From its founding in 1914 to its height in the 1920s, the Universal Negro Improvement Association made elocution, public debate and recitation a central practice of the organization, signaling Garveyism’s deep commitment to oratory as a site of political education. As one Garveyite, Claudius Barnes put it, “They say that the pen is mightier than the sword, but the tongue is mightier than them put together.” The talk charts the origins of this emphasis on oratory and demonstrates the ways in which oratory and eloquence were democratized by Garveyires through an emphasis on repetition and reiteration. The practices of elocution and oratory provide a vantage point onto Garveyism’s conception of improvement as empowerment. The language of improvement harkened back to Victorian ideals of moral improvement and to conceptions of racial uplift. While these meanings continued to be resonant during the highpoint of Garveyism in the 1920s, improvement accrued new signification as a reiterative political education organized to engender self-emancipation. 

Adom Getachew is Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism—the black nationalist/pan-African movement, which had its height in the 1920s. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times.