Redkey's study of the 1890–1910 period is one attempt to extend this question: "Whether he knew it or not, Garvey was part of a long tradition of black nationalism in the United States. Garvey's followers, moreover, were the same Southern black marginal farmers who had responded to the emigration appeals of Bishop Turner and his followers a generation earlier… . In the pattern of earlier African emigration movements, the lower-class blacks responded eagerly when flamboyant Marcus Garvey pointed the way. No longer isolated on scattered farms and restrained by southern conditions as Turner's followers had been, the black proletariat, crowded into urban ghettoes and disillusioned with their new homes, spread nationalism far and fast. Garvey himself may have been a foreigner but his millions of supporters manifested an old American response of black nationalism."

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 1725