“On December 7 One Billion Black People . . . Struck for Freedom”: Midwestern Garveyism during the 1940s

The Second World War is the subject of chapter 4. During the 1940s, Marcus Garvey’s ideas lived on through the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its offshoots. In a move that further cemented Cleveland’s prominence in the UNIA, James R. Stewart of Cleveland succeeded Garvey as the organization’s second president general after Garvey’s death in London in 1940. Stewart moved the UNIA headquarters to Cleveland. This chapter also looks at the growing ideological divide between Black nationalists and Black leftists. The former, like Mittie Maude Lena Gordon and the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, remained wedded to civilizationism and collaborations with white supremacists while Black leftist spokespersons and formations, like W. E. B. Du Bois and the Fifth Pan-African Conference in Manchester, England (1945), looked to Africa as the vanguard of global Black liberation. This chapter also explores Louise Little’s harrowing incapacitation in a Michigan mental hospital.