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The line might refer more immediately to imprisonment as a method of keeping U.N.I.A. members from migrating to Africa and taking a number of black people (and therefore a large portion of the U.S. labor force) with them. In 1919, just two years before this poem was published, Marcus Garvey was already being targeted by the legal system. In an autobiographical statement for Current History, Garvey describes being called in to a series of meetings by the New York Assistant District Attorney Edwin P. Kilroe; after Garvey published an unfavorable editorial in the Negro World, Kilroe had him indicted and arrested for criminal libel. Garvey was not prosecuted over this incident, but he was later charged and sentenced to prison for mail fraud. Dunlap seems to anticipate the infamous arrest that would take place less than a year after the publication of this poem.
