Yale historian Jonathan Holloway examines the rise of the New Negro consciousness that emerged after World War I, when unmet wartime promises of democracy and the upheavals of the Great Migration reshaped black political life. The lecture centers on Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association, the first mass grassroots protest movement in African American history, tracing Garvey's push for black economic autonomy, his ill fated Black Star steamship line, and his vision of return to Africa. Holloway details J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to infiltrate and dismantle the UNIA, then situates Garvey against rival black leaders including W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, and Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement. Delivered as part of Yale's American History: From Emancipation to the Present course, the lecture uses these figures to map the competing strategies black Americans pursued for dignity and power in the 1920s.