Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Some of you thought there was a big white line here, but there is not; there is just a plain river, the Ohio River by name. Some of you have never been up here before and some of you are not going back South again, and I can hardly blame you. [But] whatever you do, do not go into the North to take revenge on the other race there … for the beatings and killings we received in the South.12

  Garvey was heading in the opposite direction to see for himself what conditions were like. After all, the vast majority of black people, fully 10 million, still laboured in the South. Almost a million were farmers – though a distinction needed to be made between farmers who owned their plots and those who rented them. The black man was most likely to be a tenant farmer who rented not just his farm but also the tools and the mule from a landlord whose greed (little attention was paid to an accurate keeping of accounts) left the desperate tenant in a state best summarised by the popular refrain:

  Nought’s a nought,

  figger’s a figger.

  All for the white man,

  and none for the nigger.

  Few records are available of Garvey’s odyssey in the South. From the snatches available, it’s clear that, despite his pride, he had no option other than to sit in the segregated ‘Jim Crow’ railway carriages assigned to black passengers once they’d crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. His criss-crossing of the country again mirrored the poet Claude McKay. But even if by some happy coincidence they’d found themselves aboard the same train, it’s unlikely that the aspiring orator would ever have encountered the verse-writing vagabond: McKay, the man destined to kick-start the Harlem Renaissance in a few years’ time, was a waiter on railroad dining cars. Sleeping compartments and dining cars were off-limits to black passengers in the South – no matter their hunger or tiredness. Not that Marcus Garvey had much time for either. In six months, he would sweep across thirty-eight states, conducting his one-man survey of African-American life.

  At each stopover Garvey listened to and learnt from the elders of the African Methodist Episcopal and black Baptist churches. Dipping in and out of their places of worship, the secular young man was Johnny-on-the-spot, rising early to answer the call to prayer and taking his place in the pews to observe the profound influence of the ministry in the South: hymns and sermons comforted the African-American in his belief that this world was not his resting place, that he was only passing through. Yet still, the black man craved some sense of the race’s success. Such was the racially alert state in the early days of the twentieth century that significant black achievements were often elevated beyond merit. Roundly celebrated was the vigour of the dock worker Charles Knight who brought the world record to America, driving 4,875 rivets in one day, outstripping the former champion by 400; and then there was the Georgia farmer who, in beating off all challengers (including white farmers) to be the first to take his bales of cotton to market on seven consecutive years, was proclaimed ‘King Cotton’.13

  The African-American’s suffering, or at least his standing, had, in part, been ameliorated through the civilising agencies of Booker T. Washington’s academy. Its graduates were at the head of the queue when it came to the handing out of jobs dependent on technical ability and applied learning. But if Garvey hoped to get some sense of the direction the Tuskegee leadership might now take in its founder’s passing, he was to be disappointed. The prized meeting that he’d sought and obtained with Robert Moton (Washington’s successor) was not the high-water mark of collaboration he’d hoped for. Marcus Mosiah Garvey must have wondered why he’d bothered to put himself through the hundreds of miles of hardship and ‘Jim Crow’ humiliation only to be greeted in a half-hearted ‘we salute you in your efforts to uplift the race’ manner, disguised by soothing language, laced in the sugary, overly polite Southern tradition. Where he might reasonably have expected – once the socialising was out of the way – serious attention and the meat of concrete advice to be served, as it were, alongside the after-dinner coffee and cigars, in fact scant consideration or encouragement was given to his ideas for a Tuskegee-style institute in Jamaica. Instead, Garvey endured a painfully formal meeting in which Moton merely mouthed platitudes.14 Short-changed and mightily perplexed, he set off once again across state lines in the South.

  The one constant, from as far as Louisiana to Tennessee, was the clanking chorus of the cotton ‘gin’ machines drawn by mules across sharecropping land. Rather like the Caribbean peasant’s association with sugar plantations, the so-called ‘American Negro romance with cotton’ was a limitation borne of necessity – an uncomfortable reminder of the not-too-distant slave past. Those with enough grit, determination and good fortune weaned themselves off the dependency. One such was the fabulously wealthy Madam C. J. Walker. On the strength of her black hair and beauty empire, she’d succeeded in freeing herself from unpromising beginnings in the pestilent swamplands of Delta, Louisiana. ‘I gave myself a start,’ she famously quipped, ‘by giving myself a start.’ Her businesses certainly gave plenty of young black women an opportunity. She’d started with ‘two dollars and a dream’ and had gone on to pioneer a unique way of selling. Long before the advent of ‘Avon Ladies’, the well-groomed door-to-door sales agents attending a Madam Walker class would be grilled on the primacy of hygiene, safety and deportment. These neatly dressed, transparently hygienic and manicured precursors of Avon Ladies toured the country expanding Walker’s beauty empire. Her only child, A’Lelia, would inherit a fortune and a highly successful business. Enrolling at the Walker College of Hair Culture, beauticians would qualify for ‘a passport to prosperity’ once they graduated. But the secret of Madam Walker’s success was in selling not only beauty, but also pride. The Baptist churches that Garvey attended thronged with congregations who held firmly to two fundamental beliefs: that their abuse in the South was temporary, and that they no longer needed to live with the curse of the Negro hair that they were born with. Everywhere he went that was evidently so – thousands of black women of all classes softened and straightened their unwieldy, frizzy hair with Madam Walker’s preparations.15

  C. J. Walker was just the kind of philanthropic black entrepreneur whom Garvey hoped to court. Unfortunately, whilst he was riding the Jim Crow railways in the South, she had climbed into her splendid seven-seater open Cole touring car and bid her chauffeur drive north; Garvey would later catch up with Walker in Harlem and launch an unremitting but subtle campaign to solicit her help.

  The pep and snap of this first black millionaire was to inspire his assessment in the Champion magazine. Garvey had stopped off in Chicago and stepping into the offices of Champion had impressed the editors with his energy and wide-awake ambition. Garvey returned the compliment, writing that ‘the American Negro is the peer of all Negroes, the most progressive and the foremost unit in the expansive chain of scattered Ethiopia … the acme of American enterprise is not yet reached. You have still a far way to go. You want more stores, more banks and bigger enterprises.’16 Garvey could not yet hope to garner the enthusiasm of audiences for a woman who – born uneventfully as Sarah Breedlove and transformed into Madam C. J. Walker thirty-five years later – could now blaze into town after town like a visiting royal: Garvey and Garveyism was not yet a brand. But his turn in the South and contact with black communities in the North was giving rise to an evanescent Garvey: the nervous and humiliated speaker on his debut in Harlem had disappeared, and a newly confident visionary emerged in his place.

  The visit to the Southern black belt was daily opening his eyes to an unexpected vista of possibilities. Towards the end of March 1917, Marcus Garvey wound up his tour with his signature humility, advertising ‘a call for all colored citizens of Atlanta’ to attend a ‘Big Mass Meeting’ to hear the great West Indian Negro leader, ‘Professor Garvey, an orator of exceptional force [who] has spoken to packed audiences in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Louisville, Nashville …’ and so on, and so on.

  He spoke with abundant pleasure about the unexpected sight of Negro banks,
theatres and real-estate agencies, and saluted the active part played by certain industrious blacks in commerce, who put their sleepy Jamaican cousins to shame. Such positivism had to be offset against the intermittent blight on the American landscape: firstly, the boll-weevil infestation in the cotton, and secondly, the burning crosses erected by hooded stalwarts of a resentful and resurgent Ku Klux Klan.

  Perhaps it was naivety that carried Marcus Garvey so fearlessly into the heart of danger, when so many terrorised black people were heading in the opposite direction. A daily diet of humiliation and abuse was the lot of Southern African-Americans. Worse still, lynching was common south of the Mason-Dixon Line – thirty-seven were recorded in 1917 and their numbers would almost double the following year. Lynching was not just the murder of black men and women by a mob. It was preceded, in the case of black men, by their mutilation (‘surgery below the waist’), after which they were doused with petrol, set on fire and burnt until all of their blood vessels, veins and arteries, exploded. Bits of their bodies were routinely chopped off as souvenirs before the mob was sufficiently satiated to leave what was left of them dangling from a tree. As a five-year-old, Charles William Brown remembered the sight of the big cross where ‘they burned a Negro at the stake’, at Jacksonville, Florida. Years later, Brown could still recall the ‘smell [of] his burning flesh five miles away … after the flames were over, and he was burnt to a crisp, [they went] around and cut things off of him – off the fingers and toes … and they’d take them home, the white women and put them in glass jars and set them on the mantelpiece’.17 The anti-lynching campaigner, Ida B. Wells, related to Garvey her first-hand accounts of such barbarities when he visited her in Chicago. Wells had been chased out of the South (following voluble death threats) after she’d published details of the southern custom of lynching.

  Such atrocities were not known in the Caribbean. The idea that a man could not travel just where he wished, without fear of assault or abuse, was anathema to Marcus Garvey. Besides, as Amy Ashwood testified, he possessed a great store of personal courage. Even so, it was not a propitious moment for a foreign black man to be travelling alone through Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama, equipped only with an uppity tongue. Unaccustomed as he was to the vagaries of the South, Garvey couldn’t have read the warnings, foretold in the Negro spiritual:

  Boll weevil in de cotton

  Cut worm in de cotton,

  Debil in de white man,

  Wah’s going on?

  Unscathed and unmolested, Garvey returned to Manhattan after more than six months on the road. Between his departure and return, a roster of pastors had virtually set up camp outside Penn station touting for newly arrived Southern worshippers to join their congregations uptown. Black Harlem was still expanding, creeping down towards 125th Street, much to the chagrin of certain members of the elite who, in drawing the desirable distinction of living on or south of 125th Street, could no longer amuse themselves with the enquiry: ‘How are the folks up in Harlem?’ They were in Harlem, whether they liked it or not. The border was continually being redrawn. Further south in mid- and lower Manhattan, encouragement to move on up to the Negro capital was increasingly the sermon delivered by the preachers of Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches who guided their flocks towards home ownership as if it were a vital appendix to the Ten Commandments. If the congregation was heading home to Harlem, the clergy correctly deduced they too would have to move on up with them. Collection plates were passed round, like hands in a poker game, with the stakes continually raised until the pot was sufficient for handsome churches to change hands from white to black. A smaller number of Moravian and Anglican churches (often little more than shopfronts) were established to serve the Caribbean believers. Even so, the growth of churches could not keep pace with the expanding population. The combined ministries were so popular that they belched out Sunday worshippers who had shouldered their way into the temples and still struggled to find a place to kneel, despite the extra services that were laid on throughout the day to accommodate them.

  Lord-loving Harlemites at St Mark’s church hall would be privy to the second coming of Marcus Garvey – provided they could spare the dollar for the ticket. At the same venue where he’d made his debut the previous year, the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association was guaranteed an audience of at least twelve – made up of the newly joined members of the New York branch of the organisation, which he’d founded in May. He was also magnanimous or thick-skinned enough to extend an invitation to Robert Moton who had rebuffed his advances in Tuskegee. But topping Garvey’s wish-list of guests to the high-class benefit evening was the former American president, Theodore Roosevelt. The VIP tickets may have been returned by Roosevelt but Marcus Garvey took vicarious pleasure in the fact that at least they were acknowledged. At 8 o’clock on 26 June 1917, the attendance and acknowledgement were modest. The competition would have been stiff in any case, for the congregation of the church was shepherded each day of the week by charismatic pastors. And further, Garvey needed only to step outside St Mark’s church hall to gain some understanding of what else might have gone wrong.

  As well as the church, the social events at the church hall, the speakeasy and the cabaret, there was now another new game in town, free, competitive and outdoors. The unseasonably warm weather of 1916 cued the birth of a new form of street entertainment: the stepladder orators. These ebony sages set up their stepladders and soapboxes at agreed points along Harlem’s main drag; the most favoured assembly spot was on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue where the expansive pavement was wide enough to accommodate several hundred people. The stepladders would be hauled through the shopfronts of sympathetic tailors or cigar-store keepers; a topic was agreed on and the battle of ideas would ensue. By taking to the streets the zealous orators circumvented the old-school local leadership – the representative men who practised a form of benign patronage. The Young Turks eschewed the niceties of conventional politics: any subject or any person was likely to be criticised with faint regard for reputation. With great daring and fearlessness, they aired popular grievances about the violence meted out to migrants in the North; the denial of jobs based on colour; and the high rents tenants were often forced to pay for slum apartments – on this latter point, the extortionate landlords (no matter their creed or colour) were named and shamed.

  The granddaddy of all the speakers (even though he was only thirty-four at the time) was Hubert Henry Harrison. An intellectual lightning conductor, he drew the highly charged masses to his street seminars on topics that ranged from Darwin’s theory of evolution, through to the Marxist philosophy of the development of capitalism. Depending on whether you read reports in the Harlem Home News or New York News, speakers such as Harrison were either harbingers of a golden period when Harlem would ‘eclipse the age of Pericles and Socrates’, or self-appointed bores spouting their prejudices at ‘bug house corner’.18 On one essential point both journals agreed: Caribbean men and women were much over-represented among these rabble-rousers or activists; the job specification – eloquent, overeducated and underemployed – suited them perfectly.

  It was a game that suddenly all of his unofficial schooling – the elocution lessons, the debating societies and the tour of black churches in the South – seemed to have been carefully leading Garvey towards. He had found a voice, a strange and eclectic one – part evangelical (borrowed from Billy Sunday), part formal King’s English, and part lilting Caribbean speechifying. He was on-song, just needing a receptive audience which, in the spring of 1917, seemed to be tantalisingly close. But still the Jamaican migrant had no ready entrée to the masses. There’d been a false start the previous year, but then, graciously, the young electric socialist A. Philip Randolph had entered the scene. Randolph was a gifted speaker and one of the ‘most notorious street radicals in Harlem’. Rival soapboxers paid him the compliment of rarely encroaching on his territory. According to his biographer, ‘if other soapboxers wante
d to hold on to their audience, they had to be careful not to hold their meeting too close to where Randolph was preaching’.19 A. Philip Randolph proudly recalled his pivotal role in launching Garvey’s subsequent career; how he’d sportingly stepped down from his ladder and offered it to the penniless Jamaican: ‘Garvey got up on the platform and you could hear him from 135th to 125th Street. He had a tremendous voice.’20

  His health and voice, though, were troubled by a bout of the pneumonia that was to recur throughout the most stressful times of his adult life. He was also emotionally wrought by the bleakness of his prospects. Months after his sojourn through black America, he had returned to his Harlem lodge room, exhilarated but broke, to a stack of pitiful, heart-rending letters from Amy Ashwood back in Panama. She was desperate for money. Her father’s business ventures in Panama had evidently failed. Michael Ashwood had gone on alone to Florida and had not yet met with financial success. ‘One year now since my father has not given me a cent,’ Ashwood complained though she sympathised with him, realising he was not in a position to help. Her distress was compounded by the family home going up in flames: ‘I have been burnt out twice since my father’s absence and for one to be burnt out and penniless is hell.’ Ashwood spared her fiancé no details. Her poverty had badly affected her health. She was not mindful of accusations of exaggeration or special pleading because her troubles were so great. She insisted that she had lost more than fifteen teeth in the last year. ‘They are extracted now,’ she wrote, ‘and only waiting on the money to put them in.’ $200 would suffice to pay for the dental work to restore the smile to her youthful face and go some way to restoring her faith in him. She scolded Garvey for not replying to her letters, whilst simultaneously pleading for financial assistance for her passage to America. In the plan Amy outlined how he might – pretending to be her uncle – act as guarantor. For good measure, she attached a shopping list of fine clothes. She may have been burnt out but she was determined, when they met, to look her best. Her travelling colours were black or navy blue. Garvey was requested to purchase ‘one black suit, I like silk – stiff silk, a black hat like this with a white feather behind. One pair of high heel boots, bronze. One corset, straps over shoulder and a pair of stockings.’ The clothing would need to be shipped over prior to her arrival.21