United Links Party
convention program
*On this date in 1881, the United Links Party held its first convention. In 1880, Benjamin Singleton was called to testify at Congressional hearings on the migration of Blacks from the South.
By 1881, however, Singleton had begun a new phase in his campaign to aid his people, organizing a party called the 'United Colored Links' in a Black community of Topeka, Kansas, called "Tennessee Town" because so many natives of that state lived there. Affiliated with the Greenbacks, a white workers' party that called for fundamental social change in the United States, Singleton's Links party was intended to help African Americans acquire their factories and start their industries.
Unfortunately, Singleton soon discovered that there was not enough capital within the Black community to achieve this goal. Shifting his sights again, in 1883 Singleton founded an organization called the Chief League, which encouraged blacks to emigrate to the island of Cyprus. Few responded to his call, so in 1885, he formed the Trans-Atlantic Society to help Blacks move back to their ancestral homeland in Africa. By 1887, this group, too, was unsuccessful.
Suffering from poor health, Singleton was forced at last to retire from his self-appointed mission, and in 1892, he died in St. Louis. But his vision of a society in which African Americans owned the land, directed the industries, and held the power would find a charismatic champion in Marcus Garvey, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association of the early 1920s briefly realized many of Singleton's dreams.
