Pan-African thinkers in the pre-1945 period developed innovative ideas that challenged the racialized hierarchies of the world economy. Some of these thinkers are discussed in previous chapters, such as George Padmore and C.L.R. James (both discussed in chapter 7) as well as Amy Ashwood Garvey (chapter 10). This chapter discusses three other prominent Pan-African thinkers who sought to cultivate the transnational economic solidarity of Africans and the African diaspora in order to challenge this group’s subordinate position in the world economy. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey was the best-known popularizer of this kind of “economic Pan-Africanism” via his Universal Negro Improvement Association and its Black Star Line. The other two discussed in the chapter are W.E.B. Du Bois (from the United States) and Hubert Harrison (who migrated from the Danish West Indies to the United States). The latter two disagreed with Garvey and each other about a number of issues, ranging from their views of capitalism to the role of the African diaspora in Pan-African politics.

This 1936 essay laments the lack of knowledge that African Americans and Indians have of one another, attributing the situation to poor journalistic standards and propaganda, which encourage false, frivolous, and sensationalist stories and suppress news of freedom struggles on both sides. Religious differences also hinder understanding. It calls for Indians and African Americans to understand their respective anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggles as facets of the same “world-wide clash of colour,” to stand together against exploitation by white races, and to commit to new and emancipatory forms of economic activity so that exploitation by whites is not replaced by that “of coloured races by coloured men.”

Du Bois delivered “To the World” as an address at the Second Pan-African Congress in London in August 1921, and the conference delegates approved its resolutions, as well as those of a separate manifesto addressed specifically to the League of Nations. Both were published in The Crisis in November 1921. “To the World” declares racial equality to be the “founding stone of world peace and human advancement and insists on the world’s duty to assist in the advancement of the “backward.” It projects a vision of “interracial contact” based on democratic political institutions and mutual respect and argues that poverty and class conflict in developed countries (“culture lands”) can be truly solved only when white nations stop perpetrating even greater poverty and injustice among “darker peoples.” The manifesto to the League makes three key demands: that the International Bureau of Labor establish a section to deal with Negro labor in Africa and the “Islands of the Sea”; that a man of Negro descent be appointed to the League’s Mandates Commission; and that the League attend to legal and cultural bias against “civilized persons of Negro descent.”