“New Africa Faces the World”: Midwestern Garveyism during the 1950s

Chapter 5 discusses the post–Second World War evolution of midwestern Garveyism in the 1950s through the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its derivatives within the context of the nascent US Black Freedom Movement, global Cold War, and the Bandung World, a transnational political project committed to global decolonization. The chapter begins with a discussion of midwestern Garveyism through the work of Elinor White Neely, of Robbins, Illinois, and Lillie Mae Gibson of Cleveland, Ohio. The chapter then looks at James and Goldie Stewart, who emigrated in 1949 from Cleveland to Liberia, as well as Detroit UNIA leader William Sherrill’s transformative trip in March 1957 to newly independent Ghana. The rise of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam as the fastest growing Black nationalist formation in the United States constitutes a turning point in the history of Garveyism. Masculinism and collaborations with white supremacists continued to bedevil heartland Black nationalists.