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| * Afro-American flags at Flags of the World | * at Flags of the World | ||
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Revision as of 16:49, 31 March 2006
The red, black and green flag was created by the members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) at their convention held in Madison Square Garden on August 13, 1920.
The UNIA flag is now more often known as the Marcus Garvey flag, the Black Liberation flag, the International African flag, and perhaps most commonly, the Pan-African flag. Although other designs are also referred to as the International African flag or the Pan-African flag, the descending stripes of red, black, and green in created by UNIA are the design most often referred to this way.
The three colors represent:
- red: the blood that unites all people of African ancestry, and shed for liberation;
- black: black people whose existence as a nation, though not a nation-state, is marked by the existence of the flag; and
- green: the abundant natural wealth of Africa.
The flag was created in 1920 by Marcus Garvey and the members of the UNIA in response to a racist song written in 1900 entitled The Only Race without a Flag is the Coon; the song was written by Will A. Heelan and J. Fred Helf and popular in the U.S. and Britain.
The flag later became a black nationalist symbol for the liberation of African people everywhere.
A 1912 report appearing in the Africa Times and Orient Review (for which Marcus Garvey worked) documented the far-reaching consequences of this song. In 1921 Garvey stated:
Show me the race or the nation without a flag, and I will show you a race of people without any pride. Aye! In song and mimicry they have said, "Every race has a flag but the coon." How true! Aye! But that was said of us four years ago. They can't say it now....
Similar flags
The African National Congress flag is three horizontal stripes, descending black, green, and dark yellow (gold).
The Rasta flag is three horizontal stripes,descending green, yellow, and red. It is derived from the Ethiopian flag.
The flag of Ethiopia is three horizontal stripes, descending green, yellow, red, with a light blue disk in the center blazoned with a yellow pentagram with yellow single rays emanating from the angles of the pentagram and terminating before the edge of the disk. It is the oldest national flag in Africa, and the colors of its three horizontal bands are sometime referred to as the Pan-African colors.
Internal links
External links
- The UNIA-ACL official website
- "Every Race Has a Flag But the 'Coon.":
- Sheet music from a Johns Hopkins University website
- Sheet music from the American Memory website of the Library of Congress
- Flags of the Worldnon-commercial vexillology site
- Afro-American flags at Flags of the World