ABSTRACT
The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries were hard times for black people in the United States, characterized by extremely dreadful events-the infamous case of Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), the promulgation of the Jim Crow laws, and the incredible rise of lynching among others-and many blacks feared the repealing of the civil and social achievements gained after the Civil War. The black intelligentsia was certainly aware of such a backlash and fought hard to contrast it, both by preserving the memory of black Americans’ oppression, and by fostering a political and cultural awareness in black people’s minds. In their commitment to put an end to the discriminations, however, some African American thinkers began to conceive the return to Africa as the only possible solution to the oppression of their people. In the late 1910s-early 1920s, the clash between “integrationists” and “separatists” culminated in the famous ideological dispute of two great African American thinkers, Marcus Garvey-leader of the separatists and advocate of the back-toAfrica movement-and W.E.B. Du Bois, the integrationist philosopher and a believer in the cooperation between blacks and whites in the struggle for civil rights.
