An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Similar to other Progressive Era organizations, the UNIA held large
conventions in order to showcase its brand for the purpose of attracting new
members. On August 13, 1920, at Liberty Hall in New York City, the UNIA
members met to discuss how they might move forward in getting the rest of
the world to respect African peoples, wherever they may be. At this
meeting, the UNIA revealed the “Declaration of the Rights of Negro
Peoples of the World,” which served as “the Principles of the Universal
Negro Improvement Association.”
The declaration consisted of twelve complaints against European racism,
followed by fifty-four declarations of rights. The preamble read, “Be It
Resolved, that the Negro people of the world, through their chosen
representatives assembled in Liberty Hall . . . protest against the wrongs and
injustices they are suffering at the hands of their white brethren, and state
what they deem their fair and just rights, as well as the treatment they
propose to demand of all men in the future.” 19 The preamble shares
similarities with the discourses of other colonized and oppressed peoples—
during a period that historian Erez Manela calls the “Wilsonian moment.”
In The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International
Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007), Manela argues that colonized
people in China, Egypt, India, and Korea used the rhetoric propagated by
US president Woodrow Wilson during his Fourteen Point Plan, to create
their own ideas of self-determination that undergirded their anticolonial
struggle. 20 Manela further argues that the Wilsonian Moment “launched the
transformation of norms and standards of international relations that
established the self-determining nation-state as the only legitimate political
form throughout the globe, as colonized and marginalized peoples
demanded and eventually attained recognition as sovereign, independent
actors.” 21
While it is not known whether or not the Garveys and the UNIA were
directly influenced by the words of Wilson—though number forty-five of
their declaration claimed that African peoples should declare the “League
of Nations null and void”—it is no doubt that their fundamental idea of
nationhood and self-determination developed as a part of a broader network
of Black and Indigenous peoples imagining themselves free of oppression,
both now and forever. Appearing at the top of their complaint was that
antiblackness was prescient for African peoples everywhere in the world:
“Nowhere in the world, with few exceptions, are black men accorded equal