fund-raising organ that would finance the trans-
portation of people back to Africa and establish
colonies and Christian missions there. From 1821
to 1830, 1,420 blacks emigrated. The ACS took on
a diverse contingent of supporters and dissenters.
Major objections to its objectives came even from
blacks who favored emigration, such as Martin R.
Delany, who objected to white control of the orga-
nization. Nonetheless, from 1817 to 1865, 147 ships
set sail for Liberia, and 18,959 blacks emigrated.
Influenced by the emigrationist ideas of Lewis
Woodson, a former Virginia slave, several major
19th-century black leaders, including T. Holly,
Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Highland Garnet,
Alexander Crummell, and MARTIN R. DELANY,
among others, supported emigration and es-
poused Black Nationalist ideology. Delany, a phy-
sician, and a journalist, coined the phrase “Africa
for the Africans” in 1854. Although the Civil War
and black American aspirations of liberation led
Delany to change his stance on emigration, join
the Union forces, and recruit many blacks for
military service, Delany would once again re-
vert to the idea of emigration; he supported the
South Carolina–based Liberian Exodus and Joint
Stock Steamship Company after the reconstruc-
tion period. The Liberian Exodus and Joint Stock
Steamship Company acquired the Azors, which
made one voyage in 1878 before the company
went bankrupt. Another prominent figure in the
emigration scene of the mid- to late 1800s was Al-
exander Crummell, a missionary to Liberia whom
many critics consider the father of Pan-African-
ism. Crummell asserted that all people have a re-
lation and a duty to the land of their fathers, in
this case meaning Africa.
However, perhaps the most famous of Black
Nationalists by way of emigration was MARCUS
GARVEY. This Jamaican-born Pan-Africanist pro-
pounded the idea of “Africa for the Africans.”
Though he never spearheaded any emigration
movements directly, he did organize 6 million
Africans in 33 chapters of the Universal Negro
Improvement Association (UNIA). Although
20th-century black writers did not outright em-
brace an emigrationist agenda, they spoke in
terms of building a black nation—a black world,
as Madhubuti’s speaker demands in “We Walk the
Way of the New World,” that leads to morality and
cleanliness: “We walk in cleanliness / the newness
of it all / becomes us” (Randall, 309). Maulana
Karenga’s Pan-African holiday, Kwanzaa, a cul-
tural holiday of seven days of observation, and
his doctrine of Nguzu Saba, the “Seven Principles
of Blackness,” to guide Kwanzaa celebration, are
a clear example of the impact Black Nationalist
ideas continue to have not only on African Ameri-
cans but globally.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berry, Mary Francis, and John Blassingame. Long
Memory: The Black Experience in America. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred Moss, Jr. From Slav-
ery to Freedom: A History of African Americans,
Vols. 1 and 2. 7th ed. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Randall, Dudley, ed. The Black Poets. New York: Ban-
tam Books, 1971.
Gwinyai P. MuzorewaBlack No More George Schuyler (1931)
GEORGE SCHUYLER’s first novel, Black No More,
originally published in 1931 by Macaulay and re-
issued in 1989 by Northeastern University Press,
is generally considered the first full-length satire
by an African American and perhaps the first Afri-
can-American science fiction novel. Moreover, its
satirical importance includes its open, yet humor-
ous, critique of the New Negro movement (dur-
ing which it was published) and the absurdities
of race matters from both sides of the color line.
Schuyler addresses the political issues for which
he was best known: America’s social stratification
based on race and its obsession with racial differ-
ences. While society searched for a solution to the
“race problem,” Schuyler, as a minority voice, in-
sisted that race was in fact not the problem at all.
His satire is aimed specifically at myths of racial
purity and white supremacy, presenting ways in
which the perpetuation of racism serves economic
purposes foremost; greed is the primary motiva-
tion of his characters, black and white. He presents54 Black No More