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strategic/pragmatic alliances all appear as central parts of this story.
The skill and persistence of Black Nationalist women as grassroots activists is apparent throughout
the text. The organizational life of PME provides a telling example
of this. Founded by former UNIA member Gordon in Chicago in
1932, the organization attracted an estimated three hundred thousand predominantly working-class supporters around the country, while PME activists (including Allen) traveled to the Jim Crow South working to recruit sharecroppers and tenant farmers to the Black Nationalist cause. As Blain summarizes, “During this era of global economic instability and political turmoil a large segment
of the Black working class in the United States embraced Black Nationalism—especially the core tenets of Black capitalism, political self-determination, and emigration— as viable solutions to achieve universal Black liberation” (pp. 48-49). The extent to which groups like the
PME fostered a global political
vision among the working class is particularly significant, providing a timely reminder that the politics of Black internationalism resonated with everyday working people as well as prominent “race leaders.”
Black Nationalist women also collectively resisted global white supremacy in print. Writing from the US, the Caribbean, and Europe, such figures as Ashwood Garvey, Jacques Garvey, Collins, Amy Bailey, and Una Marson used their journalism and creative writing to set out a political
vision that would unite African people throughout the diaspora. Promoting Pan-African unity as a powerful response to European colonialism, these women once again insisted that the struggle against white supremacy needed to be global in scope. This
is particularly apparent in chapter
5, where Blain outlines how Black women fostered race pride and imaginatively constructed a shared race consciousness across national borders. As Jacques Garvey wrote
in the Universal Ethiopian Students Association’s (UESA) newspaper “The African”, “the ties of blood that bind us transcends all national boundaries. The differences of languages and dialects are being overcome as all of us are learning the language of freedom” (p. 162). In this regard, “Set the World on Fire” joins a growing number of important works that examine the gender politics of Black diaspora
and the role that women played in mobilizing people of African descent in the struggle against global white supremacy.[3]
Finally, it is impossible to read this book and not to be struck by the resourcefulness and pragmatism of Black Nationalist organizers. Blain details how women lobbied for African emigration throughout the 1920s-50s, organizing petitions, writing editorials, delivering speeches, and supporting legislation—most notably, Senator Bilbo’s Greater Liberia
Bill in the late 1930s that asked for federal funding to relocate African Americans to Liberia. Positioning this activism within the longer history of Black emigration initiatives of Henry McNeal Turner and others in the nineteenth century, it is clear that the
BCALA NEWS | Volume 45, Issue 3 | 29 call to return to Africa continued to
offer an appealing alternative to the violent forms of colonial and white supremacist power for people of African descent well into the twentieth century.
The efforts of Gordon, Allen,
Jacques Garvey, and others to keep their African dreams alive further illuminate the pressures, strains, compromises, and negotiations
that are central to understanding
the Black freedom struggle. Indeed, the strategic alliances that Black Nationalist women established with Senator Bilbo and other prominent white supremacists, such as Ernest Sevier Cox, that are explored in the text might initially appear to be reactionary and ultimately misguided. However, as Blain makes clear, Black Nationalist women always viewed these alliances as “a means to an
end” (p. 119). As Gordon privately commented to a fellow PME organizer who had reservations about working with the senator from Mississippi: “When we have to depend on the crocodile to cross the stream ... we must pat him on the back until we
get to the other side” (p. 124). Black Nationalist women were acutely aware of the scale of the task they faced and worked to harness every resource they possibly could to achieve the right to self-determination.
This is not to say that the tensions and shortcomings of Black Nationalist politics are overlooked in the book. Blain is particularly critical of the “civilizationist” outlook of many of the women featured in her study,
who often advanced narratives of African primitivism and assumed