When Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris was first picked by Joe Biden to be his running mate, for many it was quite exciting for so many reasons. There were those, however, who actually questioned her race, citizenship, and heritage. It was suggested that as a child of immigrants from Jamaica and India, she was somehow less American and less Black. Now some of the same people are mispronouncing her name as a variation on a similar theme. Kamala — something foreign, something different, not your story, not our story, they seem to be saying.
But nothing could be further from the truth. Caribbean immigrants and their American born children have long contributed to the building up of American society. This is not a new phenomenon. Kamala Harris is the latest in a long tradition rooted in Pan African ideology from Marcus Garvey to the present.
Pan African ideology is an ideology that originated in the late 19th century in response to slavery, colonialism, and institutional racism. Proponents believed that people of African descent should unify along political lines to achieve freedom and self-determination. For centuries, according to America’s one-drop rule, even one drop of Black blood defined someone as Black. As a practical matter, courts labored over fractions like quadroon (1/4 Black) or octoroon (1/8) even when the persons in question looked White. Pan- African ideology, as espoused in several major Pan African Congresses from 1900-1945, was a way to turn the idea of the one-drop rule on its head; to turn an arbitrary racial designation into a profound political statement.
Pan African ideology meant that the Jamaican Marcus Garvey could relate to American born Malcolm X and his family and influence generations of African Americans and other people of African descent around the world. Pan African ideology meant that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be an inspiration to freedom fighters on the African continent, and vice versa, and would subsequently be invited to Kwame Nkrumah’s inauguration as the first Prime Minister of independent Ghana in 1957.
Pan African Activists, Caribbean heritage and Civil Rights
Marcus Garvey, the civil rights and Back to Africa activist is perhaps the most prominent proponent of Pan Africanist thought and action. In brief, Garvey — who was born in Jamaica and came to the United States in 1916 — cut his teeth in activism in Harlem from where he ran an international campaign against racism and colonialism. His United Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) had chapters all over the US and around the world. He was a role model for many other civil rights activists including Malcolm X who wrote about the pivotal influence of Garvey on his entire family in his famous autobiography.
Garvey was unflinching in standing up for people of African descent. Moreover, Garvey, more than almost anyone in the 20th century, promoted the notion that “Black is beautiful.” Civil rights activists of the 1960s picked up on this aspect of Black consciousness and started wearing their hair in natural afros. Some, for the first time, embraced the idea that their skin color was a blessing and not a curse. Such was the influence of Jamaican born Garvey on Black populations from New York to Monrovia. “Africa for Africans … at home and abroad” was his motto which represented his call to unite people of African descent worldwide.
