Crisis and Achievement

French West Africa (Afrique occidentale française)

French West Africa came into being in 1895 when France decided to consolidate its African holdings. Initially, French West Africa was a temporary combination of Senegal, French Guinea (now Guinea), French

Sudan (now Mali), and Côte d'Ivoire. In 1904 it became permanent, with territories including Dahomey (now Benin), French Guinea, French Sudan, Côte d'Ivoire, Mauretania, Niger, Senegal, and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso).

The federation was ruled by a governor-general first from Saint-Louis and then, after 1902, from Dakar, both in Senegal. The federation supported Vichy France during World War II before accepting the Free French in November 1942.

The federation occupied an area of 4,689,000 square kilometers, most of which was desert or semidesert in the interior of Niger, Sudan, and Mauretania. One of the largest colonial possessions in Africa, the federation reached from westernmost Africa at Cape Verde to deep within the Sahara. Population at its creation was over 10 million. When the federation dissolved, its population was about 25 million.

West Africa was not a primitive area when the Europeans arrived. Precolonial empires and states included Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Hausa. The precolonial era was also a time when Islam expanded into West Africa. The Europeans entered and disrupted a highly complex society.

The slave trade in West Africa expanded greatly beginning in the late 16th century and continued to grow into the mid-19th century. By the 18th century the slave trade was an important ingredient in the European interest in Africa, especially for providing slaves to New World plantation economies. The increasing New World demand coincided with Islamic jihads and rivalries between the precolonial states.

The capture and transfer of Africans into slavery became the dominant commerce for the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the British and French. The British, Dutch, and Portuguese controlled the major slave ports between Ghana and the Cameroons. Africans also facilitated the slave trade.

The French early on regarded their African possessions as overseas provinces. The early efforts to colonize were unsuccessful, though, and in the mid-19th century interest shifted from colonization to mercantile prospects. Trade with the savanna of the interior coincided with the race for Africa of the late 19th century.

The Berlin Act of 1885 formalized the partition of Africa, including West Africa. By 1890 the French had signed treaties with African leaders that in theory authorized their annexation of much of western Sudan. Military superiority allowed the French to acquire large territories, most of it desert or otherwise worthless. The French did not turn to commercial development until early in the 20th century.

In the early 1890s France conquered Dahomey, made Côte d'Ivoire a formal colony, and obtained territory in Upper Volta. French Africa ran from Algeria to the Gulf of Guinea.

The administrative unit known as French West Africa included the coastal colonies— Senegal, French Guinea, and Côte d'Ivoire—as well as the French Sudan, the large interior territory that included present-day Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Dahomey became part of French West Africa in 1899. French Sudan became Haut Senegal-Niger in 1904.

Mauretania became a protectorate in 1905. Upper Volta separated from Haut Sénégal–Niger in 1919, and the remaining Haut Sénégal–Niger became French Sudan once more. Mauretania became a colony and part of French West Africa in 1920. Niger separated from French Sudan in 1922.

Senegal was the only part of French West Africa with even token assimilation, and participation by Africans in French affairs was confined to Saint-Louis. Elsewhere in French West Africa, inhabitants were subjects, not citizens. The European French were increasingly skeptical about the ability of the Africans to become "suitable" French citizens.

The assimilationist philosophy of the original exploration was gone by the time of the French West African Federation in 1895. Rather than allow local authority, the French established direct rule in the form of a governor-general taking his orders directly from the minister of colonies and the government in Paris.

The governor-general relayed orders and financing to his lieutenant governors in the territories. Senegal had representative government as a residue of the original assimilationist impulse—citizens could represent the Senegalese in France.

The French effort to make the colony pay its own way led to their pushing the productivity of groundnuts and cotton where suitable. Extraction of valuable resources was also emphasized. Taxes forced the population into the cash economy.

Inhabitants of areas where cash crops were impractical were encouraged to migrate to wage-earning areas. Servitude nearing slavery was tolerated in the interest of profitability. The French did provide at least a small amount of missionary effort as well as minimal educational and health services. The economic benefit accrued to the French only.

After World War I France relaxed its rule somewhat. Occasional revolts as well as a rediscovery of African tradition encouraged the easing of the slavery and aristocratic rule that had characterized the decades from the mid-1890s until the war. Tribal leaders were more respected after France reinstated them.

Initially loyal to Vichy France during World War II, French West Africa shifted to the Allies after the U.S. invasion of North Africa and the occupation of Dakar, Senegal, by the Allies. The Free French under General Charles de Gaulle took control of French West Africa.

When World War II was over, the Europeans were worn out, unwilling politically, and unable economically to resist demands for political reform in colonies that were increasingly an intolerable financial burden.

The Europeans living in Africa were an issue. Also, the colonies provided valuable resources. But the benefits were far from matching the costs. And independence came in the 1960s. France also had an ego at stake in the postwar era. Defeat and occupation were not preconditions for an easy abandonment of the empire.

After World War II France's overseas colonies in Africa became overseas territories. Their inhabitants became eligible for French citizenship. They also received the right to organize political parties and have representation in the French legislature.

When given the choice of complete independence or self-governance as members of the new French Community (France and its former colonies), which was intended for common defense, foreign policy, education, and other common matters, all elected to join the community except French Guinea, which became independent Guinea in October 1958. With the establishment of the French Community, French West Africa was no more.

The autonomous states of French Sudan, Senegal, Upper Volta, and Dahomey united into the Federation of Mali, named for the ancient African Mali Empire, in 1958. Upper Volta and Dahomey withdrew before the federation became operational in January 1960. By August 1960, when Senegal withdrew, the federation was defunct.

Postwar nationalism and the example of the newly independent English colonies, led by Ghana in 1957, produced a strong impulse toward independence in French West Africa. Between August and November 1960, Dahomey, Niger, Upper Volta, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Mali, and Mauretania gained their independence.

Sigmund Freud

Freud's theories had and still have great effects on psychiatry, psychology, and related fields. For many, Freud is the most influential intellectual of his age because his theories provided a completely new interpretation of culture, society, and history.

Freud was born into a Jewish family in Freiberg (today Príbor), Moravia, in the Austrian Empire (now the Czech Republic). His large family had only limited finances but made every effort to foster his intellect, which was apparent from an early age.

In 1873 Freud entered the University of Vienna as a medical student, and in 1881 he received a doctorate. Beginning in 1882, he worked as a clinical assistant at the Central Hospital of Vienna. In 1885 Freud was appointed lecturer of neuropathology.

At this time he also developed an interest in the pharmaceutical benefits of cocaine, which he pursued for several years. Despite some limited successes, the general outcome of this research was disastrous and tarnished Freud's medical reputation for some time.

In late 1885 Freud left Vienna and traveled to Paris to continue his studies under the guidance of the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot's work with patients classified as hysterics confronted Freud with the possibility that some, if not all, mental disorders might be caused by psychological factors rather than by organic diseases.

This insight proved to be a turning point in Freud's career. Having been confronted with the use of hypnosis in therapy, Freud returned to Vienna in February 1886 with the seed of his revolutionary method implanted.

Several months after his return, Freud married the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, Martha Bernays. She was to bear him six children, one of whom, Anna Freud, was later to become a distinguished psychoanalyst in her own right. Freud then turned to a clinical practice in neuropsychology.

Shortly after his marriage Freud entered into a fruitful partnership with his fellow physician Josef Breuer. Their main cowritten work was Studies in Hysteria, published in 1895. This book contains a presentation of Freud's psychoanalytical method of free association.

This pioneering method of psychoanalysis—a term Freud created in 1896—allowed him to arrive at numerous insights. Freud and Breuer discovered that for many of their patients the very act of verbalization of their problems seemed to provide some relief. Such a "talking cure" resulted in an abreaction.

Freud subsequently developed a theory of the human mind and clinical techniques for helping neurotics. The goal of Freudian therapy is to bring to consciousness repressed feelings.

Typically, this is achieved by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to repeat his or her dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is a lack of involvement by the analyst, which is meant to encourage the patient to project emotions onto the analyst.

Through this transference the patient can resolve repressed conflicts. Freud also observed the power of what he called the patient's defenses against any expression of unconscious thoughts and feelings. He looked for a method to overcome such blockages. Freud was the first one to believe that the most insistent source of resisted material was sexual.

Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to modern interpretations of human nature is his conception of the dynamic unconscious. He suggested that we are not entirely aware of what we think and often act for reasons that have little to do with our conscious thoughts.

On the contrary, Freud proposed that there were thoughts occurring below the surface. His basic assumption was that all dreams, even nightmares manifesting apparent anxiety, are the fulfillment of imaginary wishes.

One could also regard dreams to be the disguised expression of wish fulfillments. Many commentators consider The Interpretation of Dreams Freud's masterwork because it provides a hermeneutic for the unmasking of the dream's disguise.

Crucial to the operation of the unconscious is repression. Because of the incompatibility of the unconscious with conscious thoughts, these feelings are normally hidden, forgotten, or unavailable to conscious reflection.

Such thoughts and feelings cannot, Freud argued, be banished from the mind, but they can be banished from consciousness. Freud observed that the process of repression is itself a nonconscious act. He supposed that what people repressed was determined by their unconscious.

Freud sought to explain how the unconscious operates by proposing that it has a particular structure divided into three parts: id, ego, and superego. The unconscious id represents primary process thinking, our primitive need-gratification thoughts. The superego represents our socially induced conscience and counteracts the id with moral and ethical thoughts.

The largely conscious ego stands in between both to balance our primitive needs and our moral beliefs. A healthy ego provides the ability to adapt to reality and interact with the outside world in a way that accommodates both id and superego. Freud was especially concerned with the dynamic relationship between these three parts of the mind.

According to Freud, the defense mechanisms are the method by which the ego can solve the conflicts between the superego and the id. The overuse of defense mechanisms can lead to either anxiety or guilt, which may result in psychological disorders.

In 1905 Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The book established its author as a pioneer in the serious study of sexology. Sexuality, Freud concluded, is the prime mover in a great deal of human activities and behavior.

Freud believed that humans were motivated by two drives, libidinal energy/Eros and the death drive/Thanatos. Freud's description of Eros/libido included all creative, life-producing drives. The death drive represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm or of nonexistence.

According to Freud, children pass through a stage where they fixate on the parent of the opposite sex and think of the same-sexed parent as a rival. Every male child has the desire to sleep with his mother and remove his father, who is the obstacle to the realization of that wish. Turning, as he often did, to evidence from literary and mythical texts, Freud named his theory the Oedipus complex after the Greek tragedy by Sophocles.

Freud expressed highly influential and controversial views on the psychology of women. He was an early champion of both sexual freedom and education for women. Some feminists, however, have argued that Freud's views of women's sexual development set the progress of women back decades.

Believing as Freud did that women are a kind of mutilated male who must learn to accept her deformity (the lack of a penis), he contributed to the vocabulary of misogyny. Terms such as penis envy and castrating discouraged women from entering any field dominated by men.

Psychoanalysis today maintains the same ambivalent relationship with medicine and academia that Freud experienced during his life. His psychological theories are still hotly disputed. Although Freud has been long regarded as a genius, psychiatry and psychology have been recast as scientific disciplines.

Freud examined the rationality to be found even in material regarded as thoroughly irrational and meaningless, such as dreams, verbal slips, neurotic symptoms, and the verbal productions of psychotics. Conversely, he discovered irrationality even in material that is manifestly rational.

Freud introduced a novel discursive technique in the talking cure. Psychoanalysis enables people to mitigate distress through the indirect revelation of unconscious content. The other schools of psychology have produced alternative methods of psychotherapy.

In 1909 Freud, together with Carl Gustav Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, visited the United States and lectured there. Generally, Freud had little tolerance for colleagues who diverged from his psychoanalytic doctrines.

He attempted to expel those who disagreed with the movement or even refused to accept certain aspects of his theory that he considered central. The most widely noted schisms occurred with Adler in 1911 and Jung in 1913. These clashes were followed by later breaks with Ferenczi and Wilhelm Reich in the 1920s.

Freud lived and worked in Vienna for nearly 78 years, deeply inspired by the town's intellectual atmosphere. Following Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria in March 1938, Freud fled Austria with his family.

On June 4, 1938, they were allowed across the border into France, and then they traveled to London. Freud died there three weeks after the first shots of World War II had been fired.

Gilberto de Melo Freyre

Gilberto de Melo Freyre was the author of many books that traced the cultural heritage of Brazilians from Indians, Portuguese, and African slaves. He was born on March 15, 1900, at Apipucos, near Recife, and after being educated at home attended the American Baptist School, the Colégio Americano Gilreath de Pernambuco.

From a wealthy plantation family, he traveled to the United States to complete his education, attending Baylor University at Waco, Texas, where he graduated with a bachelor of arts.

He then went to Columbia University, where he graduated with a master of arts in Latin American history in 1923. At Columbia he was greatly influenced by lecturers Franz Boas, J. H. Hayes, and Edwin R. A. Seligman. Freyre then journeyed to Europe, visiting anthropology museums in Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal.

Returning to Brazil, Freyre, who started teaching sociology, organized in 1926 the first northeastern regionalist congress to be held in Recife, which saw the publication of his "Regionalist Manifesto." His political activity in Brazil meant that after 1930 and the collapse of the Third Republic, Freyre had to leave Brazil.

He left in October, going to Bahia and then to Portugal via Portuguese Africa, which he felt was a historic opportunity to experience the Portuguese diaspora. In Lisbon Freyre studied at the National Library, and in February 1931 he was offered a position in the United States working as a visiting professor at Stanford University.

This allowed him to spend time researching the nature of slavery in the United States. Freyre returned to Brazil a few years later and helped found sociology departments at the University of Rio de Janeiro and the University of São Paulo.

In 1934 he was to organize the first Congress of Afro-Brazilian Studies, which was held at Recife and achieved notoriety in political circles because of its emphasis on establishing the causes of Afro-Brazilian poverty as environmental.

Freyre spent most of his life studying the socioeconomic development of the area around Recife—the northeastern part of Brazil. He documented the many links between that part of Latin America and the Portuguese colonies in Africa, particularly Portuguese Guinea (modern-day Guinea-Bissau), São Tomé and Príncipe, and Angola.

His studies of Portuguese colonialism made him believe that since the Portuguese had, before they found Brazil, extensive colonial experiences in Africa, they were better equipped to deal with the problems in the Americas than the Spanish were. This, in turn, Freyre argued, led to a more successful multiracial and multicultural society.

The author of many books, his best known was Casa-grande e senzala (The big house and the slave quarters, published in 1933), which was translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves.

It was a detailed sociological thesis that described the relationships between the Portuguese colonial masters and their African slaves. It also includes plans of the Noruega Plantation in Recife, which was used as the basis for a section of the book.

He compares and contrasts at length the Brazilian plantation society with that in the southern United States, noting that the planters in both areas were keen on "the rocking chair, good cooking, women, horses and gambling."

Although early detractors called Freyre a communist and a pornographer, he was socially conservative and had worked as secretary to his cousin, Estácio de Albuquerque Coimbra, who was governor of Pernambuco from 1926 to 1927 and from 1929 to 1930.

In 1946, with the reintroduction of democracy to Brazil, Freyre was elected to the national constituent assembly and was a member of the chamber of deputies from 1946 until 1950. In 1949 Freyre represented Brazil at the United Nations General Assembly with the rank of ambassador.

He welcomed the rightwing military government of Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco in 1964. He rapidly became closely identified as a supporter of the government, and his sociological work was increasingly criticized for its highlighting of "benign" aspects of Brazilian slavery.

In 1968 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Münster, in Germany. Repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize, he was never invited to join the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He died on July 18, 1987, at Recife.

Euclides da Cunha

Euclides da Cunha was born on January 20, 1866, at Santa Rita do Rio Negro, near Cantagalo, close to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the eldest son of Manuel Rodrigues Pimenta da Cunha and Eudóxia Moreira.

When the boy was three years old his mother died, and the family moved to Teresópolis and then went to stay with relatives in Rio de Janeiro. He attended Aquino College, where he studied under Benjamin Constant, an important republican historian.

In 1886 he attended the Escola Militar da Praia Vermelha, a military school in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of the country. Two years later he took part in a protest during a visit by Tomás Coelho, the minister of war in the last conservative cabinet under the Brazilian monarchy, which ended in the following year.

On December 11, 1888, for his role in the protest, he was expelled. Through the efforts of Major Solon Ribeiro, a prominent republican, and others, there was an amnesty for those who had protested against the emperor, and da Cunha was readmitted to the military school. He graduated in the following year and was commissioned second lieutenant. In that year he also married Ana, the daughter of Ribeiro.

In 1891 da Cunha went to the Escola de Guerra (War School) and was quickly promoted to first lieutenant. He then worked as a military engineer in the Brazilian army but left to study civil engineering, although he was soon working as a journalist.

In 1896–97 he went, on behalf of the magazine O Estado de São Paulo, with the army to Canudos, a village in Bahia state in eastcentral Brazil, where Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel "Conselheiro" ("the Counselor") and his supporters had established their own "empire."

Some 30,000 people moved to Canudos with the promise of freedom for escaped slaves and impoverished Indians. The Conselheiro also promised the return of the Portuguese late medieval king, Sebastian.

There were five army expeditions over three years to Bahia in what became known as the War of Canudos. It took three generals, 19 guns, and 10,000 men to conquer the place, with the rebels fighting to the death for their messianic leader. Da Cunha's first article on the rebellion had been published in March 1897 as "A Nossa Vendéis"; this led to his becoming a reporter attached to the general staff.

He spent the period from August 7 to October 1, 1897, writing about what he saw in the rebellion and the subsequent reprisals. This was to form the basis of his historical narrative, Os Sertões (1902), the first major work that championed the rights of Brazil's Indians.

On September 21, 1903, da Cunha was elected to the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters). On December 13 of the same year he established the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico (Historical and Geographic Institute).

In 1907 da Cunha was appointed to head a commission to deal with problems in Amazonia, and he spent December 1904 and much of 1905 traveling down the Amazon. In early 1909 da Cunha was appointed chairman and professor of logic at the Colégio Pedro II, a public secondary school in Rio de Janeiro.

Euclides da Cunha was a keen amateur geographer and geologist and spent the last years of his life visiting remote parts of Brazil and writing about the Indian tribal people he met. He also was influenced by the Darwinian aspects of naturalism. He was the author of Contrastes e confrontos (Contrasts and confrontations, 1907), and Peru versus Bolívia (1907).

On August 15, 1909, da Cunha was killed in a duel by a young army lieutenant, Dilermando de Assis, who was having an affair with his wife. He died at Piedade, Rio de Janeiro. He is commemorated by the Brazilian education department, and in August each year they observe a Semana Euclideana (Euclides Week) in his honor. The Euclides da Cunha Foundation in Brazil commemorates the historian and the role he played in the education system.

Galveston Flood

Galveston flood wreckage

In 1900 Galveston, located on an island in the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles southeast of Houston, was Texas's fourth-largest city and a bustling port. On September 8 a presumed Category 4 hurricane, accompanied by ferocious tidal surges, smashed into Galveston, killing at least 6,000 of its 38,000 residents and possibly twice as many. Some 10,000 lost their homes. These fatalities make it still the worst single disaster in U.S. history.

Although the storm had wiped out Galveston's rail link to the mainland, recovery began almost immediately, spearheaded by city officials, who appointed a relief committee on September 9, and the American Red Cross, under the leadership of 78-year-old Clara Barton, who arrived September 17.

Restoring water and telegraph services was the first priority. By the third week saloons and the port had reopened, even as dead bodies continued to wash up on the island for at least a month after the disaster.

Armed with federal, state, and private donations, the people of Galveston mounted a hugely expensive project to protect the low-lying 27-mile-long island from future hurricanes. A 17-foot-high seawall was built along the island's Gulf Coast. (By the 1960s its length had grown to more than 10 miles.) In 1902 Galveston launched an even more ambitious project designed to boost the island's overall elevation above sea level. In eight years some 500 city blocks were raised.

Some 16 million cubic yards of sand were dredged from the Gulf of Mexico and pumped onto the island, where workers used jacks to raise structures, including utilities, and then shoveled the sand underneath. Most of the city is now 15 feet higher than its preflood level. A major hurricane in 1915 flooded much of the city, but that time Galveston survived.

The catastrophe had mixed effects on Galveston residents as they struggled to restore their way of life. In 1901 Galveston replaced its city government with five commissioners appointed by Texas's governor. Soon known as the Galveston Plan, this progressive municipal reform was seen as a way to supplant local cronyism with expertise and was widely imitated.

Seeking valuable in the wreckage

Although the Red Cross tried to deal fairly with African-American flood survivors, many of them homeless, bogus stories of black violence, thievery, and refusal to join in recovery efforts circulated in the smitten city.

As the city recovered, Jim Crow restrictions intensified, and African-American political power was further weakened. Galveston would never again compete with archrival Houston or any other major city. Remade as a resort town, Galveston for years wooed tourists with night spots, big-name entertainment, and illegal gambling.

By 1904 the disaster at Galveston had been turned into an entertainment attraction, both at the St. Louis World's Fair and at Brooklyn's Coney Island amusement park, where paying patrons could view a simulation of the destruction. In 1960 folk musician Tom Rush published and later recorded "Wasn't It a Mighty Storm," a song that sensitively portrayed the horror of the September day "when death come howling on the ocean/death calls, you gotta go."

Marcus Garvey

The list of players involved in the 20th-century social empowerment and civil rights movements for blacks could not be complete without the story of Marcus better conditions. By the time Garvey was a teenager he had become cognizant of the lines dividing blacks and whites.

Garvey supplemented his schooling with time spent reading from his father's library, fueling his own curiosities about the outside world. At 15 he began to learn the printer's trade, and in 1905 he moved to Kingston, Jamaica's capital city, where he eventually became a master printer. This knowledge of the printing business proved invaluable when he started his own newspapers and journals as a part of the organizations he founded.

By 1909 when he was 22, Garvey had learned that residents of Kingston liked to argue the sociopolitical ideas of the time. He found himself getting involved in these political and intellectual debates that dealt with the betterment of blacks in Jamaica and addressed the problems associated with imperialistic colonial rule.

Seeking other work in 1910, Garvey traveled to Costa Rica to work for the giant American-owned United Fruit Company. He was arrested for agitating for better working conditions, left Costa Rica, and began traveling around Latin America, noticing the generally oppressed state of black workers.

In 1912 Garvey went to England hoping to address Britain's colonial rule and its promotion of disparity between blacks and whites in the Caribbean and Central America. In London he got a job working for the Africa Times and Orient Review, one of the foremost Pan-African publications of the day.

Garvey returned to Jamaica in 1914 and immediately began the UNIA. His intent was to develop a separatist, nationalistic movement of international scope, meaning that it would allow the blacks of the world to eventually achieve a unified culture separate from the whites, including a separate country that would become a sovereign central nation for the world's blacks. These goals were the hallmark of "Garveyism."

Garvey came to America in 1916 to solicit the support of American blacks. In 1917 New York City's Harlem district was virtually the world's capital of black culture, and Garvey chose this as his temporary base. By 1918 Garvey was publishing Negro World, the internationally distributed paper that would be the voice of the UNIA, and he decided to stay in Harlem and run the UNIA headquarters from there.

Garvey's promotion of totally separate cultural spheres through his separatist ideals went so far as the conducting of (unsuccessful) negotiations between the UNIA and the African country of Liberia between 1922 and 1924 to allow establishment of settlements of black Americans. This caused considerable consternation among both blacks and whites in America and abroad.

Other prominent black-rights groups such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), led by the widely respected W. E. B. DuBois, increasingly criticized Garvey for hurting the cause of black unity and advancement. Garvey had his followers but was also criticized for his pursuit of racial separation, which was deemed counterproductive to the racial cooperation being sought by the NAACP.

Almost since his arrival in America, Garvey had been the object of scrutiny by governmental and corporate agencies that viewed his ideologies as subversive. Garvey was accused of fraud on several occasions because he attempted to start new businesses that would allegedly benefit the members of the UNIA but that proved to be financial fiascos.

The bestknown one was the 1919 venture known as the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation, which involved the purchase of obsolete ships using hopeful investors' money to start international freight and passenger shipping lines.

The end of Garvey's hopes for operating his organization from America came in 1922 when he and the top officials of the Black Star Line were indicted for mail fraud concerning the Black Star Line's business practices. Garvey's trial ended with a conviction in 1923, which he appealed. The appeal was rejected in 1925, and Garvey was sent to prison in Atlanta until 1927, when his five-year sentence was commuted. Upon his release, Garvey was deported back to Jamaica.

Garvey went back to England in 1928, where he unsuccessfully attempted to revive interest in the UNIA's goals. He died in London of complications from a stroke on June 10, 1940.

Geneva Conventions

The signing of the first-ever Geneva Convention by some of the major European powers in 1864

The signing of the first Geneva Convention in 1864

The Geneva Conventions and their subsequent protocols are a series of four treaties regarding the fundamental rules of humanitarian concerns of soldiers and noncombatants during warfare. They were first established in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1864. In addition, there are three protocols added to the Geneva Conventions that prohibit certain methods of warfare and deal with issues regarding civil wars.

The first Geneva Convention dealt exclusively with the care of wounded soldiers on the battlefield and was later amended to cover warfare at sea and prisoners of war. The Red Cross, an international philanthropic organization, was formed because of the First Geneva Convention. Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was instrumental in campaigning for the ratification of the first Geneva Convention by the United States, which signed it in 1882.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), under the first Geneva Convention, chapter 1, article 3, was recognized as an impartial humanitarian body permitted to offer its services during conflicts, and its emblem would be recognized as a neutral organization to parties to the conflict. This was later amended to include the emblems of the International Red Crescent and the Red Lion and Sun humanitarian organizations.

In brief the seven fundamental rules that form the tenets of the Geneva Conventions and protocols are:

Civilians not taking part in the conflict are entitled to respect for their lives and their moral and physical integrity; and shall in all instances be treated humanely.
It is forbidden to kill or injure an enemy who surrenders.
The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for by the party to the conflict that has them in their power. Protection also covers medical personnel, establishments, transports, and equipment. The Red Cross and Red Crescent are two signs of such protection and must be respected.
Captured combatants and civilians are entitled to respect for their lives, dignity, personal rights, and convictions. They shall be protected against acts of violence and have the right to correspond with their families and to receive relief.
Everyone shall have the right to fundamental judicial guarantees. No one shall be subjected to physical or mental torture, corporal punishment, or cruel or degrading treatment.
It is prohibited to employ weapons that would produce unnecessary or extreme losses or excessive suffering.
Civilians shall be protected from attack and not the subject of attack. Attacks shall be directed solely against military objectives.

In 1949 each convention was revised and ratified after the horrific loss of human life in World War II. These revisions had their basis in part in the 1899 and 1907 Hague Peace Conferences, which were initiated by Russian czar Nicholas II to discuss peace and disarmament during the Japanese-Russian conflicts. The original Hague Peace Conferences led to the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the precursor to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.