Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Or beaten to death by cops in New York.

  ‘Mr Dooley’s Philosophy’, 1902

  WITHOUT doubt the bravery of black soldiers in the trenches did lead to a transformation in the way some white Americans viewed their darker compatriots. The Southern humourist, Irvin Cobb, was one of them. Cobb was famous for genial comedies which drew on a plentiful supply of stereotypical black characters with ‘complexions like the bottom of a coal mine, and smiles like the sudden lift of a piano lid’. The unthreatening black world that Cobb wrote about was populated with flamboyant hucksters in ill-fitting suits, and simplistic coons, dozing under the shade of trees. But his journalistic accreditation with the American Expeditionary Force in 1918, and his subsequent contact with the Harlem Hell Fighters on the front line, complicated his perception of the Negro. At first, he’d described his visit amongst black troops in France as ‘two days of a superior variety of continuous blackface vaudeville’. His account of an exchange between a white officer and Private Cooksey (a former Harlem lift attendant who grandly referred to himself as an ‘internal chauffeur’) reads suspiciously like a well-rehearsed vaudeville routine: The commanding officer asks Cooksey what he’d do if enemy mortars started landing close by. ‘Kurnel, ain’t going to tell you no lie,’ says Cooksey, ‘I fest nacthelly be obliged to go away from here. Fest put it in de books as “absent without leave” ’cause I’ll be back jest ez soon as I kin get my brakes to work.’ The colonel then asks Cooksey what he’d do should the enemy advance without warning. Cooksey answers again that he’d be forced to flee, but rest assured ‘we’ll spread de word all over France dat de Germans is comin’.’ Come crunch time though, when the theory was put into practice and the mortars began to fall, Cobb reported admiringly that neither ‘Cooksey nor any of his black mates showed the white feather or yellow streak or turned back’.1

  Irvin Cobb underwent a Pauline conversion in France, observing the black sons of Mississippi and Alabama marching towards the Rhine. The normal, prejudicial, assumptions that came with their casual description would no longer hold: ‘Hereafter,’ he declared, ‘“n-i-g-g-e-r” will merely be another way of spelling “American”.’2 At the war’s cessation, that new lexicography did not appear to have made its way south of the 49th parallel. There a military uniform would not necessarily spare the black man the wrath of the mob. In some quarters, it was deemed an impertinence – not quite the equal of the heinous crime of rape (the usual excuse given for a lynching) – but a provocation, nonetheless. By the year’s end, at least ten black veterans, some still proudly clad in their khaki uniforms, would be lynched. In the bitter words of the campaigner, Ida B. Wells, when cornered by the lynch mob ‘neither character nor standing avails the Negro’.3

  If black people thought things might be different, now that the world had been made safe for democracy, then, Garvey advised, they’d better think again. Blacks kept their eyes and ears peeled for any sign of the impromptu gathering – of white men, women and children, with picnic baskets of cucumber sandwiches and ginger beer, accompanied by the shrill, rebel yell – that heralded the onset of a lynching. Even in progressive South Carolina seething hatreds were near impossible to contain. When a wealthy black merchant, Anthony Crawford, got into an argument with a group of white competitors, the sheriff placed him under arrest and locked him in the local jail for his own safety, only for the jail to be stormed by the mob. Mr Crawford was captured, strung up on a tree and his body shot though with hundreds of bullets. The Charleston News and Courier reported that he was ‘the type of Negro who is most offensive to certain white people’, and whilst in no way condoning the actions of the murderers, the paper noted that Crawford was ‘getting rich for a Negro, and he was insolent along with it’.4 The Courier’s pitiful apologia barely disguised the embarrassment and realisation that a culture which tolerated such acts of brutality degraded the white perpetrators as much as it destroyed black lives. The mob needed saving from itself. Fair-skinned blacks like the NAACP’s Walter White who, at great risk to his own safety, infiltrated lynch parties and chronicled their murderous intent, reached the same conclusion: the poor white trash had sunk to such low levels of esteem and ignorance, that if they didn’t have blacks to demonise, then they’d have no recourse other than to despise themselves.5

  It wasn’t safe to be black in South Carolina, nor in Illinois, Mississippi or Washington – the list was endless. Just walking in the wrong part of town, at the wrong time of day, death could take you away. Mothers counselled their adolescent sons in the fine art of deference, of keeping their insolent eyes to the ground and, as Ellison’s Invisible Man is advised, ‘to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins’.6 That lynchings were carried out with impunity only exacerbated the fear that any black man (or sometimes woman) might unwittingly become the next victim of a random act of group violence. Self-preservation now underpinned Garvey’s doctrine of self-respect. He sombrely warned that there was a grave danger that the Negro would soon be ‘dying out’; that it was only a matter of time before the ‘Negro will be as completely and complacently dead as the North American Indian, or the Australian Bushman’.7

  If Garvey’s prediction of extermination sounds preposterous and fanciful today, it was not, to petrified black folk, beyond the bounds of reason in that hateful red summer of 1919. It was a period of great unrest, of disillusionment and despair; a time when fevered apparitions of an apocalypse obscured any sighting of the Promised Land; and an age, the New York Bee believed, that cried out for a Negro Moses.8 Garvey showed all the signs of potentially fitting the bill, of a Moses in the making. As a character in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man says, ‘Garvey must have had something. He must have had something to move all those people! Our people are hell to move! He must have had plenty!’9 On the fringes of the Garvey fan club, all except a handful – including one unforgiving critic – shared that assessment: John E. Bruce still showed a preference for derision over praise for ‘The Moses that was to have been, the Judas that is’. By his own standards, Marcus Garvey took an unusually phlegmatic approach to Bruce’s continued sniping. He would bide his time in the hope that eventually he’d be able to turn the sceptic into a believer. However, Bruce Grit was not the kind of man to switch camps mid-race. But there were signs of desperation among the leaders of the splinter group. The constant tweaking of the name of their organisation – Universal Negro Protective Association (UNPA) and Universal Improvement and Cooperative Association (UICA) – resembling ever more closely the original UNIA, did little to arrest their diminishing numbers and the drift back to Garvey.

  During the course of 1918, the membership of the UNIA grew at an extraordinary rate. The net was cast wide. Anyone ‘of Negro blood and African ancestry’ with sufficient disposable income to hand over 25 cents a month into the UNIA treasury, could apply. Since its incorporation on 17 June 1918, the organisation had issued thousands of membership certificates – neatly embossed and stamped with a greeting, ‘To the Beloved and Scattered Millions of the Negro Race’ – that promised to extend ‘the principles of Benevolence’ towards the physical and cultural development of each member. In six months, their numbers had outgrown the capacity of the rented Lafayette Hall, and Garvey now proposed a fund to raise $200,000 for a permanent home for the organisation. Once again, Theodore Roosevelt topped the list of VIPs invited to get things rolling. A donation from Roosevelt, no matter how small, would attract the attention of other potential benefactors.

  The trading arm of the organisation, the African Communities’ League, was filed for incorporation a month later. Garvey envisaged (among other things) an import-and-export business, the running of a restaurant and a steam launderette. As well as employing members of the parent UNIA, the businesses would benefit from those members as customers. This example of synergy was an early indication of Marcus Garvey’s interlocking ambitions. Much would depend on the enthusiasm he could garner from his growing audience. The chance to consolidate brought out the
showman in Garvey, who was increasingly seeking to build on the possibility for pageantry that his mass-meetings held – most notably, the outdoor, late-night gatherings that were said to have been illuminated by the sparks of scores of tap dancers.10

  Very few Harlemites who came into contact with the UNIA could now resist the swell of excitement that accompanied such spectacular growth. The renegade Isaac B. Allen was certainly not immune. Garvey’s rival, who’d helped to split the organisation the year before, had seen which way the wind was blowing, and pleaded for readmission to the governing body. When Allen climbed back on board, his commitment dazzled; he reappeared, washed in the detergent of zealotry that was guaranteed to remove the stains of his previous betrayal. Allen would have endorsed the sentiments of the recently joined Southern member – quoted in UNIA pamphlets – who asserted that ‘Garvey gave my people backbones where they [only] had wishbones.’11

  Marcus Garvey was still intoxicated by his own dream, and nightly summoned the memory of that lucid exaltation on board the SS Trent, from four years ago. To date, in the fulfilment of that vision to build a mass movement of black people, Garvey had overlooked the structural specifications required. The template he’d worked on up until this point (a nucleus of six directors and a subscription membership) hadn’t allowed for the fantastic numbers that multiplied each week. A new style of thinking and a grander design was called for: Garvey would have to scale up the structure of the UNIA, from the equivalent of a modest church to a cathedral. Self-doubt was not an option. Even so, in those rare, quiet moments, when the hurricane of applause – that followed him everywhere now – died down, Garvey could just make out the faint but distinctive slow handclap of John E. Bruce: ‘We like to listen to the music of his mouth,’ Bruce Grit taunted, ‘[but] Mr Garvey will find that the Negro race is not so easily organised as he imagines … wise statesmen always conceal more than they reveal … You won’t do Mr Garvey too muchee talkee.’ The eloquent Jamaican could ‘talk the talk’ but could anything he said be substantiated? Bruce Grit didn’t think so. ‘He is a glib phrase maker,’ Bruce concluded, ‘[who] will find that the Negro race … is a pretty good meal ticket until the period of disillusionment wanes.’12 There was little room for any rapprochement between those lines. Bruce’s skewering of Garvey was an about-turn from his previous generosity; back then in 1916, he’d offered his moral support, opened his contacts’ book and ‘given him a list of names of our leading men in New York who … would encourage and assist him’. But it was in their first encounters, before Garvey had fallen foul of Bruce’s cynicism, that the sharp-shooting journalist and committed Freemason had given him an idea that would now prove invaluable.

  When Garvey sat down to compose the constitution of the brave new UNIA he drew heavily on the charters of other fraternal benevolent organisations, like the black Freemasons. A life-insurance policy formed one of the central planks of the UNIA Book of Laws, providing death benefits to members. This was in line with other fraternities, and was particularly attractive to black people who were frequently denied such coverage by insurance companies. The UNIA promise of a final lump sum of $75 towards every member’s funeral removed the spectre of the pauper’s grave (soon to be Garvey Senior’s destiny) that overshadowed their lives. Peace in death then, but the accent of the organisation was most definitely on prosperity in life. Mutual improvement associations were nothing new. Garvey’s innovation was to attempt to weld commercial and cultural aspirations onto the body of the soon-to-be-improved Negro.

  The source of the numerous titles enshrined in the UNIA handbook – including high chancellor, chaplain general, potentate and supreme commissioner – could also be traced back to African Freemasonry. Garvey borrowed some of the nomenclature along with aspects of its philosophy. The anachronistic-sounding ‘potentate’ was an abbreviation of the ‘imperial potentate’ of the Ancient Egyptian Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (or black shriners) made famous by the peerless black Mason, Prince Hall. In a prevailing climate of political impotence and disenfranchisement, only the Masons and parallel fraternities provided opportunities for black collective organisation – outside the church. The cautious and clever Prince Hall was just the kind of figure whom Bruce believed should serve as a model of shrewd leadership.

  Prince Hall was born in Barbados in 1735 and was subsequently enslaved in North America. He won his freedom during the American War of Independence, and through persistence, guile and courage, he managed to establish the first black lodge in Boston – with the blessing of the parent Masonic body in England – much to the chagrin of white American counterparts.13

  John E. Bruce was a fervent Prince Hall Mason (an active member of Lodge number 38), and though he declined to pin his colours to the Garvey mast-head, some of the other ‘odd fellows’ were not so circumspect. Besides, the UNIA seemed to share the same language: the titles came first, the costumes would follow. There were, however, fundamental differences. Garvey eschewed the secrecy of the society, and imposed no stringent selection procedures: the doors of the UNIA were open to all Negroes from all walks of life. Equally, there was one central tenet (shared with the black shriners) that was sacrosanct: in the shrine of the UNIA, the potentate would retain absolute power. And if Garvey was ever to play the role of casting director, he had only to look in the mirror to discover the most suitable (and bankable) candidate for the role. The job description stipulated that the potentate be compelled to ‘marry only a lady of Negro blood’; retain the power to ‘confer titles and orders of merit’; and from time to time issue ‘articles’ and ‘messages’ to the entire body of members. Marcus Garvey envisaged that those messages would be transmitted in a forthcoming journalistic organ, to be called the Negro World. Garvey’s missives aside, the weekly journal would need wordsmiths as talented as the potentate-in-waiting to fill its pages with sparkling propaganda.

  Among his compatriots in Harlem, the Socialist-leaning Claude McKay would have been an obvious candidate for inclusion on the pages of the Negro World but he kept his distance. McKay favoured the rambunctious rent party or salacious speakeasy over the Sunday-school theatrics animating Garvey’s growing followers up at Lafayette Hall. The UNIA leader’s regular sermon on self-defence did, however, resonate. After all, Pullman porters travelling in small numbers through hostile backwaters of bigotry were especially vulnerable. Trains risked pulling into towns on the verge of the racial conflagrations that had sharply increased after the war. In the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919, the nation ignited, turned vigilantes loose against the Reds in its midst, and boiled over with rage against the impertinent Negro. As McKay recalled, ‘Our Negro newspapers were morbid … full of details of murderous shootings and hangings. Travelling from city to city, we Negro railroad men were nervous … less light-hearted. We did not separate from one another gaily to spend ourselves in speakeasies and gambling joints.’ Instead, McKay’s fellow Pullman porters cleaved together, some of them armed with pistols, ‘and stayed in our quarters through the dreary ominous nights, for we never knew what was going to happen’.14 It was from this terrible sense of dread and foreboding that McKay’s great sonnet, ‘If We Must Die’, exploded out of him.

  If we must die, let it not be like hogs

  Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

  While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

  Making their mock at our accursed lot.

  If we must die, O let us nobly die,

  So that our precious blood may not be shed

  In vain; then even the monsters we defy

  Shall be constrained to honour us though dead!

  O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!

  Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

  And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!

  What though before us lies the open grave?

  Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

  Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!15

  That one poem, pub
lished in the Liberator in 1919, encapsulated all the fear, frustrations and defiance of black people in America. It also tapped into the unstated terror of white America, for the price that had yet to be paid for its subjugation of the black man. From the slave insurrections of Nat Turner in 1831 to the murderous escapades of John Brown twenty-eight years later, America had been forewarned of an apocalyptic settling of the score that was to come. Claude McKay would have them believe that time had arrived. Although intended for the liberal white readership of the Socialist Liberator magazine, the scorching and heart-rending call to arms of ‘If We Must Die’ found its mark most keenly in the bosom of black folk: it wasn’t poetry, it was unfettered truth. News of its potency spread throughout black America. It was quickly reprinted by the Messenger and Crusader in Harlem, and space was found for it in almost every significant black journal.

  ‘If We Must Die’ was mightier than any poem Marcus Garvey would ever write, and the UNIA leader recognised in it his long-held belief in the unification of art and propaganda as the keenest instrument of protest. Though McKay would baulk at a description of his work as protest poetry, it was the only poem he ever felt comfortable about reading aloud to his fellow dining-car waiters: ‘They were all agitated. Even the fourth waiter – who was the giddiest and most irresponsible of the lot – even he actually cried,’ McKay confided, ‘and one, who was a believer in the Marcus Garvey movement, suggested that I should go to the headquarters of the organisation, and read the poem. As I was not yet uplifted with his enthusiasm for the Garvey Movement, yet did not like to say so, I told him truthfully that I had no ambition to harangue a crowd.’16

  Now the war was over, old resentments resurfaced. There was continued anger: over the exodus of blacks in the South, resulting in a shortage of labour that hamstrung industry there; over the jobs in the North lost to non-unionised blacks that rightfully belonged to whites; and over the new Negroes who did not seem to know their place, neither north nor south of the Mason-Dixon Line. It was the same old tune. The difference now was the greater willingness of black people to answer violence with violence.