Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Those nations in the forefront were, necessarily, the successful belligerents of the Great War – the USA, Great Britain, Italy and France – the so-called Big Four. Readers of the Negro World might be forgiven for thinking that the Garvey movement was to play a key role. On 13 March 1919 the faithful members of the UNIA gathered at the recently inaugurated Universal Restaurant in Harlem at a meeting presided over by Marcus Garvey to hear the wireless cable of his young emissary’s first dramatic reports from Paris read out. Cadet did not disappoint, and Garvey revelled in the young man’s early achievements as a proud father does in his son’s first tentative steps. In the High Commissioner’s account, he had marched to the great chateau of Versailles, ascended the grand staircase and delivered the UNIA resolutions directly to the President (the French PM Georges Clemenceau) and the Secretary of the Peace Conference. Cadet wrote that he had returned the next day for an answer. Pleas for hush whispered round the Harlem restaurant while the reader scanned the rest of the cabled telegram for the answer. ‘They promised,’ confided Cadet, ‘to get it for me as soon as possible.’25 The UNIA celebrants who moved on to the Palace Casino that night included confidential sources in the pay of British Military Intelligence who relayed the minutiae of Garvey’s meeting. But far from being perturbed, British officials appeared rather drily amused, having detected elements of fiction in the young commissioner’s account. ‘I imagine the part played by Mr Cadet,’ one official concluded, ‘is less prominent than Garvey would wish his readers to believe.’26

  Elizier Cadet had been given an unenviable task. Without official accreditation it was nearly impossible to wade through French bureaucracy which had been significantly increased for the conference: slipping a guard a couple of cigarettes was no guarantee of admission to any of the venues or debates. It proved difficult enough for Cadet to attract the attention of those delegates who should have been sympathetic. Partly, he suffered bad luck. Calling on the Cuban delegate, he found him bedridden, suffering from influenza.27 An audience with the tetchy Liberian delegate, Secretary of State and President elect, C. D. B. King, got off to a bad start. King was chaperoned by an American-appointed financial adviser, Henry Worley, and so perhaps was playing to the solitary member of the gallery. Worley reported that when presented with copies of the Negro World, the Liberian scoffed at the inflammatory headlines: ‘If the American Negroes were so thoroughly dissatisfied with the social and political conditions in America,’ Secretary King is said to have asked, ‘why [then] did they not go to Liberia … and become citizens there?’ King’s plain-speaking contrasted with the politeness and importance shown towards W. E. B. Du Bois who reported back to the NAACP board that ‘the Liberian delegates to the Peace Conference are with us!’ Actually, for all his political leverage, Du Bois fared not much better than the inexperienced Cadet in setting out an agenda for the delicate subject of the inequality of the races to be discussed at Versailles. Before leaving for Paris, Du Bois had written to President Wilson, but the subtle hints from the editor of Crisis that he be offered an official role at the Peace Conference were ignored by the President. Being a senior member of the NAACP, Du Bois had been able to exploit the connections of the wealthy white liberals who backed the organisation, and call in the necessary favours that allowed him to scramble aboard the Orizaba, carrying fellow newspapermen to the conference. But once in Paris, like Cadet, he had no official role. In decades of campaigning on behalf of black citizens of the world, though, he’d also built up a healthy book of international contacts. In Paris, Du Bois solicited the help of the decorated Senegalese deputy to the French National Assembly, Blaise Diagne, to secure permission for a Pan-African Congress to be held in Paris. Diagne was highly regarded, especially after his efforts in the Great War in helping to recruit Africans (280,000 volunteers from Senegal alone) into the depleted French army, and he successfully lobbied Prime Minister Clemenceau on Du Bois’s behalf. A Pan-African Congress was some consolation but even then there were restrictions. The gathering would inevitably draw attention to the plight and grievances of Negroes throughout the world, including the USA, and the American delegation suspected that Clemenceau had only granted permission for the congress in order to irritate President Wilson. Tempers had already begun to fray between the national delegations. On one occasion, in the French Assembly, Clemenceau had called Wilson a man of noble ‘candeur’ which translates not as candour but as ‘simple-mindedness’. In the uproar that followed, ‘candeur’ was quietly changed to ‘grandeur’ for the official records. The French, nervous of further upsetting American racial mores, stipulated that the Pan-African Congress could only proceed on the understanding that there would be no publicity. Race appeared then as the embarrassing older relative (at Versailles), one who had to be hidden away lest he spoil the party.28

  Arrangements were made for the African Congress, composed hurriedly of fifty-seven representative men who came together after Du Bois had mounted a trawl through Paris of congruent West Indians, Africans and black Americans who had either escaped the censure of their respective governments and obtained passports, or who happened conveniently to be in the capital at the time. They crunched through the crisp February snows and met discreetly at the Grand Hotel where resolutions were passed without fanfare. Principally, the Allies were asked to administer the former German territories in Africa on behalf of the Africans who ‘should only exercise self-government as fast as their development permits’. Though borne of the real fear of rejection in Paris, the overall tone of muted reasonable requests contrasted with the thunderous rhetoric of Marcus Garvey and others (even Du Bois before leaving America) who demanded African home rule as the black man’s right.

  The convening of an African Congress had preceded the arrival of Garvey’s man in the French capital. Unknown and unheralded, it is unlikely that Cadet would have found his name on Du Bois’s list. Equally, it is uncertain whether Cadet would have agitated for a place even if he had arrived in time. For, although the congress has come to be noted as an important landmark in the development of Pan-African thought, at the time those fifty-seven pioneers were largely talking to themselves. To circumvent the official opposition to the event being given any publicity, William Du Bois quietly printed hundreds of copies of the resolution passed by the congress. He hoped their discreet distribution, to the delegates of the Peace Conference and other influential outlets, might work subliminally in their favour.

  Cadet’s approach was far more direct. Armed with letters of introduction from Garvey, the High Commissioner camped outside the offices of the major Parisian newspapers, firstly the liberal Le Matin. There, he reported, the editor listened sympathetically and was ‘deeply touched to hear my statement concerning the atrocities committed against our brethren in the Southern States of the USA’. But Cadet left that liberal institution with nothing more than saccharine bon mots ringing in his ears. Doorstepping the editors of La Presse and L’Intransigeant proved more profitable. He was encouraged to leave behind articles upon which, he assured the UNIA leader, he had secured promises of publication. Actually, Cadet’s reports back to Harlem were a strange mix of the fiction of startling progress coupled to undisguised frustrations and humiliations. A cursory inspection even at the margins of the breathless and exciting news dispatches reveals early doubts creeping in; there lingers the fear, for example, that no sooner has Cadet left the offices of the small Parisian publications than the unsolicited articles will most probably end up on the copy-editor’s spike. And then, in the same breath, he is charging off, with not a second to spare, to press for an audience with other eminent men.29

  Whilst Cadet outlined a catalogue of disappointments, the readers of the Crisis could follow every small triumph of its editor, Du Bois, who revelled in the respect accorded him in France: ‘The Mayor of Domfort [for example] apologised gravely: if he had known of my coming,’ Du Bois wrote, ‘he would have received me formally at the Hotel de Ville – me whom most of my fellow-countrymen receive at naug
ht but back doors, save with apology.’30 The chair of the African Congress could also count on the quiet but committed support of a small group of influential French sympathisers, brought together in a salon of Madam Calman-Levy, widow of the esteemed Parisian publisher. His time in France had been stirring and revelatory. As Du Bois steamed back to America, Cadet was forced to admit that his own hoped-for success had mostly eluded him. Finally, he could not discount his disappointments and impotence in Paris. La Presse and L’Intransigeant did not keep their word to publish his articles. Low on funds and with little to show for his Herculean efforts, Cadet cabled Garvey for help and hinted strongly that Du Bois’s secrecy and success had worked to his (Cadet’s) disadvantage. Cadet claimed to have made explicit – through published articles – the conditions of lynching and other injustices endured by the Negro in America but that Du Bois had repudiated his statements by defeating his articles in the French newspapers.

  On 22 March 1919, Cadet’s cablegram was delivered to UNIA headquarters, and Marcus Garvey was apoplectic when he read it. He called for an emergency mass convention 24 hours later and 3,000 near-hysterical supporters crowded into the Mother Zion AME Church in Harlem and heard their furious leader howling with indignation at Du Bois’s perceived treachery. In front of the baying crowd, erstwhile admirers of the Crisis’s editor leapt to the stage and denounced the Harvard graduate as a traitor to the race and a ‘good nigger’ who’d been granted a passport to France because he ‘positively would not discuss lynching, peonage, disfranchisement and discrimination’. A resolution was passed and cabled to the French press that repudiated Dr Du Bois for ‘placing obstacles in the way of the elected representative efficiently discharging his already difficult duties on behalf of the Negro race’. A collection of more than $200 was raised to help Cadet combat Du Bois’s negative propaganda and to enable his return to the USA.31

  W. E. B. Du Bois, the scholar whose important work The Souls of Black Folk was placed alongside the Bible in the households of educated African-Americans, did not have to rely on informants to learn of this violent, sudden backlash and challenge to his authority and integrity: he had only to purchase a copy of the Negro World. There in unsparing detail his alleged treachery was laid before the reader. The man who many (including himself) saw as the rightful heir to Booker T. Washington’s leadership of black America was vilified as a ‘reactionary under [the] pay of white men’ and therefore more than happy to act as a ‘mouthpiece of the government’.

  Du Bois was stung into answering back. In a wary defence that barely masked his dismay, he claimed ignorance of the young Haitian’s existence: ‘The truth was that Mr Du Bois never saw or heard of his [Garvey’s] High Commissioner,’ the editor wrote snootily in the Crisis, ‘never denied his nor anyone’s statements of the wretched American conditions, did everything possible to arouse rather than quiet the French press and would have been delighted to welcome and co-operate with any colored fellow-worker.’32

  Four months after he had set sail for France, William Du Bois returned to New York to find the black political landscape much changed. Back in December, if he considered Marcus Garvey at all, then it was as no more than a minor irritant. After all, Du Bois’s expedition to France, his convening of a Pan-African Congress and forthcoming history of black involvement in the Great War should, not unreasonably, have rehabilitated and endeared him towards black doubters whose eyes had rolled on the publication of his controversial ‘Close Ranks’ essay, that supported the USA administration’s war effort. Instead, in the spring of 1919, Dr Du Bois found himself the easy target of a foreign-born Negro leader whose own momentum seemed unstoppable.

  As foretold, black expectations were not met at Paris. The Peace Conference eventually determined the mandates for the confiscated German African colonies, mostly in favour of her European adversaries. Mandates for Togoland and the Cameroons (both partitioned) were awarded to France and Great Britain; the greater portion of German East Africa (known as Tanganyika) also went to Great Britain; the remainder of German East Africa (now known as Urundi-Burundi) was awarded to Belgium; and finally the conference awarded a mandate for South-West Africa (Namibia) to South Africa.33 Garvey angrily dubbed the events in Paris ‘the “Pieces Conference” because its unholy intent in depriving men of their liberty has made no headway for the restoration of peace’. Versailles had initially proved a welcome diversion. It had temporarily stopped the Negro from practising disappointment. Finally, though, it had delivered the black man from his delusion, cured him of the fantasy of inclusion proffered by the Peace Conference when it had seemed to hold his destiny in the balance. It was potentially a debilitating blow from which he might take years to recover. But the obvious setback, at least to the aims of the Garvey movement, would be offset by an announcement soon trumpeted in the Negro World and picked up by other curious newspapers. The New York Call led the way on 27 April 1919 with its headline, ‘Negroes Plan to Found Ship Line’.

  9

  FLYIN’ HOME ON THE

  BLACK STAR LINE

  Brothers, sisters, countrymen,

  You’d better get on board.

  Six steamships want to sail away,

  Loaded with a heavy load.

  It’s gwina take us all back home,

  Yes, every native child.

  And when we get there,

  What a time …

  Flying home on the Black Star Line

  ‘Black Star Line,’ 1924

  IF Harlemites looked for grandeur amongst the overcrowded tenements in 1919 they would not find it. To see grandeur they would have to close their eyes and imagine themselves transported to the tantalisingly close but unobtainable lavish homes of the ebony aristocrats up in Harlem’s exclusive enclaves, Sugar Hill and Strivers Row. Apart from the magnificent churches, there was no entrée to grandeur in Negro life. But when Marcus Garvey closed his eyes in the middle of the year, he did not imagine the saccharine luxury of a Sugar Hill penthouse with a chauffeured Cadillac parked outside and a Scandinavian maid to open the front door. No, what he saw were ships, not one or two but a whole line of Negro-owned steamships sailing across the Atlantic. It was an impossible idea. There had been no hint of anything like it ever being achieved in recent history.

  The beginning of the twentieth century marked the romantic peak of the great maritime age, of hulking steamships of enormous tonnage and passenger ships of comfort and splendour. But those vessels belonged to powerful nation states, trading on decades and centuries of experience: the Negro had experience of being a commodity, not as a captain of industry or magnate of a shipping line. Aside from that, Garvey’s improbable, grandiose scheme was also counter-intuitive. The usual narrative of the rags-to-riches Horatio Alger-type myth was to start small, with 25 cents and an idea worked out on your kitchen table; to go from door to door, as in the case of Madam Walker, selling your wonderful new hair product and steadily, over years and decades of thrift and hard work build up an empire. Garvey’s track record included the launching of a newspaper, a restaurant and a laundry. To then go on, almost overnight, to establish a shipping company could not be said to be a natural progression. But the great dreamer became increasingly emboldened by the fantastic growth in numbers and the euphoria of black people who signed up to his organisation. They were dazzled by his certainty and by his unrivalled eloquence. Garvey came to embody the movement and where another man might have fretted and been overwhelmed by the transference of his supporters’ dreams and emotions, Garvey thrived on it. Claude McKay accurately captured the excitement of his audience when he later wrote, ‘Garvey shouted words, words spinning like bullets, words falling like bombs, sharp words like poisoned daggers, thundering words and phrases lit with all the hues of the rainbow to match the wild approving roar of his people.’1

  The audience at a Garvey meeting were just as susceptible as the rest of the population to the ideals of the American Dream. In Harlem the dream was just one roll of the dice away, or a lucky combina
tion of numbers for ‘policy’ or increasingly in the purchase of shares. The Great War had immediately been followed by the period of wild speculation, of ‘fatuous optimism’ and its near cousin intractable pessimism. It had led to a more radical mindset amongst the black population, the cause of which the Nevis-born Marxist Cyril Briggs rather prosaically attributed to high rents. ‘Landlords and real-estate agents in Harlem are doing their level best to increase the converts of Bolshevism in the district,’ wrote Briggs. In such a climate, when economic hardships had put the ‘bite on’ black people, they were desperate for some kind of relief. Historically the church had provided spiritual comfort in the absence of financial health. On 16 October 1919, in the pages of the Negro World, Garvey gave voice to the popular sentiments of his supporters when he expressed their discontent with the present state of affairs: ‘We have been very spiritual in the past; we are going to take part of a material now and will give others the opportunity to practise the spiritual side of life.’2

  Garvey’s supporters looked upon his success, at his momentum, and felt, perhaps for the first time, that they had signed on with the winning side. Early on, Marcus Garvey had championed the idea that real emancipation would come through economic independence; the mighty dollar was the great leveller in American society. And yet when he’d arrived in 1917 the great Negro capital of the world could boast not one decent restaurant owned or operated by black people. Harlem’s two popular cafeterias were similarly white-owned. Garvey’s Universal Restaurant challenged them with its ‘down-home’ Southern cuisine. There were black businesses in Harlem but for the majority of them the black man or woman who greeted the customers was just a front. In 1917, the New York Age reported that there were 145 black businesses in Harlem, and less than a quarter of them were owned and operated by Blacks. Claude McKay conducted his own survey and found that ‘the saloons were run by the Irish, the restaurants by the Greeks, the ice and fruit stands by the Italians, and the grocery and haberdashery stores by the Jews. The only Negro businesses, excepting barber shops, were the churches and the cabarets.’3 Even when black businesses were established there was a problem with patronage. Because of the lack of precedents, most African-Americans had grown accustomed to dealing with white businesses; and, even when presented with a black alternative, continued to patronise their white counterparts, no matter how shabbily they were treated by them.4