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Before the end of the Soviet-Nazi alliance, socialists had no problem being openly racialist: Jack London, Margaret Sanger, etc. Even black socialists like Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois had their own views on proper "racial hygiene" - few people today realize exactly what Garvey meant by naming his organization the "United Negro Improvement Association."

I didn't know Garvey was a socialist. I thought he was a "right winger" who advocated "Black capitalism" and who hated (and was hated by) the Communists (and the NAACP for that matter). And so far as I know, he was a devout Roman Catholic. Unfortunately, he was also anti-Semitic and expressed support for the Nazis.

Some time during the last Presidential election you posted a comment here that the liberal political cartoon poking fun at Sarah Palin for speaking in tongues would backfire because it would offend the Black Pentecostals in COGIC. That this did not happen has led me to basically write the Black church off completely. If no line has been drawn in the sand so far, one is never going to be drawn.

Unfortunately, there was a strain of leftist radicalism in Black politics from at least the early twentieth century, as represented by Hubert Henry Harrison, a militant Black nationalist and Garveyite who was also an outspoken socialist, secular humanist, Darwinist, and advocate of birth control--in other words, a living KKK caricature of Black activism. As an old Civil War Southern Republican and fan of traditional Black culture (at least as presented by B.A. Botkin folklore anthologies), I am beginning to wonder if were not Profound Left Wing Intellectuals from the very beginning, perhaps having philosophical discussions about the Hegelian dialectic to pass the time during the Middle Passage.

I am profoundly disenchanted.

I didn't know Garvey was a socialist. I thought he was a "right winger" who advocated "Black capitalism" and who hated (and was hated by) the Communists (and the NAACP for that matter).

Garvey had one of those lives.

In 1908 he was a 21 year old socialist union organizer.

He went to college in the UK and became a disciple of Dousey Muhammad Ali the Nigerian pan-African nationalist.

In 1914 he started the UNIA in furtherance of Ali's goals, as the New World wing of the African racialist movement.

He split with the NAACP in 1919 when he began the back-to-Africa movement.

It wasn't until after this break that he began becoming more of an economic conservative as a reaction to NAACP criticism. He converted to Catholicism after his return to the UK.

He died a social and economic conservative - but he wasn't one all his life.