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The Universal Negro Improvement Association is often most closely associated with Marcus Garvey, but from the beginning, the work of women was essential to the development of the organization. Amy Ashwood co-founded the UNIA with Garvey, and it was her connections and capital that launched the Negro World newspaper, but after her brief marriage to and divorce from Garvey, she was removed from the UNIA and the newspaper. Other women, like Garvey’s second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, and actress Henrietta Vinton Davis, played important and public roles in the UNIA, especially during Garvey’s incarceration, but their contributions aren’t as widely remembered as Garvey’s. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Natanya Duncan, associate professor of history and director of Africana studies at Queens College CUNY, and author of An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode audio is "Explanation of the Objects of the Universal Negro Improvement Association," a studio recording made by African-American leader Marcus Garvey in New York in July 1921, and adapted from his longer speech "A Membership Appeal from Marcus Garvey to the Negro Citizens of New York;" it is in the public domain and available via Wikimedia Commons. The episode image is a photograph of Henrietta Vinton Davis, published in Women of distinction: remarkable in works and invincible in character by L. A. Scruggs in 1893; the image is in the public domain and is available via Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library.
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Natanya Duncan is associate professor of history and director of Africana studies at Queens College CUNY. A historian of the African Diaspora, her research and teaching focuses on global freedom movements of the 20th and 21st Century. Duncan’s research interest includes constructions of identity and nation building amongst women of color; migrations; color and class in Diasporic communities; and the engagements of intellectuals throughout the African Diaspora. Her forthcoming University of Illinois Press book, An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, focuses on the distinct activist strategies in-acted by women in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which Duncan calls an efficient womanhood. Following the ways women in the UNIA scripted their own understanding of Pan Africanism, Black Nationalism and constructions of Diasporic Blackness, the work traces the blending of nationalist and gendered concerns amongst known and lesser known Garveyite women.
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