February 4, 2026 • 43 mins
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What happens when the archive starts talking back? We sat down with Dr. Natanya Duncan to illuminate the women who built the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) from the ground up and gave the movement its global muscle. From a Kingston porch to Harlem kitchens and London cafés, their labor carried Garveyism across continents while reshaping what Black leadership looked like in the early twentieth century. Along the way, we meet names that deserve the spotlight: Henrietta Vinton Davis, Laura Kofey, and especially the Two Amys. Amy Ashwood Garvey co-founded the UNIA and helped the Negro World reach readers far beyond Harlem. Amy Jacques Garvey transformed the paper’s women’s page into a political and strategic forum, setting the tone for a movement that saw home life and nation building as the same fight.
Threaded through the conversation is “efficient womanhood,” a term recovered in the archive that captures how UNIA women blended gender demands with nationalist goals as one practical program. We explore how public stance and private negotiation worked in tandem, why women printed their addresses and left a paper trail of property, and how their coalitions nurtured anticolonial leadership. This is a story of logistics, courage, and care: parades organized, ledgers balanced, alliances brokered, and a movement sustained in the face of surveillance and erasure.
Editor's Note: At 03:14, Dr. Duncan meant to refer to Dr. Patrick E. Bryan instead of "Patrick Henry."
City University of New York Associate Professor of History, Dr. Natanya Duncan's 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 book, An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, (University of North Carolina Press 2025) focuses on the distinct activist strategies in-acted by women in the 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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Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Just a quick note before we get started, this
(00:03):
conversation with Dr.
Natania Duncan was so rich thatwe've divided it into two parts,
and this is part one, where webegin unpacking the foundational
roles women played in theUniversal Negro Improvement
Association.
Welcome to Strictly Facts, aguide to Caribbean history and
culture, hosted by me, AlexandraMiller.
(00:24):
Strictly Facts teaches thehistory, politics, and activism
of the Caribbean and connectsthese themes to contemporary
music and popular culture.
Hello, hello everyone.
Welcome back to another episodeof Strictly Facts, a guide to
Caribbean history and culture,where we explore the rich and
(00:45):
complex histories that havealways shaped the Caribbean and
its diaspora.
Today we turn our attention tothe Universal Negro Improvement
Association, or the UNIA, anorganization known for its
groundbreaking work in Blackempowerment, Pan-Africanism, and
community building.
While a Jamaican-born activistand now national hero, Marcus
Garvey often dominates theconversation regarding the UNIA
(01:08):
and its 20th century activism,the organization was sustained
and propelled by the tirelessefforts of black women.
Their leadership, organizing,and vision have too often been
overlooked, despite beingcentral to the organization's
impact and legacy.
In this episode, we are sheddinglight on some of these women and
the important work that's beingdone about them, exploring their
(01:30):
roles within the UNIA, andexamining how their
contributions helped shape amovement that sparked and
spanned the globe, really.
And so joining us for this verytimely conversation, which we'll
get into in our discussion, weare being joined by Dr.
Natanya Duncan, Director ofAfricana Studies, and the
Associate Professor of Historyat Queen's College CUNY, and the
(01:53):
author of An EfficientWomanhood, Women and the Making
of the Universal NegroImprovement Association.
So, Dr.
Duncan, thank you so much forbeing here and for joining us
for this episode.
Why don't we begin with youtelling our listeners a little
bit more about yourself, yourconnection to the region, and
what inspired your interest inthis book, and you know, wider
(02:14):
interest, including Blackintellectual history, identity,
and nation building?
SPEAKER_01 (02:19):
Thank you so much first for having me, Sister
Milla.
I really appreciate it.
Um my interest in the topicactually came as a result of an
undergraduate research project.
I was a United Negro CollegeFund Mellon Fellow.
And in my junior year, we wereafforded the opportunity to
(02:44):
propose a research grant for ourtopic.
My topic at the time was acomparative study of women in
the National Association for theAdvancement of Colored People
and women in the Universal NegroImprovement Association.
I wrote the grant, I get toJamaica, and as a part of the
(03:05):
grant process, I indicated thatI would do interviews, believe
it or not, with Rupert, Lewis,and Patrick Henry, who had
completed a collected essaysvolume on Garvey and his work in
impact.
And so I go to Jamaica toUniversity of the West Indies.
(03:25):
I spent some time with PatrickBryan.
Full disclosure, I'm a child ofthe diaspora.
My mother and Patrick Bryan'swife were best friends and went
to short with teachers collegein Jamaica together.
And so I was, you know, affordeda little grace in terms of
(03:48):
connecting with him and thengetting an introduction to
Professor Rupert Lewis.
And my conversation withProfessor Lewis was an
interesting one.
I went on and on about who thewomen were in the NAACP, who the
women I had discovered were inthe UNIA, what the differences
(04:09):
were according to my research atthe time, how important I
thought this project would be,you know, and at the end of, I
think maybe about 42, 43minutes, because I recorded our
conversation, he says to me,This is wonderful, but can I
just ask you a question?
Besides you and me, who elseknows the names of the women
(04:34):
that you just told me about?
And that kind of like set meback a little bit, you know,
realizing in that moment thatpeople didn't know the names of
the women in the UNIA.
They knew Mary Church Tyrrell,right?
But they didn't know that MaryChurch Tyrrell was friends with
(04:56):
the membership in the BrooklynUNIA and used to go to meetings
to help them raise money thateventually helped them buy a
building, right?
Um They didn't know that Ida B.
Wells was one of Marcus Garvey'searly supporters and hosted
parties at her house in Chicagoto get him, you know, started in
(05:19):
the area.
And she and her husbandbasically introduced him to some
of the more elite AfricanAmericans of the period in
Chicago that got him entrywayinto a lot of black churches and
acceptance with black ministersthat helped grow the
organization in the city ofChicago.
(05:41):
And the same could be said ofCharlotte Bass in Los Angeles.
So at the end of that, Irealized that the project was
going to be a little bitdifferent than I had intended.
And I went to St.
Anne, which is my home parish,and had conversations with
people at the time who stillremembered Garveyites in the
(06:07):
area.
I had the privilege ofconnecting with persons who
introduced me to Mother Samad,known as Sister Samad, who had
basically repatriated.
I say repatriated because shesays she repatriated, but really
she's an American-born personwho adopted Jamaica as her home
(06:28):
country.
The same was true for MadameMamie Demina Aiken, who helped
launch Jamaica's independentpolitical process.
And so at that time, I decidedthat I would focus on talking
about women in the UNIA'sleadership, still not realizing
(06:50):
that that word leadership wasgoing to change its definition
for me over time.
Because normally when we thinkabout leadership, we think about
people who are like the head,who have a specific title, their
Madam Vice President, theirsecretary, their international
organizer, right?
(07:11):
But in the UNIA, leadership forwomen was more organic and
practical and realistic than Ihad first assumed or had been
led to believe.
But fast forward, I graduateundergrad and I get to grad
school, and I have professorswho are pushing me on why is
(07:35):
this so important?
Why do we care, right?
Like, why do you want to talkabout these black women in this,
to them, in their minds, obscureorganization?
And I couldn't help themunderstand that the word
universal really meantuniversal.
That the organization existedalmost everywhere on the planet,
(07:55):
right?
I mean, they're Aborigine peoplewho belong to the UNIA, right,
in Australia.
Um, and and that legacy isactually lived out during the
Black Power era as well.
And so there's thislong-standing connection in
South Africa, in Ghana,throughout the United Kingdom,
in Nova Scotia, in Halifax, andin South America.
(08:18):
And so I'm trying to find a wayto convince them that this is a
viable project.
And I end up in the library,going through the New York
Times, reading, looking for anymention of the Universal Negro
Improvement Association.
Anything that would be like myshowstopper, my aha, my this is
(08:42):
why I have to finish thisproject.
And I come across theassassination of Laura Kofi.
And up until that point in mylife, I believed that only black
men got assassinated, right?
Black women, because the imageof the civil rights woman,
right?
She has her pocketbook, she hason her Sunday church shoes, she
(09:05):
has on her hat, she has ongloves, she always looked like
she was praying or she about toserve fried chicken, you know,
um, she's singing in the choir,right?
There was never this idea thatblack women were disturbers of
the peace, right?
And they were always marchingalong beside somebody or working
(09:25):
in cooperation with, or theybelonged to some larger
organization.
But this idea of this womanbeing assassinated, it just
stopped me.
And the questions changed.
What was it about women in theorganization that made people
scared, uncomfortable, or feelthreatened?
(09:48):
So much so that they had tosilence a Laura Kofi.
That then brought me back to aquestion that I had been playing
with from the start of theproject.
What happened to Amy Ashwood?
Why is Amy Ashwood not a part ofthe historiography of the UNIA?
How come they wrote her out ofthe story?
(10:08):
The divorce could not have beenthat bad, right?
Um, she still had all of theseUNIA friends, from what I could
tell.
Because she, you know,periodically would pop up in
correspondences and so forth.
And then I knew all about her inManchester and her interactions
with W.E.B.
Du Bois and George Padmore.
So what happened?
Why she fell off?
(10:28):
Then I realized that there was asort of silencing.
And I couldn't decide if it wasthe fault of the historians who
were looking to rescript,retrieve Marcus Garvey himself
and the Universal NegroImprovement Association as his
(10:49):
mission, and that we just hadn'tgotten to this other part of the
work yet because we we still hadsome fixing to do, right?
Or was there a deliberate, um,willful ignorance, so to speak,
about the role of women thatemanated from within the
(11:09):
organization itself.
And that led me to start readingthe Negro World like it was
Bible, like it was the last bookof the Bible, chapter and verse.
And that's where I found thewomen, their names, their
addresses.
They were very brazen.
(11:30):
They put their address in theNegro world, so then I could go
and look for them in the formalgovernment records, right?
In the census data, in the cityregistry.
I could look at mortgage deeds.
You know, some of these womenactually owned homes.
Oh my goodness.
Um, and see how their activismplayed out really under the
(11:52):
radar of the powers that be.
In part because, as many peopleknow, J.
Edgar Hoover surveilled MarcusGarvey.
And all of what he learned, hethen applied to what became
COINTELPRO and used that when hefollowed Malcolm X, El Haj Malik
Shabbaz, Martin Luther King, theBlack Panther Party, and the
(12:14):
Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee.
And so his attention, lucky forme, was not only on Mr.
Garvey, but on peopleimmediately close to him.
One such person was HenriettaVinton Davis.
And so I started following theFBI records on Lady Davis,
(12:34):
coordinating that with what Iread in the Negro world, and
then labeling some informationfrom the Negro press as well as
the mainstream press, andstarted to see, well, who were
Lady Davis's friends?
Who did she mentor?
And that's how I started to seethe activism of women in the
(12:58):
organization.
At that time, however, I hadn'tcome to the term efficient
womanhood.
I hadn't come to the termdiasporic back chat because the
archive was still teaching me.
One of the things that I try toencourage people, graduate
students and my colleaguesalike, is you know, we have to
sort of check our assumptions,right?
(13:20):
Check what we've been taught andwhat we believe at the door and
allow the archive, allow thepeople who lived it and spoke it
and did it and said it and leftus information because these
women wrote their own story.
They wrote into the Negro world.
So they told me what they wantedpeople to know.
They actually provided me thenarrative, right?
(13:42):
And so that didn't fit with thecategories that I had previously
been introduced to.
It didn't fit neatly withrespectability politics.
As sure as I didn't fit into thewhole separate spheres
construction, right?
Um, and this whole idea ofquote-unquote grassroots, no,
(14:04):
because they're organized in adifferent kind of way, right?
Many of the women I encounteredwere actually doing work before
they come to the UNIA.
And so when they come to theUNIA, it's really
credentializing the work thatthey had already been doing,
giving them an internationalnetwork, you know, some
backative, as we would like tosay.
(14:26):
And so I began to see that theyactually incorporated their
gender concerns with thenationalist aims of the
organization itself.
And that they didn't see them asseparate but equal, they saw
them as simultaneous andintertwined with one another.
(14:47):
And so as I began to flush outthe chapters, my dissertation
chair, Brian Wood, I'm gonna sayhis name, says to me, point
blank, if I read one more timethe sentence that you seem to
hang your hat on, and this ishow they blended gender and
(15:10):
nationalist concerns.
And this was the blending ofgender and nationalist concerns.
If you say that one more time, Iam going to pull all my hair
out.
There has to be a name for this.
We have to call it something.
What is it?
So I was in the library, and forthose of us who do African
American history and history ofthe diaspora, particularly those
(15:33):
of us who focus on um gender, wehave two favorite sections of
the library (15:37):
the Isle Desmart E185 and the Isle Desmart H20,
right?
We got our black studies and ourgender studies.
So I was going down E185 and Isaw Damnation of Women in a book
of essays by W.E.B.
(15:58):
Du Bois.
And I was just pulling books offbecause now I'm on the hunt to
figure out what I am going todo, what am I gonna tell him?
I can't go into another meetingwithout having something to say.
So I'm reading this essay fromDu Bois, and in it he says that
these women had the strife, thestruggle, and from that struggle
(16:22):
was born an efficient womanhood.
I said, aha.
So now we're going to quote DuBois in reference to Garvey and
Garveyism and just totally upsetthe apple card, right?
Because how could I do that?
People misleadingly believe thatDu Bois and Garvey were, you
know, um famed, sworn enemiesuntil the time of each one's
(16:46):
death.
But in actuality, in a book umentitled Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois
actually backpedals and correctssome of his assertions about
Garvey and concludes that Garveywas simply a man ahead of his
time.
And as we know, Dr.
Du Bois ends up in Ghana.
(17:07):
Um, that's where he decides tomake his transition from this
life.
And so some of Garvey's visionand Garvey's dream is actually
lived by Dr.
Du Bois in the 1960s.
But as I use the term efficientwomanhood, it satisfied the
committee basically because noneof us knew any better at the
(17:28):
time, you know, and and God ismerciful, I got out of grad
school.
So I work on the book over anumber of years, and I travel.
I go everywhere that theGarveyites were.
So I'm in Barbados, I'm inGrenada, I'm in Guyana, I go to
Cuba twice, I go to SouthAfrica, uh, go to Ghana, uh, I
(17:52):
spend a lot of time in Jamaica,I go to Trinidad, I go to
Canada, and I end up in the lastleg of it, and when I said,
okay, now I I think I I haveenough, I end up in the United
Kingdom at the queue.
And they have a set of the NegroWorld Newspaper in folders, not
(18:18):
digitized, because it can bedigitized.
It's already dilapidated.
October 1919 edition.
And I'm supposed to be readingwith gloves and a toothpick,
right?
Because you're not allowed toactually turn the page.
And the archivist brings out thefolder and she says to me, I
(18:41):
realize that this is veryserious for you, isn't it?
So I was like, yes.
She says, okay, I'm going toturn my back and you're going to
take pictures, and then I'mgoing to take back the folder.
SPEAKER_00 (18:51):
And so I just want to give a shout out to the
librarians with small merciesbecause it is a very difficult,
difficult road to do some ofthis work, but continue.
SPEAKER_01 (19:01):
Yes, yes, because, you know, you have to, not only
do you have to read, you know,the the crumpled up half eaten
by insect paper, right?
You then have but so much timeto take notes.
And so I, you know, whipped outmy phone, which I wasn't
supposed to have, and I startedtaking the pictures.
(19:24):
And I took picture, picture,picture.
I'd like took three pictures ofthe same page.
And then I and then I would takea picture of a section of the
page and, you know, so to makesure I could zoom it up and blow
it out.
And in that, I landed a speechfrom a woman named Hannah
Nichols, who actually called foran efficient womanhood.
(19:47):
And so I realized that there wasdivine intervention in the day
that I found the term anddecided to use it in the library
while at university.
Of Florida, and I appreciatedthe challenge from Deborah Gray
White at the time, who asked me,Well, did they use that term?
(20:10):
Why do you keep using that termfor them?
If they didn't say it, then whyare you saying it?
And it sort of pushed me to,okay, I either I'm going to
change it or I'm going to provethat this is theirs.
Not knowing that I wouldactually get a chance to prove
(20:30):
it, I was trying to, and justbeing honest, I was looking at
the League of Colored Peoplepaperwork, their magazine and
their papers, and really attrying to excavate Amy Ashwood's
life in England to see if therewas anything in there that I
could use that would help me.
(20:52):
And instead, this was the answerthat I got back from the
Ancestors in the Universe.
And so that's how I then wasable to rescript the
introduction and solidify theuse of the term and efficient
womanhood for the text.
And I know that's, you know, along-winded way of answering the
(21:15):
question, but I think it'simportant for people to
understand process and that thewriting is never fully done or
fully finished.
It's what you know at the momentthat you're able to write about.
The questions that you ask orthe questions that are asked of
(21:38):
you, stretch this thing, pushthis thing.
And what becomes important isbeing grounded in the sources in
a way where you can determinewhether or not you need to go
further or you need to juststand your ground, like you can
just dress back.
So now when people ask me, well,did anybody other than Hannah
(22:00):
Nichols ever use the termefficient womanhood?
I simply respond by saying noone else had to.
She issued the call, and here isthe evidence of the response.
This is how it mapped out.
No one ever came back to HannahNichols, who was a younger
(22:21):
person in the organization atthe time, and said, Oh no,
that's a dumb idea, right?
Instead, women took it uponthemselves to begin to create
spaces where they had autonomy,where they could elect one
another, decide who would be thehead, the second, the third,
whether or not they wanted mento belong to the space or not
(22:43):
belong to the space, and ranwith it.
And so my appreciation for how Igot to this, ultimately, you
know, and and this is maybeevery scholar with their first
book has some element of this init.
I wanted to understand somethingabout the community that raised
(23:06):
me, about the women that raisedme.
My mother's mother launched 14children, not all of them
biologically hers, but all ofthem biologically my
grandfather's.
And my father's mother launched11.
And when I say launched, I meanthey found the money not only to
(23:28):
send them to school, but to sendthem abroad and then support
them while they were abroad.
And there was something aboutthe role that my father's
mother, who was a grandparentthat I got to know the most, the
role that she played in hercommunity, where she was lay
midwife, seamstress, banker,negotiator, judge, jury, police.
(23:55):
I mean, there my grandmotherwould write letters to my father
or call my father and give us alist of things that we would
need to bring.
And my father's like, what arewe doing with how many bottles
of Mercury are comb?
Why you, you know, and becauseshe has this person to look
after, and that person needs tokeep some in their house, and
(24:17):
blah, blah, blah.
You know, and understanding thatwas a way in which she provided
care, the politics of care, andthe awareness for politics of
care that had nothing to do witha government official, a JP, an
MP, you know, um a councilperson.
(24:39):
Like, what are we doing righthere in our little community, in
our little district, in ourlittle village, to make sure
that the things that youngpeople need, young mothers need,
are addressed.
And understanding that this wassomething that she chose to do
based on her own life experiencehelped me to understand what the
(25:03):
women in the UNIA were doing,how valuable it was at the time,
and how underappreciated it hasbeen historically.
And so that was my other, youknow, entryway into the work was
really understanding who I amand how I got here, and what
(25:28):
legacy is it that I actuallybelong to and participate in.
SPEAKER_00 (25:34):
Thank you for that introduction and also alluding
to many of the questions I havefor you, having read Umefficient
Momented.
I think it maps for us, as yousaid, the genealogy of how books
really come to be.
You know, as a grad studentmyself, I'm like, this
dissertation already has takenmany years for me, right?
But to understand, you know,upon even transforming from
(25:56):
dissertation to book, this is a,for some people, decades-long,
even longer process.
And as you said, letting thearchives guide you, I found that
really beautiful and I thinkimportant for listeners to
understand that like the writingof history, the historiography,
doesn't come in just a moment,right?
It doesn't just come in asecond.
It's a a myriad of experiencesand a journey, really, that
(26:20):
takes, you know, the author, thehistorian to get from point A to
point B.
I do for a little bit want tomap out for our listeners just
some important points.
We think of the UNIA, I think wethink of Garvey a lot, right?
And even to an extent, Garvey'sinfluence on um later
generations of black activists.
(26:42):
But I do sort of want to map outfor our listeners that the
United Negro ImprovementAssociation and African
Communities League was foundedby Garvey and First Wife Amy
Ashwood Garvey in Jamaica in1914 as a response to the
systemic oppression anddisenfranchisement of black
people across the globe.
Um, many of its missionsincluded, you know, promoting
(27:03):
racial pride, economicself-sufficiency, unification of
the black diaspora, and as youpointed to, had locations and
chapters really spanning acrossthe globe.
Very impactful newspaper, TheNegro World, read by over
200,000 people.
Um, but the point that I'm sortof wanting us to get to, as you
(27:26):
outlined for us, is this notionof um women's leadership, right?
And what that looks like.
Um, but also the fact thatthere's these myths, I think,
that surround this idea of womenin the UNIA.
So you sort of mentioned the twoAMIs, uh, quote unquote, as it's
often um discussed.
And by that we mean Garvey'sfirst wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey,
(27:49):
and his second wife, Amy JacquesGarvey.
Um, there's also, I think, awhole slew of other women who
sort of get mentioned briefly interms of their um affiliation or
their identities as Garveyites.
I think some people often talkabout uh Malcolm X's mother,
Louise Little, who was born inGrenada, as being a Garveyite as
(28:10):
well.
But I definitely do want us tostart with um talking about Amy
Ashwood and Amy Jacques.
For you, and as you sort of werealso alluding earlier, I think
your book does a tremendous jobof really cementing Amy Ashwood
Garvey in the story of the UNIA.
As you said, um she doesn't gether sort of due process in a lot
(28:30):
of the historiography.
And so, why was this really animportant part of the process
for you?
How is this sort of similar andor in direct opposition to the
imprint Amy Jacques Garvey lefton the organization?
SPEAKER_01 (28:44):
Thank you so much for that question.
So a few things.
Um, one, from the verybeginning, it was always the
universal Negro ImprovementAssociation.
Uh, there are some scholars whouse United Negro, but it wasn't.
It's always been incorporatedfrom 1914, from that opening on
(29:04):
Amy Ashwood's porch in Kingston,Jamaica, it's always been
universal.
Uh Amy Jakes comes into thepicture as a friend of Amy
Ashwood initially.
And her relationship with Mr.
Garvey um takes sort of adifferent um stance as Miss
(29:31):
Ashwood's marriage to Mr.
Garvey dovetails.
It was important to me to bringAmy Ashwood into the story and
to cement her contribution inorder to help people understand
one, the constitution of theorganization.
The UNIA's constitution is theonly constitution at that time
(29:56):
that enfranchised women.
One member, one vote.
In so doing, it then enabledwomen to have voice in ways that
they couldn't have in otherorganizations, in other
governments.
And we have to understand thatthe UNIA considered itself a
(30:18):
government in exile.
What Amy Ashwood really does inthe very beginning of the
organization is sort of set atone for the kind of partnership
and nation building, the familystructure, the togetherness, the
oneness that the UNIA aspired tohave.
(30:41):
And her support of Mr.
Garvey was one not onlyintellectual, but also
financial.
And I don't feel that peoplereally understand what it meant
to have her borrow money fromher mother's purse.
And borrow is used, you know,figuratively.
(31:02):
She stole the money to circulateflyers, to then come to New York
City and help her relativesdeliver bread throughout the
city.
And while they're deliveringbread, they're delivering the
newspaper, um, the Negro Worldas well, and making sure that
the Negro world newspaper gotoff the ground and got
(31:25):
circulation.
Those are key factors inestablishing the Universal Negro
Improvement Association,establishing its reach,
establishing its audience.
How can we tell a story withoutincluding those critical
moments, right?
Marcus Garvey could have come tothe United States.
(31:47):
Um, remember, he came on afailed mission, really, because
he was coming here to meet umBooker T.
Washington.
By the time he reached, BookerT.
Washington had passed away.
And so he was gonna have to, youknow, recalibrate, you know, um,
come up with a plan B.
And so the whole thing couldhave been a bust, but yet, you
(32:08):
know, there was Amy Ashwood whohad social capital, right?
She had relatives who were here.
Um, they had businesses thatcould provide a space.
They were already in Harlem.
And so her social capital iswhat actually helps get Marcus
Garvey going.
(32:28):
It gases the car, right?
This is not to take away fromMr.
Garvey himself as a speaker, asa leader, as a person who was a
visionary, right?
But he didn't do this alone.
He didn't do this by himself.
You know, we take the personalout of it for a moment, right?
And look at what Amy Jakesaccomplishes with the Negro
(32:52):
world on behalf of women in theorganization and outside of the
organization, whether we agreewith everything that she ever
wrote and everything that sheever said, having that
designated space, our women andwhat they think, encouraging
women to write into the Negroworld, taking on topics that
(33:16):
included what makes a goodhusband and what to do when the
husband is not functioning.
Right?
What does it mean to support ablack business and why some
black businesses should not besupported, right?
Generating that kind ofconversation in 1922, 1923, 1924
(33:40):
is significant in understandinghow black nationalism evolves,
how it spreads, and that she didit as the wife of, right,
without formal title at thatpoint, right?
Because originally she was Mr.
(34:01):
Garvey's secretary.
And Amy Ashwood was alsosecretary, but she was secretary
of the UNIA, not Mr.
Garvey's secretary, right?
That they held these offices,read correspondences, responded
on behalf of Mr.
(34:21):
Garvey or on behalf of theorganization, means that they
are then now scripting the voicethat people hear and what people
see, right?
They are becoming arbiters ofthe image of the organization
and of Mr.
Garvey.
And so understanding that AmyAshwood set a trend, so to
(34:43):
speak.
She set up a paradigm, right?
She befriended persons thatwould not normally be in Mr.
Garvey's camp because theyshared a similar goal, a similar
aim.
And Amy Jakes comes to alsoparticipate in that way.
(35:05):
So they establish, withoutgiving it a name in that moment,
the first leg of what efficientwomanhood is.
Amy Ashwood married Mr.
Garvey because Mr.
Garvey had a brain, in heropinion.
He was about something, right?
And so, what did it mean to be arace woman?
What did it mean to be a raceman?
(35:28):
Now, when that race man or thatrace woman no longer seemed to
be on the same page with you ordid not share the same ambition,
then it was time to move on tothe next thing.
For example, when we look atEula Taylor's biography of Amy
Jakes Garvey, we understand thatnot at every point in their
(35:49):
marriage, in their lifetogether, was Amy Jakes totally
convinced and totally, you know,100% behind everything that Mr.
Garvey said and did.
But there's negotiation, andthat's what makes it an
efficient womanhood.
The negotiation, Amy Ashwood'swillingness to negotiate, to
(36:09):
refuse to give up on the nameGarvey, to re refuse to
relinquish the name Garvey.
Why?
Because she helped build it,because it was an access pass,
because it was internationallyrecognized, and she had
contributed to making itinternationally recognized, and
so it would garner her audience.
(36:30):
Now, what she did once she hadthat audience was specifically
and uniquely Amy Ashwood, right?
And her manifestation of theautonomous aims of the UNIA that
led her into partnerships withpersons that Mr.
(36:50):
Garvey never had access to.
You know, the George Padmores ofthe world, um, Ras McConnell,
Jomo Kenyatta, you know, CLRJames.
She's she's in her restaurant,um, the Florence Mills in the
UK.
You know, I jokingly tellpeople, yeah.
So she would bring out the curryand, you know, the rice and
(37:14):
peas.
And before she gave them thecarriage, she would make them
promise that they were gonna doX, Y, and Z.
And that's how she ran her shop,right?
But she creates this space wherewe see black internationalism
evolving, right?
And I think the the greatestline of demarcation occurs when
(37:35):
we see how Amy Ashwoodestablishes the Friends of
Abyssinia in support of um hisimperial majesty, Hailey
Selassie I, and sort of thispush to galvanize uh black
people globally in defense um ofthe kingdom of Ethiopia, and
then Marcus Garvey writes of hisdisappointment of his imperial
(38:01):
majesty.
And it wasn't that Amy Ashwoodwasn't as disappointed, right?
Or as deflated.
But again, the efficientwomanhood negotiation.
What do we say in public?
How do we act in private?
How do we act in public that isinfluenced or motivated by how
(38:23):
we align ourselves in private,right?
I mean, Jomo Kenyatta becomesthe first president of an East
African country, right, out ofthat group.
Um, she is supporting uh LolimpoSolanke and the West African
Student Union, the WASU, right?
And these are all inroads to,okay, we're going to build
(38:45):
independent African nations andso we're going to educate
independent African minds sothat we can overthrow
colonialism.
Are we disappointed in what hashappened?
Clearly we're disappointed, butin the meantime, we have to
start pushing, right?
And this is how we get involvedwith the League of Colored
Peoples, and so we we refashion.
We don't come out publicly andsay, Hayer Selassie has let us
(39:09):
down, right?
But also recognizing that inthat moment, you know, Marcus
Gary is mourning the loss of thesymbol, right, that Ethiopia
represents, the loss of anopportunity that Ethiopia
represents, because, you know,Liberia is now a no-go, right?
(39:31):
And there's no turning back,there's no coming back to
Liberia by the 1930s.
And even in that, we see AmyAshwood and Amy Jakes attempt to
course correct Mr.
Garvey's assertions about oneAfrica, United Africa, and
Liberia being the right place.
We see Laura Kofi attempt topresent Mr.
(39:54):
Garvey with alternatives, right?
And this is why the book openswith Amy Allen.
Ashwooden ends with Laura Kofi.
Um, because really, what I'm uhattempting to politely comment
on, and and as well as with thequote from Louise Little, is how
(40:14):
we've created this grandnarrative, ignoring the very
loud silence about the cost ofall of this, right?
The UNIA and Marcus Garvey'spush and commitment and drive
towards it made Amy Jakesunhappy in her marriage.
(40:38):
She was married to someone whowas not the best provider at
points in their marriage, right?
And this is true of allactivists to some degree, you
know, they're not physicallypresent for their family in the
way that their family would wantthem to be.
In Amy Ashwood's case, you know,she and Mr.
(40:59):
Garvey disintegrated, politeword.
And from there, Miss Ashwooddecided that, you know, she
would find a better way, anotherway, but remain committed to the
aims and objectives of theUniversal Negro Improvement
Association and lives apan-Africanist feminist life
(41:25):
that, you know, I argue needsmore consideration than it has
gotten in recent years.
And I think although we think ofAmy Jakes as Mr.
Garvey's chronicler, truly hisfirst biographer, and the
(41:48):
champion of all his causes, wealso have to realize that the
plan that was hatched on AmyAshwood's porch between herself
and Mr.
Garvey is the plan that shestuck to, so much so that when
they ran into each other in theUK, they could speak decently to
(42:09):
one another because they stillhad that in common.
You know, the betterment of therace, the progress of the race
was something that they bothheld dear.
And so I just see sort of apassing of the baton from one
Amy to the other.
Other folks read it differently,and that's fine.
(42:30):
I believe that Miss Jakes umjust simply built on a
foundation along with otherwomen that was very much so
cemented and laid and smoothedout by Amy Ashwood.
SPEAKER_00 (42:46):
We're gonna pause here, but don't worry, the
conversation continues.
Be sure to join us for part two,where we dive even deeper into
the labor, leadership, andlegacies of women in the UNIA.
Thanks for tuning in to StrictlyFacts.
Visit strictlyfactspodcast.comfor more information from each
episode.
(43:06):
Follow us at Strictly Facts Podon Instagram and Facebook and at
Strictly Facts PD on Twitter.
Just a quick note before we get started, this
(00:03):
conversation with Dr.
Natania Duncan was so rich thatwe've divided it into two parts,
and this is part one, where webegin unpacking the foundational
roles women played in theUniversal Negro Improvement
Association.
Welcome to Strictly Facts, aguide to Caribbean history and
culture, hosted by me, AlexandraMiller.
(00:24):
Strictly Facts teaches thehistory, politics, and activism
of the Caribbean and connectsthese themes to contemporary
music and popular culture.
Hello, hello everyone.
Welcome back to another episodeof Strictly Facts, a guide to
Caribbean history and culture,where we explore the rich and
(00:45):
complex histories that havealways shaped the Caribbean and
its diaspora.
Today we turn our attention tothe Universal Negro Improvement
Association, or the UNIA, anorganization known for its
groundbreaking work in Blackempowerment, Pan-Africanism, and
community building.
While a Jamaican-born activistand now national hero, Marcus
Garvey often dominates theconversation regarding the UNIA
(01:08):
and its 20th century activism,the organization was sustained
and propelled by the tirelessefforts of black women.
Their leadership, organizing,and vision have too often been
overlooked, despite beingcentral to the organization's
impact and legacy.
In this episode, we are sheddinglight on some of these women and
the important work that's beingdone about them, exploring their
(01:30):
roles within the UNIA, andexamining how their
contributions helped shape amovement that sparked and
spanned the globe, really.
And so joining us for this verytimely conversation, which we'll
get into in our discussion, weare being joined by Dr.
Natanya Duncan, Director ofAfricana Studies, and the
Associate Professor of Historyat Queen's College CUNY, and the
(01:53):
author of An EfficientWomanhood, Women and the Making
of the Universal NegroImprovement Association.
So, Dr.
Duncan, thank you so much forbeing here and for joining us
for this episode.
Why don't we begin with youtelling our listeners a little
bit more about yourself, yourconnection to the region, and
what inspired your interest inthis book, and you know, wider
(02:14):
interest, including Blackintellectual history, identity,
and nation building?
SPEAKER_01 (02:19):
Thank you so much first for having me, Sister
Milla.
I really appreciate it.
Um my interest in the topicactually came as a result of an
undergraduate research project.
I was a United Negro CollegeFund Mellon Fellow.
And in my junior year, we wereafforded the opportunity to
(02:44):
propose a research grant for ourtopic.
My topic at the time was acomparative study of women in
the National Association for theAdvancement of Colored People
and women in the Universal NegroImprovement Association.
I wrote the grant, I get toJamaica, and as a part of the
(03:05):
grant process, I indicated thatI would do interviews, believe
it or not, with Rupert, Lewis,and Patrick Henry, who had
completed a collected essaysvolume on Garvey and his work in
impact.
And so I go to Jamaica toUniversity of the West Indies.
(03:25):
I spent some time with PatrickBryan.
Full disclosure, I'm a child ofthe diaspora.
My mother and Patrick Bryan'swife were best friends and went
to short with teachers collegein Jamaica together.
And so I was, you know, affordeda little grace in terms of
(03:48):
connecting with him and thengetting an introduction to
Professor Rupert Lewis.
And my conversation withProfessor Lewis was an
interesting one.
I went on and on about who thewomen were in the NAACP, who the
women I had discovered were inthe UNIA, what the differences
(04:09):
were according to my research atthe time, how important I
thought this project would be,you know, and at the end of, I
think maybe about 42, 43minutes, because I recorded our
conversation, he says to me,This is wonderful, but can I
just ask you a question?
Besides you and me, who elseknows the names of the women
(04:34):
that you just told me about?
And that kind of like set meback a little bit, you know,
realizing in that moment thatpeople didn't know the names of
the women in the UNIA.
They knew Mary Church Tyrrell,right?
But they didn't know that MaryChurch Tyrrell was friends with
(04:56):
the membership in the BrooklynUNIA and used to go to meetings
to help them raise money thateventually helped them buy a
building, right?
Um They didn't know that Ida B.
Wells was one of Marcus Garvey'searly supporters and hosted
parties at her house in Chicagoto get him, you know, started in
(05:19):
the area.
And she and her husbandbasically introduced him to some
of the more elite AfricanAmericans of the period in
Chicago that got him entrywayinto a lot of black churches and
acceptance with black ministersthat helped grow the
organization in the city ofChicago.
(05:41):
And the same could be said ofCharlotte Bass in Los Angeles.
So at the end of that, Irealized that the project was
going to be a little bitdifferent than I had intended.
And I went to St.
Anne, which is my home parish,and had conversations with
people at the time who stillremembered Garveyites in the
(06:07):
area.
I had the privilege ofconnecting with persons who
introduced me to Mother Samad,known as Sister Samad, who had
basically repatriated.
I say repatriated because shesays she repatriated, but really
she's an American-born personwho adopted Jamaica as her home
(06:28):
country.
The same was true for MadameMamie Demina Aiken, who helped
launch Jamaica's independentpolitical process.
And so at that time, I decidedthat I would focus on talking
about women in the UNIA'sleadership, still not realizing
(06:50):
that that word leadership wasgoing to change its definition
for me over time.
Because normally when we thinkabout leadership, we think about
people who are like the head,who have a specific title, their
Madam Vice President, theirsecretary, their international
organizer, right?
(07:11):
But in the UNIA, leadership forwomen was more organic and
practical and realistic than Ihad first assumed or had been
led to believe.
But fast forward, I graduateundergrad and I get to grad
school, and I have professorswho are pushing me on why is
(07:35):
this so important?
Why do we care, right?
Like, why do you want to talkabout these black women in this,
to them, in their minds, obscureorganization?
And I couldn't help themunderstand that the word
universal really meantuniversal.
That the organization existedalmost everywhere on the planet,
(07:55):
right?
I mean, they're Aborigine peoplewho belong to the UNIA, right,
in Australia.
Um, and and that legacy isactually lived out during the
Black Power era as well.
And so there's thislong-standing connection in
South Africa, in Ghana,throughout the United Kingdom,
in Nova Scotia, in Halifax, andin South America.
(08:18):
And so I'm trying to find a wayto convince them that this is a
viable project.
And I end up in the library,going through the New York
Times, reading, looking for anymention of the Universal Negro
Improvement Association.
Anything that would be like myshowstopper, my aha, my this is
(08:42):
why I have to finish thisproject.
And I come across theassassination of Laura Kofi.
And up until that point in mylife, I believed that only black
men got assassinated, right?
Black women, because the imageof the civil rights woman,
right?
She has her pocketbook, she hason her Sunday church shoes, she
(09:05):
has on her hat, she has ongloves, she always looked like
she was praying or she about toserve fried chicken, you know,
um, she's singing in the choir,right?
There was never this idea thatblack women were disturbers of
the peace, right?
And they were always marchingalong beside somebody or working
(09:25):
in cooperation with, or theybelonged to some larger
organization.
But this idea of this womanbeing assassinated, it just
stopped me.
And the questions changed.
What was it about women in theorganization that made people
scared, uncomfortable, or feelthreatened?
(09:48):
So much so that they had tosilence a Laura Kofi.
That then brought me back to aquestion that I had been playing
with from the start of theproject.
What happened to Amy Ashwood?
Why is Amy Ashwood not a part ofthe historiography of the UNIA?
How come they wrote her out ofthe story?
(10:08):
The divorce could not have beenthat bad, right?
Um, she still had all of theseUNIA friends, from what I could
tell.
Because she, you know,periodically would pop up in
correspondences and so forth.
And then I knew all about her inManchester and her interactions
with W.E.B.
Du Bois and George Padmore.
So what happened?
Why she fell off?
(10:28):
Then I realized that there was asort of silencing.
And I couldn't decide if it wasthe fault of the historians who
were looking to rescript,retrieve Marcus Garvey himself
and the Universal NegroImprovement Association as his
(10:49):
mission, and that we just hadn'tgotten to this other part of the
work yet because we we still hadsome fixing to do, right?
Or was there a deliberate, um,willful ignorance, so to speak,
about the role of women thatemanated from within the
(11:09):
organization itself.
And that led me to start readingthe Negro World like it was
Bible, like it was the last bookof the Bible, chapter and verse.
And that's where I found thewomen, their names, their
addresses.
They were very brazen.
(11:30):
They put their address in theNegro world, so then I could go
and look for them in the formalgovernment records, right?
In the census data, in the cityregistry.
I could look at mortgage deeds.
You know, some of these womenactually owned homes.
Oh my goodness.
Um, and see how their activismplayed out really under the
(11:52):
radar of the powers that be.
In part because, as many peopleknow, J.
Edgar Hoover surveilled MarcusGarvey.
And all of what he learned, hethen applied to what became
COINTELPRO and used that when hefollowed Malcolm X, El Haj Malik
Shabbaz, Martin Luther King, theBlack Panther Party, and the
(12:14):
Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee.
And so his attention, lucky forme, was not only on Mr.
Garvey, but on peopleimmediately close to him.
One such person was HenriettaVinton Davis.
And so I started following theFBI records on Lady Davis,
(12:34):
coordinating that with what Iread in the Negro world, and
then labeling some informationfrom the Negro press as well as
the mainstream press, andstarted to see, well, who were
Lady Davis's friends?
Who did she mentor?
And that's how I started to seethe activism of women in the
(12:58):
organization.
At that time, however, I hadn'tcome to the term efficient
womanhood.
I hadn't come to the termdiasporic back chat because the
archive was still teaching me.
One of the things that I try toencourage people, graduate
students and my colleaguesalike, is you know, we have to
sort of check our assumptions,right?
(13:20):
Check what we've been taught andwhat we believe at the door and
allow the archive, allow thepeople who lived it and spoke it
and did it and said it and leftus information because these
women wrote their own story.
They wrote into the Negro world.
So they told me what they wantedpeople to know.
They actually provided me thenarrative, right?
(13:42):
And so that didn't fit with thecategories that I had previously
been introduced to.
It didn't fit neatly withrespectability politics.
As sure as I didn't fit into thewhole separate spheres
construction, right?
Um, and this whole idea ofquote-unquote grassroots, no,
(14:04):
because they're organized in adifferent kind of way, right?
Many of the women I encounteredwere actually doing work before
they come to the UNIA.
And so when they come to theUNIA, it's really
credentializing the work thatthey had already been doing,
giving them an internationalnetwork, you know, some
backative, as we would like tosay.
(14:26):
And so I began to see that theyactually incorporated their
gender concerns with thenationalist aims of the
organization itself.
And that they didn't see them asseparate but equal, they saw
them as simultaneous andintertwined with one another.
(14:47):
And so as I began to flush outthe chapters, my dissertation
chair, Brian Wood, I'm gonna sayhis name, says to me, point
blank, if I read one more timethe sentence that you seem to
hang your hat on, and this ishow they blended gender and
(15:10):
nationalist concerns.
And this was the blending ofgender and nationalist concerns.
If you say that one more time, Iam going to pull all my hair
out.
There has to be a name for this.
We have to call it something.
What is it?
So I was in the library, and forthose of us who do African
American history and history ofthe diaspora, particularly those
(15:33):
of us who focus on um gender, wehave two favorite sections of
the library (15:37):
the Isle Desmart E185 and the Isle Desmart H20,
right?
We got our black studies and ourgender studies.
So I was going down E185 and Isaw Damnation of Women in a book
of essays by W.E.B.
(15:58):
Du Bois.
And I was just pulling books offbecause now I'm on the hunt to
figure out what I am going todo, what am I gonna tell him?
I can't go into another meetingwithout having something to say.
So I'm reading this essay fromDu Bois, and in it he says that
these women had the strife, thestruggle, and from that struggle
(16:22):
was born an efficient womanhood.
I said, aha.
So now we're going to quote DuBois in reference to Garvey and
Garveyism and just totally upsetthe apple card, right?
Because how could I do that?
People misleadingly believe thatDu Bois and Garvey were, you
know, um famed, sworn enemiesuntil the time of each one's
(16:46):
death.
But in actuality, in a book umentitled Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois
actually backpedals and correctssome of his assertions about
Garvey and concludes that Garveywas simply a man ahead of his
time.
And as we know, Dr.
Du Bois ends up in Ghana.
(17:07):
Um, that's where he decides tomake his transition from this
life.
And so some of Garvey's visionand Garvey's dream is actually
lived by Dr.
Du Bois in the 1960s.
But as I use the term efficientwomanhood, it satisfied the
committee basically because noneof us knew any better at the
(17:28):
time, you know, and and God ismerciful, I got out of grad
school.
So I work on the book over anumber of years, and I travel.
I go everywhere that theGarveyites were.
So I'm in Barbados, I'm inGrenada, I'm in Guyana, I go to
Cuba twice, I go to SouthAfrica, uh, go to Ghana, uh, I
(17:52):
spend a lot of time in Jamaica,I go to Trinidad, I go to
Canada, and I end up in the lastleg of it, and when I said,
okay, now I I think I I haveenough, I end up in the United
Kingdom at the queue.
And they have a set of the NegroWorld Newspaper in folders, not
(18:18):
digitized, because it can bedigitized.
It's already dilapidated.
October 1919 edition.
And I'm supposed to be readingwith gloves and a toothpick,
right?
Because you're not allowed toactually turn the page.
And the archivist brings out thefolder and she says to me, I
(18:41):
realize that this is veryserious for you, isn't it?
So I was like, yes.
She says, okay, I'm going toturn my back and you're going to
take pictures, and then I'mgoing to take back the folder.
SPEAKER_00 (18:51):
And so I just want to give a shout out to the
librarians with small merciesbecause it is a very difficult,
difficult road to do some ofthis work, but continue.
SPEAKER_01 (19:01):
Yes, yes, because, you know, you have to, not only
do you have to read, you know,the the crumpled up half eaten
by insect paper, right?
You then have but so much timeto take notes.
And so I, you know, whipped outmy phone, which I wasn't
supposed to have, and I startedtaking the pictures.
(19:24):
And I took picture, picture,picture.
I'd like took three pictures ofthe same page.
And then I and then I would takea picture of a section of the
page and, you know, so to makesure I could zoom it up and blow
it out.
And in that, I landed a speechfrom a woman named Hannah
Nichols, who actually called foran efficient womanhood.
(19:47):
And so I realized that there wasdivine intervention in the day
that I found the term anddecided to use it in the library
while at university.
Of Florida, and I appreciatedthe challenge from Deborah Gray
White at the time, who asked me,Well, did they use that term?
(20:10):
Why do you keep using that termfor them?
If they didn't say it, then whyare you saying it?
And it sort of pushed me to,okay, I either I'm going to
change it or I'm going to provethat this is theirs.
Not knowing that I wouldactually get a chance to prove
(20:30):
it, I was trying to, and justbeing honest, I was looking at
the League of Colored Peoplepaperwork, their magazine and
their papers, and really attrying to excavate Amy Ashwood's
life in England to see if therewas anything in there that I
could use that would help me.
(20:52):
And instead, this was the answerthat I got back from the
Ancestors in the Universe.
And so that's how I then wasable to rescript the
introduction and solidify theuse of the term and efficient
womanhood for the text.
And I know that's, you know, along-winded way of answering the
(21:15):
question, but I think it'simportant for people to
understand process and that thewriting is never fully done or
fully finished.
It's what you know at the momentthat you're able to write about.
The questions that you ask orthe questions that are asked of
(21:38):
you, stretch this thing, pushthis thing.
And what becomes important isbeing grounded in the sources in
a way where you can determinewhether or not you need to go
further or you need to juststand your ground, like you can
just dress back.
So now when people ask me, well,did anybody other than Hannah
(22:00):
Nichols ever use the termefficient womanhood?
I simply respond by saying noone else had to.
She issued the call, and here isthe evidence of the response.
This is how it mapped out.
No one ever came back to HannahNichols, who was a younger
(22:21):
person in the organization atthe time, and said, Oh no,
that's a dumb idea, right?
Instead, women took it uponthemselves to begin to create
spaces where they had autonomy,where they could elect one
another, decide who would be thehead, the second, the third,
whether or not they wanted mento belong to the space or not
(22:43):
belong to the space, and ranwith it.
And so my appreciation for how Igot to this, ultimately, you
know, and and this is maybeevery scholar with their first
book has some element of this init.
I wanted to understand somethingabout the community that raised
(23:06):
me, about the women that raisedme.
My mother's mother launched 14children, not all of them
biologically hers, but all ofthem biologically my
grandfather's.
And my father's mother launched11.
And when I say launched, I meanthey found the money not only to
(23:28):
send them to school, but to sendthem abroad and then support
them while they were abroad.
And there was something aboutthe role that my father's
mother, who was a grandparentthat I got to know the most, the
role that she played in hercommunity, where she was lay
midwife, seamstress, banker,negotiator, judge, jury, police.
(23:55):
I mean, there my grandmotherwould write letters to my father
or call my father and give us alist of things that we would
need to bring.
And my father's like, what arewe doing with how many bottles
of Mercury are comb?
Why you, you know, and becauseshe has this person to look
after, and that person needs tokeep some in their house, and
(24:17):
blah, blah, blah.
You know, and understanding thatwas a way in which she provided
care, the politics of care, andthe awareness for politics of
care that had nothing to do witha government official, a JP, an
MP, you know, um a councilperson.
(24:39):
Like, what are we doing righthere in our little community, in
our little district, in ourlittle village, to make sure
that the things that youngpeople need, young mothers need,
are addressed.
And understanding that this wassomething that she chose to do
based on her own life experiencehelped me to understand what the
(25:03):
women in the UNIA were doing,how valuable it was at the time,
and how underappreciated it hasbeen historically.
And so that was my other, youknow, entryway into the work was
really understanding who I amand how I got here, and what
(25:28):
legacy is it that I actuallybelong to and participate in.
SPEAKER_00 (25:34):
Thank you for that introduction and also alluding
to many of the questions I havefor you, having read Umefficient
Momented.
I think it maps for us, as yousaid, the genealogy of how books
really come to be.
You know, as a grad studentmyself, I'm like, this
dissertation already has takenmany years for me, right?
But to understand, you know,upon even transforming from
(25:56):
dissertation to book, this is a,for some people, decades-long,
even longer process.
And as you said, letting thearchives guide you, I found that
really beautiful and I thinkimportant for listeners to
understand that like the writingof history, the historiography,
doesn't come in just a moment,right?
It doesn't just come in asecond.
It's a a myriad of experiencesand a journey, really, that
(26:20):
takes, you know, the author, thehistorian to get from point A to
point B.
I do for a little bit want tomap out for our listeners just
some important points.
We think of the UNIA, I think wethink of Garvey a lot, right?
And even to an extent, Garvey'sinfluence on um later
generations of black activists.
(26:42):
But I do sort of want to map outfor our listeners that the
United Negro ImprovementAssociation and African
Communities League was foundedby Garvey and First Wife Amy
Ashwood Garvey in Jamaica in1914 as a response to the
systemic oppression anddisenfranchisement of black
people across the globe.
Um, many of its missionsincluded, you know, promoting
(27:03):
racial pride, economicself-sufficiency, unification of
the black diaspora, and as youpointed to, had locations and
chapters really spanning acrossthe globe.
Very impactful newspaper, TheNegro World, read by over
200,000 people.
Um, but the point that I'm sortof wanting us to get to, as you
(27:26):
outlined for us, is this notionof um women's leadership, right?
And what that looks like.
Um, but also the fact thatthere's these myths, I think,
that surround this idea of womenin the UNIA.
So you sort of mentioned the twoAMIs, uh, quote unquote, as it's
often um discussed.
And by that we mean Garvey'sfirst wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey,
(27:49):
and his second wife, Amy JacquesGarvey.
Um, there's also, I think, awhole slew of other women who
sort of get mentioned briefly interms of their um affiliation or
their identities as Garveyites.
I think some people often talkabout uh Malcolm X's mother,
Louise Little, who was born inGrenada, as being a Garveyite as
(28:10):
well.
But I definitely do want us tostart with um talking about Amy
Ashwood and Amy Jacques.
For you, and as you sort of werealso alluding earlier, I think
your book does a tremendous jobof really cementing Amy Ashwood
Garvey in the story of the UNIA.
As you said, um she doesn't gether sort of due process in a lot
(28:30):
of the historiography.
And so, why was this really animportant part of the process
for you?
How is this sort of similar andor in direct opposition to the
imprint Amy Jacques Garvey lefton the organization?
SPEAKER_01 (28:44):
Thank you so much for that question.
So a few things.
Um, one, from the verybeginning, it was always the
universal Negro ImprovementAssociation.
Uh, there are some scholars whouse United Negro, but it wasn't.
It's always been incorporatedfrom 1914, from that opening on
(29:04):
Amy Ashwood's porch in Kingston,Jamaica, it's always been
universal.
Uh Amy Jakes comes into thepicture as a friend of Amy
Ashwood initially.
And her relationship with Mr.
Garvey um takes sort of adifferent um stance as Miss
(29:31):
Ashwood's marriage to Mr.
Garvey dovetails.
It was important to me to bringAmy Ashwood into the story and
to cement her contribution inorder to help people understand
one, the constitution of theorganization.
The UNIA's constitution is theonly constitution at that time
(29:56):
that enfranchised women.
One member, one vote.
In so doing, it then enabledwomen to have voice in ways that
they couldn't have in otherorganizations, in other
governments.
And we have to understand thatthe UNIA considered itself a
(30:18):
government in exile.
What Amy Ashwood really does inthe very beginning of the
organization is sort of set atone for the kind of partnership
and nation building, the familystructure, the togetherness, the
oneness that the UNIA aspired tohave.
(30:41):
And her support of Mr.
Garvey was one not onlyintellectual, but also
financial.
And I don't feel that peoplereally understand what it meant
to have her borrow money fromher mother's purse.
And borrow is used, you know,figuratively.
(31:02):
She stole the money to circulateflyers, to then come to New York
City and help her relativesdeliver bread throughout the
city.
And while they're deliveringbread, they're delivering the
newspaper, um, the Negro Worldas well, and making sure that
the Negro world newspaper gotoff the ground and got
(31:25):
circulation.
Those are key factors inestablishing the Universal Negro
Improvement Association,establishing its reach,
establishing its audience.
How can we tell a story withoutincluding those critical
moments, right?
Marcus Garvey could have come tothe United States.
(31:47):
Um, remember, he came on afailed mission, really, because
he was coming here to meet umBooker T.
Washington.
By the time he reached, BookerT.
Washington had passed away.
And so he was gonna have to, youknow, recalibrate, you know, um,
come up with a plan B.
And so the whole thing couldhave been a bust, but yet, you
(32:08):
know, there was Amy Ashwood whohad social capital, right?
She had relatives who were here.
Um, they had businesses thatcould provide a space.
They were already in Harlem.
And so her social capital iswhat actually helps get Marcus
Garvey going.
(32:28):
It gases the car, right?
This is not to take away fromMr.
Garvey himself as a speaker, asa leader, as a person who was a
visionary, right?
But he didn't do this alone.
He didn't do this by himself.
You know, we take the personalout of it for a moment, right?
And look at what Amy Jakesaccomplishes with the Negro
(32:52):
world on behalf of women in theorganization and outside of the
organization, whether we agreewith everything that she ever
wrote and everything that sheever said, having that
designated space, our women andwhat they think, encouraging
women to write into the Negroworld, taking on topics that
(33:16):
included what makes a goodhusband and what to do when the
husband is not functioning.
Right?
What does it mean to support ablack business and why some
black businesses should not besupported, right?
Generating that kind ofconversation in 1922, 1923, 1924
(33:40):
is significant in understandinghow black nationalism evolves,
how it spreads, and that she didit as the wife of, right,
without formal title at thatpoint, right?
Because originally she was Mr.
(34:01):
Garvey's secretary.
And Amy Ashwood was alsosecretary, but she was secretary
of the UNIA, not Mr.
Garvey's secretary, right?
That they held these offices,read correspondences, responded
on behalf of Mr.
(34:21):
Garvey or on behalf of theorganization, means that they
are then now scripting the voicethat people hear and what people
see, right?
They are becoming arbiters ofthe image of the organization
and of Mr.
Garvey.
And so understanding that AmyAshwood set a trend, so to
(34:43):
speak.
She set up a paradigm, right?
She befriended persons thatwould not normally be in Mr.
Garvey's camp because theyshared a similar goal, a similar
aim.
And Amy Jakes comes to alsoparticipate in that way.
(35:05):
So they establish, withoutgiving it a name in that moment,
the first leg of what efficientwomanhood is.
Amy Ashwood married Mr.
Garvey because Mr.
Garvey had a brain, in heropinion.
He was about something, right?
And so, what did it mean to be arace woman?
What did it mean to be a raceman?
(35:28):
Now, when that race man or thatrace woman no longer seemed to
be on the same page with you ordid not share the same ambition,
then it was time to move on tothe next thing.
For example, when we look atEula Taylor's biography of Amy
Jakes Garvey, we understand thatnot at every point in their
(35:49):
marriage, in their lifetogether, was Amy Jakes totally
convinced and totally, you know,100% behind everything that Mr.
Garvey said and did.
But there's negotiation, andthat's what makes it an
efficient womanhood.
The negotiation, Amy Ashwood'swillingness to negotiate, to
(36:09):
refuse to give up on the nameGarvey, to re refuse to
relinquish the name Garvey.
Why?
Because she helped build it,because it was an access pass,
because it was internationallyrecognized, and she had
contributed to making itinternationally recognized, and
so it would garner her audience.
(36:30):
Now, what she did once she hadthat audience was specifically
and uniquely Amy Ashwood, right?
And her manifestation of theautonomous aims of the UNIA that
led her into partnerships withpersons that Mr.
(36:50):
Garvey never had access to.
You know, the George Padmores ofthe world, um, Ras McConnell,
Jomo Kenyatta, you know, CLRJames.
She's she's in her restaurant,um, the Florence Mills in the
UK.
You know, I jokingly tellpeople, yeah.
So she would bring out the curryand, you know, the rice and
(37:14):
peas.
And before she gave them thecarriage, she would make them
promise that they were gonna doX, Y, and Z.
And that's how she ran her shop,right?
But she creates this space wherewe see black internationalism
evolving, right?
And I think the the greatestline of demarcation occurs when
(37:35):
we see how Amy Ashwoodestablishes the Friends of
Abyssinia in support of um hisimperial majesty, Hailey
Selassie I, and sort of thispush to galvanize uh black
people globally in defense um ofthe kingdom of Ethiopia, and
then Marcus Garvey writes of hisdisappointment of his imperial
(38:01):
majesty.
And it wasn't that Amy Ashwoodwasn't as disappointed, right?
Or as deflated.
But again, the efficientwomanhood negotiation.
What do we say in public?
How do we act in private?
How do we act in public that isinfluenced or motivated by how
(38:23):
we align ourselves in private,right?
I mean, Jomo Kenyatta becomesthe first president of an East
African country, right, out ofthat group.
Um, she is supporting uh LolimpoSolanke and the West African
Student Union, the WASU, right?
And these are all inroads to,okay, we're going to build
(38:45):
independent African nations andso we're going to educate
independent African minds sothat we can overthrow
colonialism.
Are we disappointed in what hashappened?
Clearly we're disappointed, butin the meantime, we have to
start pushing, right?
And this is how we get involvedwith the League of Colored
Peoples, and so we we refashion.
We don't come out publicly andsay, Hayer Selassie has let us
(39:09):
down, right?
But also recognizing that inthat moment, you know, Marcus
Gary is mourning the loss of thesymbol, right, that Ethiopia
represents, the loss of anopportunity that Ethiopia
represents, because, you know,Liberia is now a no-go, right?
(39:31):
And there's no turning back,there's no coming back to
Liberia by the 1930s.
And even in that, we see AmyAshwood and Amy Jakes attempt to
course correct Mr.
Garvey's assertions about oneAfrica, United Africa, and
Liberia being the right place.
We see Laura Kofi attempt topresent Mr.
(39:54):
Garvey with alternatives, right?
And this is why the book openswith Amy Allen.
Ashwooden ends with Laura Kofi.
Um, because really, what I'm uhattempting to politely comment
on, and and as well as with thequote from Louise Little, is how
(40:14):
we've created this grandnarrative, ignoring the very
loud silence about the cost ofall of this, right?
The UNIA and Marcus Garvey'spush and commitment and drive
towards it made Amy Jakesunhappy in her marriage.
(40:38):
She was married to someone whowas not the best provider at
points in their marriage, right?
And this is true of allactivists to some degree, you
know, they're not physicallypresent for their family in the
way that their family would wantthem to be.
In Amy Ashwood's case, you know,she and Mr.
(40:59):
Garvey disintegrated, politeword.
And from there, Miss Ashwooddecided that, you know, she
would find a better way, anotherway, but remain committed to the
aims and objectives of theUniversal Negro Improvement
Association and lives apan-Africanist feminist life
(41:25):
that, you know, I argue needsmore consideration than it has
gotten in recent years.
And I think although we think ofAmy Jakes as Mr.
Garvey's chronicler, truly hisfirst biographer, and the
(41:48):
champion of all his causes, wealso have to realize that the
plan that was hatched on AmyAshwood's porch between herself
and Mr.
Garvey is the plan that shestuck to, so much so that when
they ran into each other in theUK, they could speak decently to
(42:09):
one another because they stillhad that in common.
You know, the betterment of therace, the progress of the race
was something that they bothheld dear.
And so I just see sort of apassing of the baton from one
Amy to the other.
Other folks read it differently,and that's fine.
(42:30):
I believe that Miss Jakes umjust simply built on a
foundation along with otherwomen that was very much so
cemented and laid and smoothedout by Amy Ashwood.
SPEAKER_00 (42:46):
We're gonna pause here, but don't worry, the
conversation continues.
Be sure to join us for part two,where we dive even deeper into
the labor, leadership, andlegacies of women in the UNIA.
Thanks for tuning in to StrictlyFacts.
Visit strictlyfactspodcast.comfor more information from each
episode.
(43:06):
Follow us at Strictly Facts Podon Instagram and Facebook and at
Strictly Facts PD on Twitter.
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