No Trouble from the Women: Black Women, the UNIA and a Global Movement
An online lecture examining the overlooked roles of Black women in Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and Pan-African organizing.
Why we picked this
The UNIA was one of the largest Black organizing movements in history, but the women who built its infrastructure have been written out of most accounts — this lecture puts them back in.
Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association mobilized millions across the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa in the 1920s and ’30s, but standard histories center Garvey himself while treating the women who organized, fundraised, and ran local divisions as background figures. This online lecture corrects that imbalance.
The talk examines how Black women shaped the UNIA’s organizational structure, its community programs, and its Pan-African vision — often while navigating gendered expectations within the movement itself. The title, drawn from a dismissive remark in the historical record, becomes an ironic frame for revealing just how much “trouble” these women actually made.
Free and virtual.