Vintage 1960s Malcolm X Pan‑African Flag Pinback Button 📌 NOS Civil Rights Era

Size: 1.75 inches ~ Normal storage wear - here and there a light scuff, sometimes a spot of rust or staining on the back. They vary a little one to the next.

✊ What It Is

Two versions of the same button: one with the bands running edge to edge (I call it "No Border"), the other with the same three bands set inside a black ring ("Black Border"). Both are the plain Pan-African flag - red over black over green - with no words, portrait, date, or maker's mark on the face. Construction is a paper design under a clear film, crimped into a metal collet back with a straight pin. The black-border version has a line of tiny raised lettering around its rim.

🏳️ The Flag

Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League adopted this flag on August 13, 1920, in Article 39 of its Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, at its month-long convention at Madison Square Garden in New York. Garvey was reworking earlier ideas - the Liberty League's 1917 black-brown-yellow tricolor, and his own earlier black-red-gold "Black Liberation Flag" - before settling on red, black and green. Red for the blood shed in the fight for liberation, black for the people themselves, green for the land. The UNIA's own history is blunt about it: there was no red-black-green flag before Garvey and the UNIA. Garvey scholar Robert Hill put it simply - anyone who saw the flag would recognize it as "a manifestation of black aspirations, black resistance to oppression." (It's not the Rasta flag, which is green-gold-red and comes from Ethiopia's colors - a different flag, a different story.)

🌍 Where It Went

The design traveled. Kenya's flag, raised at independence in December 1963, is a black-red-green tricolor built on the same palette. Malawi followed in 1964 with the same three colors. Biafra's flag during Nigeria's 1967-70 civil war was a direct variant of Garvey's design. Back home, the flag found a second life during the Black Liberation years of the 1960s and 70s - and it never really stopped: a Howard University student flew it at half-mast in 2014 after the shooting of Michael Brown, and it flew over a federal building for the first time - the Denver Federal Center - in February 2023.

🧷 The Pinback Button

The format itself goes back to Newark, New Jersey, where Chester R. Hoag and Benjamin S. Whitehead started the Whitehead & Hoag Company in 1892, patenting the crimped-together pin-and-shell button in 1896. Their old rival, Bastian Brothers of Rochester, New York, bought them out in 1959; the Whitehead & Hoag name was gone by the mid-1960s, and the buyer is said to have had the old company's records destroyed. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture holds a similar red-black-green pinback in its own collection - a smaller one, about an inch across, with a partial union-shop stamp on the back that dates it to after 1955 - a sign that plain buttons like this came out of union shops too, maker's name or no. The flag's biggest wave as a wearable pin came in the 1960s and 70s, the Black Liberation years.

Choose No Border or Black Border - the same flag, worn the way people have worn it for a hundred years.