Garveyism

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Garveyism, which refers to the political aspirations, beliefs and actions of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, is one of the earliest fronts in Pan-African discourse which emphasized racial unity and empowerment among Negros and repatriation of Africans in the diaspora to a greater United States of Africa. The Garveyite push for African unity transcended religious, cultural and class barriers as it analyzed White supremacy as the primary existential threat to African people. Because of Garveyism's call to resist white power structures, the UNIA philosophy came to represent the more radical tendencies in black political thought, which directly opposed W.E.B Du Bois's Talented Tenth and Booker T. Washington's assimilationist positions. Although Garvey himself openly endorsed state capitalism as the solution to the problems of laisse faire finances, alongside his denunciation of White Marxists and the Socialist Party of America for their settler-colonial stances, there continued to exist socialist tendencies of Garveyite thought who worked and operated within the UNIA and its high offices. These circles within Garvey's thought were strengthened by his analysis on poverty, in which he recognizes the relationship between poverty and petty theft and denounces mass inequality.