Gandhi, Garvey, and the Origins of Black Power: Religion, Violence, and Nonviolence in the Global Struggle against Racism and Imperialism

Beginning in the early 1920s, advocates of racial justice in the United States debated the possibility of wielding Gandhian satyagraha, or nonviolent civil disobedience, against American racism.  For African Americans, however, Gandhi’s legacy always extended beyond nonviolence.  Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement demonstrated the ability of an oppressed people, if unified and organized on racial and national lines, to advance amidst the collapse of the old world order.  As exemplified by Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), African American engagement with India demonstrated a profound transnational awareness that was simultaneously tightly linked to local and national initiatives.  Garvey’s frequent references to Gandhi and India served to legitimize Garvey’s own efforts to unite “the Negro race.” 

An examination of the relationship between Gandhi and Garvey, as well as of their differences, helps reveal the role of religion in bridging distant social movements, while calling into question easy dichotomies between nonviolence and more militant approaches to social change.  This paper will argue that the relationship between Gandhi and Garvey offers an early form of Black Power that transcends dichotomies between integration and separatism, and between nonviolence and armed self defense.  By the late 1960s, the equation of Gandhi with an overly simplified notion of nonviolence overshadowed the continued relevance to Black struggles of Indian anticolonial nationalism and economic self-sufficiency (swadeshi) at the very time that these ideas found new relevance with the emergence of Black Power on the national stage.  Studying the connections between Gandhi and Garvey helps excavate alternative conceptions of Black Power, while offering new insights into the larger history of African American engagement with Gandhi, from Garvey to Martin Luther King to Barack Obama.