by Colin Grant
Harlem exerted a romantic and magical hold on the imagination of black people in the Americas. Marcus Garvey’s and the UNIA’s favourite poet, Paul Dunbar, captured that sense of wonder in ‘The Sport of the Gods’ when he wrote of black people who ‘had heard of New York as a vague place and a far away city that, like Heaven, to them had existed by faith alone’. The first tentative steps to Harlem were taken by black residents already living in lower Manhattan. They weren’t just moving because they aspired to better living conditions; in 1900 fear was also the spur. On 15 August that year racial tensions exploded and rioting broke out in the rough ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ following the death of a policeman killed in a tussle with an African-American whose wife the patrolman was trying to arrest for soliciting, having mistaken her for a prostitute. Vengeful policemen reached an understanding with an angry white mob that descended on the district beating and bludgeoning any black man who was unfortunate enough to be on the streets. A similar riot a few years later (in 1905) convinced unsettled and unprotected Blacks to pack up and move out to the safe, if expensive, haven of Harlem.3
Families doubled up or took in lodgers to meet the rent on the solid, overpriced brownstones. Garvey was doing his Jamaican landlord a favour in occupying ‘a little hall-bedroom, hardly heated or well ventilated’, remembered Edgar Grey, an early acquaintance. Decades later, Grey was still quoting from his vivid recollection of ‘a poorly clad asthmatic Negro’, whom he saw ‘in Rose Dairy room, day after day, eating portions of corn beef hash at the small cost of fifteen cents … I visited his lodgings and saw there dozens of empty sardine [tins], beans and cooked or prepared soup cans from which he had eaten morsels so rude and meagre as to draw forth the pity of any who saw him.’4 Garvey’s rationing was an absolute necessity, as early on, his asthma limited his ability to work. Even with this self-sacrifice and careful budgeting, he could barely meet the cost of his rent – much to his landlord’s dismay.
As was often said at the time, the black man in Harlem was like a poor relation who’d inherited a limousine he could ill afford to maintain.5 Designed in the 1880s for the Jewish and Scandinavian middle-income class, the apartment blocks had shot up in just over two decades, but the developers had miscalculated and too many had been built. The building boom had anticipated the extension of the subway to Harlem. There were fantastic profits to be made; speculators bought and sold contracts for properties that they never even took possession of. But the overheated market had suddenly cooled. By 1900, empty apartments were beginning to eat away at the nerves of investors and the future returns expected from the thousands of dollars ploughed into their construction. Something had to be done. Anxious white landlords who noisily professed their reluctance to trade their consciences for a profit, did so quietly nonetheless. Black entrepreneurs such as the real-estate agent, Phillip A. Payton, were increasingly taken up on their offer to fill the unrented apartments with aspiring black tenants willing to pay over the odds. Realtors who knew the market believed that prices were so high that blacks would never be able to sustain a presence there. The Harlem Home News saw things differently. ‘We now warn owners of property,’ the paper proclaimed in July 1911, ‘the invaders are clamouring for admission right at their doors and that they must wake up and get busy before it is too late to repel the black hordes.’ Complacent white residents, who were still holding out in the spring of 1914, might have been advised to pay closer attention to the news that the black St James Presbyterian church intended to head north from midtown to Harlem. Church leaders were finely tuned to the temper of their congregations. Once churches like St James’s had decided to move then any semblance of temporariness, of a possible, eventual return from whence the new migrants had come, disappeared. The consequences were not unexpected: a trickle of white tenants fleeing from the area in panic turned into a stampede. There was a concurrent rush of African-Americans moving up, socially, economically and literally to take their place.6
Dreams of a better life, afforded by their arrival in Harlem, were capped by the reality of work opportunities – most often limited to menial and manual labour. The lucky 50 per cent found employment in familiar roles: for men it meant donning the uniforms of lift attendants, janitors, Pullman porters and longshoremen; the bulk of women’s work was as domestic servants in the middle-class homes of white New Yorkers beyond Harlem’s borders. Though the workforce might have been defined by the same titles and job descriptions available to them in the Southern black belt, they rejoiced in having freed themselves from the acquiescence and subordination that had tethered them in Atlanta or Charleston. Typical of such sentiments was the Southern migrant who wrote back home: ‘I am fixed now and living well … Don’t have to mister every little boy comes along … I can ride in the street or steam car anywhere I can get a seat.’7
The predominance of such revelations ran counter to the experiences of Marcus Garvey and his compatriots for whom doffing your cap to the Massa was a tradition long since passed with emancipation, preceding their entry into the land of the free. Foreign-born black immigrants to the district, wrote Wilfred Domingo, ‘find it impossible to segregate themselves into colonies; too dark of complexion to pose as Cubans or some other Negroid but alien-tongued foreginers, they are inevitably swallowed up in black Harlem’. Garvey’s fellow member from the Jamaican National Club days, Wilfred Domingo, had been in New York since 1912. Though they might appear indistinguishable, Domingo delineated early on certain tensions and frictions between West Indians and African-Americans. This was partly cultural. Their differences were obvious, for example, in their ways of worship. ‘While large sections of [African-Americans] are inclined to indulge in displays of emotionalism that border on hysteria,’ observed Domingo, West Indian Negroes exhibited ‘all the punctilious emotional restraint characteristic of their English background’. It was their attitude towards employment that was most marked. Significant numbers of skilled West Indian workers had migrated to New York and were not about to trade their artisan crafts for menial work without a fight. They applied for ‘positions that the average African-American has been schooled to regard as restricted to white men only’. The dream would not be deferred.8
In 1915, before leaving Jamaica, Marcus Garvey had corresponded with Domingo. Soon after his arrival, Garvey solicited his help, and Domingo had generously steered him towards useful contacts and job opportunities. Brandishing his credentials as a master printer and the much-exploited endorsement from Alfred Burrowes, under whom he’d originally served his apprenticeship in St Ann’s Bay, Garvey landed intermittent printing jobs.
The idea of securing funds for the ‘Industrial Farm’ back in Jamaica seems to have been Garvey’s primary concern at this point. Establishing himself on the unofficial lecture circuit in church halls, libraries and other municipal centres, drawing on the tradition of the late nineteenth-century Chatauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, was the means to do so. The philosophy of the Chatauqua circuit (with its emphasis on self-help and education), chimed with Garvey’s UNIA programme; he’d already been practising it in Jamaica, without realising there was a name and tradition. Although his compatriots had not been receptive to his ideas, by the time he’d set sail for America, Garvey considered himself a public lecturer. He never wavered from the idea, which though enunciated in 1937, clearly applied to 1916:
I am a public lecturer, but I am President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association … There is always a charge for admission, in that I feel that if the public is thoughtful it will be benefited by the things I say. I do not speak carelessly or recklessly but with a definite object of helping the people, especially those of my race, to know, to understand, to realise themselves.9
Garvey’s confidence was high but he would need to hone his skills to attract an audience who, through the power of his oration, might be motivated to donate to such a worthy cause. By April, a month after his arrival, he’d saved enough to place a down payment on renting St Mark’s Hall, 57 West
138th Street for an evening, to serve as the venue for his American debut.
Garvey printed his own handbills and distributed tickets around the streets of Harlem. The minor recognition he’d achieved in Jamaica, notwithstanding the last two months of demoralising stagnation, could not be built on. He was unknown. Shrewdly, he calculated the need for someone special to introduce him to a Harlem audience. On the morning of 25 April 1916, Garvey pocketed a few of the tickets and set off for the Lenox Avenue subway. He brushed past the pushcart pedlars – including the likes of ‘Pigfoot Mary’, ‘Hot Dawg Dan’ and ‘Pickled Patsy’, famed for her pickled watermelon rinds – all vying for pitches outside the recently opened station, and wended his way downtown. There, with startling chutzpah, the unknown race leader with a following of zero hurried on through the doors of 69 5th Avenue and into the offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He had come to seek out the biggest name in black American life: W. E. B. Du Bois, the solitary black board member of the NAACP and editor of its magazine, the Crisis, a monthly tome which solemnly billed itself responsible for providing ‘A Record of the Darker Races’.
W. E. B. Du Bois had been catapulted into lead position as the voice of black America, following Booker T. Washington’s death. An opponent of Washington, the Harvard-educated scholar advocated a policy of liberal humanistic education which could compete with anything the Ivy League colleges had to offer. ‘I believed in the higher education of a Talented Tenth,’ Du Bois explained, ‘who through their knowledge of modern culture could guide the American Negro into a higher civilisation.’ His position was unashamedly elitist, arguing that it was both desirable and necessary to show that black intellectuals, the ‘Talented Tenth’ of the general Negro population, were the equal of their white counterparts – in literature, classical music, composition and art, but especially literature – and by so doing this 10 per cent would act as a vanguard, forcing mainstream American society to integration – a process that the historian, David Levering Lewis, summarised as ‘civil rights by copyright’.10
Garvey straightened his jacket, pulled back his shoulders and courteously asked to see the editor. Unfortunately, Du Bois was out of town, and the Jamaican caller had to settle for leaving a short, deferential note inviting the celebrated editor ‘to be so kind as to take the “chair” at my first public lecture to be delivered on Tuesday 9th May at 8 o’clock. My subject will be Jamaica.’ More in hope than expectation, he also left behind a couple of complimentary tickets and a request that Dr Du Bois distribute his circular among prospective patrons. Later, Garvey would recall how his disappointment was offset by the peculiarity of what he had witnessed in the NAACP offices: the stark absence of coloured staff among the officers of a supposedly coloured organisation. He claimed to have been perplexed and ‘unable to tell whether I was in a white office or that of the NAACP’. Marcus Garvey returned that night to the decidedly black Harlem neighbourhood and busied himself with polishing his speech and ironing out any first-night nerves that a less confident speaker might have admitted to himself on the eve of his debut.
In the event, Du Bois declined the invitation so graciously extended to him. It was a wise choice if the account of that evening by Wilfred Domingo, who was in the audience, is to be believed. According to Domingo (who wrote up his account years after the two men had acrimoniously fallen out), the evening of entertainment on 9 May 1916 was a mixture of tragedy and farce. From the outset things boded ill. The replacement ‘chair’ did not show on time, and the impatient orator, after nervously pacing the floor for half an hour, mounted the platform shaking like a leaf and, after struggling to make himself heard above the heckles and whistles, fell off the stage – in a pitiable stage-managed attempt, Domingo concluded, to garner some sympathy and draw the proceedings to a close. Amy Jacques offered a more charitable interpretation: deprived of sleep and so hungry that his belly was knocking on his backbone, Garvey had inevitably swayed and tumbled from the podium after a dizzy spell. No matter who was correct, it was an inauspicious beginning to his campaign to win over Harlem’s masses – all thirty-six of them.11
There was little sign of Garvey descending into a pit of despair. Rather the opposite. Three days later, in a letter back home to Thaddeus McCormack in Kingston, he modestly announced plans for a major tour of the USA, ‘a big programme which I feel sure will put us in a good position’. The money he would garner from this improvised lecture tour would be ploughed back into the organisation once he returned to Jamaica. Though upbeat, Garvey was anxious about the safekeep of his few possessions which had furnished the UNIA reading room in Kingston: ‘I am at a loss to know what has become of my things. There was a table … and a case … also books, papers, desk, chairs, pictures, etc.’ He suspected that the fourteen chairs and table (loaned from a local restaurant) might have been confiscated by bailiffs in lieu of rent, and he promised to send McCormack enough money so that they might be redeemed. Boston was to be the first city on his tour, and he signed off grandly by advising his old friend, ‘all my letters can be addressed to me here at my headquarters’. There would have been little room for filing correspondence in the tiny lodge room at 53 West 140th Street.
The route of Marcus Garvey’s lecture, fact-finding and fundraising tour would eventually take him to the South where powerful black pastors exerted immense influence over their congregations. Before turning south, Garvey took a curious but symbolic pit-stop at the Tabernacle Church of Billy Sunday – a huge wooden structure temporarily erected at Broadway and 168th Street with a seating capacity of 18,000. Reverend Sunday was the great white evangelist, famed for the full-bodied dynamism of his sermons, delivered to massive congregations at revivalist meetings with no need for loudspeakers or any other form of amplification. To witness William Ashley Sunday in full flow was to be in the presence of a man possessed with the spirit of light that the Spanish call duende: the ability to transmit a supreme and powerfully felt emotion. Billy Sunday had it, but, judging by his efforts at St Mark’s Hall, Garvey still had a long way to go.
He was, however, headed in the right direction, hastening to the Tuskegee Institute, to the shrine of Booker T. Washington to pay his homage. Laying the foundations of a Jamaican Farm and Industrial Institute, based along the lines of Tuskegee, had been the dream that had fuelled Garvey’s passage to America in the first instance. At last he’d be able to see at close range the likelihood of that particular and Southern conceit serving as a useful model in the Caribbean. Countless others had made the pilgrimage before him. His compatriot, the poet Claude McKay, had beaten him to Tuskegee by a couple of years and had even enrolled on a course offering a diploma in scientific farming.
Fairly early on McKay realised he’d made a mistake. With hindsight, a writer reputed for his sharp and violently subversive poetry was bound to find the conservatism of the institution oppressive. Worse still, its formal and functional architecture – following the blueprint of a modern industrial machine – was replicated in the souls of the students. After much agonising, McKay (like Ralph Ellison, another dropout who was to satirise Tuskegee in his famous novel Invisible Man) had reached the conclusion that the academy imposed a rigid and prescriptive way of thinking on formerly fertile undergraduate minds. Such an assessment would have found no favour with Marcus Garvey. Tuskegee was a marvel of black endeavour. There was nothing in Jamaica to match its physical splendour and high-minded ideals. One hundred acres had been given over to a spacious and aesthetically pleasing complex built on rich red Southern soil. Loving care and consideration had gone into its creation, with lawns so neat one imagined them trimmed with nail scissors. Everything underscored its principal purpose to turn out graduates schooled in the latest understanding of modern agriculture. In so doing, Tuskegee proved its attachment to the spirit of the founding father. In his famous Atlanta address of 1895, Washington had outlined how self-reliance might be achieved by a people waking up to the resources that were much closer t
o hand than assumed. The plight of Negroes was akin to a vessel which had strayed dangerously off route and given up hope of rescue. From the platform at Atlanta, Washington enlarged on this theme:
A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: ‘Water, water. We die of thirst.’ The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River.
In the summer of 1916, the maritime analogy was not so secure. Though established only thirty years previously, to the thinking of its critics like Du Bois, Tuskegee was already out of date – strangely unsuited to the new world that was a-coming. Far from heeding Booker T. and casting down his bucket in Southern waters, the Negro was disengaging from the strictures of the agrarian South, packing up his family and possessions, and venturing to the great conurbations in the North. In the next three years alone, more than half a million black families were on the move, getting out as best they could on horse-drawn carts, vans and segregated ‘Jim Crow’ trains. Theirs was an emotional and symbolic uprooting, witnessed time and again by men like Alonzo Whittaker, a veteran porter of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company. As his train prepared to cross the Mason-Dixon line (the psychic and symbolic boundary demarcating the Northern states from the Southern), Alonzo Whittaker removed the ‘Jim Crow’ signs from the carriage, and took it upon himself to counsel the tearful migrants: