Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  At the trial, Domingo was accused of straying way off-message from the UNIA position and of ‘writing editorials not in keeping with the programme [Garvey] had outlined’. Wilfred Domingo survived the trial, but the trust between the two men was irreconcilably broken. Garvey readily accepted his old friend’s resignation when it was proffered a few weeks later. The sacrifice of Domingo was one of the first demonstrable signs that in Marcus Garvey’s ascent and development as a leader, once serious disagreements arose, past friendships and loyalties would be discounted. But in moving against Domingo, not only had Garvey lost a close and vital associate, he’d gained a life-long, vengeful enemy who, in years to come, would continue to probe for weaknesses and to inflict maximum damage.43

  In the short term, the loss of Domingo would be offset by Amy Ashwood’s ability to continue to charm the printer, Henry Rogowski, when funds were not available to pay him on time. Ashwood was Garvey’s secret weapon, wheeled out to negotiate seemingly intractable difficulties. In the case of Rogowski, her delicate mission was to both ‘obtain an extension of credit as well as the promise to print the next week’s edition [of the Negro World]’. Garvey also depended on general secretary Ashwood to scout and secure properties for their meetings on favourable terms. She had neither Domingo’s knowledge nor contacts, but her energy, flirtatiousness, chutzpah and inventiveness would prove a boon in the critical months ahead.44

  Domingo’s departure did not throw investigators off the trail of the UNIA and Garvey undoubtedly felt it politic to distance himself and the organisation further from his former ally. In a statement published in the Negro World, under the headline ‘Extraordinary Announcement for Everybody, All Politicians Should Take Notice’, Garvey attempted to clarify the position that ‘this organisation has no association with any political party’, and furthermore, ‘Republicans, Democrats and Socialists are the same to us – and that persons who endeavour to use the name of the Negro World for enhancing their political fortunes do so without [our] approval.’ As an exercise in damage limitation this was a spectacular failure. The following month Garvey held a mass meeting at Carnegie Hall and amongst the uninvited guests were agents of the Lusk Committee accompanied by a bomb squad.45

  Meanwhile, the covert investigation of Garvey and his fellow black radical newspapermen continued apace. Hoover called for even closer scrutiny of the Harlem headquarters of both the Negro World and the Messenger which the BOI man believed to be the powerhouse ‘of the Russian organ of Bolsheviki’ in New York.46 Actually, the editors were bashing away on one battered old Underwood typewriter, in a tiny room of a converted brownstone. Worryingly for the UNIA, Hoover seemed reluctant to relinquish the notion that ‘there appears to be an intense feeling existing between Garvey and the group supporting the Messenger’.47

  On 11 October, Hoover composed a memorandum to special agent Ridgely in which he spelt out his frustrations:

  ‘He [Garvey] has … been particularly active among radical elements in New York City in agitating the Negro movement. Unfortunately, however, he has not yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an undesirable alien.’48

  Garvey may have been a radically inclined alien whose speeches and writings occasionally veered towards sedition, but he certainly didn’t fit the newspaper cartoon identikit of a scruffy, wild-eyed Bolshevik, with radical literature stuffed in his jacket pockets and a bomb in his beard.49

  The attempt to pin a Bolshevik/Socialist label on him appears all the more perverse as Garvey was, at the time, busy establishing his capitalist credentials with a number of high-profile ventures. The coloured population of Harlem could now dine at the UNIA’s lunch room, restaurant, tea room and ice-cream parlour at 56 West 135th Street. At the same address, Harlemites would also shortly be able to drop in and buy shares in an ambitious-sounding project, a steamship corporation called the Black Star Line. Soon Garvey was promising his followers a new business launched every month. Adverts placed in the Negro World reached far beyond Harlem, disseminating news of each achievement to black populations wherever they were so configured. Garvey was always the greatest advert for any enterprise linked to the UNIA. He was an extraordinary salesman who’d developed a philosophy where punters weren’t just buying into a business but were placing a down payment on future black redemption. Garvey sold stock but fundamentally, in the words of Samuel A. Haynes, ‘Garvey sold the Negro to himself.’50 Garveyism would always remain a secular movement with a strong under-tow of religion. Doubters in a Garvey audience were more often drowned out by the collective din of those bewitched by the musicality of his speech. His language was biblical, the meetings were laced with hymns and Negro spirituals, and his end-of-service stock-selling appeals induced the kind of frenzy more familiarly found in the pews of black American churches.

  When Marcus Garvey, accompanied by Amy Ashwood, took to the road on a mission to spread his message and sign up new members, the churches were usually their first port of call. Some church elders viewed Garvey’s inroads into their congregations with apprehension – especially because, as his confidence grew, he became less guarded in his criticism of their greed and avarice. The welcome he received was not always warm. No matter how speedily the UNIA grew, Garvey’s income was still largely dependent on monies gathered from speaking engagements; and he was to find that the opportunities to address church congregations stopped short of permitting him to call for an offering afterwards. Such was the proviso laid down by the pastor of a local African Methodist Church in Virginia. That restriction, however, had not taken Amy Ashwood into account. In her presence, Garvey’s daring was doubled. When they discovered that the pastor had a mistress, Ashwood devised a ruse to send an urgent telegram to the man of cloth, pretending it was from his lover. With the pastor called away on a pressing business matter, Garvey delivered a rousing sermon and was free to call for a silver collection which apparently pocketed the couple several hundred dollars.51

  The clergy’s objections, though, were more often political than financial. Arriving in Detroit at the back end of June 1919, Garvey had taken up a longstanding invitation from Bishop Charles Spencer Smith of the African Methodist Episcopal church to call upon him for an inquisition dressed up as afternoon tea. No sooner had he bid his visitor farewell than the Bishop was feverishly writing to the Attorney General, denouncing the alien ‘native of Jamaica’ as ‘in every respect a “Red”,’ a promulgator of a vicious propaganda that was ‘calculated to breed racial and international strife’.52 That assessment, scorched in fire and damnation, certainly chimed with the Attorney General’s newly promoted special assistant at the Justice Department.

  In the wake of the bomb scares, J. Edgar Hoover had been appointed to identify the extent of the threat posed by those disparaged as ‘race pimps’, peddlers of ‘Socialist bilge’ and ‘Bolshevik twaddle’.53 In a few months, Hoover and his zealous team had collated and cross-referenced the worst of the crop, and hatched a plan to round them up, in what became known as the Palmer Raids. Before the year’s end, the files of tens of thousands of potential enemies of the state would be stamped in readiness for their expulsion from the USA. Widescale arrests began on the long night of 7 November 1919, the second anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. The first wave of 249, including the infamous anarchist writer, Emma Goldman, and young Russian émigrés unfortunate enough to be attending night classes at Russia House that evening, were swept up in the raids, denied the privilege of a lawyer, bundled aboard the USS Buford (popularly known as the Soviet Ark) and deported to Russia.54 In all, close to 10,000 suspects were arrested. Garvey escaped the first cull of alien anarchists but nonetheless his name was put forward to Louis F. Post at the Labor Department to ratify the case for his deport ation. As with the vast majority of suspects, Marcus Garvey was spared deportation through the intervention of this seventy-year-old civil servant who insisted, much to the fury of the Attorney General, on going through the cases on an individua
l basis. There was insufficient evidence to proceed and Post’s department concluded that the case against Marcus Garvey was not proven. The matter would have to rest there for now, but it was far from settled in Hoover’s eyes.

  The young attorney’s gut feelings about the UNIA leader were backed up by the final report into the ‘Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications’. That report was certainly no hanging indictment but did suggest, to the earnest men who commissioned it, that steps needed to be taken now to forestall an even bigger problem in the future; before the welcome sound of Negro ‘yessums’ and the sight of happy Negro grins became a fable of yesteryear. The erstwhile reliable Major Loving signed off his investigation with a memorandum which was much more measured. He would be drawn only as far as the evidence warranted; after nine months of diligent intelligence gathering, Loving had concluded that there was no need yet to sound the alarm. The UNIA was, for instance, ‘too young as yet to give it any special significance’. He agreed with white superiors who believed that coloured folk would be ‘far better off without these self-styled race leaders who are springing up’. Nonetheless, he wrote flatteringly of Garvey as a ‘very able young man’, the promulgator of a ‘clever propaganda’. But for the blackness of his own skin, Loving might have been suspected – after perhaps straying too close to his subject – of having gone native. The Director of Military Intelligence was quick to defend Loving as ‘one of the best types of white man’s Negro’ who had grown a little uncomfortable about the direction taken when investigating the black Red Scare. Evidently, the major’s enthusiasm for the project had cooled. He asked to be relieved of his duties and transferred back to the more harmonious world of his regimental band in the Philippines. The Red Scare had yet to run its course and Loving’s assessment ultimately lost out to strident critics in the administration who viewed Garvey and the rest of the Negro editors with menace. The slave insurrections of the past paled next to the ‘dangerous influences [presently] at work upon the Negro’. The final report concluded solemnly that ‘to ignore all this as the ante-bellum characteristics of the plantation Negro preacher is … to go very far astray of the mark.’55 The message was clear: Marcus Garvey and his ilk had killed Uncle Tom and resurrected Nat Turner.

  Uncle Tom had served his purpose. According to the myth, the saintly protagonist of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had shamed the North into issuing an ultimatum to the South: the stain of slavery must be washed from American society. When President Lincoln eventually met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he is said to have remarked, ‘So you’re the little lady whose book started this big war.’56 In the abolitionist novel, the stoical and Christ-like Uncle Tom dies willingly at the hands of his master. Through his sacrifice others might redeem their humanity. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a best-seller several times over, found in the homes of enlightened white Americans (especially in the North). African-Americans, though, had become increasingly ambivalent about the character, Tom, even more so when he was transformed into a figure of fun in minstrel shows, portrayed as an unprincipled coon who would abase himself to please the white man. Black people had tried the Uncle Tom approach but it had gone on for too long with very little gain. In 1919, at the back of the unequivocal evidence that black military sacrifice in the Great War had been to little or no avail, at this crucial and psychic moment in African-American lives, Marcus Garvey was electrifying disenchanted black audiences with the simple but militant message, ‘The time for cowardice is past. The old-time Negro has gone – buried with Uncle Tom.’57

  8

  HARLEM SPEAKS FOR

  SCATTERED ETHIOPIA

  What is Africa to me:

  Copper sun or scarlet sea,

  Jungle star or jungle track,

  Strong bronzed men, or regal black

  Women from whose loins I sprang

  when the birds of Eden sang?

  One three centuries removed

  From the scenes his fathers loved,

  Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

  What is Africa to me? …

  Countee Cullen, ‘Heritage’

  A tall, angular man stood at the back of the crowds on a street corner in the heart of Harlem. He wasn’t one of the spies that Marcus Garvey constantly warned his followers to beware. He wasn’t employed by the BOI or Military Intelligence. He had attended Garvey rallies before. Then, as now, he’d remained aloof and sceptical. But on the evening of 13 October 1919, as the autumn leaves began to fall from the towering poplars that lined 135th Street, so too did John E. Bruce’s suspicions about the spectacular Jamaican start to recede. For, as Bruce wrote in his memoirs, he had listened to the Ciceronian orator at numerous events in church halls and at Harlem’s Speakers’ Corner, but on this occasion he ‘heard’ Garvey perhaps for the first time – and it was as if the whole of Harlem was speaking with one voice. He’d listened and listened until he’d got a line on Garvey – ultimately on his honesty and tremendous earnestness – that would not break. Thereafter, John E. Bruce was a convert to Garveyism, immune to doubt, and would remain loyal to the man and the cause until his last breath, five years later. It was an extraordinary volte-face. Up until then Bruce had rarely passed up an opportunity to ridicule Garvey and his schemes, which seemed ‘wild, chimerical [and] impossible of accomplishment’. Sixty-three-year-old John E. Bruce prided himself on an old-fashioned steadfastness, no matter how detrimental to himself: he might ultimately break under superior force or argument but, in the meantime, he would not bend. Prior to October, he suspected the UNIA leader of being nothing more than a ‘four-flusher’ or ‘grafter’. By some miracle, the brother on the edge of the crowd now found himself uncharacteristically moved by the sound of Garvey’s voice booming out over the chill night air.

  In front of hundreds of devotees, Marcus Garvey built towards the evening’s resounding, emotional conclusion; and John E. Bruce experienced what many had testified: that the Jamaican seemed to speak to him individually, as if he were inside his own head, speaking his own thoughts. That night, in his haunting and melodious voice, Marcus Garvey reiterated for his audience, as he had done hundreds of times before, the aims of the UNIA. But on this occasion he had managed to turn the cast-iron journalist away from his usual default position of cynicism. ‘I said to myself, “Let him try out his plan; since no one else has submitted a better one, why oppose him.”’ John E. Bruce was surprised by how easy it was to let go of his prejudice; and further made a vow to himself. ‘From that cold night in October,’ Bruce recalled, ‘I ceased writing and talking against Garvey.’ What ultimately united the two men was Africa. Bruce was an amateur archivist of all things African, and over a number of decades had forged impressive links with African scholars such as Liberia’s Edward Wilmot Blyden. With no funding, but with a passionate commitment, he’d also started the Negro Society for Historical Research with a fellow Afrophile, Arthur Schomburg. His bookshelves, staircase and even bathroom were brimming with scholarly texts and rare African books. But John E. Bruce, Garvey and a small band of self-taught historians, collectors and scholars were – in their unbridled enthusiasm for Africa – the exceptions.

  To a majority of black people, scattered across America and around the globe at the turn of the twentieth century, Africa was just as dirty a word as Uncle Tom; a source of embarrassment, the skeleton in the ancestral cupboard which, if they stopped to think about it, was an uncomfortable reminder of their slave past. Africans were depicted in cartoons as a comical, conquered, barely civilised people with bones through their noses, riding semi-naked on the backs of alligators down the Zambezi. Many in a Garvey audience would have heard for the first time ‘Africa’ spoken of as the motherland. For the migrants who thronged to UNIA massed meetings, ‘the old country’ meant Louisiana or Alabama. Their connections had been severed from Africa generations previously; maybe, after 200 years, they were still aware of one or two words and mutated customs that had survived but beyond that there was
no history; beyond that was only darkness. ‘Every man,’ says Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘mistakes the limits of his mind for the limits of the world.’ The truth of that statement, as far as black Americans in 1919 were concerned, lay in their inability to even frame the question, ‘What is Africa to me?’ Into that void walked Marcus Garvey and what he had to say had hardly ever been heard before.