The second type of populism that I explore in The Political Theologies of Populism: the Garveyites, the Klan, and the Wobblies, 1905-1930 is Pan-African populism. Pan-African populists decenter Whiteness and work to build cultural, economic, and political power amongst Africans and the African diaspora.
The roots of Pan-African populism are found in the experiences of the very first Africans who were kidnapped and unwillingly transported across the Atlantic to work in the forced labor camps called plantations. It was articulated in texts like Robert Wedderburn’s The Horrors of Slavery and David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World and in resistance, rebellion, and revolution against the slave masters. In places of inhuman bondage, it found expression in the hush arbors and clandestine meetings where Africans and their descendants gathered across language barriers and ethnic differences to develop common practices to undermine enslavement and in service of what Robin Kelley has named freedom dreams. In the urban neighborhoods of states that outlawed slavery, in the communities of maroons, and anywhere they could assemble outside of bondage, early Pan-Africanists came together and discovered “the map to a new world is in the imagination” and envisioned alternatives to, and escape routes from, slavery that have continued to fuel the Black radical imagination.
In The Political Theologies of Populism I hone in on two periods to examine the development of Pan-African populism. The first is the period immediately following the US Civil War. The second is the years leading up to and following World War I.
In both Pan-African populists demanded full citizenship for people of African descent–most especially in the form of their own political communities. After the Civil War, this vision was expressed by many as a desire to achieve full citizenship, which throughout the history of the United States has included several elements. Some were highlighted in a speech that the Reverend John W. Hood made at the 1865 North Carolina Freedmen’s Convention: “[W]e want three things,—first, the right to give evidence in the courts; second, the right to be represented in the jury-box; and third, the right to put votes in the ballot-box.” To this list must be added the power to create autonomous institutions, the right to bear arms, the capacity to work for wages, own property and accumulate savings, and the ability to control one’s own sexual reproduction.
In the years immediately following the Civil War most African Americans thought that they could achieve these citizenship rights within the United States. But once that possibility faded, many began to dream of freedom elsewhere. These dreams would eventually materialize into an international Pan-African movement in the years immediately following World War I, when they took the form of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. They remain today on the African continent, in the United States among the Black radical community, and in many other places where Pan-Africanists advocate for a united Black people. In their earliest years, as now, authentic Pan-Africanist populism finds itself in contests with white supremacist populism–a type a populism I described two weeks ago–and in a complicated relationship with pluralistic populism, a form of populism I explore next week.
