August 1920, Madison Square Garden. Some 25,000 people hear Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican printer, open his Universal Negro Improvement Association's convention: uniformed legions, a shipping line, a Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, and Garvey named provisional president of an Africa he has never seen.
The pressure
Jim Crow's laws and lynch mobs push Black southerners north and war factories pull: half a million move in the war years, many to Harlem, beside West Indian migrants. Black soldiers come home from France to the race riots of 1919. In Paris that February, W. E. B. Du Bois holds a Pan-African Congress the peacemakers ignore.
Which future
Du Bois wants civil rights won by an educated 'talented tenth', and a voice for Africa among the empires. Garvey preaches pride, Black business and a return to Africa. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write Black life without apologising for it. White New York wants the nightlife without the citizenship.
What survived
Garvey is jailed for mail fraud and deported in 1927, but his branches have spread across the Caribbean and Africa. The Depression empties the clubs; the books and the records last. When Italy invades Ethiopia in 1935, Harlem marches for the one free African state; at the Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945, Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta demand Africa's independence.
Whose story
Adam Ewing follows Garvey's movement into colonial Africa, where it outlived the trial that made him look a swindler. David Levering Lewis watches the white patrons as closely as the art; others find a working-class and queer Harlem the anthologies sanded down.