Product Code Database
Black nationalism is a Nationalism movement which seeks representation for Black people as a distinct national identity, especially in racialized, Colonialism and Postcolonial Age societies. Its earliest proponents saw it as a way to advocate for democratic representation in culturally plural societies or to establish self-governing independent Nation state for Black people. Modern Black nationalism often aims for the social, political, and economic empowerment of Black communities within Western world, either as an alternative to assimilation or as a way to ensure greater representation and equality within predominantly Eurocentrism cultures.
As an ideology, Black nationalism encompasses a diverse range of beliefs which have variously included forms of economic, political and cultural nationalism, or pan-nationalism. It often overlaps with, but is distinguished from, similar concepts and movements such as Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, the back-to-Africa movement (aka Black Zionism), Afrocentrism, and Garveyism. Critics of Black nationalism compare it to white nationalism and white supremacy, and say it promotes racial and ethnic nationalism, separatism and Black supremacy. Most experts distinguish between these movements, saying that while white nationalism ultimately seeks to maintain or deepen inequality between racial and ethnic groups, most forms of Black nationalism instead aim to increase equality in response to pre-existing forms of white dominance.
Black nationalists tend to believe in Autarky and self-sufficiency for Black people, solidarity among Black people as a nation, and Black pride, in order to overcome the effects of institutionalized inequality, self-hate and internalized racism.
The roots of Black nationalism extend back to the time of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, when some enslaved Africans revolted or formed independent Black settlements (such as the Maroons), free of European control. By the 19th century, African Americans such as Paul Cuffe and Martin Delany called for Free Negro and fugitive Black people to emigrate to Africa to help establish independent nations. In the early 20th century, activist Marcus Garvey moved to the US and, inspired by Zionism and Irish independence, promoted Black nationalist and Pan-Africanism ideas, which collectively became known as Garveyism.
Modern Black nationalist ideas coalesced as a distinct movement during the era of racial segregation in America, as a response to centuries of institutionalized white supremacy, the discrimination African Americans experienced as a result, and the perceived failures of the nonviolent civil rights movement of the time. After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, the Black nationalism movement gained increased traction in various African American communities. A focus on returning to Africa became less popular, giving way to the idea that Black people constituted a "nation within a nation," and therefore should seek better rights and political power within a Multiculturalism US.
Black nationalists often fought racism, colonialism, and imperialism, and influenced the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Black Panther Party, Black Islam, and the Black Power movement.
These two ideologies can also overlap as "separatist nationalism", which typically manifests in the belief in a literal or metaphorical secession from white American society, and is especially popular among those who have become disillusioned with "deferred American racial equality". Separatist nationalism often rejects integration into white society—which may extend into rejection of existing political systems—preferring to organise alternative structures. In this schema, Black nationalism without Black separatism is called "cultural nationalism". Black cultural nationalism often focuses on engagement with societal and political structures to enact change, such as by attempting to elect Black representatives at the local and national level. Black cultural nationalism has broader support among African-Americans than separatist nationalism; the latter is more popular among young men and people of lower economic status. Examples of Black separatist organizations include the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panther Party.
Black nationalists often reject conflation with Black supremacy, as well as comparisons with white supremacists, characterizing their movement as an anti-racist reaction to white supremacy and color-blind white liberalism as racist. Additionally, while white nationalism often seeks to maintain or re-establish systems of white majority dominance, Black nationalism instead aims to challenge white supremacy through increased civil rights and representation (or independence) for black people as an Oppression Minority group. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Black nationalist groups have "little or no impact on mainstream politics and no defenders in high office", unlike white supremacists.
Professor and author Harold Cruse said revolutionary Black nationalism was a necessary and logical progression from other leftist ideologies, as non-Black leftists could not properly assess the particular material conditions of the Black community and other colonized people:
As early as 1655, escaped Africans had formed communities in inland Jamaica, and by the 18th century, Nanny Town and other Jamaican Maroons villages began to fight for independent recognition. Jamaican Maroons consistently fought British colonists, leading to the First Maroon War (1728–1740). By 1740, the British governor of the Colony of Jamaica, Edward Trelawny had signed two treaties promising them 2,500 acres (1,012 ha) in Cudjoe's Town (Trelawny Town) and Crawford's Town, bringing an end to the warfare between the communities and effectively freeing the Maroons a century before the Slavery Abolition Act came into effect in 1838.
In Cuba, maroon communities formed in the mountains when escaped African slaves joined the indigenous Taínos. Before roads were built into the mountains of Puerto Rico, heavy Shrubland kept many escaped maroons hidden in the southwestern hills where many also intermarried with the natives. Escaped slaves sought refuge away from the coastal plantations of Ponce. In the plantation colony of Suriname, escaped slaves revolted and started to build their own villages. On October 10, 1760, the Ndyuka people signed a treaty with the Dutch recognising their territorial autonomy; it was drafted by Adyáko Benti Basiton of Boston, a formerly enslaved African from Jamaica.
After the Revolutionary War, educated Africans within the colonies (specifically within New England and Pennsylvania) had become disgusted with the social conditions of Black people. Individuals such as Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, James Forten, Cyrus Bustill and William Gray sought to create organizations that would unite Black people, who had been excluded from white society, and improve their situation collectively. Institutions such as Black Masonic lodges, the Free African Society, and the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas lay the groundwork for the independent Black organizations and communities that would follow.
Meanwhile, Black people were relocated from the Americas and Britain to new colonies in Sierra Leone and Liberia, paving the way for Black-led nations in those countries. Back in the Caribbean, the Haitian Revolution proved to disparate Black communities across the Americas that they could achieve independence or equality in the law, if they Cooperation and worked together. (2025). 9780415899628, Routledge. ISBN 9780415899628
The message of spiritual equality appealed to many enslaved people and, as African religious traditions continued to decline in North America, Black people accepted Christianity in large numbers for the first time. Black people even began to take active roles in these mixed churches, sometimes even preaching. Many leaders of the revivals also proclaimed that enslaved people should be educated so that they could read and study the Bible. This helped establish a new class of educated black people in America.
With the 1775 proclamation of Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, the British began recruiting the slaves of American revolutionaries and promised them freedom in return. Free Blacks like Prince Hall proposed that Blacks be allowed to join the American side, believing if they were involved in founding the new nation, it would aid in attaining freedom for all Black people. The Continental Army gradually began to allow Blacks to fight in exchange for their freedom.
After the Revolutionary War, General Washington urged the British to return the as stolen property, under the Treaty of Paris (1783). The British attempted to keep their promise to the Loyalists by relocating them outside the US. The British transported more than 3,000 Black Loyalists and Jamaican Maroons to resettle in Nova Scotia (part of present-day Ontario). Between 1749 and 1816, approximately 10,000 Black people settled in Nova Scotia. Those settlers who remained in Nova Scotia would go on to found large communities of freed Black people, forming 52 black settlements in total, and would develop their own national identity as Black Nova Scotians.
Meanwhile, in 1786, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, a British organization with government support, launched its efforts to establish the Sierra Leone Province of Freedom, a colony in West Africa for London's "Black poor". After Nova Scotia proved a hostile environment for many of the new settlers, with extreme weather as well as racism from the white Nova Scotians, about a third of the Loyalists, and nearly all of the Jamaican Maroons, petitioned the British for passage to Sierra Leone as well, eventually leading to the founding of Freetown in 1792. Their descendants are known as the Sierra Leone Creole people.
In 1787, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones formed the Free African Society (FAS) of Pennsylvania. It became famous for its members' work as nurses and aides during the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793, when many other residents abandoned the city. Notable members included African-American abolitionists such as Cyrus Bustill, James Forten, and William Gray, as well as survivors of the Haitian Revolution in Saint-Domingue, as well as fugitive slaves escaping from the South.
The FAS provided guidance, medical care, and financial advice. The last became particularly important, and would establish a model for later African American banks. It operated ten private schools for Blacks across Pennsylvania, performed burials and weddings, and recorded births and marriages. Its activity and open doors served as motivator for growth for the city, inspiring many other Black Benefit society to pop up.
In 1793, Jones and several other FAS members also founded the St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, a nondenominational church specifically for Black people. This in turn paved the way for the first independent in the United States. The church and its members played a key role in the abolition/anti-slavery and equal rights movement of the 1800s and it would later be involved in the civil rights movement.
Mutual aid became a foundation of social welfare in the United States until the early 20th century.
In Boston, Black Quaker and activist Paul Cuffe advocated settling freed American slaves in Africa. He was a successful ship owner and in 1815, he attempted a settlement for freedmen on Sherbro Island. By 1811, he had transported some members of the Free African Society to Liberia. He also gained broad political support to take emigrants to Sierra Leone, and in 1816, Cuffe took 38 American Black people to Freetown. He died in 1817 before undertaking other voyages. By 1821, his Sherbro Island settlement had failed and the survivors also fled to Sierra Leone.
In 1816, modeled after Cuffe's work and the British resettlement of Black people in Sierra Leone, Robert Finley founded the American Colonization Society (ACS). The ACS and organizations like it aimed to encourage and support the migration of freeborn people of color and Manumission to the continent of Africa. The African American community, who wanted to keep their homes, overwhelmingly opposed the ACS, as did the abolitionist movement. Many African Americans, both free and enslaved, were pressured into emigrating anyway.
By 1833, the Society had transported only 2,769 individuals out of the U.S. and close to half the arrivals in Liberia died from tropical diseases. During the early years, 22% of the settlers in Liberia died within one year. (2025). 9780813017334, Univ. Press of Florida. ISBN 9780813017334 According to Benjamin Quarles, however, the colonization movement "originated abolitionism" by arousing the free Black people and other opponents of slavery.
Between 1822 and the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, more than 15,000 freed and free-born African Americans, along with 3,198 Afro-Caribbeans, relocated to Liberia. The settlers carried their culture and tradition with them, gradually developing a Black national identity as . Liberia declared independence on July 26, 1847, becoming the first African republic to proclaim its independence and Africa's first and oldest modern republic. The U.S. did not recognize Liberia's independence until February 5, 1862.
The successful revolution was a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World and the revolution's effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. Independence and the Abolitionism in the former colony was followed by a successful defense of the freedoms the former slaves had won, and with the collaboration of already free people of color, of their independence from white Europeans. This had the effect of encouraging other Black communities suffering under slavery or colonialism to imagine independence and self-rule.
In 1885, Haiti anthropologist and barrister Anténor Firmin published De l'égalité des races humaines ( On the Equality of Human Races) as a rebuttal to Count Arthur de Gobineau's work, challenging the idea that Craniometry was a measure of human intelligence and noting the presence of Black Africans in Pharaonic Egypt. Firmin then explored the significance of the Haitian Revolution of 1804 and the ensuing achievements of Haitians such as Léon Audain, Isaïe Jeanty and Edmond Paul. (Both Audain and Jeanty had obtained prizes from the Académie Nationale de Médecine.) Though marginalized for his belief in the equality of all races, his work influenced Pan-African and Black nationalist thought, and the négritude movement. Firmin influenced Jean Price-Mars, the initiator of Haitian ethnology and developer of the concept of Indigenism, and 20th-century American anthropologist Melville Herskovits.
Beginning in 1847, Delany worked alongside Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York to publish the anti-slavery newspaper The North Star. Delany dreamed of establishing a settlement in West Africa. He visited Liberia, a United States colony founded by the American Colonization Society, and lived in Canada for several years, but when the American Civil War began, he returned to the United States. When the United States Colored Troops were created in 1863, he recruited for them. Commissioned as a major in February 1865, Delany became the first African American field grade officer in the United States Army.
After the Civil War, Delany went to the South, settling in South Carolina, where he worked for the Freedmen's Bureau and became politically active, including in the Colored Conventions Movement. Delany ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor as an Independent Republican. He was appointed as a trial judge, but he was removed following a scandal. Delany later switched his party affiliation. He worked for the campaign of Democrat Wade Hampton III, who won the 1876 election for governor in a season marked by violent suppression of Black Republican voters by Red Shirts and fraud in balloting.
After Emancipation, the back-to-Africa movement eventually began to decline. In 1877, at the end of the Reconstruction era, it would experience a revival as many Black people in the American South faced violence from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Interest among the South's Black population in African emigration peaked during the 1890s, a time when racism reached its peak and the greatest number of lynchings in American history took place.
During World War II, Liberia supported the United States war effort against Nazi Germany, and in turn received considerable American investment in infrastructure, which aided the country's wealth and development. President William Tubman encouraged economic and political changes that heightened the country's prosperity and international profile; Liberia was a founding member of the League of Nations, United Nations, and the Organisation of African Unity.
Florence Kenna, a leader within the PME, praised the senator for his efforts to bring national attention to the emigration cause. Other notable Black nationalist women, including Mittie Maude Lena Gordon and Ethel Waddell, were instrumental in promoting the legislation. These women formed strategic alliances to advance the goals of Black separatism and economic independence, reflecting a broader tradition of Black women's leadership in nationalist organisations during the early 20th century, despite marginalization within both Black and mainstream political movements in the United States.
Marcus Garvey encouraged African people around the world to be proud of their race and see beauty in their own kind. Garvey used his own personal magnetism and understanding of Black psychology to create a movement that appealed to working class African Americans. Garvey's movement, known as Garveyism, was opposed by mainstream Black leaders, and crushed by government action. However, its many alumni remembered its inspiring rhetoric.
A central idea to Garveyism was that Pan-Africanism and that, to advance, they should put aside their cultural and ethnic differences to unite under their shared history. He was heavily influenced by the earlier works of Booker T. Washington, Martin Delany, and Henry McNeal Turner. By the 1910s, Alexander Bedward became convinced that God had intended for him to be Aaron to Garvey's Moses — paving the way for the younger man to deliver his people into the Promised Land. Bedward led his followers into Garveyism by finding the charismatic metaphor: one the Kohen Gadol, the other the prophet, both leading the children of Israel out of exile.
In 1967, Stokely Carmichael and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton wrote , drawing on Black nationalist ideas to define the concept of Black power. Stokely Carmichael stated that white supremacy, colonialism, and systemic racism were drivers of disenfranchisement and racism. (1992). 9780679743132, Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679743132 The authors believed Black power not only lay in dismantling white supremacy, but also in establishing camaraderie within the African American community. The authors disavowed liberal, conformist politics, instead emphasizing sovereignty for the Black community, similar to the goals of Black nationalism.
Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, has called for reparations for slavery and historic racism in the form of "financial restitution, land redistribution, political self-determination, culturally relevant education programs, language recuperation, and the right to return (or repatriation)," and cited Frantz Fanon's work for "understanding the current global context for Black individuals on the African continent and in our multiple diasporas."
The Not Fucking Around Coalition (NFAC) is a Black nationalist and Black separatism organization in the United States. The group advocates for Black liberation, and has been described by some news outlets as a "Black militia", though they have avoided violence. The NFAC gained prominence during the 2020–2021 United States racial unrest, making its first reported appearance at a protest near Brunswick, Georgia, over the February 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery, though they were identified by local media as "Black Panthers". Historian Thomas Mockaitis said that, "In one sense it (NFAC) echoes the Black Panthers but they are more heavily armed and more disciplined... So far, they've coordinated with police and avoided engaging with violence."
John Fitzgerald Johnson, also known as Grand Master Jay and John Jay Fitzgerald Johnson, claims leadership of the NFAC and has stated that it is composed of "ex military shooters". In 2019 Grand Master Jay told the Atlanta Black Star that the organization was formed to prevent another Greensboro Massacre. Johnson expressed early third period Black nationalist views, putting forth the view that the United States should either hand over Texas to African-Americans so they may form an independent country, or allow African-Americans to depart the United States to another country that would provide land upon which to form an independent nation.
The early African nationalists were elitist and believed in the supremacy of Western culture but sought a greater role for themselves in political decision-making. They rejected African traditional religions and Tribal chief as "primitive" and embraced western ideas of Christianity, modernity, and the nation state. One of the challenges faced by nationalists in unifying their nation after European rule were the divisions of tribes and the formation of ethnicism.
Some Rastas have settled in Ghana, Nigeria, Gambia and Senegal.
In 1889, Harrison "Shakespeare" Woods, an African-American immigrant, officially founded Bedwardism as a new religion in August Town, Saint Andrew Parish, with Bedward as its prophet—referred to as "That Prophet" and "Shepherd." Bedwardian literature described it as the successor to Christianity and Judaism, though its teachings differed little from those of most Christian denominations. Even so, because the movement likened the ruling classes to the Pharisees, it met with disapproval and even suppression. Bedwardism originated the belief that August Town, Jamaica corresponds to Jerusalem for the Western world, which would influence Rastafari beliefs. Bedward also variously claimed to be the reincarnation of prophets such as Moses, Jonah and John the Baptist, and was twice ruled insane by the colonial Jamaican courts. Bedwardism later drew inspiration from the rise of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
The movement lost steam in 1921 after Bedward and hundreds of his followers marched into Kingston, where he failed to deliver on his claim to ascend into Heaven, and many were arrested. In 1930, Bedward died in his cell of natural causes. Many of his followers became Garveyites and Rastafarians, and brought with them the experience of resisting systems of colonial and white supremacist oppression. While some Rastafari cast Marcus Garvey as a Messiah, Bedward sometimes takes the role of John the Baptist.
By the 1920s, some Black Christian groups had begun to develop their own canon of Afrocentrism religious texts in opposition to the Eurocentrism of mainstream Christian churches. Between 1924 and 1928, preacher Robert Athlyi Rogers, inspired Marcus Garvey, wrote the Holy Piby, also known as the Black Man's Bible. It was intended for an Afrocentric Abrahamic religion, known as the Afro-Athlican Constructive Gaathly. Rogers declared Garvey an "apostle of God" and dedicated the seventh chapter of the Holy Piby to him. His theology described Black people as God's chosen people, and preached self-reliance and self-determination. Around 1926, Jamaican preacher Fitz Balintine Pettersburg wrote The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy, which decried white colonialism and the oppression of Black people. In the book, Pettersburg declared himself "King Alpha" and his wife as "Queen Omega", suggesting a fulfillment of the Ethiopianist promise of Psalm 68.
In August 1930, Marcus Garvey's play Coronation of an African King was performed in Kingston. Inspired by the coronation of Haile Selassie that same year, and drawing on Psalm 68, it featured the coronation of a fictional Sudanese prince. When Haile Selassie was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia in November, his Ethiopian title was Nəgusä Nägäst (literally "King of Kings", a common epithet for Jesus). He was the first sovereign monarch crowned in crowned in Sub-Saharan Africa since 1891. According to Ethiopian tradition, Haile Selassie was descended from David, Solomon, and the Queen of Sheba. Some Jamaican preachers, such as Archibald Dunkley and Joseph Hibbert, saw Selassie's coronation as proof he was the Messiah they saw prophesied in the Book of Revelation, the Book of Daniel, and the Psalms. That year, Dunkley proclaimed Rastafari was the name of God, after Haile Selassie's pre-regnal title and name: Ras Tafari Makonnen. In 1933, he founded the King of Kings Ethiopian Mission in Kingston. In 1931, Hibbert, a former member of the Ancient Order of Ethiopia masonic lodge, concluded that Haile Selassie was divine after studying the Ethiopian Bible. He left the Ethiopian Baptist Church, founded by the 18th-century Jamaican Baptist George Lisle, and formed the Ethiopian Coptic Faith ministry, in St. Andrew Parish. When he later transferred his ministry to Kingston, he found Leonard Howell was already teaching similar doctrines.
From 1933, Howell had begun preaching that Selassie was the "Messiah returned to earth"—an important symbol for the diaspora.Petrine Archer Straw (2025). 9789766405496, The University of the West Indies Press. ISBN 9789766405496 Under his Hindu pen name G. G. Maragh (for Gangung Guru), Howell published The Promised Key, which synthesized material from the Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy and the Holy Piby. Most significantly, the identities of "King Alpha and Queen Omega" were changed from Pettersburg and his wife to Selassie and Empress Menen Asfaw, solidifying the prophecy of Psalm 68. This Howellite innovation became an article of faith for many Rastafari. Howell later formed the Pinnacle settlement in Saint Catherine Parish that became associated with Rastafari. Rastafari's new Black religious Biblical canon—with its Anti-imperialism message, and promotion of a positive Black identity—threatened colonial authorities who attempted to quell the growing movement with the arrest, trial for sedition, and imprisonment of these early Black preachers.
In 1937, the Ethiopian World Federation (EWF) was founded in New York City by Dr. Malaku Bayen and Dorothy E. Bayen, under the advice of Haile Selassie. Dr. Bayen was the cousin and personal physician of the Emperor, and a prince. Dunkley, Hibbert and Howell would also join the organization, which aimed to mobilize African American support for the Ethiopians during the Italian invasion of 1935-41, and to embody the unity of Black people worldwide. Ethiopia's resistance against European imperialism made it a source of pride and inspiration among Black people in the diaspora.
The BLF's politics were informed by Pan-Africanism socialism and black nationalism. The BLF had links with Pan-African groups worldwide, often sending money back to Africa, and helped organize the Africa Liberation Day celebrations in the 1970s and 1980s. They also published the Grassroots Newspaper, which often featured creative work, alongside news on anti-colonial movements back in Africa and the Caribbean.
BLF was especially concerned with educational inequalities in the UK. Because black-authored books were extremely difficult to source in London at the time, the BLF established three book shops filled with black history, black politics and black literature. The Grassroots store front on Ladbroke Grove was one of these book shops, and became a community hub. The Headstart bookshop provided information for young people and at the weekends, volunteers ran math, English and black history classes there.
BLF ran prisoner welfare schemes, and schemes to support black women. Ujima Housing Association was established by the BLF to address issues around discrimination in housing. Young people and mothers were especially welcome. By 2008, when Ujima was merged into London and Quadrant, its assets were valued at £2 billion.
The party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major American cities, including San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. They were also active in many prisons and had international chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria.
In April 1964, Malcolm X participated in a Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca); Malcolm subsequently shifted to mainstream Islam and recanted many of his earlier opinions, including his prior commitment to Black separatism. He still supported Black cultural nationalism and advocated for African Americans to proactively campaign for equal human rights, instead of relying on white citizens to change the laws. Malcolm X articulated his new philosophy in the charter of his Organization of Afro-American Unity (which he patterned after the Organization of African Unity), and he inspired some aspects of the future Black Panther Party.
In 1965, Malcolm X expressed reservations about Black nationalism, saying, "I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary. So I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of black nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as black nationalism? And if you notice, I haven't been using the expression for several months."
Deviating significantly from mainstream Islam, Muhammad also taught that Fard was a Messiah and that he himself was sent by God to prepare Black people for global supremacy and destruction of "the white devil". The Nation promoted economic self-sufficiency for Black people, and talked of establishing a separate Black nation in Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi.
In the 2010s, artists such as Killer Mike and Kendrick Lamar have released songs criticizing the War on Drugs and the prison industrial complex from an anti-racist perspective. Hip hop music continues to draw attention to the struggles of black people and attracts a young demographic of activists. Kendrick Lamar and many other rappers have been credited with creating discussions regarding "blackness" through their music.
Norm R. Allen Jr., former director of African Americans for Humanism, calls black nationalism a "strange mixture of profound thought and patent nonsense":
Tunde Adeleke, Nigerian-born professor of History and Director of the African American Studies program at the University of Montana, argues in his book UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission that 19th-century African American nationalism embodied the racist and paternalistic values of Euro-American culture and that black nationalist plans were not designed for the immediate benefit of Africans but to enhance their own fortunes.
In Black Nationalism in America, John H. Bracey Jr., August Meier and Elliott Rudwick argue, "In the arena of politics, black nationalism at its mildest is bourgeois reformism, a view which assumes that the United States is politically pluralistic and that liberal values concerning democracy and the political process are operative."
Dean E. Robinson, meanwhile, argues that "modern black nationalism drew upon strategies for political and economic empowerment that had analogies in the wider political landscape" and that, shaped by circumstances in America, black nationalists merely began to "do what other 'ethnic' groups had done" — i.e., "pursue their interests in a pluralistic political system, subsumed by a capitalistic economic one".
Patricia Hill Collins criticizes the limited imagining of black women in cultural nationalist projects, writing that black women "assumed a particular place in Black cultural nationalist efforts to reconstruct authentic Black culture, reconstitute Black identity, foster racial solidarity, and institute an ethic of service to the Black community."
A major example of black women as only the heterosexual wife and mother can be found in the philosophy and practice called Kawaida exercised by the US Organization. Maulana Karenga established the political philosophy of Kawaida in 1965. Its doctrine prescribed distinct roles between black men and women. Specifically, the role of the black woman as "African Woman" was to "inspire her man, educate her children, and participate in social development." Historian of black women's history and radical politics Ashley Farmer records a more comprehensive history of black women's resistance to sexism and patriarchy within black nationalist organizations, leading many Black Power era associations to support gender equality. (2025). 9781469634388, UNC Press Books. ISBN 9781469634388
Notable black nationalist leaders who have professed antisemitic sentiments include Amiri Baraka, Louis Farrakhan, Kwame Ture, Leonard Jeffries and Tamika Mallory among others.
The SPLC has designated a number of black nationalist groups as hate groups, including the Black Riders Liberation Party, The Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, the New Black Panther Party, the Revolutionary Black Panther Party and Nuwaubian Nation.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has previously been criticized for conflating black nationalism with hate more generally. It later clarified that "black nationalists are assessed as a loose-knit network of various hate groups, charismatic leaders, as well as unaffiliated individuals who may identify as black nationalists, but who do not associate with black nationalist groups," and reiterated that "violent black nationalists" were distinct from other forms of black activism. They also challenged the notion that black activists of diverse ideologies should be grouped as "black identity extremists" by the FBI.
In October 2020, the SPLC announced that it would no longer use the category "black separatism", in order to foster a more accurate understanding of violent extremism and avoid creating a false equivalency between black separatism and white supremacist extremism. This change in the terminology which is used by the SPLC also includes the removal of "black nationalism" as a category of hate groups from the SPLC's website.
|
|
