Pan-Africanism and the Contributions of Black Intellectuals

The legacies of George Padmore and Marcus Garvey

Résumé

The period between the end of the 1800s up until the 1970’s was a significant and tumultuous stage in charting the present and future of black people in the Americas and Africa. The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation set off a chain of events in North America that would see some progress and major setbacks in the struggle for racial equality. The movement toward emancipation of enslaved black populations was progress but this was followed by the tumultuous Reconstruction Period, Jim Crow laws as well as the 1884 Berlin Conference that placed the second-largest land mass on Earth in direct control of imperial powers. It should come as no surprise then that this period was marked by the rise of what historians Manning Marable and Anthony Bogues describe as the “black radical intellectual tradition (Bouges, 2016, 13)”, represented by African Americans, Africans and individuals from the Caribbean who were concerned with envisioning a better future for black people all around the world. Two important figures from this history of black radical intellectual tradition will be thoroughly analyzed in the scope of this essay: George Padmore and Marcus Garvey. These intellectuals were ultimately both committed to the betterment of the black condition, however their approaches to this end, through Pan-Africanism, tended to differ. This essay aims to highlight elements of their legacies and differences in their ideologies that drove a wedge between them. [...]