Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Of far greater significance was the increasing attention paid her by a family friend and mature gentleman caller almost double her age. Allen Cumberbatch, a Trinidadian bachelor with a successful tailoring business, was a popular figure in her family’s circle. On several occasions, he’d been spotted escorting Amy on the ex-patriot social circuit. Still, whether or not Garvey was on the horizon, the energetic Amy Ashwood was one of those whom Domingo had described as ‘dusky destiny seekers’ who could only resist the lure of New York, and Harlem in particular, for so long. By the beginning of September 1918, she’d finally purchased a ticket on a Royal Mail vessel bound for New York. But when she set off for the wharf with her luggage, her plans were not greatly developed: she had only a ticket and a prayer. Just before embarking, Ashwood chanced upon a teacher from Colón called Parker known to both her and Garvey. Parker had been in recent communication with the UNIA leader who, in his last letter, had been enquiring about Amy Ashwood. It was an extraordinary piece of good fortune as the teacher was able to give her details of Garvey’s address in Harlem just before the ship set sail.29

  In her navy-blue travelling colours, with matching hat, Ashwood was finally on her way; her love of Garvey and of the limelight had been revived by the amazing tales of his success coming out of Harlem. She pulled into port on 6 October 1918, charmed her way through the clearing halls of Ellis Island and hurried to Garvey’s headquarters. The records of that encounter, based on later affidavits which are therefore qualified by the prejudiced but necessary justifications of plaintiff and defendant, tell of a tempestuous and combustible reunion. For two heart-rending years they’d been apart; and the romantic pledges so sincerely made when last together, had been broken. Ashwood had thought Garvey lost to her. In the interim, Marcus Garvey had devoted his whole being to the founding of the organisation and was prepared to sacrifice himself and his professed love for Amy Ashwood until such time as he had met success. After two spectacular years, now at the head of a much larger movement than had ever been realised in Jamaica, he’d reached that point. But just as he was about to send for her and her parents so that they might be married, he was informed that Amy Ashwood was dead. That account was no more fanciful than her story of his derangement. Both believed themselves released from the pledges made in Jamaica. Both cards had been blotted, so there was no call for recrimination; the score was settled – almost. There was an addendum: Allen Cumberbatch. Back in Panama, there had, it transpired, been a tacit agreement between Amy and Cumberbatch that they would be married. It was devastating news. Yet Marcus Garvey, though initially agitated and provoked to the point of apoplexy by the revelation, remained, in the end, remarkably sanguine. At the very moment when the organisation needed to build on the momentum of its evolution, the dynamic Amy Ashwood had reappeared. Garvey found himself calmed by Ashwood’s honesty and the soothing reassurance of her love for him. He ‘asked permission’ to contact Cumberbatch to inform him of her earlier pledge; Amy promised that she would write to the Trinidadian tailor breaking off the engagement.

  Amy Ashwood had been busy in Panama promoting her own ideas of a confraternity amongst the local West Indian population: she joined the ‘Democratic Club’, which served as a social and political forum for the British West Indians in Panama; she organised charity events for various war works; most memorably, with the blessing of the British Consul, she started a ‘Red Cross Fund’ for Caribbean soldiers fighting in the trenches of Europe. Ashwood had an attractiveness and ability to flatter that was extremely persuasive. Even though now removed to Harlem, she maintained and developed her contacts in Panama (Allen Cumberbatch excepted). Her skills at recruitment and her organising panache were talents which were speedily put to use once she became an official of the UNIA; Ashwood was appointed the general secretary of the organisation a month after her arrival in November 1918. One task that Garvey assigned to her was the careful handling of Wilfred Domingo. Garvey had found that Domingo was stubborn and wilful; not at this stage in his political views, but over the matter of his remuneration for his work on the Negro World. Domingo had ‘a habit of demanding prompt payment upon production of his article for the Negro World,’ recalled Amy Ashwood. ‘If the agreed $5 was not forthcoming on printing day, no power on earth could persuade him to leave the article in the office.’30 The dissemination of his Socialist ideals was desirable but Domingo drew the line at personal and financial sacrifice. He was constantly exercised by the need for money to fund his various capitalist projects, particularly his import/export business with the Caribbean. He imported the ingredients for pepper sauces from the West Indies, wrote a radical contemporary, Ras Makonen, ‘and in his own little factory in Harlem, he would chop them and produce various chutneys and sauces … Woolworths took his products and they don’t play ball with anybody who doesn’t deliver on good time. This economic basis put him on a level to meet the Socialist Jew boys of the period who also combined business and radicalism.’31

  The traffic between Harlem and the Caribbean and the West Indian enclaves in Costa Rica and Panama was non-stop. It was through the advocacy of men such as the Panamanian-based teacher Mr Parker that word of Garvey’s movement spread to the Caribbean, Central and South America. They were part of the great wave of migrants to the USA, sowing the seeds of an essential remittance culture that has continued till this day. As well as these regular returnees, Garvey relied on the willingness of merchant seamen to act as informal agents for the Negro World, carrying bundles of the paper from port to port. By such means the Negro World had been successfully distributed throughout the Panama Canal zone. Over in neighbouring British Honduras (now Belize), however, the paper was not given such a free run. British Intelligence officers deemed its circulation to be undesirable. But by the middle of 1919, Governor Eyre Hutson, whose predecessor had taken steps to suppress the journal, became alarmed when the ban seemed to result in many more copies being ‘regularly introduced surreptitiously, and … largely circulated’. He also conceded that the restrictions were ‘one of the grievances that led to a riot’ later in the year. A proto-Garveyite, Samuel Haynes, was among the leaders of the demonstrators, made up of ex-servicemen and impoverished mahogany log-wood cutters, protesting the low wages of the mostly seasonal work on offer. Nonetheless, the British authorities, mindful of the scores of white-owned businesses destroyed in the riots, defended their actions against the paper on the grounds that the Negro World appeared ‘to incite racial hatred and … was [probably] supported by German or Bolsheviki money’. It was more likely that this was simply a warming up of the same tepid, uncritiqued and unsourced intelligence in continuous circulation between Washington and London.32

  Taken alone, the unlevelled American charge of sedition against the Negro World was impossible to substantiate. But standing alongside the fierce prose of an editor, Wilfred Domingo, who nightly spoke on a range of contentious subjects from Negro discontent to Irish autonomy, and who moonlighted on the radical Messenger, Garvey’s paper’s culpability was aggregated. Even though Garvey’s fellow Jamaican was increasingly distracted by capitalist exploits, in Domingo, the paranoid investigators thought they had their man. Such was the heretical and farcical climate that mere mutterings of dissent could land one in deep trouble. One of the most bizarre and instructive examples of this occurred in a clothes shop in Waterbury, Connecticut, where Joseph Yenowsky, an unashamed Socialist, was employed as a salesman. Yenowsky slid into a discursive and injurious conversation with a customer about the elusiveness of the American Dream and corrupt industrial barons. The patriotic customer didn’t appreciate the turn in the conversation and was further aggrieved when Yenowsky allegedly flicked through an openly displayed copy of the Liberator, pointed at a picture of Vladimir Lenin and remarked, ‘There is what I consider one of the brainiest men in the world.’ The enraged customer rushed out of the shop, and returned with a policeman who promptly arrested him. His unguarded remarks were enough to secure the unfortunate Yenowsky a six-month jail
sentence for sedition. Its comic proportions were lost on the humourless Red-baiters ascendant in Connecticut at the time.33

  There was equally nothing funny about spice-loving Negro agitators stirring up the resentments of the formerly loyal black population in Harlem. The whispers of rebellion evoked the kind of terror last seen during plantation days of slave insurrections. Even white friends and acquaintances of the Negro, like the anti-lynching campaigner Bolton Smith, noted the pernicious change that had come across the black man. Travelling on a segregated streetcar in Memphis, Tennessee, Smith had been alarmed by the sight of an elderly Negro couple brushing past him to take a seat in the section of the carriage reserved for white people. It was the kind of insolent behaviour that might lead to violence. Smith had offered to change seats with the Negroes to prevent (and save them from) any trouble. That example, and other mumblings of defiance, half-detected on the lips of sullen black men, had led Bolton Smith to conclude that ‘the Negro is not as jolly, and as good natured as he once was’. He too pointed a finger of blame at the black press for ‘shaming the Negro into this new attitude’.34 Bureau of Investigation agents on the front line were equally convinced of the sinister implications behind the new Negro attitude, and were returning with more and more disturbing accounts: ‘I have something to report to you in a few days that will give you a jolt,’ one agent wrote tantalisingly. ‘There is more in the wind than we think.’

  A welter of memoranda (from BOI informants who infiltrated black radical organisations and toured barber shops in Harlem) landed on Hoover’s desk in the Justice Department, yet no matter how quickly he rushed communiqués to his superiors there was actually little evidence that was actionable, certainly not enough to implement his recommendation that ‘something should be done to the editors of these publications as they are beyond doubt exciting the Negro elements of this country to riot and to the committing of outrages’.

  There were other not-so-hot heads who further doubted the quality of the intelligence that such sentiments were predicated on. In his tribute to black war veterans (for a proposed Negro memorial in Washington) the Supreme Court Associate Justice Wendell Phillips Stafford declared, ‘Cite me a Negro traitor … Show me a Negro anarchist … Let me see a Negro Bolshevist … The only red flag the Negro ever carried was when his shirt was stained crimson by the sacrificial blood he gave to America.’35

  Stafford’s opinion, though, wasn’t the received wisdom of the day. Such noble sentiments were a luxury the guardians of the liberty-loving country could ill afford. Or as the Washington Post put it, ‘There is no time to waste on hair-splitting over infringement of liberty.’

  The fear of the enemy within was a characteristic that had come to define the tension between the public and private domains of American life; at times of stress that fear tempered its celebration of individuality and cast a shadow over its Eden-like innocence. When researching The Crucible, (which drew parallels between the Salem witch-hunt and 1950s McCarthyism) the playwright Arthur Miller had reached the conclusion that there was some pathology at large in American society that required, every thirty years or so, these periodic scares and subsequent purges.36

  Arthur Miller’s theory was borne out by the events of 1919 – thirty years prior to McCarthyism – when fear of radicals was running to a pitch of seething paranoia; and also thirty-odd years previously, in 1886, when the USA had been convulsed by another Red scare. Then anarchists, who defiantly published their motto, ‘A pound of dynamite is better than a bushel of ballots,’ had terrified the authorities when a bomb exploded at a demonstration in Haymarket, Chicago, killing a number of police officers.37 When Americans passed news-stands on 20 April 1919, they learnt that the Mayor of Seattle – one of the country’s noisiest opponents of radical groups – had been the target of a bomb, delivered through the US mail. Subsequent attacks were only foiled by luck and the keen eyes of a scrupulous post-office clerk. Charles Kaplan’s suspicions had been aroused by sixteen similarly labelled brown packages (all with insufficient postage) addressed to prominent members of the establishment. They included the Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer and millionaire businessman, R. D. Rockefeller. The blame for the failed bombing campaign naturally fell on the usual suspects – anarchists, Industrial Workers of the World and hardcore Socialists – but other lesser known organisations also found themselves drawn into the investigation. Marcus Garvey was understandably perplexed when police officers turned up at UNIA headquarters with a search warrant, after an anonymous, malicious tip-off that the bombs had been posted from the offices of the Negro World.38 Though the police were quickly disabused of the notion, their willingness to investigate such an obvious hoax presaged a future in which the paranoid authorities were unlikely to draw distinctions between radical organisations.

  The better informed and more widely briefed insiders – Senator Lusk included – were adamant that Bolsheviks were at the back of the radical movement. Lusk clamoured for the authorities to flush out the parlour Bolsheviks and sewer Socialists. They had stealthily propagandised among factory workers, particularly the alien workforce, and were said to have infiltrated the American Federation of Labor (AFL). A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General, catching up with the mood of the country, warned that, ‘like a prairie fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution’. Palmer said he’d watched in agonising disbelief as the Red menace began ‘eating its way into the homes of the American workmen … licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school’.39 The evidence was there and the coming events of 1 May 1919 signalled that the threat of revolution would be met by an indignant population, stamped with 100 per cent Americanism. No further proof of conspiracy was needed for the uniformed veterans who commandeered a tank in Cleveland amidst the May Day red flag parade and drove it headlong into the radical crowd. A similar collective response took shape in New York where veterans and patriots – bricks in hand – marched on Russia House, a social club for Russian migrants, and set fire to books, magazines and Russian-language papers whilst forcing the onlooking émigrés to sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. Further downtown, another angry mob, fortified by victory cabbage and liberty dogs (formerly sauerkraut and frankfurters), descended on the Rand School of Social Science and smashed their way through the Socialist institution, and ‘liberated’ the building (previously the home of the Young Women’s Christian Association) by pinning the Stars and Stripes to a makeshift pole on the roof.

  Americans vented a measure of their anger during the May Day riots of 1919 but public hysteria continued unabated; it erupted beyond all previous recorded levels the following month. A reflux of panic welled up in people’s throats on 1 June, when news spread of a series of coordinated explosions that ripped through several cities. They were followed, even more ominously, by a detonation in front of the Attorney General’s residence in Washington DC. Luckily for Palmer, who’d been reading in the library upstairs, the bomb-carrier had tripped on the steps outside. When the police assembled the human remains on Palmer’s lawn, they also claimed to have discovered partially intact but legible copies of Plain Words, an anarchist pamphlet that threatened, ‘There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder; there will have to be destruction; we are ready to do anything and everything to suppress the capitalist class.’

  The newspapers screamed for revenge, for tough sanctions to be taken against both the terrorists and those who could be shown to be their supporters. ‘I was preached upon from every pulpit,’ Palmer complained, and ‘urged to do something and do it now.’ His immediate response was to enforce aspects of the war-time immigration code whereby any alien who simply read or received anarchist publications could be apprehended and possibly deported.40

  Senator Lusk – by now the chairman of the committee appointed to examine the perilous conditions of Alien Anarchy in America – put all Socialist organisations on note that they would be investigated. He particularl
y had in mind those guilty of ‘the changeless habit of dissatisfaction, and [guilty of] bringing it with them to our shores [where] it was not justified’. True to his word, Lusk ordered state troopers into the offices of the IWW and Rand School – a raid which swept up ‘tons of radical propaganda’, according to the New York Times, as well as ‘forged stationery and a plan to deceive postal authorities similar to that used by the failed bombers’. During the public hearing into what had been unearthed amidst this radical bounty, Senator Lusk also revealed the discovery of a plan to foment revolution amongst Negroes that would bring down the US government. The press in the gallery strained forward to see the evidence in support of such an alarming hypothesis: Lusk held up a neatly typed essay entitled ‘Socialism Imperilled, or the Negro – a Potential menace to American Radicalism’. The article was written by Wilfred Domingo – editor of the Negro World.41

  When Marcus Garvey opened the newspapers the next day and his unsuspecting eye lighted on Domingo’s name alongside the raid of the Rand School, he scoured the article with a precipitous dread and fury. He had tolerated his friend’s Socialist transgressions up until now, as a loving father might the high-jinks of a reprobate son. Since their earliest encounter – serving a kind of political apprenticeship together at the National Club in the Jamaican capital – the two had maintained a nurturing and sympathetic relationship. But in the current repressive and paranoid climate, Domingo had exposed not just himself but the organisation to danger. After all, Marcus Garvey was not a citizen of the USA. He was an alien and was extremely concerned about the possibility of infringing any convention that might lead to his deportation. Expulsion would have meant the end of Garvey, and the end of the magnificent dream that he was well on the way to realising. His alarm over the perilous position that Domingo had inadvertently placed him in was of the same order as the directors of the Rand School of Social Science. The principal of the Rand School had sought to play down the charge of providing an outlet for sedition by drawing the investigators’ attention to an envelope, stamped and addressed to Domingo, that was found alongside his ‘Socialism Imperilled’ essay, together with a letter of rejection: the Rand School had never intended its publication. The school’s ignominous attempt to wriggle out of any association impressed none of the parties – certainly not an embarrassed Wilfred Domingo but, equally, neither the investigators nor Garvey. The caveat was a technicality, not mitigation for the Socialist content. And in Garvey’s eyes, Domingo was further damned when his ‘scientific editorials’ in the Negro World were praised on the pages of the Socialist Messenger as the work of a Negro scholar ‘who has the courage to say just what he thinks’.42 That was the very gist of the problem as far as the UNIA leader was concerned; fury won over friendship as he summoned his old political soulmate to be ‘tried’ by the UNIA’s nine-person executive committee. The seizure by the Lusk Committee had proven the final spur, but Domingo later conceded that Garvey had, in recent months, grown mightily dissatisfied with an editorial approach that had failed to boost the UNIA leader’s ideas. Garvey had even gone to the lengths of taking out an advert in the Negro World, setting forth his personal propaganda in a signed article.