Since Marcus Garvey unfurled the UNIA’s iconic tri-color flag at its Liberty Hall headquarters in Harlem over a century ago, the seeds of environmental consciousness have been slowly germinating within America’s Black urban centers—nurtured by the conviction that the red blood offered by Black freedom fighters will nourish the growth an independent green Africa. On the day the symbol of Black Power debuted before the dozens of delegates from across the globe who attended the first international convention, a spectacular affair that lasted the entire month of August 1920. By then, Harlem was already home to 70,000 African Americans, nearly half of New York City’s Black population. In the two decades that had passed since the turn of the century, Harlem had more than doubled in size, surpassing all metropolises in terms of the sheer size of the Black population, earning it the title of the “Black Mecca” of the globe. All of America’s major cities were seeing their Black swell population from the of a profound social transformation, however, all did make up a much greater share of the population of major American cities elsewhere. of Some 400,000 to 500,000 Black southerners made the trek north during WWI, lured by the chance to work in industrial plants that experienced labor shortages when the outbreak of hostilities in the old world reduced the immigration of European laborers to a trickle. However, Blacks And while more than 8 in 10 Blacks still remained in the south, just under half of the top 50 cities where Blacks made their residence were located somewhere outside the region. Buoyed by descriptions of city life that appeared in the pages of newspapers like the Chicago Defender, growing numbers of sharecroppers and unskilled laborers settled alongside the smaller contingent of well-to-do, middle-class Blacks professionals who arrived North decades prior. “One Defender reader in Mississippi expected State Street,” then the epicenter of Black Chicago, “to be heaven itself.”
nature must be established if either are to survive the rapacity of our industrial civilization. Garvey’s vision, symbolized in his call for Black diasporans to return to Africa, ignited the hopes of countless Black migrants who had uprooted themselves from the backwaters of the former Confederate states, seeking a Promised Land north of the Mason-Dixon line. driven by the sense that a new relationship with
Contrary to the rosy picture painted in the pages of the Black press, the cities to which migrants fled had the look and feel of Dixie north. New arrivals usually found themselves confined to blighted neighborhoods, caged in by white prejudices that were given expression in invidious nicknames like “Darktown,” “Black Bottom” and “Coontown.” Overcrowded housing became increasingly common as Black migrants arrived from the South in droves, hungry for better-paying jobs offered by industrial plants where militant unions had won more generous wages and benefits for their members. In the steel town of Pittsburgh, a contemporary observer noted, with some alarm, that the sudden influx of “thousands of migrant meant ‘the utilization of every place in the Negro sections capable of being transformed into a habitation. . . . [A]ttics, cellars, storerooms, churches, sheds, and warehouses” were suddenly “turned into [makeshift] accommodations . . .” No matter what the particular city, conditions were equally bleak. Speaking of Chicago, the pioneering Black sociologist Charles S. Johnson “found that in a single day[,] there were 664 Negro applicants for houses, and only fifty houses available.” Inadequate sewage system, sanitation services, and water treatment facilities, along with residing in “undesirable localities,” further exacerbated the difficulties faced by Black migrants. Mary McLeod Bethune, future founder of the National Council of Negro Women, could’ve had Anytown, USA in mind when she penned an essay in 1925 on “The Problems of the City Dweller” that ran in Opportunity magazine, the house organ of the National Urban League: “It is ever the problem of living a rational, healthy life in the midst of an environment which for the masses is for the most part, unfavorable,” she wrote. “It is the problem of fresh air, wholesome food, sunshine and freedom within limits as pitilessly circumscribed as prison walls.”
A century later, the apprehensions of earlier generations of Black leaders, who feared southern immigrants setting out in search of a promised land would only find an industrial waste pit, have now become our reality. Regardless of where their journey terminated, the once-bustling industrial boomtowns, to which millions of Blacks relocated as part of the Great Migration, would undergo a complete transmogrification in the decades that have passed since. Here’s what Dr. Robert Bullard, recognized as the father of the environmental justice movement, said in a recent interview: “Environmental challenges that many of our communities face, including climate challenges, are made worse by racial redlining that occurred 100 years ago, when Black communities were not provided flood protection, were not provided the kinds of trees and green space and landscaping and design. In the 2020s, those same areas that were redlined are hotter because there are no trees, green canopy. They’re more prone to floods. They have more pollution, and they have more Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.” Indeed, many Black and Brown communities now resemble real-life Robledos, the fictional city outside of L.A. that serves as the backdrop for Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Set in the year 2025—just one New Year’s toast away—Robledo is a Hobbesian hellscape that will be familiar to any inhabitant of the American city today: a never-ending war of all against all, fueled by gun violence, mass addiction, lack of economic opportunities, and public utilities that can no longer provide an adequate supply of water or energy to locals. Bulter’s dystopic cli-sci-fi thriller could’ve been taken from the flashing red chyron of our headline-making news. These real-life developments going on just beyond our doors are quite disquieting. In fact, serious thinkers are beginning to question if they’re the first warning signs of a coming civilizational collapse.
Confronted by the threats in their own time, earlier cadres of Black leaders thought the solution could be found by fusing the politics of race and place into potent forms of Black nationalism. Garvey’s well-known call for diasporic Blacks to “return to Africa” has meant the establishment of a separate state continues to be regarded by many as the highest stage of political struggle. Self-determination; economic development; mutual aid and racial solidarity—these are the seen indispensable ingredients from which Blacks must devise policy solutions to the daunting problems we’re now confronted with. “I do not believe that there is any manhood future in this country for the Negro,” AME Bishop Henry McNeal Turner averred—bitterly, “and that his future existence, to say nothing of his future happiness, will depend upon his nationalization.”
In addition to the dreams of an independent republic in Africa, calls to establish independent, all-Black autarkies somewhere on U.S. soil have also galvanized popular grassroots movements that have arisen among Black Americans before and since. In the 1870s, for example, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton gained fame as the self-proclaimed “Moses of the Colored Exodus” after persuading thousands of Black sharecroppers to pool their monies to purchase land that available for sale under the Homestead Act and establish independent townships under Black control in the Kansas and other areas in the west. Unfortunately, this movement was largely a failure. However, it would be revived in far more ambitious form, decades later, when Black communist theoreticians like Harry Haywood began to revamp Marxist doctrine as the competition for colonial domination of Africa came to be regarded by many as the root cause of WWI. Along with radicals from the African Blood Brotherhoods, Haywood rejiggered the tenets of Marxism into a call for the establishment of a “Black Belt Republic” in the areas of the south where Blacks predominated. Whether it was to be realized at home or abroad, the dreams of independent statehood likely strike us as anachronisms from another time, when uninhabited land was in far greater supply than today. Mass exodus from the city, simply put, is no longer a viable option. The metastization of localized industrial pollution into a global climate crisis is forcing Blacks to consider an age-old question: where do we go from here? Is there anywhere to go, moreover, when the crisis blankets the entire globe?
To answer these questions, the post-civil rights generation could profit by taking a second look at UNIA’s “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,” the remarkable 1920 manifesto which christened the colors red, black, and green as the banner of an intercontinental Pan-African struggle. Beyond the primary goal of wresting control of Africa from Europe’s colonial powers, this declaration delineated another 50 demands, including provisions aimed at the empowerment of Blacks who constituted a minority in white-majority Western nations. In his recent study of Black nationalist thought, political scientist Dean Robinson notes that many “nationalists” thinkers understood “black administration of key institutions of social, political, and economic life” to be in alignment with the call for independent state: “Wheresoever they form a community among themselves,” the declaration insists, “Blacks should be given the right to elect their own representatives to represent them in Legislatures, courts of law, or such institutions as may exercise control over that particular community.” Though Garvey was deported back to Jamaica in 1927, his insistence that Black Americans must gain control over the institutions of local governance would be echoed in the writings of other leaders who sought to fill the void his removal left. “All self-determination means,” Harry Haywood later remarked, “is that Black people have the right—in their area of major concentration, the Black Belt—to whatever degree of self government (sic) they find necessary to guarantee equality.”