Anthem

Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora

Shana L. Redmond

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814760277
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

“An extraordinary, innovative, and generative book.” – George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

1
From Race to Nation

“Ethiopia” and Pan-African Pageantry in the UNIA

[T]o organize Negroes we have got to demonstrate; you cannot tell them anything; you have got to show them; and that is why we have got to spend seven years making noise.

—Marcus Garvey

It was the thirteenth of August 1920, nearly two weeks into the month-long International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World held in Harlem, New York. The stage was emblazoned with the colors of red, black, and green, and the two-thousand-member audience sat in eager anticipation of their entrance. On that day the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) announced its human rights platform for the protections of the Black race. Titled the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, the manifesto was designed to broadcast the formation of and agenda for 400 million Negroes worldwide and was, on this day, given a rigorous and vibrant rendering by the newly appointed provisional president of Africa, Marcus Garvey. As the oratory closed, his breath hanging from the final line of the Declaration of Rights (“These rights we believe to be justly ours . . .”), the audience took its cue and boldly affirmed its solidarity when it “sprang to its feet and sang most fervently the new anthem of the association, ‘Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers.’”¹ This recital was their moment of exultation and collective advance, signaling the introductory chapter of their ascent into the world corps of nations.

The anthem, “Ethiopia (Thou Land of Our Fathers),” in performance was the evidence of citizenship on the lips of UNIA members. Like the Declaration of Rights, it was a defining text of the organization that ushered its performers into complex conversations and practices of race and nation, thereby becoming a centrifugal element and catalyst for a plethora of politico-cultural activities and symbols used to unite the “scattered of Africa.” Culture was developed and mobilized within the organization by a cast of religious leaders, organizers, and musicians—including, notably, the anthem’s co-composer and UNIA musical director Arnold Ford—as a strategy to build identification and solidarity among and between Afro-diasporic communities. This previously unknown combination of racial politics and performance made the UNIA the most adroit race organization of the immediate post–World War I order.

The UNIA practiced what performance scholar Honor Ford-Smith terms an “ecology of cultural production,” which provided Black men and women the space to develop, distribute, and control their own representations. This process, “combined with cultural critique and audience education,” made up a matrix of arts and performance whose didactic purposes propelled the organization forward.² A crucial centerpiece to this cultural project was the UNIA anthem, “Ethiopia (Thou Land of Our Fathers),” a text that launched the impressive platform of the organization even as its composition and performances around the world exposed the dangers of its gendered rhetoric. With this song serving as a mouthpiece for the organization, international divisions flourished from Canada to Australia, but nowhere more densely than in Cuba. As Black bodies traveled the globe following World War I, so too did the UNIA, and its performances forever altered the expectations, ambitions, and projects of the African descended and their protest organizations.

Black August: Building and Defying Convention(s)

By the time of the August 1920 convention the UNIA was more than six years old. Founded in Jamaica in 1914 by printer and race man Marcus Mosiah Garvey and his soon-to-be wife, Amy Ashwood, the UNIA taught thrift, dedication, and simple ambition to its followers.³ This early stage of the organization was characterized by a resistance to political participation—a position deeply influenced by Garvey’s relationship to the teachings of Black American leader Booker T. Washington.⁴ A 1916 trip to the United States, in which he witnessed the nation’s unique brand of Jim Crow, changed Garvey’s perspective on politics and impressed upon him the necessity of a strong race program based in the political desires of Afro-diasporic communities. As the message and spectacle of the 1920 convention demonstrates, both Garvey and the organization quickly adjusted their political philosophies in order to respond to the growing racial antagonisms within the United States.

The UNIA’s new Black world was launched from Liberty Hall. Dedicated on July 27, 1919, Liberty Hall was a nod to the building of the same name in Dublin, Ireland, which was a recognized site of rebellion during the Irish War of Independence.⁵ The shared name of the two locations highlighted the organization’s global perspective and encouraged visitors and members alike to imagine the UNIA struggle as an extension of existent nationalist movements. Liberty Hall therefore beckoned individuals invested, or at least interested, in a mobilization-centered approach to Black activism and served as a welcome site for visitors and UNIA members from around the world. The hall’s location in Harlem, the “Black Mecca,” offered additional incentives to the African descended. It was not only a densely populated Black section of the city, where Black men and women developed and enjoyed relatively safe public spaces, but also the hub of Black culture and protest, housing the offices of the UNIA and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and forming the landscape for the labor militancy of A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen’s socialist Messenger magazine. The Harlem Renaissance writers, musicians, and performers of the 1920s set a brilliant stage for the upcoming events of the blooming UNIA.

While Garvey harbored a “long-held belief in the unification of art and propaganda as the keenest instrument of progress,” his vision was not universally held.⁶ Debates within the infant UNIA hinged on questions of the relationship between performance and politics. As historian Colin Grant notes, “[E]ven before the fundamental building blocks were put in place, the ideological stress lines were beginning to show” between Garvey and his colleagues and culture was a sticking point that reflected the tensions of both performance and nation within the organization. The collective questioned, for example, “if meetings were to culminate in rousing renditions of the national anthem, should it be ‘God Save the King’ or ‘The Star Spangled Banner’?”⁷ By the time of the Liberty Hall purchase, the fault lines among the UNIA organizers appeared to be resolved. The organization had incorporated, and a decision on its sound had been reached.

The answer was the anthem “Ethiopia.” Composed in 1918 by Benjamin E. Burrell (coauthor of the lyrics) and Arnold J. Ford (lyrics coauthor and composer), the song was informed by their profound sense of obligation to the furtherance of a Black nation. Both men were, at the time of composition, members of the UNIA-NY and used the organization’s militaristic rhetoric to accomplish their goal of providing the Black nation with its musical accompaniment. The lyrics of “Ethiopia” demonstrate the efforts made by the two men to mobilize their singing audience:

Ethiopia, thou land of our fathers,
Thou land where the gods loved to be,
As storm cloud at night suddenly gathers
Our armies come rushing to thee.
We must in the fight be victorious
When swords are thrust outward to glean;
For us will the vict’ry be glorious
When led by the red, black and green.

CHORUS

Advance, advance to victory,
Let Africa be free;
Advance to meet the foe
With the might
Of the red, the black and the green.

With this rallying text, the UNIA sounded its position on Western colonialism in Africa and announced its impending project of reclamation. The text draws on heavily militaristic prose in order to manufacture a sense of power and emotional connection to the cause in the face of a dismal political reality and extended battle ahead. The early decades of the twentieth century continued the radical post-Reconstruction exclusion of Black political participation in the United States; from 1901 to 1929, there were no Black elected officials in the Senate or House of Representatives and local Black officials were scarce in communities north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Beyond the United States, the Black world lived and struggled under distinct and dispersed regimes of colonial domination. In the face of this radical exclusion, Black men and women played an exponentially larger role within their communities and used those spaces to not only investigate and respond to contemporary issues but also imagine, again and again, alternatives to them. “Ethiopia” reflects this future vision. The claim that “for us will the vict’ry be glorious” assumes success in an undetermined future—a utopia that is visible only because of Black people’s remembrance and knowledge of an idyllic past condition, located in Ethiopia, the “land where the Gods loved to be.” Landscapes of milk and honey were long since gone for Black subjects; “Ethiopia” predicted that the Black future of possibility could be made manifest only in the moment of a violent reversal of contemporary power relations: the Black man reclaiming his rightful place as leader of Africa. This power struggle was, as the exclusively male imagery attests to, incomplete; as I will soon discuss, the gender hierarchies that structured power on a global scale also abound within “Ethiopia.” Although the UNIA was both revolutionary and progressive, it often remained, like so many of its contemporaries, stubbornly antiquated in its approach to gender and the role of women within its ranks. Women are not explicitly acknowledged in the past of “Ethiopia” or its future vision, thereby falling into the rhetorical and temporal gap of the anthem even as the Black nation’s heterogeneity is put on display.

The internationalism of “Ethiopia” echoed the bustle of the UNIA, which by 1918 developed a language of diaspora to identify the organization’s work and character through its global political aims and diverse membership. The New York branch alone boasted members from Caribbean, African, and Central American nations, and the myriad cultural tropes within “Ethiopia” mirrored that diversity. Drawn from the mystic and religious imagery of Psalms 68:31, the anthem privileges the Egyptian princes whose deliverance will allow “Ethiopia [to] soon stretch out her hands to God.”⁸ Through this vision, “Ethiopia” brought to the modern UNIA membership a resonant, biblical perspective on liberation and redemption from the cradle of civilization. This is the history that ordained Black victory and, in the hands of the UNIA, would usher the Black nation into its formative position as global redeemer. The text enforces its use as a nationalist tract by incorporating a call to the race (“Advance, advance”), a common goal (“Let Africa be free”), and a unifying symbol (“the red, the black and the green” of the UNIA flag). The spiritual core of the race in Ethiopia and the symbols of Africa’s reclamation—the flag, the armies—project the “we” that the UNIA hoped would soon be realized.

The song’s music adds an important layer of meaning to an already compelling and complicated text. The composer was Arnold J. Ford, the man responsible for many of the fantastic productions of the UNIA. Born in Barbados, Ford was a prominent fixture within the culture industry of the organization. A leader within New York City’s Black Jewish circles, former military man, and trained musician, he offered many talents to the organization. Beyond his travels and experiences, his diasporic perspective is evident in his choice of a militant Jamaican missionary tune as the frame for the Exodus narrative within “Ethiopia.”⁹ Written in B-flat major, the anthem closely follows the notation and harmonic progressions of the Western tradition. Four-part harmony opens the piece with a short quarter measure in common time quickly leading the voices to a IV chord half note on “fathers” in measure 3. All four voices proceed together in harmony until a punctuated accompaniment entrance in measure 17 announces the gender break in measure 18. The men introduce the line, “Advance, Advance to Victory,” while the women join in measure 19. This musical notation has social consequence as the chorus sings men into positions of leadership within the nationalist project while the women follow. This compositional element was not the only signal of gender stratification within the anthem or the larger UNIA. The gender break within the music, however, was a consistently replayed device of difference within a composition that eventually returns to four-part singing with “Let Africa be free,” a communal exclamation highlighting the necessity of a combined effort in the rescue of Africa from the hands of oppressors.

Beyond its composition, it was the instructional elements and standardization of its performance across the organization that highlighted the hierarchies within the UNIA. The groundwork for these practices was laid at the International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. The 1920 event was described as opening “in a blaze of glory,” and music was its spark.¹⁰ The variety of music used by the UNIA was a formal process regulated by leaders in the organization and the inaugural convention was the place where the rules and regulations were devised and implemented. Delegates from twenty-five countries plus a participatory audience large enough to necessitate the use of Madison Square Garden discussed and debated the status and future of Black subjects globally, with a particular focus placed on Africa. From this gathering emanated the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. Composed of twelve complaints and fifty-four demands and proclamations, the declaration attempted to outline the common condition of Negroes internationally, document the opinions of the convention participants, and set forth a platform for the actors of the movement with the express purpose being to “state what [the Negro race] deem their fair and just rights, as well as the treatment they propose to demand of all men in the future.”¹¹

The document is compelling for its comprehensiveness and multiple purposes. Its use as a representational record for the race as well as a rubric for the members of the UNIA ensured that the Declaration of Rights had a depth that was absent in other of the documents produced by the organization’s contemporaries. The UNIA argued that the entitlements of the Black race exceeded the jurisdiction of any nation and were therefore a matter of human rights. Included within its articulation of rights is the privilege of expression. The organization recognized the importance of culture in advancing its agenda and used music, in particular, to promulgate the UNIA and its claims to nationhood; declaration 40 resolves that “the anthem, ‘Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers’, etc., shall be the anthem of the Negro race.”¹² Originally written and adopted in the nascent stages of the U.S.-based UNIA, “Ethiopia” held a prominent position in the local events and international advances of the organization. Section 58 of the UNIA Constitution and Book of Laws states that “[t]he Anthem of the Association shall be played or sung at all public meetings or functions or whenever appropriate at the opening or closing of such meetings or both.”¹³ In tandem, the declaration and constitution wrote “Ethiopia” into the very structure of the nation and UNIA—two distinct bodies made contiguous through the anthem. As ethnomusicologist J. Martin Daughtry argues, “[T]he enforced ritual dimension of anthems elevates them above the level of mere propaganda.”¹⁴ The UNIA, in fact, argued that the performance of the anthem was a necessary part of political and civic participation within the Black nation; it reinforced doctrine and cohered the membership/citizenry. If, as other scholars have suggested, the UNIA was ordered by a Black masculinist performance of storytelling and ambition, then its anthem was the most consistent element of its organization.¹⁵ The demand to sing drew individuals into the function of the nation and organization by uniting them in common cause politically and musically, as they used their harmonies as a practice that could liberate them. In this respect, the formal adoption and ritualization of “Ethiopia” signaled its role as a method to build citizens of both the UNIA and the Black nation.

The composition and performance of “Ethiopia” model the types of anxieties that exist within nationalist constructions, namely anthems. These songs are intended as public expressions of unity, an ambitious concept and practice under anyone’s direction that inevitably falls short of its goal. “Ethiopia” exposes these hazards and imperfections at the previously mentioned gender break in measure 18. The lead that the men take in the singing of the anthem is structural: it is written into the composition and performa...