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Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations - 2. Nationalist Movements
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8 14 An American Dilemma
This sounds much more like the wishful dreaming of a kindly conservative
Southern white man than an expression of thoughts and desires of Anier-
ican Negroes. In fact, I have nowhere seen any traces of this organization
in the Negro communities I have visited. When the President found it
impracticable to act favorably upon the petition, the memorialists turned to
the General Assembly of Virginia, since Virginia had taken the initiative in
acquiring the territory which is now Liberia. This legislative body resolved
to recommend the proposal.®
The National Union for Peofle of African Descent is another paper
organization of* American Negroes. It is extremely chauvinistic in the
Garvey tradition. The aim of the organization is to create a sort of extra-
territorial independence for the Negro people:
... to obtain a nation, a flag, an army and navy exclusively of the black people, and
through these media to ultimately throw off the yoke of white domination,’ white cul-
ture, and white mores.*^
It has been helped by Negro unrest but does not seem to have made much
headway.
The National Movement for the Establishment of the Forty-Ninth
State wants to establish a territorial state in some less populated part of
America:
. , . not an isolated uncivilized hostile colony around which to build a figurative wall
of China shutting out the possibilities of travel and growth from within and without;
not a separate nation, but an interdependent commonwealth like any other of the
present 48 states.®
In the Garvey tradition, this movement holds a fatalistic and pessimistic
view of the Negroes’ future in white America. White people do not consider
giving Negroes justice and, therefore, Negroes will not get any unless they
get off by themselves. Like all other organizations of this type—except the
Garvey movement itself—it has never amounted to much.
During the present war crisis there have been rumors about various
‘‘fifth column” groups among American Negroes. For several years there
have been attempts to disseminate Japanese propaganda to Negroes, but
with minor success. Individual Negroes of the type who have been active
in the small groups which are the remnants of the Garvey movement have
given response, but their influence on Negro opinion is small. To our
knowledge, only a few dozen Negroes have been arrested for advocating
the cause of Japan.*^ There is undoubtedly a small group of Negroes who
are in some degree friendly to Japan. A larger number take a vicarious
satisfaction in imagining a Japanese (or German) invasion of the Southern
* In addition, some members of the Islamic cults have been arrested for failing to
register for the draft. (PM [September 15, 1942 and September 22, 1942].) Two of the
persons attempting to win Negroes to the cause of Japan were white. One was a follower
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