"Building Up a Country of Their Own": Garveyism and the African American Search for Rural Independence, 1920-1929

Why was Marcus Garvey's black nationalism at the center of the civic lives of the thousands of African American farmers who moved into southeast Missouri's new cotton lands in the 1920s? This chapter examines the appeal of Garveyism among the relatively successful black male landowners and renters who led the migration to Missouri. I argue that Garveyism situated their search for agrarian independence within a radical movement for the liberation of the race and, at the same time, provided a top-down model of economic advancement that reinforced their paternalistic control of the social and work hierarchies within their communities.