In the early 20th century, Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey gave black people in the Americas a rousing response to white supremacy. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914, and called for the “400 million” Africans around the world to unite in a commitment to liberate the African continent—and their own lives—from racial oppression. Two years later, he took his campaign to the United States, where he organized businesses to employ African-Americans.

Confident that black people could advance through any cultural, political, or intellectual field they chose, Garvey put race first, individual self-determination next, and black nationhood last. He envisaged a United States of Africa that would preserve the interests of all black people, galvanized by an almost religious sense of racial redemption. The “New Negro” consciousness would borrow from existing intellectual traditions, yet forge its own racial interpretation of international politics. Coining the term “African fundamentalism,” Garvey promoted a sense of black selfhood, rooted in the belief that ancient African civilizations that had declined would be regenerated.

  Garvey’s radical message—and the mismanagement of his many blacks-only businesses—attracted the ire of rival black leaders and the US government. Yet he was the first to insist on black power, and the first to articulate the African liberation proposition that animates African nationalists to this day.