by Colin Grant
But Ashwood’s secret fiancé was in no position to help. Not yet vagrant but most definitely out of work, Garvey now regularly joined the ranks of street scholars with stepladders at Speakers’ Corner on 135th Street. Unexpectedly, he found the Harlemites, especially the West Indians, twitching with pride and excitement as he spoke. Though the immigrant West Indians and native black Americans shared a much-prized possession in the shape of Harlem, a current of suspicion and competition lingered just beneath the surface. The Caribbean migrants’ boldness stemmed from the fact that they did not recognise the lesson, learnt by every African-American in the cradle, that the more distinguished jobs were off limits. After all they’d come from islands where social standing was based more on class than race. They constituted the most adventurous islanders; many had made a good living in Panama up until the completion of the canal in 1914, when their services were no longer required. In Harlem, they cleaved to each other, endured the monikers of ‘monkey chaser’, ‘ring tail’, ‘cockney’ and ‘King George’s niggers’ and the snide lampooning song:
When a monkey chaser dies
Don’t need no undertaker
Just throw him in de Harlem River
He’ll float back to Jamaica.
The ‘monkey chasers’ formed fraternal organisations and social clubs and pooled their savings into unofficial, collective banking systems that offered each ‘partner’, after regular monthly deposits, a yearly draw from the rotating credit lines and emergency interest-free loans. Nonetheless, Caribbean immigrants were said to be aggressive in business and local politics, and – even when naturalised citizens – pledged allegiance, not to Uncle Sam, but to the superior King George V. As Claude McKay put it, ‘West Indians [were] incredibly addicted to the waving of the Union Jack in the face of their American cousins.’22 At times, he acknowledged, it could be prudent for his countrymen to accentuate the difference between themselves and black Americans. McKay often told the anecdote of having once been swept up inadvertently in a police dragnet. When he was brought before the court the following morning, the judge dealt summarily with the rest of the defendants but his stance softened on hearing McKay’s voice. He peered over his glasses and began reminiscing with the poet about a recent vacation in Jamaica and chastised the police for having made a false arrest. Henceforth, McKay had resolved ‘to cultivate more my native accent’.23
To the discerning ear it would have been easy to recognise Marcus Mosiah Garvey’s own Jamaican accent but, as he declaimed from the top of a Harlem soapbox, it was masked by a style of speech that reminded Southern migrants of the forceful preachers in their ‘shouting churches’ back home. The genius of Garvey lay in his early ability to reach out to both native and foreign-born groups. The popular journalist, John E. Bruce, was among those who marvelled at the ‘little sawed-off, hammered-down black man, with determination written all over his face, and an engaging smile that caught you and compelled you to listen to his story’.24
That summer, it seemed the Jamaicans, Trinidadians and Virgin Islanders had brought the tropics to Harlem. Green bananas ripened on their window sills, pots of pimento flowered, and the trilling sound of their stepladder compatriots drifted in through open doors and windows. They turned out in their hundreds; the men uniformly in their straw boaters, and women carrying parasols, spilling off the pavement and onto Lenox Avenue, blocking traffic to hear Garvey’s doctrine of self-help. Their numbers would soon be swollen by curious, impoverished African-Americans: the bellboys, janitors and maids who’d made the great trek from the South.
Garvey’s big break amongst these harassed but slow-to-anger Southern Negroes came through the intervention of the radical Hubert Harrison. The American Dream had turned sour for Harrison. He’d arrived ten years earlier from the Virgin Islands and, like so many migrants, must have thought himself blessed with luck on his appointment as a clerk in the New York Post Office. All had gone reasonably well until he’d made the unforgivable mistake (in the eyes of certain powerful men) of criticising Booker T. Washington – an act akin to writing his own dismissal note. Though Booker T.’s agent in New York (a close friend of the postmaster) publicly declared no part in it, it quickly came to pass. By the time Garvey met Harrison, the former post-office clerk had already undergone a transformation into a class warrior. He’d been courted as the great black hope of the Socialists, and managed to eke out a living on a small stipend from the party which was keen to exploit his contacts and standing amongst black Harlemites, and have him serve as a recruiting agent. But after a few unproductive years (in which, for instance, trade unions still barred black membership and Southern Socialists continued to warn against the races blending ‘at the present time’) a chill of disenchantment had set in. Harrison had renounced his attachment to the party: instead the ‘Black Scorates’ – a reference to his formidable intellect and bespectacled, potato-shaped head – was promoting a philosophy of separation and black self-reliance. The Voice, the black paper that Harrison edited, made explicit his creed that the road to unity between blacks – of all description – would be through appealing to their hearts as well as their heads. And in the ‘poetry for the people’ section of that paper, he perfectly articulated his belief that there was no ‘Negro problem’ to solve; rather, there was a Caucasian one. His own poem ‘The Black Man’s Burden’ summed it up. Rudyard Kipling had spelt out patronisingly in ‘The White Man’s Burden’ that it was the Englishman’s duty to regulate the affairs of backward and underdeveloped peoples of colour. In his sharp parody of Kipling, Harrison laid bare raw feelings of abuse and rank hypocrisy:
Take up the black man’s burden
Send forth the worst ye breed
And bind our sons in shackles
To serve your selfish greed.
Where two years previously Hubert Harrison had taken the Socialist propaganda south of Harlem into the very belly of capitalism, setting up a soapbox on Wall Street, he now gave up on white people altogether. He devoted himself exclusively to lecturing among his own people and to the propagation of a New Negro Movement. Garvey was both alarmed and intrigued by the depths of Harrison’s bitterness; certainly he was darkened by the shadow cast by the Black Socrates. But overriding any hesitation about following Harrison into the furnace of hate was the knowledge that through the Virgin Islander Garvey himself would gain an entrée to an even larger audience.
On 12 June 1917, Hubert Harrison had invited Garvey to share the stage at the inaugural meeting of his ‘Liberty League of Negro-Americans’ in front of some 2,000 Harlemites at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal church. Harrison was a polished orator but, even so, he was no match for Marcus Garvey. ‘This was Harlem’s first real sight of Garvey,’ and when he took the floor, ‘his magnetic personality, torrential eloquence, and intuitive knowledge of crowd psychology were all brought into play,’ reported James Weldon Johnson. ‘He swept the audience along with him.’25
Garvey was a sensation that night, and more so at subsequent meetings. He began as a warm-up act to the Black Socrates but soon Harrison would find the roles of master and pupil reversed. There was no coup. Garvey simply wooed Harrison’s supporters with the seductive sound of his beautiful voice and the simplicity of his compelling arguments. He was also fortunate that vanity does not appear to have played too great a part in Harrison’s make-up. Hubert Harrison, like Garvey, was a man forever on the move. But he had a large family (of five children) to feed, and consequently could not be as single-minded in his pursuit of their shared ideals. He saw in Garvey an ally and man with the same amount of, if not greater, prodigious energy. The loquacious Jamaican spoke far longer than any other, and held, entertained and drew audiences away from his bemused, rival stepladder sages. Garvey’s success was attributed to his profound empathy with the crowds. ‘His words were compassionate,’ recalled Virginia Collins, ‘he spoke from his soul, and you had this feeling that you were there, that you [were] he, too, that you felt the same thing he was speaking of.’2
6 Such sentiments were equally apparent to Harrison. They spoke the same language, in large part, he later mused, because Garvey had helped himself to some of his better ideas. But Garvey’s latest mentor was a generous and patient intellectual who watched with little rancour as his followers turned towards his protégé.
The pitiful plight of the Caribbean black man’s blood relations in the USA had stirred Marcus Garvey’s imagination. He was starting to detach himself from an outlook formed through the prism of a Jamaican colonial world, governed firstly through class privilege and secondly by racial prejudices. On American soil that order was reversed: race came first. ‘The American Negro,’ he stated ironically, ‘occupies the best position among all Negroes up to the present time,’ and for that ‘he has the white man to thank.’ Garvey had found, perversely, in his travels throughout black America that ‘the honest prejudice of the South was sufficiently evident to give the Negro the start with a race consciousness responsible for the state of development already reached by the race’.27
5
NO FLAG BUT THE STARS AND STRIPES
– AND POSSIBLY THE UNION JACK
Come lay your kinkey head on Mammy’s shoulder
Don’t you cry you’re Mammy’s chocolate soldier.
And a soldier can’t be crying, even though he’s dying
Though your skin is dark at night,
I know your little pickaninny heart is white.
Sidney D. Mitchell and Archie Gottler,
‘Mammy’s Chocolate Soldier’ (1918)
BESIEGED by rent collectors, debts he couldn’t pay and a fiancée who showed no let-up in goading him to alleviate her own desperate circumstances, Garvey had been on the point of returning to Jamaica before he met Harrison. Yet with Harrison’s tutelage, he now exploded each night onto the stage. So successful were these speeches that Harrison would later tell all who would listen that it was he who had brought the greatest orator ever seen to the Negro world’s attention. Thoughts of returning home were put on hold as Garvey considered his options. Back on the tiny island of Jamaica he’d be working once again in miniature. The USA offered a much more exciting theatre of operation, a much grander canvas to match the scale of his unbound ambition. Garvey was the coming man, as far as sections of black America were concerned.
By 1917, American newspapers – not noted for their international coverage – were filled with dispatches from the ongoing carnage in Europe. On 2 June, President Woodrow Wilson answered the Allies’ prayers and took America into the war under the slogan: ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy’. It was a declaration that presented a conundrum for African-American leaders, clearly the standard definition of democracy was not something that its black citizens benefited from at home. Woodrow Wilson had declared for America, but could he count on the African-American? Anecdotally, James Weldon Johnson, the editor of the conservative black newspaper, the New York Age, had evidence of ambivalence – at least from the snatches of conversations he overheard in a Harlem barber’s shop. When its resident philosopher was asked if he’d join the army and take up arms against the Germans, he is said to have replied, ‘The Germans ain’t done nothin’ to me, and if they have, I forgive ’em.’1 A conclusive verdict had yet to be reached.
Garvey’s future rival, W. E. B. Du Bois, seemed to have caught the prevailing patriotic mood when he advocated in the pages of the Crisis that the Negro should put to one side his ‘special grievances’ for now, and ‘close ranks, shoulder to shoulder’ with his fellow Americans.2 The majority needed little encouragement. The recent Mexican border dispute had already whetted appetites. Young men eager for honour and glory were spellbound by the romantic headlines in the New York Age of the ambush of black soldiers, the ‘Gallant Tenth Cavalry … [who] faced almost certain death at Carrizal with smiles and songs on their Lips’. And if the jubilant scenes which greeted reports in 1916 of the formation of a new, all-black regiment, the 369th, in Harlem proved anything, then it was that the black man, when it came to pass, would be just as prepared to smile and sing his way to the next world fighting for Uncle Sam on the battlefields of Europe.3
The Governor of New York, Charles Whitman, had been cheered at a casino in Harlem for his endorsement of the 369th. In recognition of their fearlessness in battle, the French would later dub them ‘The Harlem Hell Fighters’. One of the district’s leading clergymen, Adam Clayton Powell Snr, who was also on the platform that day, seemed to have anticipated Du Bois’s hunch: ‘We do not know any flag but the Stars and Stripes,’ Powell told the Governor. ‘We have always stood ready as Boston Common, Bunker Hill, Fort Pillow and San Juan Heights will testify, and we now stand ready to give our blood in the defence of the sacred principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence.’4
Whether they shared that view or not, more than half a million African-Americans registered in the first week of July 1917, at the start of enrolment under the new Selective Service Act. Among the potential recruits was a twenty-nine-year-old asthmatic Jamaican who was speedily exempted on the grounds that he was physically unfit.5 Garvey’s registration card was completed more out of legal necessity than conviction. In the three years since the war began, his enthusiastic endorsement of the Allies’ moral supremacy and that of His Majesty’s forces to ‘smite the common foe’ had curdled. A certain cynicism had begun to set in. On 16 March 1916, over a thousand Jamaican recruits had boarded the Verdala bound for England. Fearing enemy warships on the north coast of Europe, the ship was diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia. But before it could reach safe shores the Verdala sailed into a blizzard. The Jamaican volunteers were only kitted out in lightweight tropical khaki uniforms. Denied the heavier uniforms which were on board, more than half the soldiers suffered from frostbite; there were also substantial casualties. Thereafter, the War Office, perhaps not surprisingly, struggled in its recruitment drive.
Arguably, military ineptitude was not colour-coded. The British High Command, and General Haig in particular, only paused momentarily, if at all, before ordering thousands of his compatriots out of the trenches and over the top into no man’s land, on suicidal missions. Similarly, when African-American troops of the 368th Regiment later advanced towards the enemy, they would complain, for instance, that the field officers’ callous disregard for their survival left them battling with enemy wires without the provision of wire cutters, and exposed to German mortars and Gattling guns.6 Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey reacted angrily to the often exaggerated accounts of black soldiers being assigned the most perilous tasks with their lives needlessly squandered.
Conversely, W. E. B. Du Bois raged against the insult to the vast majority of African-American soldiers in being relegated to supporting roles: more likely to be issued with a broom or shovel than rifle and bayonet. Better the news of the unprecedented and unbroken 191 days that the ‘Harlem Hell Fighters’ endured under enemy fire. The ‘no ordinary sacrifice’, of African-American men fighting in the First World War, Du Bois considered a ‘deposit in the bank towards full citizenship’ which would be drawn on at the conflict’s end. But Garvey was not alone in doubting the wisdom of the Crisis’s, jingoism. In an ironic inversion of the usual state of affairs, no sooner was the ink dry on Du Bois’s editorial than the conservative black press were taking issue with the militant editor’s conservatism. When one considered Dr Du Bois’s distaste for compromise, and factored into the equation the raft of injustices (lynching topping the list) that the black man could daily expect in America, then his editorial was indefensible. For Hubert Harrison – and by extension Garvey – it bore all the hallmarks of, at the very least, questionable self-justification. ‘All the more significant because of his former services to the race’, which, Harrison argued, were ‘of a high and courageous sort’.7 William Du Bois should have known better. Though the editor fudged the dates of his supportive article, its publication in the Crisis appeared shortly after he was offered a head-turning captain’s commission into Military Intelligence. The two even
ts were not unconnected. It was a rare miscalculation on Du Bois’s part, notwithstanding that he eventually declined the offer of a commission.
Riding in on the coat-tails of Hubert Harrison, Garvey became a vocal opponent of participation in the ‘white man’s war’ in which the lot of black soldiers mirrored their civilian counterparts: relegated to segregated quarters, cooking, cleaning, transporting and burying their fallen white compatriots. By the war’s end he would openly proclaim: ‘Why go over to Europe and fight for the whites and lose an arm or leg when you can fight for a just cause?’8 Why should black people fight for democracy abroad when they didn’t have the vote at home? Or as A. Philip Randolph’s the Messenger put it, ‘We would rather make Georgia safe for the Negro.’9 In black churches, rented halls and on street corners, Garvey and his fellow orators argued the point: that there should be no conscription without representation. In the midst of such conflagration, the War Department held out the hope that a conciliatory tone in a militant organ such as the Crisis might neutralise the volcano of African-American resentment that spluttered and then exploded after the events of 2 July 1917.