They also come out when black people need a symbol of unity that stands outside the notion of Americanness. These days, Pan-African flags fly on some black owned businesses, or in neighborhoods in cities like Philadelphia, where Marcus Garvey had a big historical influence. Ghana, Libya, Malawi, Kenya and many other African countries adopted the red, black and green - often with the addition of gold, which sometimes symbolizes mineral wealth. Robert Hill says that the Pan-African flag went on to become the template for flags all over Africa as they gained independence. ![]() Fred Helf composed a popular song called " Every Race Has a Flag But the Coon."Ĭode Switch Encore: "You're A Grand Old Flag" Some years earlier, white minstrel singers were expressing the importance of flags as a matter of racial pride: In 1900, Will A. "Everybody immediately seeing that flag would recognize that this is a manifestation of black aspirations, black resistance to oppression." Garvey and the UNIA framed the need for a flag in a political context, Hill explains. ![]() And green was a symbol of growth and the natural fertility of Africa. Red stood for blood - both the blood shed by Africans who died in their fight for liberation, and the shared blood of the African people. The Pan-African flag's colors each had symbolic meaning. And it was the Irish struggle for independence that Hill says "unofficially gave Garvey a lot of the political vocabulary of his movement." Hill says that Garvey patterned his thinking on other nationalist movements at that time - the Jewish Zionist movement, the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the fight against imperialism in China. At that time, the goal of Garvey's movement was to establish a political home for black people in Africa.
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