by Colin Grant
The hotchpotch of fuming letter-writers did not yet constitute a threat but were soon joined by one who would: the noted political heavyweight Alexander Dixon professed to be shocked and outraged by what he interpreted as Garvey’s disdain for the masses. A co-founder of the National Club, and the first black man to be elected to the Legislative Council in Jamaica, Dixon snootily claimed to have no recollection of the club’s former secretary. Now in his sixties and in poor health, the patrician elder-statesman had looked on imperiously, if also impotently, as Garvey’s fledgling movement had taken root.
By appealing directly to white patrons, Garvey had circumvented the brown elite and established a credible, if small, base. The detour, though, could not be followed indefinitely. He needed the middle classes if the organisation was to expand, but he had no appetite for criticism. Consequently, there was little sign of conciliation. Garvey judged his critics as hypocrites. If he had transgressed it was only because he was saying in public that which was privately espoused in the parlours of new Kingston and in the well-meaning analysis of friends of the Negro like W. P. Livingstone. In his study of the evolution of black Jamaicans, the English anthropologist considered that ‘too much is expected of the Negro’, and added with impunity that, ‘bearing in mind how near [he] is to the savage it is to his credit that he so seldom descends to the level to which he is more habituated’.24
No doubt fear and jealousy played their part in the enmity directed towards Garvey, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that one consequence of constantly drawing attention to himself might be greater scrutiny. A glowing self-assessment of the UNIA’s first year prompted sceptics to complain further about the lack of financial transparency and to voice thinly veiled accusations of impropriety. Where had all the money gone?
Under Garvey’s guidance, the donations which dribbled into the UNIA coffers were not, according to critical coverage in the Daily Gleaner, sufficiently returned to the poor and needy Kingstonians (as stipulated by their manifesto), but squandered on expensive and fawning telegrams to the King on his birthday. Worse still were the unsubstantiated allegations that monies solicited for other worthy causes, such as the industrial farm, were temporarily diverted into the bank account of the UNIA president to subsidise his living expenses, and that the IOUs – the promissory notes that built up – were never honoured. The bad-tempered spat that followed – played out in rival newspapers – was considered most ungentlemanly, and caused wavering supporters to reconsider their position vis-à-vis the Negro Society. Garvey was forced to call an emergency meeting to protest his innocence and defend his integrity but by then it was too late: several high-profile sympathisers had already begun to distance themselves from the man and his movement.
The vituperative onslaught threatened to undermine all the good works and advances thus far, and this fear and embarrassment was most acutely expressed in a letter of damage limitation to Booker T. Washington. The malicious attacks, Garvey believed, were motivated by revenge; the editor of the Daily Gleaner, Herbert George De Lisser, took a pique against the UNIA for patronising the advertising pages of rival newspapers – the Jamaica Times and Daily Chronicle. Garvey assured Washington that he would ‘be able to furnish you and the American public with the best proofs of my integrity’.
Having done all he could to dislodge any notion of impropriety, it was time to get on the road and to take the message further afield. And what better place to return to, when feeling under attack, than home? Garvey actually settled on the idea of delivering his first major speech at St Ann’s Bay, wrote Amy Ashwood, primarily because he was ‘anxious about being ridiculed by Kingston sophisticates’ and calculated that his home town was more likely to be sympathetic.25
Setting out for the north coast, Garvey later recounted how the organisation’s first foray beyond Kingston was clouded by suspicions of sabotage. ‘We left Kingston in an old Ford car, a “tin Lizzy”,’ recalled Ashwood, ‘which sprang a leak on the way.’ When the car, carrying Garvey, Ashwood and her brother (acting as chaperone) broke down at Spanish Town, just a few miles out of the capital, the driver left to find help, never to return. Late into the night, Garvey’s party finally crawled into St Ann’s Bay expecting a hero’s welcome for the town’s near-famous, native son: instead, he was greeted by a half-empty hall as many townsfolk had given up waiting and gone to their beds. Invited by his son, ‘Garvey Snr sat stonily in silence’. The remaining crowd, though warm and approving at first, were increasingly bemused by the formality of the proceedings, and the ribald wags in the provincial audience somewhat punctured the grandiosity of the occasion. Amy Ashwood complained that ‘not one soul in St Ann’s Bay helped us with a penny’. But in the town’s defence, Ashwood had skirted round the most likely explanation: that, in the mayhem, the treasurer forgot to call for a collection. Ashwood later conceded that Garvey had indeed written a speech for the treasurer that was ‘intended as a stirring appeal for funds’, but when the treasurer rose to speak ‘alas his memory took leave of absence’.26
When they returned to Spanish Town, they had not one penny to pay for the car and driver they’d hired. Amy recounted her embarrassment in being pushed forward to seek out a clergyman who agreed to stand security for them. In subsequent months, a stream of other fundraising schemes also flopped. On 13 November 1915, a UNIA announcement in the Jamaica Times trumpeted the next week’s big event: ‘Buy A Rose Day’. The scale of that particular failure could be measured by the stench from the mountain of rotting roses blocking the doorway of 30 Charles Street. The expected beneficiaries, the poor of Kingston, would have to dine out on the memory of the big Christmas dinner from the previous year; and the untrained and unemployed would need to wait some time yet before enrolling at the proposed Industrial Farm and Institute. The early progress of the movement had stalled.
The sudden shards of gloom were arrested, at least temporarily, by the splendour of the first 500 respectable volunteers who, having met the brigadier’s criteria of being able to clothe and feed themselves up until embarkation, now qualified to take the King’s shilling. That same night, the society bid them farewell, with hearty good wishes, on their journey to England to assist in the war.
The end of the month brought yet another setback with the news of Booker T. Washington’s death. Ever since reading Washington’s autobiography, Up From Slavery, Garvey had nurtured a plan to travel to America to learn first-hand from the ‘wizard’ and chief engineer of the mighty, black-American political movement known as the ‘Tuskegee machine’.27 Washington had towered above all other black leaders with his domination of the Negro press, an intricate network of patrons both black and white, and the ambitious black industrial college he’d founded in Tuskegee, Alabama. Born a slave, Booker Talioferro Washington had risen from a humble start on the dirt floor of a backwoods cabin to become the spokesman of his race. Washington was the acceptable face of black America – but his smiling eyes disguised a ruthless determination to retain power. By the accounts of his many admirers, he was an unpretentious man who’d never forgotten his previous diet of grits and chitterlings, even when answering invitations to dine at the White House. Famously, he’d forged an unthreatening accommodation with white folks – characterised by his disarming Atlanta Compromise address of 1895 when, according to the New York World, ‘The Negro Moses’ advanced his homespun philosophy of how the two races might lead an economically harmonious but separate existence: ‘In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,’ he’d argued, ‘yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.’ Towards the end of his life, however, Washington had had to fend off growing challenges from the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois who criticised his scheme for racial uplift with its emphasis on vocational courses rather than intellectual excellence.
For now, Garvey’s approach was closer to the successful model of conventional Washingtonian wisdom, of lifting up the race through practical and achievable economic means.
Though Booker T.’s response was prompt and encouraging, to any student of diplomacy it was clear that his words were those of a man who daily received such requests for help. His sincere apology for ‘not [being] able now to make a contribution toward your work’,28 while rather more than perfunctory, was actually only a grade or two above a standard reply. The subtlety seemed lost on his young admirer. When, in that same correspondence, Booker T. suggested, noncommittally, that the UNIA president should ‘come to Tuskegee and see for yourself what we are striving to do for the coloured young men and women of the South’, an ebullient Garvey wrote back with overbearing enthusiasm, thanking Washington for ‘inviting me to see your great institution’ and indicated that he had already packed his bags so that between ‘May and June … I shall be calling on you’.29 Correspondence was limited subsequently to a handful of letters but each one was deemed worthy of a public airing at UNIA meetings. With white-gloved reverence, the letter was removed from its envelope, unfolded and read out, or rather declaimed, by a most satisfied UNIA president so that members might vicariously share in the honour.
The significance of Booker T. Washington’s letters lay in the weight Marcus Garvey attached to them. Short and to the point, they might seem no more substantial than the greeting and condolence cards he peddled on the streets of Kingston, but to an aspiring race leader and his fellow travellers, they demarked just how far he’d come: let critics sneer, here was validation of his endeavours from arguably the most outstanding black man of his time.
Now Washington was dead. Garvey genuinely mourned his loss and equally rued the missed opportunity to capitalise on their correspondence. He still had an unambiguous invitation to visit Tuskegee, of course, and with Washington’s passing that dream was resurrected. He wrote in a hurry to the former principal’s private secretary, friend and political agent Emmett J. Scott. Aware of the need to strike the right note in paying tribute to the deceased whilst simultaneously reminding him of his duty to honour the pledge made by his boss, he implored Scott ‘to do your best for me in that portion of the South … If you were to turn [to] his files for April of last year you will see where he [Washington] promised to help me whilst there.’30
Scott had greater concerns to address than the special pleading of a distant stranger. His own designs on the vacant leadership of Tuskegee were thwarted by the appointment panel. And when he did get round to replying to Garvey the response was polite but not encouraging.
Scott was not to know that the UNIA leader was of the school of thought that translated ‘no’ as ‘maybe’ and ‘maybe’ as ‘yes’. Apart from a whiff of undiplomatic directness, there was certainly no crisis of confidence on Garvey’s part. After all, he’d moved quickly; he’d embraced large ideas and formulated a plan for the salvation of the race. By the age of twenty-nine, he’d travelled widely, educated himself in the ways of the world and woken up to the realisation that he possessed a talent to captivate an audience. But now, after two years back home – having spent all he owned on the UNIA, along the way being calumnied by many and praised by few – even for a man whose naive but determined personality was daily hardening into one that was built to transmit and not receive, the uncomfortable message seemed to be getting through: not enough Jamaicans were prepared to listen to what he had to say.
Good news was long overdue by the end of 1915. It arrived at the beginning of the following year with the announcement from Tuskegee that Washington’s successor, Robert Moton, would be visiting Jamaica in February. The report reignited Garvey’s enthusiasm. Unfortunately for him it also had the same effect on his enemies – some of whom had longer-standing relations with the Tuskegee Institute – and one in particular, Percival Murray, who was commissioned to act as Moton’s agent locally. Garvey’s attempt to organise a reception for Moton drew guffaws from a hostile press and was thwarted by Murray’s intervention. In the excited jockeying for position to gain an audience with a man of such influence, Garvey found himself at the wrong end of the queue of supplicants: he was skilfully and quietly outmanoeuvred and left on the margins, fuming and frustrated. It was difficult to salvage a sense of dignity after being excluded from Murray’s list of the ‘representative men’, the best of the island to whom such an esteemed visitor should be presented. On reflection, the ungentlemanly squabbling was confirmation of the impossibility of any reconciliation between Garvey and the political sharks who patrolled Jamaica’s stagnant backwaters. With nothing much to lose now, he vented his spleen in a letter to the man from Tuskegee: ‘I would not advise you to give yourself too much away to the people who are around you for they are mostly hypocrites,’ he wrote, and in a version of the old rallying call of ‘colour for colour’ for allegiance to the Negro race, went on to warn, ‘They mean to deceive you on the conditions here because we can never blend under the existing state of affairs.’ Garvey had tried to blend with the brown elite and had been rejected.31
The Honourable Marcus Mosiah Garvey resigned himself to withdrawing his invitation to host a reception that in all probability had not yet been received. But he signalled that his thoughts were moving on beyond the island when he continued in a confidential whisper, ‘I have many large schemes that I cannot expose to the public at present as my enemies are so many. I have been planning a tour of America. If by accident I am unable to meet you here I hope to in America.’32
This latest humiliation had thrown into ever sharper relief the degree to which Garvey’s nascent movement had failed to thrive in Jamaica and introduced a sour note into his prognosis for the island. The fledgling organisation fought amongst itself. ‘The advisory board was repeatedly disbanded and was reconstituted with new members.’ Time and again his dismissed colleagues ‘left [the organisation] with the chairs that Garvey requested them to bring to the meetings’.33 Frustrated by the lack of progress, Garvey would complain that his downtrodden black compatriots were as narcoleptic as Rip Van Winkle and as apathetic as sodden leather. He had failed to build to a critical mass. In the final analysis, the moneyed class were not, he calculated, so much hostile as indifferent to his movement.
Having made the firm decision to leave the island, he had little time to settle his affairs. Even though his secret engagement to Amy Ashwood remained undiscovered, in recent weeks her parents had enforced a separation: they planned to have her return with them to Panama. There would be no lovers’ farewell with his eighteen-year-old fiancée, and on her part, no opportunity to remind him of his romantic courtship of ‘the star of his destiny’ and of their pledge of loyalty to each other and to the movement. On 7 March 1916, Marcus Garvey packed his bags, put his precious books in storage, and signed up with the crew of the SS Tallac with a view to working his passage to America.
4
AN EBONY ORATOR IN HARLEM
Melting pot Harlem – Harlem of honey
And chocolate and caramel and rum
And vinegar and lemon and lime and gall
Langston Hughes, Harlem: A Community in Transition
MARCUS Garvey disembarked from the SS Tallac at the port of New York on a crisp spring morning on 24 March 1916 and headed straight for Harlem. In the north of Manhattan, from 8th Avenue to the Hudson River, there was hardly a black face to be seen. But Garvey had another Harlem in mind. Like so many West Indians and African-Americans before him, he was drawn to a Mecca east of 8th Avenue, where between the Harlem River and row after row of streets from 130th to 145th, lay black Harlem. It was grand, brash, suffocating and thrilling. As the Jamaican novelist Claude McKay was to write, nothing came close to ‘the hot syncopated fascination of Harlem’.1
No one knew exactly how many black p
eople occupied the district. Estimates ranged from 100,000 to 150,000 and each month hundreds more newcomers from the southern states and from the Caribbean swelled their ranks. These new migrants bumped up against each other in the overcrowded tenement blocks. The airshafts that connected all of the apartments, carrying all the discordant notes and musicality of their lives, were to inspire Duke Ellington’s signature ‘Harlem Airshaft’: the roiling arguments, the cloying odours of fried chicken and overheated bodies, and the ragtime of tin-pan pianos made the airshaft an unstoppable channel of communication.2 Harlem’s exuberance and vitality was announced in every facet of life: the midnight blondes who serviced rent parties; the ‘numbers runners’ and their big-bellied unofficial bankers who’d grown fat on commissions from lottery tickets; the patron-hungry poets; the manicured barber’s shop politicians; and the ecstatic believers who thronged the mighty Baptist churches – all were incontrovertible evidence that Harlem was fast becoming the Negro capital of the world. It was a bewildering and exhilarating other world for a youngish Jamaican migrant just off the boat from the sleepy outpost of British colonial civilisation.
Garvey was twenty-nine, unheralded and unestablished. Yet again, he’d have to start from scratch. He quickly found lodgings with an expatriate Jamaican family: there were plenty to choose from. Of Harlem’s black population only a fifth had been born there. Its distinctly Southern flavour came courtesy of the majority who had joined the Great Migration, trekking north from states such as Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. British West Indians mostly made up the remaining one in five Harlemites.
The trickle of West Indians to Harlem had begun in the early 1900s when the USA took over the construction of the Panama Canal. The energetic Colón men, who had accumulated wealth and an appetite for travel, began making their way to Harlem with their families. As the canal approached completion in 1914, the more resourceful of their number also judged it the best time to move on: once the canal was opened for business, the great army of Caribbean workers – labourers, engineers, cooks and domestic servants – would be surplus to requirements. There was significant direct migration from virtually all parts of the Caribbean, from Jamaica to Trinidad in the lesser Antilles, boarding fast steamers that would reach New York in four or five days. Though the majority went in search of work, the chance to further their education was also a factor. In 1912 for instance, Claude McKay had taken leave from his creative life to enrol on an agricultural course at the Tuskegee Institute in the Southern state of Alabama, and only later trekked up north to the Negro conurbation in Harlem.