The Back-to-Africa Idea
Throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, writes Robert G. Weisbord, the idea of a return to Africa stirred the imagination of Negro leaders in the United States.
In 1961 a little-known negro bi-monthly, published in New York, carried an advertisement calling for a celebration on August 17th, the anniversary of the birth of Marcus Garvey. Readers were implored to parade their sentiments to the world so that all would know that Garvey-ism was again on the march.
Garvey, a Jamaican by birth, had been the chief promoter in the United States of black nationalism in general, and the back-to-Africa idea in particular, from 1916 until his death in Britain in 1940.
The advertisement had been inserted by a small, obscure Harlem-based group known as the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement (A.N.P.M.). At a time when the civil rights movement was reaching a crescendo, the A.N.P.M. branded integration of the races as ‘a sociological farce whose cheering section consists of myopic misfits, chronic race panderers and professional Uncle Toms of the Tschombe [sic] school’. For its part, the A.N.P.M. advocated ‘as a matter of racial survival, that all able-bodied, ambitious and race-loving Black people seriously consider colonization in Africa on a mass scale.’
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