A protean ideology, black nationalism considers blacks to be a “nation within a nation.” Black equality, it contends, requires collective self-help, solidarity, and struggle.

Nationalists are not monolithic. Over time, they were divided on strategies but united on central tenets: consciousness of African heritage; race pride; and economic, political, social, and cultural autonomy. Their formations were separate, yet many nationalists joined interracial or multiethnic alliances. In antebellum times they embraced abolitionism, Afro-Christian churches, and black emigration to and colonization in Africa. The period 1865–1920 saw them forging all-black institutions and towns, Back-to-Africa and Pan-African movements, and global unity among African peoples. Preaching the same, the Garvey Movement not only enlisted millions of ordinary followers in the 1920s but also created businesses and auxiliaries to foster independence. Garveyism influenced various groups, notably the Nation of Islam (NOI), which built a business economy and espoused “the idea of an autonomous separate state.” Moreover, at home and abroad, black nationalists ca. 1930s–50s fought racism, colonialism, and imperialism.

The 1960s ushered in a nationalist resurgence. Alarmed by violence against southern civil rights workers, Monroe, North Carolina NAACP president Robert Williams and NOI imam Malcolm X called for armed self-defense. They inspired others to create the Revolutionary Action Movement (1963) and advocate Black Power (1966). Black Power nationalists included the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Panthers carried guns in their public demonstrations as well as financed free breakfast programs and other community services. The African Liberation Support Committee (1972) promoted Pan-Africanism and the antiapartheid movement. Black nationalists’ activism, which the FBI and state authorities had widely suppressed by the mid-1970s, continued through organizations like the National Black United Front. Founded in 1980 by delegates from thirty-five states and five countries, it pledged to “struggle for self-determination.” It remains a force on issues such as police brutality, Afrocentric schooling, and reparations for slavery and Jim Crow.