Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

W. E. B. Du Bois's Darkwater (1920) and Lothrop Stoddard's Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1921) reflected a growing worldwide political opposition between an increasingly vocal global whiteness and the rise of the dark world, now joined by a new global black anti-colonialism. The migration of blacks from the South and the Caribbean fostered the emergence of the New Negro radicalism of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Hubert Harrison's Liberty League, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen's Messenger, and Cyril Brigg's African Blood Brotherhood.Historian Hubert Harrison, considered the father of New Negro radicalism, contended that the new radicalism of the Negro in 1920 was based on their observation of international events. These observations did not consist of the exploitation of laborers by capitalists, as the Socialist Party maintained, “but the social, political, and economic subjection of colored peoples by white. It is not the Class Line, but the Color Line, which is the incorrect but accepted expression of the Dead Line of racial inferiority.” Harrison was a socialist but held that the American ideology of Race First required the Negro to respond with his own defensive race consciousness. Harrison's experience with the Socialist Party had soured him on coalitions with the white left, but his fellow advocate of Race First nationalism, ... log in or subscribe to read full text