Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Certificates for the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation were printed on pale eggshell-coloured paper with an ornate green border featuring a vignette of a globe turned on its axis to reveal the African continent with the inscription ‘Africa, the Land of Opportunity’ emblazoned across it, and a steamship with a welcoming African on either side. These shares certificates, with their direct appeal to race pride, were marketed aggressively from the start. But a hard sell wasn’t actually necessary. Garvey and his salesmen found themselves pushing at a half-opened door. Black men and women were dazzled by the idea and snapped up shares overnight.

  Mariamne Samad’s father was an enthusiastic member of the movement and one of the first to purchase shares. She remembers how he used to infuriate his wife by returning home, laden not with vital groceries but rather with certificates in the Black Star Line. Certificates would be piled high on a shelf and every so often brought down and proudly displayed on the kitchen table. He had no intention of ever trading them in, no matter how hard the times.13 That sentiment, of making a difference in some small way, of investing in a great, unprecedented ideal, was reflected in the hundreds of letters and requests for certificates that poured into UNIA headquarters from black people around the world. From Panama, one eager prospective shareholder wrote, ‘I have sent twice to buy shares amounting to $125 … Now I am sending $35 for seven more. You might think I have money. I do not … but if I am to die of hunger it’ll be all right because I’m determined to do all it’s in my power to better the conditions of the race.’

  Garvey spoke in a way of the promise that had hardly been heard since the revolutionary preacher Henry McNeal Turner roused the masses in the first flush of optimism following the emancipation of slaves fifty years earlier. Slavery had not been the best preparation for industrial, commercial and intellectual endeavour: it induced a moral torpor, and though the spell had been broken it might take generations before the curse was lifted. Garvey understood this and the near-unrealisable desire to be just as good as the white man that risked rendering the black man a mere mimic of the real thing. Sentiments that the Semi-Weekly Louisianan, a black newspaper, had articulated in the first blooms of emancipation: ‘Because we had to put up with a home-spun suit before emancipation we are determined to wear a silk one now … We are a poor … ignorant … inexperienced people as every day’s transactions will prove, and yet … we will spend more time and money to appear what we are not, than it would cost to be what we pretend to be.’14

  Altruism wasn’t the only motive; prospective black stockholders were seduced by the petit-bourgeois ideals of participating in the American Dream, formerly the preserve of their white compatriots, that had been denied them up until now, as well as the lip-smacking promise of fantastic returns on their investment. The early signs of uptake were so encouraging that Garvey was eager to push on and expand into the South where, despite the Great Migration, the vast majority of black people were still to be found. It was then that the first signs of differences and a tussle between the directors began to emerge. Garvey was all for moving swiftly and capitalising on the excitement amongst the black population in Harlem and the Northern states that he was certain would be repeated in the South. Edgar Grey, the general secretary, along with Richard Warner, another director (a former associate of Grey’s whom he’d vouched for and brought into the movement) promoted a more cautious approach, or rather one in which they had greater say. The speed with which the Black Star Line (BSL) was catching on with black Americans meant that, invariably, it came ever closer to achieving its objective. This in itself, conversely, brought with it anxiety and conflagration as the dream was being realised.

  Only weeks after the company’s incorporation, the boardroom of BSL began to splinter into opposing camps. Garvey’s overbearing manner, his idiosyncratic and overconfident business sense (unsupported by any significant experience), irritated the relative newcomers Grey and Warner. They also complained that the UNIA leader’s approach to collective decision-making was simply to cajole and bully the board into agreeing with him – a task which was made easier once stalwarts Henrietta Vinton Davis and the cigar manufacturer Jeremiah Certain were elected as directors. The leader’s greatest talents were as a propagandist and promoter, and Virginia would be the target of his next conquest. He set out, accompanied by the treasurer, Ashwood and Davis on an ambitious stock-selling drive in the South, overriding the minority boardroom objections about the fledgling company’s lack of established procedures. Important matters such as how to keep account of the sale of shares, where to bank the money, and when and how to settle demands for salaries remained unresolved. Garvey left the rival camp to tend the shop, as it were, disregarding his own diminishing confidence in their abilities and allegiance. The stock-selling campaign in Virginia was a big success and the UNIA leader telegraphed hundreds of dollars (via Western Union) back to Harlem. But celebrations were tempered by the antipathy of each camp towards the other which continued to harden as did suspicions over the handling of the large sums of money coming into the Black Star Line coffers – some of which temporarily found its way into individual bank accounts whilst Garvey was out of town.

  The breakdown of trust was as alarming as it was sudden. By the beginning of July, Richard Warner was proffering his resignation (which was rejected) but even as he was doing so he and Grey had voluntarily gone to the District Attorney’s office and dictated statements to the stenographer that criticised Garvey for diverting and dispersing some of the BSL monies to pay for bills incurred by the loss-making Universal Restaurant and for liquidating other debts. Garvey, in turn, was planning to prosecute Grey and Warner for misappropriation of funds, when he was once more summoned by the District Attorney.

  Birth pains are expected at the beginning of most fledgling enterprises but the spectacular fallouts between Marcus Garvey and former colleagues, and the ensuing unbridled acrimony, became a regular pattern. This pattern is only partially explained by those allies, in businesses launched by Garvey, who felt aggrieved when the salaries that he’d promised, predicated on a future income of those enterprises, were not immediately realised. ‘Garvey expected the employees to endure this [temporary] lack of pay stoically,’ noted one contemporary, and ‘to their demand for payment, [he] frequently countered with accusations, from inefficiency and delinquency to outright misappropriation of funds.’15

  Garvey’s movement attracted leaders who seemed quite prepared to make ‘no ordinary sacrifice’ when there was little to gain or lose. Their expectations were not, in the beginning, much greater than those for the numerous other mutual-aid and friendly societies to which they had previously belonged. These were intelligent young men and women forced through the vagaries of American society to accept jobs and positions below their intelligence; as post-office clerks, Pullman porters and hotel waiters. That the officers of the UNIA were idealists is beyond doubt, but they were also practical men and women; they were consummate joiners of organisations who hopped about from one group to another, according to their outlook and ambitions. Success when it had come in the past had invariably been on a small scale. But as the UNIA expanded, so too did their expectations for personal and political advancement; there was much more to gain and much more to lose.

  Marcus Garvey was quick to find fault, and yet he believed that at the back of the adverse reactions to him lay an age-old problem: a black version of schadenfreude, the African-American and African-Caribbean’s tendency to despise, rather than celebrate, the aspirations and achievements of his brother. ‘The Negro’s greatest enemy,’ he would later lament, ‘is himself.’ The Black Star Line’s initial difficulties betrayed all the signs of the race ‘doing itself down’, of a group that lacked self-belief. In the view of Garvey, this was the familiar and tragic characteristic of a people only recently (a couple of generations) up from slavery. He often drew the analogy between emancipated black people and crabs in a barrel. A crab that was capable of rising up and crawling out of the
barrel would be impeded from doing so by the other crabs who dragged it down and cut its claws off to prevent further escape.16

  In negotiating these jealousies and animosities around the fledgling Black Star Line, a modicum of restraint and level-headedness was called for. At the earliest opportunity, Garvey discharged Warner and Grey and publicly humiliated them at the next big UNIA meeting – for the first time held in a long, half-finished empty brick building that had previously been designed as a church for Baptists but abandoned. This was the organisation’s new, permanent home; a rough-looking dwelling that had been renovated and roofed over in zinc. In the capacious and romantic imagination of Marcus Garvey it was transformed into Liberty Hall. Thereafter, the hall would serve as the spiritual mainspring of the movement and seek to emulate its namesake in Dublin which had been the site from where the Easter Rising had been launched in 1916.

  Garvey had long held a fascination for the Irish cause. He aligned Irish subjugation and peonage under the British with the suffering of black people worldwide: ‘As the Irishman is struggling and fighting for the fatherland of Ireland, so must the new Negro of the world fight for the fatherland of Africa.’ The Irish had been kicked around by the English for centuries but it seemed that their dreadful past would soon reach its apogee. For Garvey, ‘Irish’ was virtually another name for Negro. Just like the Irish, Garvey believed that ‘today the Negro seems to be the footstool of the other races and nations of the world; tomorrow the Negro may occupy the highest rung on the great human ladder’.17 As the UNIA moved away from being just a friendly society to a political organisation, Garvey turned towards Irish Republicanism for inspiration. Sinn Feiners’ agitation for home rule served as a blueprint for Garvey’s evolving philosophy of Black Nationalism. He much admired the ‘relentless propaganda in the interest of Irish Republicanism’ that had been especially successful on American soil. On 11 June, the Irish revolutionary leader, Eamon de Valera, embarked on a much-publicised mission to the USA. On 23 February 1919, 6,000 Irish-Americans attended the Third Irish Race Convention in Philadelphia during which an Irish Victory Fund was launched that eventually peaked at $1,500,000. A week later, Marcus Garvey and the UNIA announced plans to hold an ‘International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World’ for the following year. The symbols and stages of the quest for Irish independence were regularly alluded to by Garvey; he identified strongly with de Valera who in the summer of 1920 was declared by his adherents Provisional President of Ireland.

  Garvey recognised that de Valera’s mission was much more advanced than the UNIA’s. He aimed to court Irish Republicans and invite them to address UNIA members; that eventuality was still a little way off, but on the night of Sunday 27 July 1919, Garvey’s identification with the Irish cause peaked with the dedication of Liberty Hall. Henrietta Vinton Davis opened the ceremony with an ode and prayers before giving way to an impassioned UNIA leader. Garvey’s voice crackled with an unusual hint of apprehension as he confided to the audience his foreboding. He had been instructed to present himself to the District Attorney’s office the next morning, for the sixth time in as many weeks. Perhaps this speech ‘would be the last one in many years as … certain sinister forces … were trying to have him removed from the scene’. Summoning the spirit of the blood sacrifice of past Irish Nationalists from Robert Emmet to Roger Casement, he vowed that he too was ready to be offered up as martyr. Enemies might yet succeed in ‘striking the shepherd in order to scatter the sheep’. But as he neared the end Garvey asked those in the audience who were willing to sacrifice their lives for the race to stand up. As one, the vast gathering rose to its feet.18

  The published vignettes of the extraordinary evening, of his defiant farewell, dripped with drama. But in the next edition of the Negro World, Garvey went even further.

  Under the heading, ‘Two Negro Crooks Use Office of the Deputy District Attorney to Save Themselves From Jail’, in a diatribe which bore his fingerprints, Garvey alleged that Kilroe had offered the former BSL officers immunity from prosecution should they help ‘frame [him] up’ for breaking corporate law. As an experienced newspaper man, Garvey understood the perils of slander and libel. The courts were still processing the merits of the litigation he’d launched against the New York World and Harlem Home News. Yet on the front page of his own paper, he’d now penned an article that recklessly invited the charge of libel. An incensed Edwin Kilroe duly obliged. Within forty-eight hours, Garvey had gone from a position of uncertain judicious scrutiny to the certainty of his legal liability. If you wanted to libel someone you couldn’t make a worse choice than upsetting a lawyer. Later in the month police officers turned up at UNIA headquarters to arrest Garvey on a charge of criminal libel. He was shocked and deeply humiliated, recalled Amy Ashwood, even though he managed to extract a concession from the police that he would not be handcuffed. President-general Garvey suffered the ignominy of being temporarily incarcerated at Tomb’s prison and was only released once he’d met the terms of the $3,000 bail – a huge sum, the equivalent of five years’ wages for the average worker. ‘In a highly charged and apprehensive state’, Garvey returned to UNIA offices with his fiancée where they waited in dread ‘impatiently for the morning newspapers’.19

  The potential libel was undoubtedly an expensive, self-inflicted injury but there was at least one boon from his reported troubles with the district’s lawyers. A forty-three-year-old Bahamian, Joshua Cockburn, was amongst the West Indian migrants who continued to pour into Harlem. For almost a year now, he’d been casting about with little success for employment suitable to his skills. But reading about the difficulties of the embryonic Black Star Line gladdened his heart. The Negro Steamship Corporation would be his salvation. For Captain Joshua Cockburn was one of the few black men in America to hold a maritime master’s certificate. He’d been at sea since he was nineteen, and had worked his way from galley boy to second and first mate on a series of British naval vessels before obtaining his captain’s licence. Captain Cockburn’s cocksure confidence was softened by an engaging, flashing smile and beguiling deep-set eyes that would have served him well in any game of poker.

  Joshua Cockburn hurried to 135th Street and joined the long line of supplicants – now including scores of prospective BSL stockholders – and waited his turn to be presented to the UNIA and Black Star Line president. Cockburn introduced himself as not just an experienced captain but a savvy businessman who could help convert Garvey’s dream into reality by negotiating the purchase of the company’s all-important first ship. Garvey was immediately impressed with the smooth-talking, shiny-skinned black man in his sharp, white captain’s uniform. Even so, at this stage, it was not the conduct of his character but the colour of the skin that was of greater importance. Though there was not yet a Negro steamship to command, Garvey recognised the enormous propaganda value in having a black man ready to take the helm. With Cockburn in tow, accompanying the UNIA leader on promotional tours, the Garvey bandwagon rolled on throughout August, steadily selling stock in the shipping line. The 25th of that month marked yet another stage in the project’s maturity. That evening the organisation rented the 2,804 seats of Carnegie Hall to accommodate potential new recruits and investors. Henrietta Vinton Davis was greeted with polite applause at the start of the meeting but it was the appearance on stage, shortly after 8.30 p.m., of the provisional first commander of the Black Star Line that truly electrified the audience.20 The widely advertised ‘biggest ever reunion of Negroes’ from the diaspora certainly needed the extra seats. Despite months of intelligence gathering, the authorities still didn’t quite know what to make of it all and, as earlier noted, Archibald Stephenson, the anti-Red crusader from the Lusk Committee, decided to take a look for himself. He made a clumsy and ostentatious entry to Carnegie Hall along with detectives from the bomb squad and stenographers who tapped away with quiet menace throughout all the speeches. Mindful of their presence, the UNIA president reiterated that he led a movement whose members were ‘ne
ither Democrats nor Republicans nor Socialists nor Bolshevists nor IWWs’, and, much to the amusement of the crowd, Garvey reminded them that ‘when they were robbing us from Africa, they robbed us with all parties’. In that same speech, he implied that he had been vindicated and revelled in the fact that he would increasingly become a towering force and one to be reckoned with. Because, especially in that Red summer, when innocent Negro blood spilled so freely in America – when Mary Turner, a pregnant black woman, could be lynched, hung upside down, her belly slit open and her unborn baby trampled underfoot – Marcus Garvey would no longer hold his furious tongue, no matter who was present. He warned that in future, ‘when they lynch a Negro below the Mason-Dixon Line … since it is not safe to lynch a white man in any part of America, we shall press the button and lynch him in the great continent of Africa.’21

  On 25 August 1919, Marcus Garvey – harassed and harried by the authorities who would save the Negro from an alleged black swindler but not from the noose of the confirmed Southern white cracker – was not alone in spouting his defiance. Of all the new faces accompanying him on the platform that evening, even more so than Cockburn, the Reverend James Eason was perhaps the most significant. The flamboyant Eason was a prominent black American clergyman with a loyal following in Philadelphia. Eason was temperamentally inclined towards Garvey, much more so than towards the subservient old-school pastors, the ‘prophets of the hereafter’ whom Garvey grew to despise. Following the Philadelphia riots the previous summer, Eason had taken the practical position that the spiritual protection of the New Testament was not as comprehensive as that offered by the six cartridges of the Smith & Wesson. Reverend Eason had been linked with Du Bois’s NAACP but now, in switching allegiance, he made public his disillusion with that relatively conservative organisation and signalled his faith in the UNIA as the best bet for the Negro. On a good night (and there were many of them) the ‘silver-tongued Eason’ (as he was commonly known) was a match for Garvey. He would prove instrumental in delivering hundreds, perhaps thousands more recruits to the UNIA – opening up fronts all along the east coast. By embracing the organisation, he also complicated the picture of its anonymous rank and file, overturning the simplistic notions of some critics that the Garvey movement was, essentially, made up of foreign-born black people. That largely untested assertion, amounting to no more than wishful thinking, was consistently the line taken by the BOI agents who reluctantly conceded that perhaps a ‘few ignorant Afro-Americans’ might also make up the numbers of the movement’s sympathisers. The prospect of homegrown radicals was always much more frightening and incomprehensible than aliens or immigrants without the correct papers who might conceivably be deported.