UNIVERSAL NEGRO IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION AND AFRICAN COMMUNITIES LEAGUE
(UNIA-ACL), a Black nationalist, Pan-African organization founded on July 14, 1914, by visionary Black leader Marcus Garvey. The UNIA-ACL exerted a powerful influence around the globe and in particular in American cities throughout the northeast, operating hundreds, if not thousands, of branches in at least thirty-eight states and forty countries by the early 1920s. The UNIA-ACL strongly appealed to poor Black populations, despite its denouncement by prominent Black leaders and organizations, including W.E.B Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At its height, it was said by Garvey to have membership in the millions. The UNIA’s branches, called “Liberty Halls,” were meeting places for fraternal and social programs including for education and training, nutrition and healthcare, housing, and music and the literary arts—the latter led by the acclaimed dramatist, Henrietta Vinton Davis, whom Garvey called “the greatest woman of the Negro race today.”
Its counterpart, the African Communities League (ACL), formed the organization’s commercial wing, intended to link Black communities throughout the diaspora to Africa. It included various Black-owned enterprises and companies such as the Negro Factories Corporation, the Negro World newspaper, the international Black Star Line of steamships, and the management of the Liberty Halls. In addition, the UNIA-ACL helped establish many small Black-owned restaurants, grocery stores, and manufacturing companies in poor communities. Other auxiliary components included a uniformed paramilitary branch called the United African Legion, a women’s counterpart called the Universal Motor Corps, a Juvenile Division, the Black Cross Nurses (established to teach health), and the Black Eagle Flying Corps, which trained pilots. In 1920, the first UNIA International Convention was held over the course of the month of August, drawing thousands of delegates from more than twenty countries. It was a well-publicized celebration that opened at Madison Square Garden and included, among other events, a huge UNIA parade through Harlem, the adoption of the UNIA Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World—one of the most comprehensive and earliest human rights documents in history—and the launching of the UNIA Liberia program which stressed the “Back to Africa” concept and Black self-sufficiency.