Social Equity, Intellectual History, Black Movement Leaders, and Marcus Garvey

• Published date: 01 April 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/02750740231208033
• Author: Kim Moloney,Rupert Lewis
• Date: 01 April 2024

Social Equity, Intellectual History, Black

Movement Leaders, and Marcus Garvey

Kim Moloney

1

and Rupert Lewis

2

Abstract

This paper engages the U.S.-focused social equity literature and its ahistorical understanding of its pre-1968 intellectual his-

tories. We use racial contract theory to highlight the epistemological necessity of a disciplinary reconsideration. We suggest

that intellectual histories bound to an exclusively academic voice negate a fuller understanding of lived realities. By engaging

the work of a Jamaican-born activistlike Marcus Garvey and his signif‌icantinroads into 1910s and 1920s America, we create

an updated historical understanding of social equity that challenges the disciplinary script.

Keywords

social equity, Marcus Garvey, racial contract theory, intellectual history

Introduction

Methodological Whiteness shapes which socio-administrative

knowledge is considered valuable, whose voices are heard,

which history is emphasized, and how questions about

America’s founding “social contract”are framed (Bhambra,

2017a; Bhambra, 2017b; Howell & Richter-Montpetit, 2019;

Moloney et al., 2022; Moloney et al., 2023). The resulting

epistemological def‌icit is the location for our paper’stwo

observations and two disciplinary outputs. The f‌irst observa-

tion is that social equity, as a concept within an American

retelling of public administration’s disciplinary history,

began with the 1968 Minnowbrook Conference. We question

this assertionby exposing the Whiteness inherent in suchahis-

torical claims. The second observation relates to the f‌irst.

Public administration’s pre-1950s intellectual history in the

United States is largely centered upon White men: Woodrow

Wilson, Leonard White, Frederick Taylor, Luther Gulick,

Dwight Waldo, Paul Appleby, and Herbert Simon, among

others. While there are calls to reconsider social equity’s dis-

ciplinary history (e.g., Blessett 2015; Blessett et al., 2016;

Blessett et al., 2019; Blessett & Gaynor, 2021; Emas et al.,

2022; Gaynor and Schachter 2014, Gooden 2015a; Guy &

McCandless, 2012; Moloney & Lewis, 2023; Roberts 2020;

Trochmann & Guy 2022;Wright et al., 2022), more can be

done.

Our f‌irst output is to revisit and to incorporate Black

thought, activism, and experiences into pre- and post-

Reconstructiondisciplinary history. A second output observes

an elephant in the disciplinary room: American understanding

of its disciplinaryhistory islargely written by academics.

While it appears obvious that academics should author disci-

plinary histories, public administration scholars often undersell

how two hundred and f‌iftyyears of chattel slavery and 80-plus

years of Jim Crow inhibited most pre-1950s Black movement

leaders from add ing “academic”as a job title. The impact seg-

regates early twentieth century Black non-academic activists

from inclusion as an intellectual contributor to what is or is

not our disciplinary history.

We can neither address every angle of this neglect nor the

full arc of history in one article. Instead, we focus on just one

pre-1950s leader: Marcus Garvey (1887–1940). Just as arti-

cles on disciplinary histories cannot cover all intellectuals,

we also cannot discuss every Black movement leader of

importance in one article. Future scholars may wish to

unpack, expand, contradict, and reconsider our analysis of

Garvey, his understanding of social inequity within the

America of the mid-1910s to 1920s and as importantly,

bring other leaders into updated understandings of social

equity’s concept history.

This paper begins by defending its observation of social

equity’s early disciplinary Whiteness. We ask the discipline

to reconsider the gatekeeping which limited pre-1950s

Black activists from entering disciplinary conversations.

Throughout the paper, we use racial contract theory as our

entry point. That is, America’s“founding social contract”

was a “’contract between whites’as a ‘contract against non-

whites’where whites dictate racial oppression overtly, or

subtly, or by accepting the benef‌its of white privilege

1

Public Policy, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar

2

Political Thought, University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica

Corresponding Author:

Kim Moloney, Public Policy, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar.

Email: kmoloney@hbku.edu.qa

Article

American Review of Public Administration

2024, Vol. 54(3) 215–228

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/02750740231208033

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