Pan-African flag

How to read it

Article 39 of the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, drawn up by the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) at its convention in Liberty Hall, New York, in August 1920, reads: “That the colors, Red, Black and Green, be the colors of the Negro race.” The UNIA’s Universal Negro Catechism of 1921, compiled by George Alexander McGuire, says the Declaration was signed at 5 p.m. on 13 August 1920 and calls red, black and green the national colours selected by the convention; members wore buttons in them as the association’s colours. NPR lists the flag’s other names: the Marcus Garvey, UNIA, Afro-American and Black Liberation flag.

Also searched as: african american flag, black liberation flag, pan-african colors, pan african flag, red black and green flag, unia flag.

What the UNIA says the colours mean

The catechism answers the question “What do these Colors represent?” word for word: “Red is the color of the blood which men must shed for their redemption and liberty; black is the color of the noble and distinguished race to which we belong; green is the color of the luxuriant vegetation of our Motherland.” An earlier explanation is on record from Garvey himself. The flag historian William Crampton found the flag in an FBI report of 12 November 1918, which describes “the new Ethiopian flag”, red, black and green, hanging in the office of Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro World, and records Garvey’s explanation that “the black race between the blood and nature wins its rights”.

Why Garvey wanted a flag

Garvey said that the lack of a flag was “a mark of the political impotence of the black race”, the historian Robert Hill, a Garvey scholar, told NPR, and having one would be proof that the race had “politically come of age”.

The flag today

Pan-African flags fly on some Black-owned businesses and in neighbourhoods of cities such as Philadelphia, where Garvey’s influence was strong, NPR reported in 2017, and come out when Black Americans want a symbol of unity outside American national identity. Michael Hanchard, professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told NPR the flag gives Black people “some way of identifying themselves in the world”.

What flag is red, black and green?

The Pan-African flag, and several national flags that took up its colours. Libya’s flag has the same colours in the same order, red at the top, but its black stripe is as deep as the other two together and carries a white crescent and star, by Article 3 of the constitution Libya adopted in 2011. Hastings Banda’s and Jomo Kenyatta’s parties adopted the red, black and green, Crampton writes, and their party flags became, in modified form, the national flags of Malawi and Kenya. Hill names Ghana, Libya, Malawi and Kenya among the countries whose flags took up the colours; Ghana’s has a black star, not a black stripe.