The National Museum for African American History and Culture features an exhibition titled “Making a Way Out of No Way.” A popular phrase among African Americans, this kind of thinking permeates the Black Freedom Struggle and the intellectual history behind that struggle. After reading Keisha Blain’s Set the World on Fire, it is clear to me that Dr. Blain has written a history that, for all intents and purposes, is an intellectual history of making a way out of no way.
Reconsidering who should be considered an intellectual has become a hallmark of American intellectual history in the last decade. With the field of African American intellectual history, this is especially true—reconsidering whose voices should be privileged has marked the recent turn in African American intellectual history towards women, radicals, and thinkers from underprivileged backgrounds. Set The World on Fire is no different, with Blain making it clear that African American women who participated in a wide range of Black Nationalist organizations have not gotten their due.
These women created their own ideological spaces—between “mainstream civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the NUL (National Urban League)” and “the Marxist platform of leftist organizations like the Communist Party,” thus setting themselves apart from the organizations most often associated with African American political and intellectual organizing during the Great Depression (2). Blain focuses primarily on several women who were involved in Black Nationalism during and after the golden age of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1920s.
Women such as Amy Ashwood, Maymie De Mena, Mitie Maude Lena Gordon, and Amy Jacques Garvey dominate the book. As such, we’re treated to a different version of the history of the UNIA and related Black Nationalist groups, one that privileges what happened after the UNIA collapsed in the late 1920s. Until recently, the standard narrative of twentieth century Black Nationalism began with the rise and fall of Garvey and the UNIA, and picked up only with the rise of the Black Panther Party in 1966. While works such as Peniel Joseph’s Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour expanded the history of Black Nationalism back into the 1950s, Blain’s work brings it forward into the 1930s and 1940s.
Not only does Blain take into account how these women navigated the gender and international politics of Black Nationalism, she also points to the somewhat strange alliances they attempted to forge during and after the Great Depression. The work of people such as Gordon with Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo to pass a bill guaranteeing emigration by African Americans to Liberia would strike most people as a stunning revelation—but for Blain’s story, it is merely part of a larger history of Black Nationalists working with anyone to create a better, and safer, future for African Americans and other peoples in the Black Diaspora.
Blain’s careful use of sources and archives should be a worthy model for any historian. She had to dig deep in numerous archives to find information on groups such as the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME), which filled some of the vacuum left behind by the collapse of the UNIA. Again, however, this relates back to the question of whose thoughts historians should privilege. If we do not ask the right kinds of questions, and reconsider who should be part of our narratives, it’ll be easy to miss some of the sources Blain dug through for this project.
There remains, for me, the question of how important these groups were to African Americans during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. At times, reading intellectual history, I pause and consider: how important were these ideas to average people? How often did they shape policy? Blain’s epilogue, in a lot of ways, is both a defense of her project and the larger goal of digging deeper into the thoughts of activists—and, indeed, desperate Americans. Blain wrote that a petition with over 400,000 names collected at the heart of the Great Depression in favor of emigration to West Africa was a reminder of the “complex and complicated story” of Black Nationalism during the tumult between the World Wars. “It tells a story of the global black freedom struggle—filled with moments of triumph and hope yet also filled with pain and disappointment, missteps and errors in judgment, and human foibles and imperfections.” (198) This “warts and all” intellectual history does a great service in pushing readers and scholars alike to rethink who we privilege as intellectuals.
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