Black New Yorkers' Struggle for Liberation (1918-1945)
Channel: Samuel Finesurrey, Ph.D.
Date: 2021-03-23

The episode first dives in the development of different black strategies for liberation in the late 19th and early 20th century New York City. Dr. Finesurrey discusses two political organizations founded in NYC designed to create equity between the races in very different ways. The NAACP began in the Henry Street Settlement of the Lower East Side by Black and White activists led by W.E.B. Du Bois. The organization sought for Black Americans all the rights and privileges enjoyed by White Americans. By contrast, Marcus Garvey's UNIA, based in Harlem, sought not to be integrated as equals into American life, but instead worked to gain black autonomy so they controlled their communities.

Dr. Finesurrey shows how New York generally, and Harlem specifically, became a center of black culture and organizing. Harlem giants  Zora Neale Hurston, Father Divine, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Paul Robeson are examined in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II. The episode explores how the betrayal of Ethiopia by the League of Nation galvanized Harlem's solidarity with the people of that nation. 

Finally, Finesurrey traces the political strategies developed between 1918 and 1945 that would be employed in the struggle fo black liberation. The tactics of civil disobedience and boycotting that made the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s successful was first tested in Harlem decades earlier. Further, the background and character of the Harlem uprisings of 1935 and 1943 are excavated as insurrections against racist conditions within a larger conversation about Jim Crow on 125th street and tension between immigrant and black communities.