The Decline of the Garvey Movement

Here, Cyril Briggs offers a scientific analysis of the rise and fall of Marcus Garvey's reactionary "Back to Africa" movement. Briggs argues that Garveyism arose on the wave of the First World War, when increased oppression of Black proletarians brought labor struggles to the surface. In its early stage, the movement channeled the militancy of the Black masses, but under the petty-bourgeois and reactionary leadership of Garvey this revolutionary fervor was squashed and replaced with reformism and capitulation to imperialism and its domestic lackeys, such as the Ku Klux Klan.