The scholarship analyzing the political career of Robert F. Williams has either misinterpreted him, minimized his effect, or only provided limited information about his legacy as a Black revolutionary nationalist leader. In Tyson's biography, for instance, the treatment on Williams in Lake County, Michigan, raises much skepticism when he writes that Williams spent the last 15 years of his life in a quiet place “where he and his family could recover a life of their own.” Different from Tyson's assessment, this article argues that while living in Western Michigan, Williams continued to fight for rights that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed him, his people, and his community by staging a one-man protest against the editor of the Lake County Star for refusing to publish a letter he requested to be printed as a paid advertisement and by fighting to eliminate prostitution, police brutality, and political corruption in the area. Williams was one of several people who were responsible for organizing the People's Association for Human Rights, a grassroots organization in Lake County dedicated to maintaining the human rights of residents.
Read moreAlthough the scholarship on Garveyism and the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) is well documented, there is a continuing need to learn more information about Garveyism in the United States. Because the current literature on the UNIA-ACL at the local level is rather scant, this article explores the origins and development of Garveyism in the Idlewild community to determine the extent to which other Michigan divisions, including the Detroit chapter, worked collectively for the general welfare of preserving the Idlewild community. This article concentrates on two significant stages of UNIA history in Idlewild in an attempt to rescue and reconstruct the community’s identity. First, it focuses on the role small groups of Black middle-class residents played in organizing the division during the second decade of the community’s history from 1927 to 1929. Second, it discusses the many challenges and successes the division encountered from 1929 to 1936.
Read moreIn a world in which blacks are men and women are white, African American women are frequently asked to choose sides: shall they be counted as blacks or women - they cannot be both it seems. However, according to Clenora Hudson-Weems, author of Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves, the choice was taken out of the hands of African American women by the attitudes and rhetoric of European women in the suffrage movement. In this essay, the authors examine Hudson-Weems's conceptualization of Africana Womanism as a convergence point for Afrocentricity and African American women's concerns. They identify the need for Africana Womanism within an Afrocentric context by analyzing the poetic works of Audrey Kathryn Bullett, a leader and activist of prominently African American resort community, and apply an Africana Womanist perspective to Bullett's lived experiences. The authors also offer some implications for contemporary Afrocentric thinkers.
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