Black nationalism originated in late-eighteenth century emigration movements rather than with Garvey.

Evidence

Theodore Draper (The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism, Seeker and Warburg, London, 1971) was one of the first post-war historians to “discover” a nationalist tradition-he traces the beginnings of Black nationalism to the “migrationism” or “emigrationism” (p. 4) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries-his work was a bit polemical. Positing the existence of two opposing manifestations of Black nationalism: “emigrationism” and “internal statism,” Draper argues that Black nationalism was always of limited significance among Blacks. The care with which his investigation was conducted is perhaps best seen by reviewing his treatment of the nineteenth-century emigration movement. In general, his analysis suffers from a disorganized emphasis on the opinions and actions of Black freemen and rather questionable “samples” of mass opinion: “The great mass of American Negroes preferred to wage an uphill battle to become part of the nationalism where they were born rather than to take the risk of losing what they had without gaining what they were promised” (p. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1696

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Black nationalist tradition’s origin and its two-fold ‘emigrationism vs. internal statism’ schema.
• XREF: Feeds directly into the reader’s goal of locating the Black radical tradition’s origins — connects to Robinson’s historiographical grounding throughout Black Marxism.