The UNIA’s separatist “Back to Africa” Movement’s controversy lay mainly in the sheer power Marcus Garvey seemed to wield, as evidenced by their rapidly-increasing membership and lavish parades through Harlem. In contrast to pan Africans like WEB Du Bois and Ida Hunt, who argued that the strength of African peoples across the world lay in cooperation with European and American power structures, Garvey posited that the Europeans and Americans had spent so much time enslaving then exploiting African peoples that they couldn’t be trusted.
