ABSTRACT
Historian Rayford W. Logan memorably termed the period from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the World War I era "the nadir" of American race relations. This was the era when racial segregation and black disenfranchisement was enforced by agencies of power ranging from courthouse square bullies to the United States Supreme Court. One should not forget however, that the decade of the Renaissance is also the era of the largest African American mass organization in history, Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) which was, in fact, also an international anticolonial political movement of great significance. Pound and his circle reacted to the shock of a newly electric and motorized century by apprehensively attempting to assess whether it was still tethered to what has been termed "our Graeco-Hebraic and Christian heritage". European nations, conceived as a half-dozen competing empires had succeeded in divvying up the rest of the planet as colonial territories.
