Crown Colony government, implemented in 1865, reserved political power in the hands of British-appointed officials, but there was no representative assembly. Only towards the end of the Second World War were improvements made towards more democracy in Jamaica, with the introduction of a new constitution and a general election held in 1944. Jamaica’s social structure remained heavily dominated by a white elite, with an emerging professional brown middle class and many impoverished black Jamaicans. The late nineteenth century witnessed the growth of the Jamaican peasantry. Sugar production was largely reorganised to centre around large sugar factories, while banana cultivation became an important new economic activity.

Elementary education improved in the late nineteenth century with a growth in the number of schools, but secondary education lagged behind and tertiary education was virtually non-existent until after the Second World War. Jamaicans remained attached to Afro-Caribbean spiritual beliefs but Christian churches, chapels and revivalist preachers gained followers. In the 1920s and 1930s, Rastafarianism emerged as a new system of belief and Marcus Garvey’s organisations offered hope for Jamaicans to find a future beyond colonialism. Worsening employment conditions in the 1930s led to major labour protests in 1938, the formation of trade unions and the birth of political parties.

Pan-African thinkers in the pre-1945 period developed innovative ideas that challenged the racialized hierarchies of the world economy. Some of these thinkers are discussed in previous chapters, such as George Padmore and C.L.R. James (both discussed in chapter 7) as well as Amy Ashwood Garvey (chapter 10). This chapter discusses three other prominent Pan-African thinkers who sought to cultivate the transnational economic solidarity of Africans and the African diaspora in order to challenge this group’s subordinate position in the world economy. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey was the best-known popularizer of this kind of “economic Pan-Africanism” via his Universal Negro Improvement Association and its Black Star Line. The other two discussed in the chapter are W.E.B. Du Bois (from the United States) and Hubert Harrison (who migrated from the Danish West Indies to the United States). The latter two disagreed with Garvey and each other about a number of issues, ranging from their views of capitalism to the role of the African diaspora in Pan-African politics.

Afro-Latin American newspapers included extensive coverage of Black populations in other countries.Articles on Black populations and race relations in Latin America, the United States, and Europe and Africa are examples of “practices of diaspora,” international communication and engagement among Black peoples that grew out of, and helped to forge, feelings of connectedness and racial solidarity.The Black press also reported on, or offered commentary on, more formal political movements promoting Black internationalism, such as Garveyism.Black papers in Argentina and Uruguay reported regularly on their northern neighbor, Brazil. Cuban papers included Puerto Rican and Dominican writers and discussions of Haiti. Throughout Latin America, writers and intellectuals of all races watched with mixed horror and fascination the workings of racial segregation and anti-Blackness in the United States.Diasporic ties were further thickened by travel, migration, and personal connections and friendships among African American and Afro-Latin American writers and intellectuals.

Views of Africa in the Black press evolved dramatically in the ninety years covered by this volume. The first generation of Afro-Latin American journalists had grown up with African parents and grandparents and were often sympathetic to their social and cultural practices. By the turn of the century doctrines of scientific racism, with their visions of Africans and their descendants as the bearers of genetic and cultural inferiority, led to much more negative views of Latin America's African heritage, even within the Black press. Emerging critiques of scientific racism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s produced a rehabilitation of that heritage, though some doubts persisted. Ethiopia’s tenacious resistance against Italian invasions in the 1890s and 1930s, the region’s role in World War II, and decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s further raised Africa’s profile and image in the Black papers.

Reading Marcus Garvey as a brilliant popular culture practitioner, this chapter situates Garvey vis-à-vis his Black contemporaries to challenge readings of Garveyism and the UNIA that have tended to repeat limiting narratives of rise and fall, tragedy and farce, and failure. Paying careful attention to the use of uniforms, pamphlets, parades, songs, speeches, and pageantry within Garveyism, Russell analyzes Garvey as a popular cultural artist before such a concept was even conceived. The chapter is particularly sensitive to the affective dimensions of performance within Garveyism. UNIA members across the African diaspora participated in performance as embodied futurity by marching, singing the anthem, and wearing UNIA uniforms, enacting a utopian vision of Black liberation and unity that facilitated the construction of what Benedict Anderson has called an “imagined community”.

This chapter analyzes the early history of New York’s Harlem, from its Dutch beginnings to its status as an iconic symbol of Black urban modernity in the 1920s. Drawing upon the biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, and George S. Schuyler, and with references to Marcus Garvey, the chapter details the links between Harlem as a Dutch location and its locale as a “Negro Mecca.” It highlights some of the surprising ways in which Harlem Renaissance figures claimed a biographical connection to Dutch New York to illustrate “the Dutch strain in the ancestry of key Harlem Renaissance figures.” The essay focuses on how, in the 1920s, New Negro intellectuals, especially Du Bois, Schuyler, and Toomer, explored what it meant to incorporate Dutchness in their genealogical self-fashioning, and how Marcus Garvey exploited Holland Society-style stagecraft in his rise to power.