What Is the Overall Significance and Legacy of Garveyism?

What is the overall significance and legacy of Garveyism?

There are several aspects of Garveyism and its legacy that make it significant to black history over the previous two centuries. Its significance can be questioned by the ideas of earlier leaders; elements of Pan-Africanism can be seen as far back as the 18th century. The legacy of Garveyism is envisaged in the economic and cultural ideas of today and it has influenced many important black leaders and movements to the present day.

First we must consider that Pan-Africanism was around for a long time before Garvey and that his ideas were not completely original but were developed through other ideas. The intellectual genealogy of Garvey and Garveyism has been elaborated before, and it includes a collection of nationalists, protonationalists, emigrationalists as well as Pan-Africanists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Garvey’s idea for a separate state for Negroes had already been suggested to Congress in 1790 by Ferdinand Fairfax. From Jefferson to Lincoln, “colonization” was the white man’s favourite solution for the Negro problem similar to Garvey. There are many examples of earlier ideas relating to Garvey’s such as Edward Wilmot Blyden and their ideas on ‘race purity’ or even his admiration of Nicolai Lenin and his fight for “peace, bread, liberty and land”. The fact that these ideas had been present before, begs the question of how much, aspects of Garveyism, actually came from Garvey, and how significant Garveyism actually is, with its basic ideas already in place. However, it has been argued that his ideas were different. Clarence Walker says, Garvey was different to most 19th century emigrationists, his chief actors were black, and it was not to be total emigration; only the race proud would return to Africa. He also quotes Harold Cruse, who wrote that Garveyism was not an Afro-American nationalist movement, but Afro-British. Garvey was definitely critical of Negros who were not...