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the whole Afrikan population within the U.S. So a petitbourgeois<br />

Afrikan national leadership had been created<br />

which was, in fact, both employed by and solely picked by<br />

the imperialist government.(38)<br />

At this time the most prominent Afrikan in these<br />

circles, standing in reality even above the "Black<br />

Cabinet," was Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute.<br />

Washington was viewed by the imperialists as their<br />

chief Afrikan advisor, and served them as a leading propagandist<br />

and apologist for white supremacy and colonialism.<br />

In return, any Afrikan who sought position or<br />

funds from the imperialists had to be approved by him.<br />

During the Theodore Roosevelt and Taft Administrations<br />

even the "Black Cabinet" appointments were cleared first<br />

with him. Washington had great fame and, acting for the<br />

Empire, some influence over Afrikan education,<br />

newspapers, community institutions, and so on. But, of<br />

course, neither he nor the other imperialist-selected<br />

Afrikan leaders represented the will of the masses.<br />

At the end of World War I an anti-colonial movement<br />

of incredible vigor burst forth - seemingly almost<br />

overnight - that rejected both the U.S. Empire and the<br />

bourgeois leadership that it had installed for Afrikans.<br />

This was the historic movement touched off and led by the<br />

Jamaican Marcus Garvey. Even its enemies conceded that<br />

the Afrikan masses were expressing their deep desires<br />

through this rebellious movement of Afrikan nationalism.<br />

The Garvey movement at its peak in the early<br />

1920s was the greatest outbreak of Afrikan political activity<br />

since the Civil War. It said that Afrikans could find their<br />

liberation in building a new, modern Afrikan Nation of<br />

their own back on the soil of the Afrikan continent. The<br />

proposed Nation would eventually unite and protect<br />

Afrikans everywhere - in the U.S. Empire and the West<br />

Indies as well as on the Afrikan continent itself.<br />

This new nation would expand to liberate all<br />

Afrika from colonialism and unite it into one continental<br />

Afrikan Power. There Afrikans would shape their own<br />

destiny in great industries, universities, .agricultural<br />

cooperatives and cultural institutions of their own. As a<br />

beginning toward the day, Garveyism organized national<br />

institutions here in all spheres of life. However modest,<br />

these medical, religious, military. economic and other<br />

organizations were designed to develop Afrikan self-<br />

Booker T. Washington<br />

in his ofice at Tuskegee<br />

Institute (1906).

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