Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Garvey appealed to the African-American who had previously known only the dimensions of his farm, the perimeter of his town or the outer limits of the district, from which no generation before him had ever moved. That migrant – wedded to the South – had made a massive psychic jump to Harlem’s Negro metropolis; from an agrarian life to industrialisation. An even greater leap of the imagination was required to encompass Africa. Except in biblical terms, and even then only when the collection bowl came round on a Sunday service, African-Americans could hardly conceive of Africa. As the old Negro spiritual told it they’d ‘Been in the Storm So Long’ that they’d lost sight of the African shoreline and home. And yet, whether articulated or not, there remained in the recesses of black American minds, a longing to reach beyond the boundaries of a memory that stopped at slavery; a feeling that the lonesome young poet, Langston Hughes, looking out the window of the Pullman train that crossed the Mason-Dixon Line on a starless Southern night, dredged up in his bluesy ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’.1

  I’ve known rivers:

  I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

  I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

  I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

  I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

  I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

  I’ve known rivers:

  Ancient, dusky rivers.

  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.2

  In his yearning for a history, Langston Hughes dug up a past – and made a spiritual, if not actual, connection between America and Africa – where the Euphrates ran into the Mississippi, and the Nile into New Orleans. But the break with the past had never been permanent; it had only ever been a blip.

  There’d been two widescale attempts to return former slaves to Africa. The first unfolded throughout 1787 when, primarily through the exegesis of the English abolitionist, Granville Sharp, some 300 black Britons – after suffering violent storms, much privation and a one-in-five loss of life – established a settlement in Sierra Leone. News of their daring experiment in black self-government (first as a British protectorate and then a colony) later inspired the redoubtable black Quaker, Captain Paul Cuffe (a free-born black man and one of the richest merchants in America), to make two perilous expeditions to Sierra Leone. Cuffe and his all-black crew of nine must have cut quite a sight as his vessel, the Traveler, sailed into the mouth of the Sierra Leone River. Cuffe was pleased to note that he was greeted cordially by Governor Columbine, but, elsewhere, the captain was not impressed by the indolence he saw all around him. The ascetic teetotaller believed he knew the reason. The entry for his logbook on 1 March 1811 reads, ‘Peopel of the colony are very fond of spiritual liquors … [and] of haveing a number of servents about them.’ Cuffe was particularly perturbed by the state of their neglected farms. Even so he predicted a brighter future for the colony, seeing no reason why it wouldn’t one day be numbered among the great trading nations of the world.

  Cuffe was the bridge to another generation of former slaves (this time from the USA) who founded an African-American colony (alongside their Afro-Saxon cousins) on the Grain Coast of the continent in neighbouring Liberia thirty years later.3 That scheme was formally initiated in 1822 and supported by members of the American Colonization Society – comprised conscientious liberals who desired to atone for the sins of chattel slavery by engineering a voluntary return to continental Africa; and also slave-holders who sought to get rid of freed slaves whom they perceived as a threat to the smooth running of the chattel system, as well as their embarrassing illegitimate mulatto offspring with slave women.

  No matter the motivations of those advocating recolonisation, the uptake amongst black Americans was always tiny and inversely proportional to their well-being in the USA: the exodus had been greatest when things were rotten and the devil was in the white man. But now, 100 years after those first settlers had taken a punt on their futures and laid down roots in a proxy, if not actual homeland, Liberia betrayed all the signs of its origins as a hastily conceived, bastard child of a state that failed to thrive: Americo-Liberians presided over a country that was free but broke, and desperately hoped to negotiate a loan from the USA. Despite all the vagaries of their existence, the sons and daughters of Afric were perhaps better off in America. And the lesson from life in the New World was that one’s African-ness was a disadvantage – best not reflected on. Marcus Garvey would have his followers reconsider.

  Tens of thousands of supporters seemed prepared to listen. In just over 18 months the UNIA had grown from its initial 13 members to an organisation that now boasted 5,500 members in Harlem, branches throughout 25 states of the Union, and additional divisions in the West Indies, Central America and West Africa. Garvey calculated that, by June 1919, his organisation had built up 2 million followers; William Du Bois made the conservative estimate of under 300,000 paying members.4 Throughout his career the great promoter in Garvey suffered from a tendency (often unnecessarily) to inflate figures. Du Bois’s low estimate is also unlikely to have been accurate. The truth is no one really knew but, even allowing for both leaders’ bias in inflating or deflating the figures, the growth of the UNIA was impressive. It was still dwarfed by the NAACP which at the close of 1919 registered 310 branches, but the NAACP had been aggressively campaigning for members since its inception 10 years previously, and benefited from the backing of wealthy white philanthropists (a group later characterised by Langston Hughes as the ‘old entente cordiale of Jewish notables, Negrotarian publishers and civil rights grandees’)5. If Garvey’s organisation continued to expand at the same rate that it had thus far shown, then it would easily outpace its competitor within the next year or two.

  There were aesthetic and philosophical differences between the two groups. The NAACP was an interracial organisation with a significant number of sympathetic white members; in fact the majority of readers of its journal, the Crisis, were white; integration was its endgame. The talented tenth of African-Americans to whom it made a naked appeal – the doctors, lawyers and public-school teachers – led a ‘top down’ movement that would eventually, in some distant future, cascade to the rest of the black folk. The UNIA was by contrast a uniquely black organisation that grew from the bottom up. A UNIA supporter might hold a joint membership card with the NAACP but she or he was generally closer to the bottom of the social and economic ladder; members aspired to greater personal social mobility and the elevation of the group. A large number, if not the majority, of UNIA adherents were said to be West Indian immigrants. Critics sneered that Garvey’s organisation comprised pretentious Negroes, typified by its leadership of lawyers without a brief and professors without paper qualifications. Though the NAACP leadership might quietly scoff at its junior rival, the UNIA’s end-of-year progress report for 1919 was extremely encouraging.6 The dues paid contributed to the executive officers’ small salaries and Garvey continued to supplement his income through his own lectures whether in a civic or church hall. As befitting the leader of a growing mass movement, the UNIA president general now betrayed signs of greater personal comfort – though not extravagantly so; he’d moved from a draughty hall room to a furnished room at 238 West 131st Street, a few blocks down from Amy Ashwood who’d moved into a flat rented by her father. Romance was relegated to several divisions below the UNIA. There was no talk of marriage or of Garvey and Ashwood living together; and no relaxing of moral propriety even when the two were alone on fundraising jaunts around the country. As Mrs Mary Johnstone, the landlady at 4458 Prairie Avenue, told BOI investigators, when Garvey and Ashwood visited Chicago later in the year, they pointedly took separate rooms. Their energies went into the organisation. To the BOI agent C-C who infiltrated the organisation at around the same tim
e, Ashwood seemed ‘to be Marcus Garvey’s chief assistant, a kind of managing boss’.7

  Garvey and Ashwood were as one in their celebration and elevation of black culture; Ashwood was lured towards the theatre, to reviews and cabaret in the company of performers such as Florence Mills and the all-black Lafayette players, whilst Garvey was more inclined to retire to his furnished room in Harlem with a copy of Blyden’s work or something loaned to him by John E. Bruce or the amateur bibliophile and collector Arthur Schomburg (a friend of Bruce whom he described as a ‘mulatto who thought black’); both of whom were keen excavators of the Negro’s past.

  In articulating examples of Negro achievement in history, Garvey employed a range of methods which he believed would inculcate an idea of black pride amongst audiences at UNIA meetings. Recitations of Negro poetry were a favoured technique. In this Amy Ashwood proved a willing ally, and was a regular on the programme billing for the evening’s entertainment. The irrepressible twenty-one-year-old could be relied on to rouse the masses with her hearty rendition of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s ‘The Colored Soldiers’ – a celebration of African-American military endeavour. More often, though, Ashwood deferred to the regal Henrietta Vinton Davis who was the star attraction at these assemblies. Davis was a renowned elocutionist and dramatic actor – a pioneer who’d performed Shakespeare in front of integrated audiences. At a time when black performers were expected to ‘black up’ in caricatured minstrel roles, when coon songs like Ernest Hogan’s ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’ were the most popular form of entertainment, the idea of a classical black tragedienne was deemed laughable. There were significant numbers in the audience at Ford’s Opera House in Washington on 7 May 1884 who found it difficult to accept Henrietta Davis in the role of Lady MacBeth, alongside a fellow black performer, Powhaton Beaty. The Washington Bee reported that ‘there were many white people in the house who seemed disposed to turn to comedy the tragic efforts of the actors’.8

  Inevitably, Davis’s talents had been stymied by the dearth of serious roles for black actors. Long periods of inactivity were punctuated by a handful of tours of major cities in the Northern states, as well as Central America and the Caribbean, including a stint in Garvey’s Jamaica in 1912. There is no record of Marcus Garvey having met Davis in Jamaica but she was given a sharp introduction to the peculiarities of the island’s caste system that so maddened him. The future race leader had not yet made his mark on the island. That year far greater attention was given to the budding poet, Claude McKay, who recalled excitedly going backstage at the end of Henrietta Davis’s recitation. The brown elite had turned out in full for the distinguished African-American visitor and had applauded her enthusiastically. But McKay also remembered how Davis had unwittingly transgressed by allowing herself to be represented on the island by a very black manager, much to the consternation of her lighter skinned hosts; and it was suggested that her fortunes might improve if she switched to a mulatto manager. ‘This incident must have opened Miss Davis’s eyes,’ McKay noted, ‘to the subtlety of the colour problem in Jamaica, which is never brutal like a fist in the face, as it is in America, but nevertheless it is always there.’9 Later on, Davis returned to the USA and formed her own drama company in Chicago; she appeared resigned to her destiny, to trundle along with only a smattering of the recognition she deserved. But then Davis’s life took an unexpected turn when, one evening in 1919, she received an invitation from Marcus Garvey to address a UNIA gathering at the Palace Casino. ‘This woman [Henrietta Davis] commanded an audience, [she] could just hold you,’ Maida Springer, then a young Garveyite, recalled. ‘I would sit there in attention and with awe.’10 Henrietta Davis was, likewise, entranced by her encounter with Garveyism and his ecstatic audiences; she was overcome by the emotional and intellectual charge of the meetings.

  At the age of fifty-nine, she had found her true calling – one that would bind her love of drama to a celebration of African heritage. After that evening at the Palace Casino, she never returned to the stage (to the ridicule of some white audiences) but brought her theatrical skills and dramatic persona to the UNIA. Her repertoire included ‘Cleopatra’s Dying Speech’ and ‘How Tom Sawyer Got His Fence Whitewashed’ by Mark Twain. But the woman who’d become the organisation’s domestic and inter national organiser, reserved her most compelling performances for renditions of works by black writers. The Negro dialect verse of Paul Dunbar was the primary poetry of choice at UNIA gatherings. Dunbar was a poet for all seasons and for all ages. Henrietta Davis demonstrated as much when, in the middle of June 1919, she addressed his ‘Little Brown Baby with Sparkling Eyes’ to the children with satin ribbons in their hair and tweed bowties pinching their collars, who, whether willing or not, were required to accompany their parents to the Palace Casino. Besides, it was never too early in the life of a Negro to instil a sense of race pride. And, on that occasion, whilst reciting the poem for ‘God’s chillun’, Davis balanced a black doll on her knee (kindly loaned by Ross and Berry, a Negro enterprise manufacturing black dolls in Harlem) for greater dramatic effect. If Henrietta Vinton Davis was demonstrably Negrophilic, then she, along with the UNIA inner circle, would always stress that this was underpinned by a love of Africa.

  In later life, when Amy Ashwood attempted a biography of Marcus Garvey, she would stress his kinship with the Maroons of Jamaica, the escaped slaves of African descent who had fled, soon after their capture and transportation to the pearl of the Antilles, deep into the Jamaican interior where they waged an unremitting guerrilla war against the British. Decades of fierce resistance forced the weary colonial masters of the island to sue for peace and offer the Maroons a degree of autonomy in the malaria-infested Cockpit country. Their ferocity had, more ambiguously, been exploited by the British when, after a breakdown of the truce and renewed fighting on the island, 500 captives were deported to Africa, under the expectation (not guaranteed) that in gratitude for their spared lives, they would, in turn, help to put down a rebellion organised by freed slaves in the new settlement of Sierra Leone.11

  Garvey’s Maroon heritage was apocryphal. His father had been apprenticed to a former slave-owner; his grandfather was born into slavery and his great-grandfather before him. The parish records only showed a break in this pattern following the slaves’ emancipation in 1834. Garvey, therefore, was not the descendant of proud and fierce Maroons but he was, nonetheless, well named. As was the custom, slave-holders branded their property after themselves, and the Gaelic ‘Garvey’ means warlike, though this is information that is unlikely to have been transmitted to a young boy growing up in the Jamaican hinterland: neither Irish nor African history was on the curriculum.

  Colonial education on the island stressed the achievements of empire – the British Empire, that is, and not any ancient African equivalent. In his youth, Marcus Garvey had been a proud son of empire, who’d memorised, uncritically, wondrous poems and speeches from the panoply of British history; particular favourites were Glassford Bell’s ‘Mary, Queen of Scots’ and Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’. It wasn’t until his arrival in London in 1912, and his exposure to the writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden and Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford in the book-lined offices of the African Times and Orient Review, that the young Jamaican had begun to grasp an alternative history of Africa that placed it at the very centre of civilisation. Reading Blyden, Garvey felt himself let into an amazing secret; given a privileged glimpse back to the dawn of Ethiopia, through amber dusk and pastoral twilight, when Africa was the ‘gateway of all the loftiest and noblest traditions of the human race’. From the offices of the African Times and Orient Review, Garvey had followed an African literary trail to the reading rooms of the British Museum where he’d immersed himself in Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. So impressed was he with the expansive and scholarly outlook of its fiercely black author who had ‘done so much to retrieve the lost prestige of the race’, that Marcus Garvey took to quoting stirring extracts from Blyden’s work: they would prove the bedroc
k of the UNIA president general’s own concept of race, the ‘problem of the color line’ and the ‘aristocracy of color’.

  Blyden laid waste the then current racial hypotheses of African inferiority. He was a welcome counterpoint to English and American critical thinkers. Men such as the naval officer Commander Andrew H. Foote, whose zeal in policing the end of the trade in slavery did not moderate his jaundiced view of the black man. ‘If all that the Negroes of all generations have ever done were to be obliterated from recollection forever,’ Foote wrote, ‘the whole world would lose no great truth, no profitable arts, no exemplary form of life. The loss of all that is African would offer no memorable deduction from anything but the black catalogue of crime.’12 This ahistorical view of Africa was much in vogue in the modernist sport of extending Darwin’s theory of evolution to the races. So that it came as no surprise to Meredith Townsend (the saviour of the Spectator) that Africans had ‘never founded a stone city, never built a ship, and never produced a literature’.13 Such a lowly estimation of the black race had not advanced much by 1919. Even, H. L. Mencken, a coruscating critic of cant and arrogance, ventured the opinion that ‘the educated Negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a Negro’. Mencken believed his African ancestry was the root of the black man’s problem and that it would take him another fifty generations to be brought to acceptable standards of efficiency and purposefulness that came with civilisation. Even then, the superior white man would still be running the show as he was fifty generations ahead of the Negro.14

  These were failings which had conveniently disqualified the African from self-governance and justified Europeans’ civilising intervention. Such outward altruism disguised the initial self-serving economic reasons; in the case of Germany, for example, the colonisation of parts of Africa was propelled by the pressure to find free ‘empty’ territories for its impoverished and landless peasant communities.15 That impulse was soon overtaken by the rush to extract precious minerals and other resources from the continent: ‘I have the honour to inform you that from 1 January 1899, you must succeed in furnishing four thousand kilos of rubber every month’ wrote a Belgian civil servant to a sponsored agent in the Congo. ‘To effect this I give you carte blanche. You have therefore two months in which to work your people. Employ gentleness first, and if they persist in not accepting the imposition of the state, employ force of arms.’ Those who refused to bend to the will of King Leopold’s agents in the rubber groves risked having their hands cut off16 – an unsavoury episode witnessed by the African-American soldier and journalist George Washington Williams in his open letter to King Leopold II of Belgium. Williams politely informed His Majesty that Belgium’s representatives were stealthily ‘engaged in the slave trade, wholesale and retail … giving £3 per head for able-bodied slaves for military service’.