The Second Battle for Africa

In <i>The Second Battle for Africa</i> Erik S. McDuffie establishes the importance of the US Midwest to twentieth-century global Black history internationalism and radicalism. McDuffie shows how cities like Chicago Detroit and Cleveland as well as rural areas in the heartland became central and enduring incubators of Marcus Garvey's Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its offshoots. Throughout the region Black thinkers activists and cultural workers like the Grenada-born activist Louise Little championed Black freedom. McDuffie explores Garveyism and its changing facets from the 1920s onward including the role of Black midwesterners during the emergence of fascism in the 1930s the postwar US Black Freedom Movement and African decolonization the rise of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X in the 1950s and 1960s and the continuing legacy of Garvey in today's Black Midwest. Throughout McDuffie evaluates the possibilities limitations and gendered contours of Black nationalism radicalism and internationalism in the UNIA and Garvey-inspired movements. In so doing he unveils new histories of Black liberation and Global Africa.