# Ethiopianism The nineteenth- and twentieth-century political-religious tradition that made "Ethiopia" a name for Black self-determination across the Atlantic world — in Black church founding, in abolitionist rhetoric, in South African mission secessions, in Garveyism, and eventually in [[Rastafari]]. Its textual anchor is a single verse. > [!quote] Psalm 68:31 (KJV) > Princes shall come out of Egypt; **Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.** Graham Duncan's formulation is the standard one: Ethiopianism "became a generic term to describe a whole range of the black man's efforts to improve his religious, educational, and political status in society," and was "based on the text of Psalm 68:31." The verse mattered because it put an African polity in scripture as a subject rather than an object — a future in which Africans govern themselves, licensed by the same book being used to justify their enslavement. ## Where it shows up **In the naming of Black institutions.** The **Abyssinian Baptist Church** in New York, founded in **1808** by African-American members and Ethiopian sea merchants who walked out of the segregated First Baptist Church, is the archetype. Richard Allen's **African Methodist Episcopal Church** (1816, Philadelphia) belongs to the same current. **In South Africa.** **Mangena Maake Mokone** seceded from the Wesleyan Methodists in **November 1892** over segregated district meetings and unequal pay, founding the **Ethiopian Church** with Psalm 68:31 as its watchword. Through the correspondence of **Charlotte Manye**, then studying in the United States, the Ethiopians made contact with the AME and **merged with it in 1896**; **Bishop Henry McNeal Turner** visited in 1898 and ordained ministers. "Ethiopianism" became the colonial state's name for African-led independent churches generally, and was treated as sedition. **In Garveyism.** [[Marcus Garvey]]'s UNIA anthem is **"Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers"**, written into the organisation's constitution: *"Ethiopia, thou land of our fathers, thou land where the gods loved to be."* Sources date it to 1918 or 1920. ## The material that made the symbol usable Two facts did the work. Ethiopia was one of the very few African polities never incorporated into a European empire, and at [[Battle of Adwa]] in 1896 it had beaten one in the field. Both need qualification: Ethiopia was **occupied by Italy from 1936 to 1941**, so "never colonised" is a claim about the Scramble's settlement rather than an unbroken fact, and the diaspora symbolism of Adwa consolidated more slowly than the legend suggests. ## 1935: the symbol becomes a movement Italy's invasion converted an inheritance into the first mass African-American mobilisation over a foreign-policy question. Named organisations include the **Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia**, **Friends of Ethiopia** (Willis N. Huggins), the **Medical Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia**, **United Aid for Ethiopia**, and — founded **25 August 1937** by Selassie's cousin and physician Malaku Bayen on the Emperor's own advice — the **Ethiopian World Federation**. The Black press carried it continuously: the Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Atlanta Daily World. Tactics: mass rallies (a Harlem march of 20,000 on 10 August 1935 by the scholarly count; the Communist press claimed 100,000 on 3 August), a day of prayer observed by over **3,000 congregations** on 18 August 1935, boycotts of Italian merchants in Harlem and Chicago, and street fighting with Italian-Americans on **4 October 1935**, the day after the invasion, requiring around 1,000 additional police in Brooklyn and Harlem. Chicago aviator **John C. Robinson**, "the Brown Condor," commanded the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force and later helped found Ethiopian Airlines. > [!warning] Two things this cluster gets wrong constantly > The **Harlem riot of 19 March 1935 was not about Ethiopia** — it was triggered by a rumour that a teenager had been beaten at a Kress store, and its causes were unemployment, policing and hiring discrimination. Conflating it with the October clashes is a common and consequential error. Separately: **volunteer numbers were claims, not counts.** Samuel Daniels reported 17,500 signed volunteers by July 1935; essentially none reached Ethiopia, for want of transport money and because US neutrality law criminalised the enlistment. > [!important] ⭐ What actually got raised > The **enthusiasm vastly exceeded the money.** United Aid for Ethiopia set a $5,000 goal; the Committee for Ethiopia collected **$291.28** in total; American Aid for Ethiopia had raised $2,000 by the end of 1935 and finished the war with a **$94.90 deficit**. Nine tons of medical supplies did ship in December 1935. A mobilisation can be historically decisive and financially negligible at the same time — and the thing it changed was not the war. ## Why it matters here Brenda Gayle Plummer's *Rising Wind* takes **1935 as its starting point** for modern Black American engagement with US foreign affairs. Erhagbe and Ifidon call it "the first major practical demonstration in the international arena" of diaspora solidarity. Richard Romines argues the 1935–36 repertoire — mass rallies, church mobilisation, boycotts, diplomatic appeals — supplied tools later used by the [[Civil Rights Movement]]. The line from a psalm to a picket line to a bus boycott is unusually traceable, which is why this page exists in a knowledge base otherwise concerned with the right: **it is the clearest available demonstration that a political symbol can be built out of a place its builders have never seen, and still organise real people into real institutions.** ## See also [[Ethiopian History Hub]] · [[Rastafari]] · [[Haile Selassie]] · [[Battle of Adwa]] · [[Oriental Orthodoxy]] · [[Civil Rights Movement]]