Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  The birth of the Negro World had only been made possible by the generosity of patrons at each end of America’s political spectrum. Garvey’s championing of the principle of putting the race first had loosened the purse strings of Madam C. J. Walker. In what was to be the last year of her life, Madam Walker was also keen to identify other good causes and recipients worthy of her largesse. She held court at her luxurious 34-room mansion on the Hudson and a procession of suitors came to call. Garvey performed a delicate balancing act with the philanthropic Walker whose clinging, invisible, complexion-enhancing face powder came in four shades: White, Rose-flesh, Brown and Egyptian Brown. The ink-black Garvey lauded her services to the race whilst criticising cosmetics manufacturers who traded on the pathology of self-loathing Negroes.

  Marcus Garvey well understood the culture amongst black people of coveting fair skin and ‘good’ as opposed to ‘bad’ hair. ‘Good’ hair meant soft and manageable. The owner of good hair was in all likelihood the beneficiary of white input into the gene pool through the generations (shorthand for the rape of an ancestor by her slave-owning master), diluting one’s despised Negritude. ‘Bad’ hair was dry and unwieldy, as coarse as the poor class of unmixed Negroes who sported it. Bad hair damned one to the lower orders. But women (and occasionally men) could disguise their origins by investing in black beauty preparations. Once your hair had been treated, attention might then be turned to your face, applying ointments (‘Dr Fred’s Skin Whitener’ was a popular choice) that claimed ‘in just three minutes [to] lighten the darkest skin giving it a feminine exquisiteness’. For the two or three weeks that these preparations lasted – before the hair and skin stubbornly reverted to type – black disaffection with their ‘natural’ look was replaced with an artificially induced fantasy of being classified a mulatto or octoroon. But, in keeping with its philosophy of race pride, the Negro World refused to carry adverts for hair-straightening and skin-lightening products, or any other ‘advertisement that would in any way libel the race’ – Madam Walker’s included.13 It was a costly policy. Most black newspapers depended largely on the advertising revenue brought in by selling space to manufacturers of bleaching products like ‘Black No More’ and straightening preparations like ‘Dr Lee’s Bobbed Hair’ to keep in business. But Garvey equated the black desire for a Caucasian look with mental slavery. Now was the time, he argued, to ‘take the kinks out of your mind, instead of out of your hair’.14

  At the embryonic stages of the Negro World, other inconvenient principles had deferred to insurmountable practicalities. Even with a generous donation from Madam Walker, the cost of putting together a weekly publication was still beyond Garvey’s pocket. Once more, he turned to his boyhood friend, Wilfred Domingo, for help. Since his arrival from Jamaica in 1910, Domingo had consistently made it his business to build up a network of influential acquaintances. Starting out as a medical student, Domingo flitted between a host of unsatisfactory jobs – from butcher to postal clerk – before careering towards a lifetime of activism. A. Philip Randolph credited him with ‘a penetrating and logical mind and a thorough grasp of Marxism’, coupled with an unfortunate entrepreneurial fascination with the various ways of becoming rich.15 Domingo was a true believer in Marxism but not always a practising one. At the time Garvey first ran into him, Domingo was churning out imaginative business schemes on a weekly basis. At one point, he dreamed up the idea of roasting and selling potatoes on the neighbourhood’s street corners, emulating the local celebrity ‘Pig Foot Mary’, who made a fortune from hungry Harlemites who stopped at her stall for cooked trotters. Domingo saw himself as part of a ‘dusky tribe of destiny seekers’ and the West Indians in Harlem as bringing a precious vibrancy to the host culture; the Caribbeans were ‘a sort of leaven in the [African] American loaf’, possessing the same passion as the Jew for education and business. According to Wilfred Domingo, the men and women from the ‘palm fringed sea shores and murmuring streams … fortified by a graceful insouciance’ had become trend setters virtually overnight. Nattily dressed, strolling along Lenox Avenue in their light-coloured cotton suits and white shoes, the West Indians, he noted, had at first been ‘the butt of many a jest from their American brothers’. Yet shortly afterwards those same Americans had quietly ‘adopted the styles that they formerly derided’.16 In two key areas the dapper Domingo was in absolute agreement with Marcus Garvey: that whenever possible one tried to dress to distinction (in this he trailed behind the UNIA leader whose wardrobe grew with his stature) and that the small businesses – jewellery, tailoring and grocery stores – started by pioneering Jamaicans and other West Indians were ventures that should be praised to the rafters. Primarily though, it was the expiation of wealth as outlined in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital that most excited Domingo intellectually. He was an enthusiast who cultivated political alliances without fully signing up to any one group.

  From 1918 onwards, Domingo was associated with the New Crowd Negroes whose motto, ‘The Negro need no longer fear the face of day’, each claimed credit for. They were graduates of the Harlem soapbox, an iconoclastic group who were articulating ‘an attitude of cynicism that was a characteristic’ hitherto ‘foreign to the Negro’.17 Their radicalism was ‘motivated by a fierce race consciousness’, and gradually after the war those same sentiments were finding an audience amongst disaffected black people. Increasingly, but slowly, the New Crowd leaders waded through a molasses of nervous black resistance. They would need to overcome a culture of stultifying caution that had evolved over decades and centuries of bowed-head, hat-in-the-hand subservient strategies of survival. As one of the most astute chroniclers of these times, the black intellectual Alain Locke later observed, ‘the Negro [was] radical on race matters and conservative on others, in other words, a “forced radical”, a social protestant rather than a genuine radical’.18

  The New Crowd, a younger generation of genuine left-leaning radicals led by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, were mostly associated with the Socialist Party. Domingo charmed the party’s printer, Henry Rogowski, into extending a line of credit to Garvey that enabled the weekly Negro World to follow the socialist New York Call straight off the printing presses at 444 Pearl Street. In his eagerness to launch the paper, Marcus Garvey was not going to let the detail of questionable political persuasions prove an impediment. He convinced himself that if he hurried along inconspicuously then perhaps he would not be seen. But in the paranoid America of 1919 it was almost impossible for someone like Marcus Garvey to go unobserved and not to be judged by the company he kept.

  Unnerving reports of UNIA meetings where Bolshevism was not unreservedly denounced were seized on by informants and inverted, so that the UNIA position that ‘the Negro has no cause against Bolshevism’ was translated into ‘the Negro is pro-Bolshevism’. Whilst there is no evidence that the UNIA president ever showed any inclination or sympathy towards Socialism or Communism, that didn’t stop the administration casting a suspicious eye at the goings-on at the fringes of his organisation. Socialists were increasingly sniffing around the Garvey movement; they’d both admired and envied his success in signing up huge numbers of working-class black people to the UNIA – an organisation that was still expanding. Garvey seemed an extraordinarily able propagandist; in the two years since his arrival, he’d built up a substantial following that dwarfed the black membership of the Socialist Party. Most left-leaning black workers were inclined towards the colour-blind Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, also known as the Wobblies), though their solidarity foundered on the IWW’s propensity to call for industrial action at the slightest provocation. The old slogan, ‘Every strike is a little revolution and a dress rehearsal for the big one,’ froze on the lips of recruiters as potential black members backed away.19

  In over a decade of striving, the Socialists had made even less headway than the IWW amongst the black proletariat. Perhaps Garvey might serve as a conduit to the masses? Activists certainly saw his huge potential and were beginning to explore way
s of forging common cause with the UNIA. And if Garvey was increasingly seen as the lightning conductor of black aspiration and unrest, then the Socialists had flown a kite into that electrical storm in the shape of Claude McKay, the acclaimed author of ‘If We Must Die’.

  For a black poet to be published in a respected journal like the Liberator was considered, in 1919, a remarkable achievement, in and out of literary circles. Among the cognoscenti, the Jamaican poet’s admirers ranged from the doggerel-loving Garvey to the erudite Harvard man, William Braithwaite, whose own anaemic poems were studiously colour-blind. But the sentiments at the back of ‘If We Must Die’ were as likely to be discussed in the barber’s shop as they were in the literary parlour. It was commonly held that ‘If We Must Die’ had propelled McKay into a position of spokesman for the race. It also earned him a BOI file. As the first celebrator of a looming Harlem Renaissance, McKay was subsequently pulled in literary and political directions that weren’t always compatible. Braithwaite cautioned him that compositions that revealed his racial identity would not be prudent, ‘because of the insurmountable prejudice against all things Negro’, and offered his own bleached verse as a model for McKay to best advance in the world of poetry.20 Max Eastman at the Liberator, while conceding the ugliness of naked Red-soaked verse, urged him to continue proselytising with works of mass appeal. Further contradictory advice came on a trip to London, where McKay met his literary hero, George Bernard Shaw. The celebrated writer (aligned to the liberal Fabian movement) had oozed sympathy for a sensitive Negro soul who, regrettably, should expect few outlets for his poems. Shaw counselled the poet that he might have had more luck turning his skills towards pugilism and the ring. ‘You might have developed into a successful boxer with training,’ said Shaw. ‘Poets remain poor unless they have an empire to glorify and popularise like Kipling.’21

  Back in America, the management of the Liberator had seen things differently; in a vote of confidence in McKay’s skills it had offered to make him an assistant editor. For a Negro poet to be appointed to such a position was beyond black dreams and expectations. A small circle of like-minded radicals cheered McKay’s elevation to the editorial board. His graduation was a good omen and fuelled their own sense of a new day a-coming, when they’d no longer be toiling amongst the largely indifferent, unpromising and conservative Old Crowd Negroes, but harnessing a growing revolutionary spirit amongst the New Crowd. If handled correctly, Garvey’s role might prove crucial in achieving their ends.

  Once Claude McKay had settled into the job, Hubert Harrison and others were calling for him to exploit his new authority (courtesy of the impeccable leftist credentials of the Liberator offices) and convene a ‘little meeting with the rest of the black Reds’. Aside from the opportunity for back-slapping and mutual appreciation, McKay recalled that ‘the real object of the meeting was … to discuss the possibility of making the UNIA more class-conscious.’22 The gathering of co-conspirators read like a Who’s Who of former stepladder scholars, now editors of small but pioneering radical journals; among them was Wilfred Domingo (whose friendship with Garvey had become strained in the course of 1919). The black Reds’ focus on Garvey was not simply an act of expediency. There seemed much to praise in a UNIA president-general who had predicted the expansive growth of Bolshevism ‘until it finds a haven in the breasts of all oppressed peoples’ of the world, culminating in ‘a universal rule of the masses’.23

  In his negotiations with the printer of the socialist New York Call, Domingo had acted as a kind of political guarantor for the Garvey movement. And though Domingo never embraced membership of the UNIA, partly as a reward for securing the arrangement with the printer, Garvey had appointed him to write the leaders of the new paper. It had proven an expensive mistake. In his editorship of the Negro World Domingo gave free rein to his own personal views. Under Domingo’s watch, the editorials were a close match for the polemical and near-subversive writings published in the Liberator and the Messenger. At least that was what the intelligence operatives now continually monitoring the Negro World believed. The Bureau of Investigation and Military Intelligence reports had evolved over the months. The typical early entry by Major Loving on 5 January 1919 under the heading ‘Negro Activities’ had undergone a gradual transformation by April 1919 into ‘Negro Agitation’ before finally mutating into ‘Negro World: Probable Bolshevik Propaganda’.24

  It wasn’t the best of times to attract such a label. America’s entry into the Great War had ensured that the world was made safe for democracy. But Russia’s Bolshevik revolution, and the subsequent spread of its militant ideals, threatened to undo much of President Wilson’s patient and persistent brokering of a just and lasting peace. In the chaos following the armistice, Europe flared up with a revolutionary fervour. Like the great influenza epidemic that went on to claim half a million American lives, virulent Bolshevik propaganda had not been checked in time and was now abroad in the USA, tolerated and freely disseminated in undesirable left-wing publications, most notably in the Liberator and New York Call. Right-wing papers, for whom Bolshevik thought was equally as dangerous as Bolshevik deed, fulminated at the government’s inactivity. The Philadelphia Inquirer summed up their frustration when it observed, ‘We may as well invite Lenin and Trotsky to come here and set up business at once.’25

  In the view of the administration, some radicalised sections of the black population were the sleeping, junior partners in a cabal of Communists, anarchists, militant trade unionists and the Industrial Workers of the World in desiring the destruction of capitalist America and the creation of a Bolshevik state. The Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer, was a recent Red-baiting convert. When he’d first entered office, Palmer, a devout Quaker, had revealed his pristine, liberal instincts and angered the hawks in Washington by opening the jails and setting free thousands of enemy aliens and other prisoners who’d been arrested under draconian war-time Acts of Espionage and Sedition. Initially, he wasn’t as convinced of the post-war dangers. Were there thousands of members of a secret enemy within the shores of the USA who had cunningly crossed through its porous borders disguised as economic migrants? If so, those were the very people he’d let out of the jails.

  Critics like Senator Clayton R. Lusk of New York State aired the commonly held suspicion that the propagandists had by ‘devious methods’ infiltrated legitimate labour organisations and had especially taken root among the ‘large and entirely unassimilated foreign-born, non-English-speaking industrial class’.26 The Attorney General now argued that the state could at least curb the propagation of un-American ideals by censoring radical publications and disrupting their distribution through the mail. In the eyes of subordinates, such as J. Edgar Hoover, black publications including the rabid Messenger and the Negro World should also be scrutinised. Hoover was especially incensed when shown a copy of ‘Socialism, the Negroes’ Hope’, written by Domingo for the Messenger, with a byline that identified the author as editor of the Negro World.

  Voluntary self-censorship was the first line of defence but individual editors clearly couldn’t always be trusted to gauge what limits they should place on personal freedom. The Censorship Board had yet to wind down after the war and Hoover lobbied but barely convinced sceptical civil servants that Garvey, along with the boyish editors of the Messenger, should be added to the list of suspects compiled for the Postal Censorship Book. There was a certain amount of exaggeration of the Negro problem and it’s doubtful that Garvey would have been aware of the extent of the intelligence gathering.

  Right at the start of its publication the Negro World had also found its way to the British colonies. If called upon, a certain twenty-one-year-old Jamaican living with her family in Panama City would have willingly introduced it to the other Caribbean migrants who’d decided to remain in Panama after the completion of the canal. Amy Ashwood’s own bags had been figuratively, if not actually, packed for several months. But a year after she’d tracked down her fiancé – after the initial angry outbu
rsts, chastising him over his neglect, and the gradual rekindling of their romance with a trail of perfumed letters and excited talk of a reunion – Amy Ashwood had still not booked her passage to New York to join her Napoleon. (Garvey was more inclined at this time to draw a comparison with Napoleon’s nemesis, the black general Toussaint L’Ouverture, who’d led a successful slave revolt against the French in Haiti.27 Back in 1914, it was Garvey’s account of Touissaint’s terrible bravery that had inspired Amy’s own quickening sense of African identity.)

  Ashwood’s fondness for Garvey had not diminished but, through his frequent changes of address and peripatetic lifestyle, she’d lost contact with him for the second time. On top of which, she claimed, mutual acquaintances had informed her that Garvey had become mentally deranged in America.

  Psychiatric illness was the seldom-discussed ‘other side’ to the myth of instant financial success expected of immigrant populations in the USA, especially the Scandinavians and Irish. However, there is no record of Garvey having succumbed to schizophrenia or any other kind of mental ill-health. He was prone to lung infection and had, on more than one occasion, been admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. It’s also true that he was under enormous stress, was constantly over-reaching himself and possessed a single-mindedness of purpose that left no room for the kind of spectacular failure that was always a possibility. Ashwood is unlikely to have sincerely believed rumours that Garvey had tipped over into some kind of mental illness.28 Clearly Garvey took his additional title of ‘travelling commissioner’ seriously and communication between them had broken down once more. But this only partially explained Amy Ashwood’s delay.