African Americans In The Twentieth Century: Video Analysis

This video portrays the struggles African Americans encountered with segregation between blacks and whites during the Great Migration and Jim Crow era in the Twentieth Century. Henry Louis Gates Jr. talks about the Great Migration, which was the movement of 6 million Africans to the North, Midwest, and West. He also introduces us to leaders Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey who wanted equality with the blacks. Booker T. Washington argues that the political rights for the African Americans could only be won through economic strength and self-sufficiency. W.E.B Du Bois encouraged talented artists to leave the south. Marcus Garvey tried to help the African Americans go back to Africa because he believed it was beneficial to …show more content…
Garvey emerges at a time Africans are coming back for more determining to fight. Henry Louis Gates Jr. shows us how Garvey wanted unity for black people throughout the world. He was a fan and admirer of Booker T. Washington and thinks that the idea of pulling yourself up is the way to go. Marcus Garvey believed in the back to Africa movement and created a shipping company called Black Star Line, which transported followers who wanted to go back to Africa. In the Autobiography of Malcolm X in the book, Black Voices An Anthology of African-American Literature by Abraham Chapman, “He believed, as did, Marcus Garvey, that freedom independence and self-respect could never be achieved by the Negro in America, and that therefore the Negro should leave America to the white man and return to his African land of origin (Chapman 334).” Although Garvey did not own the ship and was convicted of fraud then President Calvin Coolidge commuted his jail sentence under one condition that he goes back to Jamaica his home country. Marcus Garvey belief was no matter where you are from Jamaica or Brazil we are all one