The Pan-African Flag: Colors and Meaning

The Pan-African flag is a horizontal tricolor of red, black and green, adopted August 13, 1920 by Marcus Garvey's UNIA, with red for blood shed in liberation, black for Black people, and green for Africa's land.

That is the short version, and it is the version most people need. The longer version is more interesting, because the flag was not a design exercise. It was a political claim made by an organization that believed a people without a flag would keep being treated as a people without a country.

What do the red, black and green mean?

Red, black and green each carry a fixed meaning that the movement itself published and taught.

Red stands for blood. Specifically the blood shed by Black people in the long fight for freedom and self-determination. It is not a decorative red. The Universal Negro Improvement Association framed it as the price already paid.

Black stands for Black people. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture describes the band as standing for skin color and racial identity, which is the plainest way to put it. In 1920 that was a radical thing to place at the center of a flag, because the surrounding culture treated Blackness as something to apologize for rather than something to fly.

Green stands for Africa. The land itself, the vegetation, the natural wealth of the continent. For a movement built around the idea that people of African descent scattered across the Americas and the Caribbean still had a homeland, green was the anchor.

The order matters and it is fixed: red on top, black in the middle, green on the bottom. You will occasionally see it printed upside down or with the black band moved. That is an error, not a variant.

One thing worth knowing: there are no official hex codes or Pantone numbers. The UNIA specified colors, not shades. So a deep brick red on one flag and a brighter scarlet on another are both legitimate. Anyone selling you "the official Pan-African red" is making it up.

Who created the Pan-African flag and why?

Marcus Garvey, born in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica in 1887, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica in 1914 and built its largest base in Harlem after he arrived in the United States in 1916. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture describes him as a publisher, entrepreneur, orator and early Pan-African leader, which is a fair summary of a man who ran a newspaper (the Negro World), a shipping company (the Black Star Line, selling shares by 1919) and a mass membership organization at the same time.

The flag came out of a specific insult. Around the turn of the century, a popular American song circulated with a title too ugly to print here, whose entire joke was that Black people were the one group on earth with no flag of their own. Robert Hill, the historian who edited the Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers at UCLA, has explained that Garvey read the absence of a flag as a marker of political powerlessness, and getting one as proof the race had come of age politically. The Smithsonian quotes him on exactly this point in its account of the flag's afterlife in art.

So the answer to "why" is not aesthetic. Someone wrote a song mocking Black people for having no flag. Garvey's response was to convene thousands of delegates and give them one.

When was the Pan-African flag adopted?

August 13, 1920, in New York City.

The UNIA held its first international convention through the whole month of August 1920. It opened at Liberty Hall in Harlem on August 1, and its largest session filled Madison Square Garden. On August 13 the convention adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, a long list of grievances and demands covering the vote, jury service, freedom of the press and more. Article 39 of that Declaration is the flag: it declares that red, black and green shall be the colors of the Negro race.

That is the founding document. Not a sketch, not a logo brief. An article in a rights declaration, sitting alongside demands for legal and political equality.

Is the Pan-African flag the same as the red, gold and green flag?

No, and this is the single most common mix-up.

There are two separate color schemes both described as Pan-African, and they mean different things.

Red, black and green is Garvey's UNIA flag from 1920. It represents people of African descent everywhere, including the diaspora. It is not the flag of any nation.

Green, gold and red comes from the flag of Ethiopia, which Menelik II adopted in tricolor form in 1897, the year after Ethiopian forces defeated an invading Italian army at Adwa. Because Ethiopia held off European colonization, its colors became shorthand for African sovereignty. Ghana was the first African nation to take up that palette at independence in 1957, in a flag designed by the artist and teacher Theodosia Okoh, who added a black star. Okoh explained her choices in terms of Ghana's own land, minerals and independence dead, with the star standing for African emancipation.

Both schemes get called Pan-African. Only one is Garvey's. If you are writing a caption, naming a design, or buying a piece for a specific reason, the distinction is worth getting right. The same care applies when you are reading any symbol on a piece of art, which is why it helps to know how to check an African symbol before you hang it.

How does the Pan-African flag show up in art?

The most cited example is David Hammons's African-American Flag, made in 1990. Hammons took the layout of the United States flag and swapped its palette for Garvey's: a green canton with fifty black stars, and thirteen stripes alternating red and black. Two symbols laid on top of each other, neither one cancelled.

It landed. The Museum of Modern Art holds a version of the 1990 work, printed cotton, accessioned in 1997. The Studio Museum in Harlem holds a Hammons flag in its collection and has flown one at its Harlem building, where it functions as a marker for the whole institution. In 2022 the National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired a version for its permanent collection, where it has appeared in the exhibition Reckoning: Protest. Defiance. Resilience.

What makes the piece work is restraint. Hammons did not add text or explain anything. He changed three colors and let the viewer do the arithmetic.

That restraint is the useful lesson for anyone thinking about the colors in their own space. The flag is strongest when it is not shouting. Artists working in the Pan-African tradition tend to pull the palette apart rather than reproduce the banner: a red that runs through a figure's clothing, a green ground behind a portrait, black used as a color instead of an outline. If you want to see how that thinking plays out across a wider set of work, our overview of Pan-African art and what unites it covers the movement's visual range, and the broader question of what actually makes art Afrocentric is worth reading before you buy anything sold under that label.

How do you use the Pan-African colors at home without it looking like a flag?

Hanging an actual flag is a perfectly good choice, and plenty of homes do it. But most people asking this question want the meaning without the dorm-room effect. A few things that work:

Let one color lead. Pick green or red as the dominant note in a room and let the other two appear in smaller doses. Three equal bands read as a flag. Uneven proportions read as a palette.

Use black as a real color. In the flag, black is a full band, not a border. Deep black in a frame, a fabric, or a large shape in a painting does the same job in a room. It holds everything else in place.

Go for artwork over merchandise. A print of the flag itself says one thing and only one thing. A painting that uses the colors keeps working on you over years. Original work by living artists is where the palette actually stays alive, which is the whole reason we sell African American art on archival canvas rather than reproductions of symbols.

Give it a wall with light. Red and green sitting next to each other need daylight or good lamps. Under a dim bulb, deep red goes brown and green goes gray, and the whole thing flattens.

If you want to start with work built on this visual language rather than the flag as an object, our Afrocentric art collection is where those pieces live. Every piece is printed to order in the USA, and the artist gets a royalty on every sale, which is the part that matters if you care about the economics Garvey was actually arguing for.

Why the accuracy matters

Garvey's project was economic before it was symbolic. The Black Star Line existed because he believed Black people needed to own the ships, not just ride them. The flag was the visible edge of an argument about ownership.

That argument did not end in 1920. If you hang red, black and green in your home and the art itself came from an overseas print farm that pays no artist, or from a generator that scraped Black artists' work without asking, the symbol is doing the opposite of what it was made to do. Getting the history right is not pedantry. It is the same instinct that makes you ask who made the thing and who got paid.

Red for the blood. Black for the people. Green for the land. Adopted August 13, 1920, by a room full of delegates who decided they were done being the group without a flag.

Sources

• Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, "African-American Flag" by David Hammons, object record NMAAHC 2022.7
• Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Searchable Museum, "Marcus Garvey's Pan-African Flag"
• Smithsonian Magazine, "How a Celebrated Artist Redesigned the Stars and Stripes to Mark Pride in Black America," quoting historian Robert Hill
• The Museum of Modern Art, David Hammons, "African-American Flag," 1990, printed cotton, accession 296.1997
• The Studio Museum in Harlem, David Hammons, "African-American Flag," object 2018.40.109, bequest of Peggy Cooper Cafritz
• Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, "Schomburg Research Guide: Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)", including the UNIA miscellaneous collections and Black Star Line stock certificates.