This past week, someone asked my wife about the red, black, and green flag that represents Pan-Africanism/African Americans. From here: “African Americans have long reimagined the American flag. Marcus Garvey famously redesigned the flag with three symbolic colors: red for the blood of Black people, black for their skin color and racial identity, and green for the verdant lands of Africa.”
So, who was Marcus Garvey? I was asked this. From PBS: “As the leader of the largest organized mass movement in black history and progenitor of the modern ‘black is beautiful’ ideal, Garvey is now best remembered as a champion of the back-to-Africa movement. In his own time, he was hailed as a redeemer, a ‘Black Moses.’ Though he failed to realize all his objectives, his movement still represents a liberation from the psychological bondage of racial inferiority.”
I’m surprised – OK, not THAT surprised – that more folks don’t know who Garvey was. I probably read about him in Ebony and/or JET magazines when I was a kid.
“Garvey was born on August 17, 1887, in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. He left school at 14, worked as a printer, joined Jamaican nationalist organizations, toured Central America, and spent time in London. Content at first with accommodation, on his return to Jamaica, he aspired to open a Tuskegee-type industrial training school. In 1916, he came to America at Booker T. Washington’s invitation, but arrived just after Washington died.” That last piece, I did not know.
UNIA in the US
“Garvey arrived in America at the dawn of the ‘New Negro’ era. Black discontent, punctuated by East St. Louis’s bloody race riots in 1917 and intensified by postwar disillusionment, peaked in 1919’s Red Summer. Shortly after arriving, Garvey embarked upon a period of travel and lecturing.
“When he settled in New York City, he organized a chapter of the U.N.I.A. [Universal Negro Improvement Association], which he had earlier founded in Jamaica as a fraternal organization. Drawing on a gift for oratory, he melded Jamaican peasant aspirations for economic and cultural independence with the American gospel of success to create a new gospel of racial pride. ‘Garveyism’ eventually evolved into a religion of success, inspiring millions of black people worldwide who sought relief from racism and colonialism.”
Garvey was a leading intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
Other flags
I became curious about how similar the Pan-African flag is to the current national flags. It looks most like the Libyan flag, except that on that latter one, the black is wider and there’s a star and crescent. Here are the red, black, and green flags.
In 1990, David Hammons (b. 1943) created African-American Flag. From MoMA: “Hammons created this version—one in an edition of ten—for an exhibition at Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City.” I saw it at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in August 2024.