The Women of the Universal Negro Improvement Association

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

In the summer of 1914, Marcus Garvey, who had recently returned to Jamaica after traveling to Central America and England, met Amy Ashwood, then a teenaged activist. Together, they founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League UNIA and ACL, to work for the advancement of people of African ancestry around the world. Garvey headed to New York in 1916, with Ashwood following in 1918. On July 12, 1918, the UNIA and ACL issued its constitution. Of the original seven organization directors, four were women. A month later, in August, 1918, the UNIA launched a weekly newspaper called "The Negro World," produced in New York. Originally, the paper was circulated for free, and Ashwood leaned on family connections, asking relatives with bread trucks in Harlem to distribute it, while she hand delivered copies, door to door. Eventually, at its peak, Negro World was read by 200,000 people. Garvey and Ashwood married on December 25, 1919, but their marriage began to unravel quickly, and within three months, they were separated. Before their divorce was finalized, Garvey began traveling with his new secretary, Amy Jacques, a friend of Ashwood's. Just two weeks after the divorce was granted, in July, 1922, Garvey married Amy Jacques, with whom he would remain married for the rest of his life. Amy Ashwood was removed from UNIA leadership and from any mention in Negro World after that point, but she continued her pan Africanist activism while running a London nightclub and writing and producing Black diasporic plays. From 1921 to 1945, she participated in Pan African conferences, by 1945, presiding over meetings. Amy Ashwood Garvey died in Jamaica in 1969. Within the UNIA, Garvey's second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, eclipsed the role that Ashwood had previously served. In building a movement that encouraged Black economic independence, Marcus Garvey drew the attention of the FBI, which later acknowledged that it targeted him, looking for reasons to deport him as an undesirable alien. Federal investigators believed that they had found such a reason in the Black Star Line Shipping and Passenger Company, which was created so that Black people could travel to Africa without hassle. On June 21, 1923, Garvey was convicted of using mail to defraud investors in that business. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to five years imprisonment. Four years later, his sentence was commuted by President Calvin Coolidge, and Garvey was released from prison and deported to Jamaica, never to return to the United States. Just recently, on his last day in office in January, 2025, president, Joseph Biden posthumously pardoned Garvey. During Garvey's trial and imprisonment, Amy Jacques was a major spokesperson for the UNIA and for Garvey, publishing two volumes of his speeches and writings, giving speeches herself at UNIA divisions,and organizing conferences. She also served as an associate editor of the Negro World and introduced a new page to the newspaper, "Our Women and What They Think," which ran from February, 1924 to November, 1927, and which included articles by women and reprinted stories about women around the world. Marcus Garvey and Amy Jacques had two sons together. After Garvey's death in 1940, Jacques was a contributing editor to a Black nationalist journal, "The African," and she established the African Studies Circle of the World in Jamaica in the late 1940s. In 1963, Jacques published "Garvey and Garveyism." She was awarded the Musgrave Medal, an annual award by the Institute of Jamaica in 1971. Amy Jacques Garvey died in 1973 in Jamaica. In 1919, Marcus Garvey invited actress Henrietta Vinton Davis to speak at a UNIA meeting in Harlem, where she performed a rendition of "Little Brown Baby with Sparkling Eyes," by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Davis, who was then already 59 years old, devoted the rest of her career to the UNIA, traveling around the world, representing the organization and Garvey. Davis was named the Lady Commander of the Sublime Order of the Nile in August, 1920, and by 1921, she was fourth assistant President General of the UNIA. At the 1929 international convention of the organization, Davis was elected UNIA Secretary General. In August, 1931, however, Davis joined a rival UNIA faction known as UNIA Incorporated. In 1934, she was elected president of another rival faction in New York. Davis died in Washington, DC in November, 1941. Sometime in the mid 1920s, Laura Adorkor Kofi immigrated the United States from near Accra in present day Ghana. The details of her move overseas are shrouded in mystery, but she claimed to have come at the request of her father, King Knesipi, to encourage African Americans to move to Africa, instead of focusing on Liberia, as many in the UNIA did. Kofi urged her growing number of followers in Florida and around Southeast United States, "Those of you who go to Africa, don't go in the towns that are already built up. Go in the interior and build your own towns, children." In her camp style meetings, Kofi rapidly amassed a large following, asking listeners, "Are you ready to come home?" She established the African universal church in 1927, which drew many Garveyites. Kofi herself recruited 1000s of members into the UNIA, and she used the UNIA motto, "One God, one aim, one destiny," as her church's motto. But the UNIA leadership saw Kofi's popularity as dangerous. They banned her from meetings and tried to discredit her in the Negro World. On March 8, 1928, Kofi was assassinated with a single shot through the head as she rose to speak at a podium at an event in Florida. Two men connected with UNIA were arrested in connection with the shooting, but were found not guilty due to insufficient evidence. There was never a follow up investigation. Joining me now to help us understand more about the women involved in UNIA 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." 

Speaker 1  10:58  
Hello,citizens of Africa, I greet you in the name of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League of the World. You may ask, What organization is that? It is for me to inform you that the Universal Negro Improvement Association is an organization that seeks to unite into one solid body, the 400 million Negros of the world, to link up to 15 million Negros of the United States of America with the 20 million Negros of the West, Indies, the 40 million Negros of South and Central America with the 280 million Negros of Africa for the purpose of securing our industrial, commercial, educational, social and political conditions.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:41  
Hi, Nat. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Natanya Duncan  11:44  
Thank you for having me.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:46  
I'm really excited to to have read your book and to learn about these women. I want to start by asking, you say in the acknowledgements of your book that this was a book 27 years in the making, so I want to hear a little bit about what got you started on this project, and then what kept you going on this project?

Dr. Natanya Duncan  12:05  
What got me started on the project, I was what, at the time, was known as a UNCF United Negro College Fund Mellon Mays undergraduate fellow, and all fellows were given the task of coming up with a research project that they believed would sustain them through graduate school. The idea behind the program was to get us prepared to go to graduate school and go into the professorate. So my project was initially a comparative study between women in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and women in the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s. I was an undergrad at Clark Atlanta University. Our campus was actually less than two blocks away from a church site that served as a meeting space for both organizations in the 1920s and the 1930s. So I was amazed that there was this kind of dual membership, where people belong to the NAACP, and they belong to the UNIA, and they were in the Elks, and they were in the Eastern Star, and they were in the Baptist Convention. And I said, "Well, how did they have time for all of these memberships, and why would they need to be in so many organizations simultaneously?" So the project began as this comparative study. I come across a group of women who were both in the NAACP and in the UNIA. Some of them actually stopped attending the NAACP meeting and became more involved in the UNIA. And the question for me was, why? Because I just thought that the NAACP was so vogue and so important. I was in school in Atlanta, you know, the Black metropolis. This is what people did. And as I got into the project, Mellon Mays offered us an opportunity to travel summer research, and you had to write a little grant. And I mean, I'm a junior in college, right? So this is a big deal for me to get money to travel. So I decide I'm going to Jamaica. I want to go to the National Library. I want to go to the archives, and I want to find out more about some of these women and their connections. How were women in Atlanta connected to these women in Jamaica that were connected to these women in New York? Like, how did this happen? How did this how what was the operation like? And so I go to Jamaica, and I meet the dean of Garvey scholars, Dr. Rupert Lewis, Professor Rupert Lewis, and Dr. Patrick Bryan. And Professor Lewis allowed me to sit in his office and explain to him how I was going to do this groundbreaking project, and how I thought that the NAACP and the UNIA had so much in common, and these women were so special. And you know, just go on and on and on. And then he asked me one question that just stopped me. Professor Lewis says to me,"So Miss Duncan, after you gather all this material and you know who you know, and you know what you don't know. What do you want the rest of us to understand? What makes all of this so special and important? We know a lot about the NAACP, but do we know enough about the women in the UNIA for us to understand why the project is so important?" So I had to do a little pivot at that point and sort of gather myself and the momentum shifted to "Wait a minute. I need to name names, put these women in places, and help people understand what universal meant when we talk about the universal Negro Improvement Association and how it differed from the NAACP in terms of its global focus, and that it was the global focus of the UNIA that drew people in, that it presented them this umbrella that they could stand under and declare themselves as a part of something more than just the space and the location that they were in." Not that the NAACP wasn't useful, or that it wasn't addressing their concerns, but there were Black women and men who were of the opinion that there was a global struggle that they wanted to participate in, and the way to do that was through an organization that had that kind of audience, and so my work began at that point to become figuring out who these women were, naming them, and also talking about how they interacted with each other, how they helped build community on a local, a national, and an international level, and I was quite content just "Oh, I'm working on a chapter on Henrietta VintonDavis. Oh, I'm explaining more about the women who contributed to "Our Women and What They Think." But then I get to grad school, and I started grad school at University of Miami, and I actually ended up graduating from the University of Florida. And people who are academics are listening to this and going, Uh huh, yes. So while I was at the University of Miami, I'm still working on the women, and I keep hearing about the Miami division of the UNIA, and that the Miami division of the UNIA was very much so a contested space, that there was a power struggle for leadership at different points during the 1920s and the 1930s. And that's when I came across the newspaper clipping from the New York Times that announced the coming of King Knesipi of Ghana, West Africa, in relation to the assassination of his daughter, Princess Laura Kofi in Coral Gables Florida at a UNIA meeting that was held in the Masonic Lodge Hall, and I was stopped. I was stopped because up until that point, I didn't know that women were martyrs. I didn't know that they assassinated women for the cause. I just thought of the ways in which we see Black Panther women and NAACP women and even the women that I'd studied in UNIA up until that point, as organizers, as strategists, as agitators, but I had never stopped to think that a woman could lose her life for the work, the activist work, and then, much to my dismay, to find that there was a trial and no convictions, that there were arrests, that there was a police report, an autopsy, that Laura Kofi was assassinated by one bullet to the forehead that hit her while she ascended the podium, that the bullet sailed, according to the police report, from the back of the room, and hit her dead center, knocking her backward. There were so many implications in the way that the police report was written. You know, it had to be a skilled person. It couldn't just be, you know, some Johnny- come- lately with a gun in his hand, you know, deciding, "Okay, I want to take this woman out." Laura Kofi's assassination raised some questions for me that I had not thought about in the work up until that point. It gave a whole new meaning to "She's a Bad Mamajama," in my mind, because here was a Black woman who was so much so a threat that it wasn't enough to try and scare her. She had to be stopped permanently. She had to be silenced permanently. And it also then made me begin to re- examine the role of Amy Ashwood Garvey, Mr. Garvey's first wife, who had basically been erased from the history of the organization and the historiography of Black nationalism, of Pan Africanism and civil rights itself, and yet she, as an individual, becomes what is known as an abiola to the west African Student Union. They actually have a formal ceremony and give her this title, which is mother of the outside, the person who they look to to kind of be the negotiator, their political face, their social justice face, their funder, their financier. She is in England starting an Afro Caribbean Women's League in support of women who are coming from the Caribbean and Africa, and then later, even women who are coming from Asia and are being brought into the country, into forced marriages. She starts a organization with Jomo Kenyatta and others, the International Friends of Abyssinia. All of this she does from a restaurant space that she bought called the Florence Mills, which was named after a famous African American dancer of the period. And this restaurant cabaret space employed young people who are coming to England to go to school. It served as a home cooked food kind of space for Caribbean intellectuals and others who were sort of trying to find their way in England. And yet, when I looked at the sources for studying the UNIA and Mr. Garvey and the various organizations that are associated with the UNIA, there was no mention of Amy Ashwood Garvey beyond her marriage and divorce from Mr. Garvey. Once she's divorced from Mr. Garvey, she's, you know, persona non grata. So I am sort of enticed by the assassination of Laura Kofi and then forced, and because of that, forcing to look at Amy Ashwood differently now and to question why my story of Amy Ashwood stops in 1922 when, in actuality, I find her at the fifth Pan African Congress in England. I find her in correspondence with WEB DuBois. I find her in pictures with Paul Robeson. I find her in Nigeria. I find her in West Africa with the Dahomey, who were her ancestral people. Like she actually traced her roots back to them, and they then had a ceremony to bring her back into the fold. And so I'm saying, wait a minute. What's happening here? What's happening here? These are both Laura Kofi and and Amy Ashwood. had very different views on the relationship of the African continent and independent African countries to the UNIA and the pan Africanist cause. Laura Kofi essentially did not agree with Mr. Garvey's plan to repatriate Liberia. She felt that Liberia was already developed. Liberia already had its government. There were places in the interior of Africa that were in need of the skill sets that African Americans possessed, and the technological know how that African Americans possess, and that this would be a better way in to the continent to build up something for the organization and for those who wanted to repatriate, as opposed to going to a country that already had a system in place and infrastructure and had ties to some of the governments that were already oppressing the UNIA or trying to suppress the UNIA. Amy Ashwood, for her part, just blatantly came out and said that, you know, Mr. Garvey doesn't really have a good concept of what Africa is, because he keeps talking about Africa as this uniform place, but Africa is not a uniform place. It is not homogenous. And so we have to begin to deal with the independent countries and their needs and necessities and their ideas right as it as it fits or doesn't fit with the aim of the UNIA and pan Africanist groups. And so really, what sustained me was this quest to answer this question about the silence around these two women, and how in Amy Ashwood's case, although there's this written silence that in every aspect of the organization, I could still see her imprint. I could still hear her voice, I could still see her action and her activity. And so I was enamored with this idea of a kind of activism that didn't really fit the respectability politics rubric, wasn't an activism that I could say fit the National Baptist Convention code of behavior, and then at the same time, was not what we would it would find readily available and openly discussed amongst club women, right? I mean, Ida B. Wells is one of the more notable or famous persons of the period who belong to the UNIA, and dies a member of the UNIA, and I make sure I tell people this, because Ida B. Wells belonged to just about every organization of the era, and even tried to start a few of her own in partnership With T. Thomas Fortune, with WEB DuBois and others, and could not find a space or an avenue of commonality that was sustainable. They would always come to some impasse right? There would always be some disagreement with her and with the men she tried to partner with, and also with her and the women in the National Council of Negro Women, right, and the club women and Ida B. Wells, they had their moments. But she comes to the UNIA. She hosts Garvey in Chicago. She and her husband host Garvey in Chicago, and she actually mentions the UNIA in her last will and testament. That's how significant the organization becomes for her. And I asked myself, well, what was it that she saw? What was it that made Ida B. Wells stay? And at different point, she disagreed with Garvey, and many of these women disagree with Garvey at different points, but nobody's silenced or assassinated like Ashwood and Kofi. So there's a sort of spectrum. There's a variety right of ways in which women engage that I had to now narrow down or nail down for myself and for others to begin to understand and answer Professor Lewis's question, the quest to really understand what those silences meant and why those silences were so loud. Because they were loud silences to me, so much so that it meant that these women were virtually invisible. But many scholars absented from conversations about the long freedom struggle, about pan Africanism, about the nadir in America, about Jim Crow, about imperialism, colonialism, and so that got me reading the Negro World like it was current events.

Kelly Therese Pollock  29:26  
Yeah, so let's talk about that, because again and again in this book, you're talking about some woman who is fascinating, and I want to hear more. And you say, like, there's no full length biography of her, and I just keep thinking, someone needs to write that and that and so it seems like so much of what you're able to glean about so many of these women is just from what is in the Negro World, what they've written, what's maybe written in very brief sketches about them. So where, where all are you able to find what you are able to find to put into this book?

Dr. Natanya Duncan  30:01  
So I started with the Negro World newspaper, because it was a space where the women and men of the organization wrote in for themselves, and there were different sections of the newspaper that provided them opportunity to write in: Division News and Views, where women actually wrote in from their respective branches and detailed who spoke, when they spoke, what the order of the meeting was, what the result of the meeting was, what is going to happen at the next meeting, and when they finished, they would sign their name, and not just as recording secretary or some feminized role. They signed as reporter. They were reporting. They were bringing the news. And that kind of stopped me a little bit, because in addition to recognizing that they're writing in a newspaper, and the Negro World, was banned by the British government, the Spanish government, the French government. It was banned in South Africa. It was banned in Belize at one point. It's banned in South America, and yet, people are signing their name in another section of the poetry section, Poetry for the People, the magazine section, you had poets who would write, you know, why, "Why I am a Garveyite," "I Love the Red, Black andGreen," "Ode to Africa," Ode to African Queen," you know, and just sign their name and put their address, knowing that this newspaper is banned, is being read by J. Edgar Hoover and by other government secret services, etc, and that they're being surveilled. They put their address, and I'm sitting there saying, "Okay, this is a whole other kind of brave. This is a different kind of brave," because initially, you know, we're taught that the Negro World is a yellow newspaper that is Marcus Garvey's mouthpiece. And many scholars do not go beyond the first page of the Negro World, which is where Mr. Garvey would have his editorial, but if you go to page two, page three, page seven, you meet all of these people. And what is also interesting is that they're consistent. The Negro World newspaper ran from 1919 to 1933, and you find that that these persons from the different divisions, even when they move from one state to the other, you find them replicating the role that they had previously, and continuing the work, continuing their activism. And so the newspaper became, you know, like my Bible, my text and verse, right? And then I would corroborate, right? I would corroborate some of this. You go to the National Archives. You look at the census, you read the other Black newspapers, because you realize that you know the Pittsburgh Courier, the Amsterdam News, the Chicago Defender, they're not Garvey fans, but the Garveyites are writing letters to the editors of those newspapers to tell them why they need to be Garveyites, and the editors of those newspapers are kindly printing the letters just so that they can, you know, clap back, not realizing that, hey, you know, they're essentially giving me the gold mine here, right. When you talk about the length and the breadth and the expanse of the organization, and the involvement of these women, and the kind of potency right, the assert the assumption that many of the members of the organization are uneducated, illiterate, lower working class people, who's who's reading this newspaper on how many continents? Who's buying? Who's affording to buy the newspaper on how many continents? Right? There's all these other questions that come with recognizing the importance of the Negro World as a primary source. I then started doing, you know, a little what we in the modern time we call skip tracing. And so if somebody appeared in the Negro World and they were from Buffalo, New York, I would start looking at the Buffalo newspapers see who would pop up. I think that on some level, the other ways that I came to this were essentially through photographs, the photographs of James Van Der Zee, looking at the photographs, where they were taken, going beyond the Harlem parades, and looking at photographs from Indiana, from Colorado, from Jamaica, and sort of putting it together, and saying, "Okay, the persons here look similar to the persons here. Let me see who I can identify." And then reading the church bulletins from some of the areas that were heavily populated by the UNIA. I did a lot of cemetery walks. I would find somebody's name in the Negro World, go and look up their death certificate, and then go to the cemetery so that I could read what was on their tombstone, and then go look for their family in that area. I also spent a lot of time reading the court records associated with Marcus Garvey's trial, recognizing that it was two women who actually put the nail in the coffin. There were two women who wanted their money back from the Black Star Line and went to the state attorney here in New York to file a complaint, and based on their complaint, the mail fraud trial got its real steam. Interestingly enough, those women, although they wanted their money back from their purchase of the stock sales for the Black Star Line, which was the shipping and trading company business that the UNIA started, they never left the membership role of the UNIA, and they made a point of saying that their investment in the BSL, in the Black Star Line was about making money, but their membership in the UNIA was about their life. And there was a distinct sentiment in the organization where the Black Star Line was concerned. And when you talk about, where do you get your steam, the Black Star Line collapses, and the UNIA decides that it's a good idea to start another BSL in 1924. In 1922 it collapses, so in 1924 we're gonna start another one, because we are determined to own our own ships. We are determined to no longer be second class citizens when we travel. We are determined to do our own import and export business in the Caribbean and in Africa and in South America, and we are determined to have this global venture that is solely owned by Black people. Then that came across a quote from a woman who said that the UNIA did not ask any of these white people to help them with anything, and that if they, the membership, want to give their last dime to Mr. Garvey and the ship sinks, then that is their business, and not the business of white people, not the business of the US government. And it was in that moment that I fully fully understood what this was about, what efficient womanhood was about, what it meant to partner, right? Because many of these women saw themselves as being a in partnership with Mr. Garvey, with other men, with like minded organizations, what it meant to stand in the gap in their community as bridge builders to provide services that would undergird others when the government failed to do it, when social services failed to do it, when Black churches failed to do it, when philanthropic organizations failed to do it, the women in in their communities decided, "Okay, if we are all going to have mothers who are working on Saturday, rather than have these kids up and down, we're going to have the UNIA Juvenile Cadet Corp, and we're going to have Saturday school. And so now we have some place for the kids to be, and we're also teaching a Afrocentric curriculum, and we're preparing the next generation of membership of the UNIA. The importance of the Negro World as a source and as the starting point. There are people who read the book and say, "It's a lot of citations from the Negro World. It's because this is where they live." Notice, it's called Negro World. This was their world. This is where they lived, this is where they existed, this is where they recorded themselves. And then everything else is sort of, you know, ancillary. It's corobratory, but this is the primary space. This is their universe. And it makes for an interesting story about how we look at archives and what we consider to be authoritative sources, specifically, when we're talking about Black women and men, and when we're talking about non western groups. They're not going to be in the National Archives. Granted, there were issues of the Negro World newspaper that I could find no place else other than London's Kew Library, and I give them credit for having those early issues, the October 1919, issue in particular, where I find the speech from Hannah Nichols that calls for an efficient womanhood, and therefore justify the title of the book and my use of the term. You have to be willing, I think, to go beyond what we've been taught is an archive. Archives exist in people's living rooms. Archives exist in cemeteries. Archives exist in church basements. This aspect of the work that says, you know, "I want to look at what clothes people were wearing, what songs they were singing, what shoes they were wearing, how they were doing their hair, what the uniforms looked like, who sewed the uniforms, all as primary source information." Why are people using their energy and their resources in this way, particularly when we're on the verge of you know, before, during and after the Great Depression in America, the global financial crisis, people are choosing to still invest in the UNIA and organizations and auxiliaries that are affiliated with the UNIA.

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:26  
Yes. I want to ask a little bit more about this term that you use, efficient womanhood. You just said that it came from this speech in 1919, and you use it throughout the book. And of course, these, most of these women would not have thought of themselves as as feminist or anything like that, but there is a way that that they are working within the time and place and culture that they're in, but at the same time, sort of pushing against it, sort of pushing the almost to the sort of boundaries of of where they can can push, and obviously doing amazing things and being full partners in the organization. So I wonder if you could just sort of explain a little bit more about what you mean by efficient womanhood.

Dr. Natanya Duncan  42:12  
So efficient womanhood in 1919, Hannah Nicholas gives a speech at Liberty Hall in Harlem. And in at the time, there is great anxiety around the murders of World War I Black soldiers in the south. There have been several lynchings, public mutilations, men who are being chased even in the north, right? This isn't just a southern occurrence. And apparently, during this meeting, the subject of, what do we do? How do we respond to this? How do we protect our men? How do we protect our families? And Hannah Nicholas, it's just titled, you know, "Address from Miss Nicholas," and she says, you know, "It's time for an efficient womanhood. There can be no dormant spaces in our homes. At every turn, in every way, we have to represent who we are and what we're about. And there can be no negotiation about this, that we need to demand respect as citizens and the worth of the work of our men, their contribution to this country cannot be ignored, right?" And so this unwillingness to have the Black body, the Black family, discarded the contributions of Black men and the sacrifices of Black women, discarded, the refusal to have that discarded, was what she was calling on these women to do. And I realized that that use of the term efficient womanhood really reflected the attempts of UNIA women, to sort of negotiate spaces in ways that blended their concerns as women, as mothers, as partners, as lovers, as wives, with the nationalist agenda of the organization, and that they really believe that their concerns, their gender concerns, right, were not inseparable from the nationalist aims of the organization. And for them, you couldn't have one without the other, that it wasn't going to work. You couldn't say you were building a Black nation, and you didn't have strong relationships between Black women and Black men. And it didn't have to be love relationships. It had to be relationships that were based on equity and understanding. And that brought me back to Amy Ashwood and her brilliance as Marcus Garvey's co conspirator in founding the UNIA. And when they founded it in 1914, it was the UNIA, Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, and that document, the Constitution of the UNIA, is predicated on one member, one vote. That means that as of 1914, Black women were voting in the organization, in the two gender organization, and that is unique and different and an exception to all other organizations at that time. Nobody else is doing that. Even in the Masonic orders and in the Elks, you had your Eastern Star doing one thing, the Masons doing one thing. Everybody had sort of a spheres of gender, kind of set up right. In the UNIA, men and women went in the meeting and sat next to each other, and that's why I chose the book cover that I did. There is no separation here. We're at the meeting, you in your uniform, I'm in my uniform. We're taking the picture, where do you want to stand? And that makes for such a different scope in terms of how we begin to understand their involvement in scripting the Black nationalist ideology of the UNIA, and their involvement in shaping pan Africanism, which many scholars and even lay people believe to be a very masculine, you know, sort of ideology, you know, very CLR James spoke this into existence, kind of thing, you know. They they look at Fanon, Frantz Fanon, and and say, "Okay, so this is where we understand what Africa's point of view of the world, etc." And here are these women, you know, in the 1920s basically saying, "Okay, wait a minute. now. Hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on. So you say that the idea here is for all of us to go back to Africa. Can you please tell us how we're going to eat? Slow down. We need a plan, right?" And there's a lot of the the detail in the minutia that you know, they take the high ideal, and Amy Ashwood was very good about this. So in addition to the one person, one vote, she writes into the aims and objectives of the UNIA that whatever the boys are going to learn, whatever the curriculum is for the boys, it has to be for the girls too. So we have gender equity in terms of education. So there's no you go learn to sew while he go learn to build the building. No, if you want to learn to build the building, and you're going to learn to build a building. If he want to learn to sew, then he going to come and learn to sew, right? There's this equity that is built into the structure of the organization. The third thing that makes the constitution a beautiful piece of work is that in order to have a UNIA branch, you must first show that you have enough members to make a woman's auxiliary. Now many scholars read the women's auxiliary as some kind of off the side. And the ladies went to go make tea. And Marcus Garvey wanted the women out of the meeting, so he gave them something to do. No, no, if you did not have a woman president, a woman vice president, and a membership body of seven that showed that you had female representation to start a woman's auxiliary, you could not get a charter. Partnership is built into the constitution of the UNIA. The efficient womanhood of Amy Ashwood Garvey was basically that, look women and men must sit down at the table together in the same way that Marcus Garvey sat with her on her mother's porch and dreamed out loud what this organization could do, what it could be, and they were going to work together. They weren't always going to agree and that women also needed spaces within which they could handle women's business without interference. So it wasn't that there was a woman's auxiliary as a way of keeping women in check or giving the women some kind of busy work, or making them regulators of the house. No, the women's auxiliary became the training ground for UNIA women who become the bastion of the organization, will become the defenders of the organization, who become the co scripters of the organization's ideology. Because much of this, they're ferreting out on the pages of the Negro World, right in "Our Women and What They Think,"  in the "People's Forum," in the letters to the editor, in the magazine section, they're writing in and at many points, if you read carefully, they're questioning some of the decisions of the organization. They're questioning the relationship of the organization to other oppressed people, to people in the Philippines, to Muslim people during the Rafian War, to Irish people, to the Bolshevik Revolution. And on some level, you're saying, "And these are people who are being branded as lower class, illiterates, yet who are writing into the Negro World saying, I think that the Bolsheviks have a good idea. Maybe we should apply it here. And blah, blah, blah, and then engaging socialism." And I'm like, wait a minute, wait a minute. You live in Cary, North Carolina, and you want us to what? You know, and and so this is, this is where you have to pull back and strip yourself of what you learned and allow the subjects themselves to teach you, allow the subjects to speak. And for me, the reason I titled the book "Women and the Making of the UNIA" is because much of what the Universal Negro Improvement Association eventually becomes and its legacy and its solvency and relevance even today, because I see the UNIA in Black Lives Matter. I see the UNIA in Say Her Name. I see shucks, I saw, I saw the UNIA at the Super Bowl the other night, to be honest with you, in in the freeness of Serena Williams. I saw the efficient womanhood of the UNIA of casting aside what people think I should and should not be, or I should and should not do, or what my praise and my protest needs to look like, right? Everybody's feminism is not the same, and it shouldn't look the same, right? Because we're not experiencing the world in the same way, and that kind of elasticity is what made the Universal Negro Improvement Association strong. It also presented, you know, points of weakness for it. But I think essentially that what the women in the organization come to understand, right, and why it's an efficient womanhood is this three tier activism that they engage in: where they're partnering with like groups and other men, then they are mentoring each other, they're being each other's mirror, right, that was partly the role of the Black Cross Nurses, the Daughters of Ethiopia, in particular. The Daughters of Ethiopia, many people don't know about. They know more about the Black Cross Nurses. The Daughters of Ethiopia was an organization that was started by UNIA women essentially to give credit to women who were working in their communities, in service to the race, and recognizing that these women had taken on a special agenda, and that special agenda had to do with helping to mitigate some of the pitfalls that women and men, younger women and men encountered in negotiating Jim Crow, colonialism, right and imperialism in their respective areas, that the Daughters of of the Royal Court of Ethiopia is actually the proper name. It really created a space where you could ascribe an identity to the work that you were doing that was separate and apart from who you were Monday to Friday, let's just say, and in the same way that the Black Cross Nurses wore uniforms, in the same way that the Universal African Motor Corps, which was an all female paramilitary group, wore uniforms, it was this transformation, right and reclamation of self and identity. When I think about what it must have been like to live in a Jim Crow world and have someone tell you where you could shop, what you could buy, where you could eat, what you could eat, determine what you could pay or not pay for it, and then I look at the UNIA that attempted to have its own laundry, its own millinery, its own restaurants. Part of the scheme for the Black Star Line was that it would buy raw materials and food products from the Caribbean and Africa and make them available in United States, and that they also had a farm that they were planning to use to supply goods out into the diaspora as well, that putting on those uniforms came to mean something more in terms of the psychology of eroding the negative stereotypes, the negative talk, the horrors that some of these persons faced on a regular basis just because they existed, just because of where they lived, just because they wanted more. They were trying more. And so their brazenness, and it springs me back to their brazenness in the Negro World with their name and their address, and they come get me the come get me of that right, knowing the challenges that they would face, knowing you know they could lose their employment in some cases, in other cases, you know they could lose where they lived, but still being willing to do that, and to lay it on the line in that way says a lot to me about what this activism and this activist strategy meant to them, their willingness to stand in the gap. And I call it bridge building. I borrow that from sociologist Belinda Robnett, who uses the term to talk about women in the civil rights movement. And I see UNIA women as the precursor to women in the nascent civil rights movement, that they really find themselves creating autonomous spaces, ascribing autonomy to themselves in moments of necessity, the exigencies ofleadership. One example, there was the murder of a Garveyite in New Orleans, allegedly murdered by other Garveyites. The mayor of New Orleans decided and knew at the time, New Orleans was one of the largest UNIA branches in the south, had a thriving membership. The mayor of New Orleans decided to let the UNIA membership know they could no longer meet. It was deemed illegal, so to speak, for them to meet like somebody wants to tell me it's illegal for me to teach about race in my class. We're gonna see how that gonna go. But anyway, and he threatens them with the sheriff and the military to enforce that they do not have the right to assemble, that their assembly would be considered insurrectionist. So there's a voluntary group of women, five women, two of whom are registered nurses, who write a letter to the mayor, publish it in the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, and in the Negro World. And essentially, you know, without quoting it directly, says, "We will be meeting, and we invite you to join us. And if you think you're bad and want to stop us, we're ready for you." And I'm reading this, and I'm saying the Voluntary Committee, the Voluntary Committee. So now I'm going through all my notes and the Negro World trying, and even went back to the constitution, because, like, there's a Women's Auxiliary. Then I saw in 1924 during the convention, August, 1924 convention, they brought the Daughters of the Royal Court. In 1922, they brought the BCN, okay? Then there was a Lucky Nines Club, okay? And that came in the 1930s. When did this one come? Because I couldn't find it, couldn't find it. They made it up. They made it up. They just decided that somebody had to answer the mayor. They knew that it wasn't safe for Black men to answer the mayor. So the five of them get together and decide we're gonna write a letter and we go give ourselves a name. We theVoluntary Committee New Orleans, UNIA you know, and they volunteered themselves to write the letter. And so I recognized that the structure of the UNIA provided this leadership training space for women, and in so doing, you know, because there was no in the NAACP, if you wanted to do something, you had to write headquarters, and you had to get permission. It was very strict, and in the UNIA it was okay. What is happening on the ground here, and it's specific to our local, is going to be a little bit different than what's happening in Belize or in Ontario. So we're going to deal with what we're doing, and then we'll let you know how it goes in the Division News and Views, and if it works for us, and you think it can work for you, here's, you know, here's the template. Run with it. And that kind of of fluidity, that kind of flexibility, is what really gives the organization its potency, and is what allows women to sort of develop a political and a social justice intellect that we don't find in some of the other organizational spaces of the period.

Kelly Therese Pollock  1:00:14  
Well, this was a remarkable book. Can you please tell listeners how they can get a copy?

Dr. Natanya Duncan  1:00:21  
The book is available @UNCPress.org, and you can also get it at your Barnes and Nobles, your other booksellers, your normal booksellers. It's available there also.

Kelly Therese Pollock  1:00:35  
Nat, Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I've really enjoyed learning about these women. Like I said, I think all of them deserve their own full length biographies, so I hope that someday someone writes them.

Dr. Natanya Duncan  1:00:49  
Thank you so much, and I really do hope that graduate students and other scholars pick up and that's one of the reasons for the richness of the footnotes in this book is to give people, you know, a little Hansel and Gretel experience. But this is not the definitive. It is the beginning of what I hope to be a long standing conversation about the contributions of these women to Black nationalism, Pan Africanism, civil and human rights.

Teddy  1:01:20  
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