In The Second Battle for Africa, Erik S. McDuffie establishes the importance of the US Midwest to twentieth-century global Black history, internationalism, and radicalism. McDuffie shows how cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, as well as rural areas in the heartland, became central and enduring incubators of Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its offshoots. Throughout the region, Black thinkers, activists, and cultural workers, like the Grenada-born activist Louise Little, championed Black freedom. McDuffie explores Garveyism and its changing facets from the 1920s onward, including the role of Black midwesterners during the emergence of fascism in the 1930s, the postwar US Black Freedom Movement and African decolonization, the rise of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X in the 1950s and 1960s, and the continuing legacy of Garvey in today’s Black Midwest. Throughout, McDuffie evaluates the possibilities, limitations, and gendered contours of Black nationalism, radicalism, and internationalism in the UNIA and Garvey-inspired movements. In so doing, he unveils new histories of Black liberation and Global Africa.

Erik S. McDuffie is Professor of African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism, also published by Duke University Press.

List of Abbreviations  ix
Preface  xiii
Acknowledgments  xvii
Introduction. A Manifesto on the Making of the Diasporic Midwest and Garveyism  1
1. “We are a Nation within a Nation”: The Making of the Diasporic Midwest and Black Nationalism before the Twentieth Century  37
2. Stronghold: The Diasporic Midwest and the Heyday of the UNIA  67
3. New Directions: Garveyism in the Heartland during the Great Depression  111
4. “On December 7 One Billion Black People . . . Struck for Freedom”: Midwestern Garveyism during the 1940s  147
5.  “New Africa Faces the World”: Midwestern Garveyism in the 1950s  177
6.  “A Message to the Grass Roots”: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Early Black Power  215
7.  “The Second Battle for Africa has Begun”: Garveyism and Black Power in the Diasporic Midwest  243
Conclusion. The Diasporic Midwest and Global Garveyism in a New Millennium  283
Notes  305
Bibliography  359
Index