (NAACP) campaigned for a Republican invoice to outlaw the apply, regardless of opposition from southern Democrats. The Klan regarded them as their chief opponent, the NAACP proudly reported.
However the Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey, who led the rival Common Negro Enchancment Affiliation (UNIA), took a special strategy. On 25 June 1922 he met with Edward Younger Clarke, the Klan’s appearing Imperial Wizard, in Atlanta.
Garvey was a fantastic speaker and a higher visionary. The UNIA named him the provisional president of Africa, head of a authorities in exile for the world’s neighborhood of Black women and men – these nonetheless struggling underneath European colonial rule in Africa, these nonetheless struggling underneath white supremacist rule within the American diaspora.
Integration was a sham, he thought. He dreamed of an Africa for Africans. There was, then, a logic to the Atlanta assembly. Clarke, Garvey wrote, ‘believes America to be a white man’s nation, and in addition states that the Negro ought to have a rustic of his personal in Africa’. Garvey was shocked to find that others didn’t perceive his level. ‘Marcus Garvey is, doubtless, probably the most harmful enemy of the Negro race in America and on the planet’, an editorial within the NAACP’s journal The Disaster ran. ‘He’s both a lunatic
or a traitor.’
Garvey died a damaged man in London in 1940, aged simply 52. Regardless of his errors, his legacy is immense. ‘Earlier than Garvey’, the historian C.L.R. James later stated, ‘the good hundreds of thousands of Africans and folks of African descent merely didn’t exist within the political consciousness of the world’
