by Colin Grant
As the evening approached, the president of the Black Star Line set out once more through the drizzle for the armoury and was heartened by the sight of the large turn-out, equal to the night before. In fact their numbers had been swollen by a pack of local reporters. Closest to the platform, the Defender’s correspondent was best placed to record the drama that was about to unfold: ‘Garvey stood up to address the crowd,’ and according to the reporter, ‘was on the verge of telling the people of the glories of the proposed Black Star Line, when Detective George Friend (of the Chicago Constabulary) stepped out to the aisle, calmly walked to the stage and “demobilised” the project.’ Garvey was to be arrested for violation of the Blue Sky Law – an obscure offence which required salesmen to obtain an Illinois licence before selling stock in the state. The Blue Sky Law had been brought in a few years earlier to counter the confidence swindlers issuing worthless securities that had about as much value as the blue sky. Garvey protested his innocence and ignorance of the law to no avail. The policeman moved to escort him to the waiting wagon, and as he did so Garvey noticed a half-familiar figure at his side – the man who had approached him in the morning. Sheridan Brusseaux now identified himself as a private detective of the Keystone Detective Agency. Later in court it would be revealed that Brusseaux had been hired by Robert Abbott, the editor of the Chicago Defender. Garvey had been trapped by his enemy into breaking the law and, though the fine was paltry, the Chicago paper felt free to mock the UNIA and the Black Star Line which ‘instead of sailing the Atlantic Ocean en route to some foreign port had anchored at the Harrison Police Station’.
Over the next couple of days the Defender went even further in inflammatory and satirical headlines reporting that Garvey had fallen foul of Edward Brundage, the Attorney General of Illinois: ‘Brundage “Sinks” Black Star Line – Air Castle Steamship Sails into Illinois’ was, without doubt, the most disturbing. The news brought consternation on the streets of Harlem, forcing Garvey to call an emergency meeting at Liberty Hall. Anxious investors crowded into the congested hall. Some had taken the Defender’s headline literally and feared that the Black Star Line had been sunk (even though the first ship was not yet in their possession) somewhere between Lake Michigan and the Atlantic Ocean. So jammed was the hall that people pressed to the steps leading up to the platform, ending up at the feet of the speakers, and still hundreds of others could not get in. Chicago had been an intermezzo, precipitating this next stage with Garvey now surrounded by members anxious to learn the extent of the damage; the leader whom guest speakers lauded as a latter-day Solomon was about to be judged by the people. Garvey rose to his feet and before he could say one word the clapping began: instantly the hall filled with a great wall of applause which did not abate for fully five minutes. The honourable Marcus Garvey turned in another mercurial performance castigating the ‘bad niggers’ full of malign intent who were trying to sabotage the Black Star Line. Garvey’s voice boomed out over the hall, ostensibly speaking directly to his supporters but actually answering absent critics: ‘You have brought this movement to the stage where your success is next door. All that you have to do is stick and stay.’28
There were now just three weeks to go before the 31 October deadline, by which time ‘any Negro not a stock-holder in the BSL,’ Garvey had warned, ‘will be worse than a traitor to the cause of struggling Ethiopia.’ Cheques and cash continued to pour in through the post at a rate not matched by the ability of the skeleton staff to keep up. Reams of paperwork remained unprocessed.
Into this chaotic climate walked a twenty-two-year-old middle-class Jamaican immigrant (a graduate of the elite Wolmers Girls’ School) who could well have been forgiven for believing her arrival at UNIA headquarters that summer to be preordained. Her gentle almond eyes and comely demeanour were much remarked on but Amy Euphemia Jacques was also a bold, determined and resourceful young woman. Her great-great-grandfather, John Jacques, had been the first mayor of the Jamaican capital, Kingston. Her father, George, who owned several properties and land in Kingston, had been a manager of the Paloma cigar factory. The Jacques family, then, were of comfortable middle-class stock. But when her father had died unexpectedly in 1913, Amy had assumed the role of head of the household. She was seventeen. The family’s suddenly reduced finances thwarted her career prospects. Where she had once dreamt of becoming the island’s first female barrister, she now accepted a position as a clerk in legal chambers – sublimating her former ambition with reveries of escaping Jamaica.29 After four stultifying years, Amy Jacques could delay no further. As soon as part of her inheritance matured on her twenty-first birthday, she paid over the $65 that secured her passage to America and, making a pledge to her anxious mother to return ‘if conditions were unbearable’, she set off for Harlem.
Amy Jacques had a character built to endure. Although she was a fair-skinned woman of Jamaica’s brown elite, her relatives in New York had declined to sponsor and accommodate her because ‘they all passed for white’, moving freely in mainstream society with the benefits of Caucasian life and none of the deficits that were attached to black skin; associating with a dark cousin would have exposed their true racial identity. Jacques had consequently had to invent another relative in order to obtain the necessary documents to travel to the USA.
Amy Jacques had been slow to appreciate the attraction of Marcus Garvey. But eventually, curiosity over the conflicting accounts of the UNIA had drawn her to one of his Sunday meetings, and like so many others, she’d left mesmerised by the president’s powers of oratory. A follow-up tour of the headquarters soon metamorphosed into an unofficial job interview, after her frank remarks as to the disarray of the office. ‘I am placed in a very awkward position,’ Garvey confided to her. ‘I have to employ all-coloured staff, many of whom have never had the advantages of working in business offices.’ The UNIA leader showed her into his office and opened a large cupboard crammed full with stacks of unopened letters. They had built up during his absence on a speaking tour. ‘I haven’t time to teach someone to open, sort and put notations on them before handing the moneys enclosed to a treasurer,’ he lamented. ‘You see the awful predicament I am in for lack of qualified honest people.’30
In her retrospective account decades later, Jacques wrote that Garvey persuaded her to lend a hand a few evenings a week, and quickly appraising her efficiency, pleaded with her to accept a full-time position. There is no mention in her narrative of the involvement of her close friend Amy Ashwood. Yet in Ashwood’s account, she had invited Jacques to stay with her in Harlem and had recommended her for the secretary’s job. Amy Jacques’s studied oversight was grounded in their later spectacular fallout over the amorous intentions of Marcus Garvey – a man whom they were both to marry.
Whether engineered by herself, by Ashwood or by happy accident, Amy Jacques’s introduction to the UNIA proved most fortunate for employer and employee: Garvey was pleased with the way she overhauled the office and put it on a more efficient footing, and Jacques revelled in the role of his personal secretary and unofficial office manager, the kind of position which, despite her obvious abilities, she would have had trouble finding elsewhere. The federal census of 1915 in New York (which showed clerical workers and salespersons constituting 2.7 per cent of the Caribbean workforce) pointed to the negative disparity between what skilled West Indians searching for employment thought commensurate with their island experience, and what they were actually offered.31 Though they suffered less than indigenous black workers in this respect, West Indians still came up against a rigid colour line that was difficult to breach. There was no colour bar at the UNIA, of course: one of the great attractions of the organisation was its openness. The UNIA was home to Harlem; it was for and of the people, and there would be no exclusion; the door was always, seemingly, open.
Just before noon on Tuesday 14 October, George Tyler, a part-time vendor of the Negro World, walked through the door of the brown-stone UNIA offices on 135th Street. He had no appointment but
that, in itself, was not unusual: people showed up all the time, occasionally still clutching the coupon they’d perhaps cut out of the Negro World, and now intended to redeem for a share certificate in the Black Star Line. Especially if the Garveyites were coming from out of town or from abroad they’d want to memorialise the day, Amy Jacques recalled: ‘[They’d] want to see Garvey personally after transacting business and inspecting various departments; they just wanted to shake his hand, so that they could tell the folks back home that they had held his hand and that he sent greetings and good wishes.’ George Tyler had purchased $25 worth of bonds in the Universal Restaurant. But he hadn’t brought along the stubs to check on his investment, and he wasn’t lugging along a bundle of unsold copies of the paper; George Tyler was holding a gun. Before the receptionist even had time to look up, he’d brushed past her, shouldering and kicking open doors in the downstairs offices and all the while calling out in a strident and insistent voice demanding to see the UNIA leader. Garvey was working with Amy Ashwood and another secretary on the floor above. He came to the top of the stairs to investigate the commotion and did not, at first, notice that the man causing all the fuss held a .38-calibre pistol in his hand. George Tyler took aim and fired. The first shot went wild and Garvey ducked instinctively. The second bullet grazed his temple; the next two slammed into his legs and Garvey crumpled to the ground. Ashwood rushed to tend to Garvey; the other officer, Mrs Mary Clarke Roach, thrust herself in front of the fallen leader, standing between Garvey and the gunman; together the two women shielded him from further gunshots. In the slowed-down ‘no-time’ of the attack, the switchboard operator managed to grab Tyler and tried to wrestle the gun away from him but the would-be assassin broke free and fled the building, chased by other UNIA members. Halfway up the street, Tyler was speedily apprehended by a passing patrolman, handcuffed and taken to the local police station. Minutes later an ambulance arrived to rush Garvey to casualty for an emergency operation.
Almost immediately speculation began as to the assassin’s motives. Newspapers the next day stated that Garvey had owed Tyler $25 from money he’d lent to start up the Universal Restaurant. The shooting, they claimed, was the culmination of several rows. When, in the past, he’d asked for his money back, the disenchanted investor had been continually rebuffed and had become incensed when, rather than a refund, he was offered the equivalent of $25 in shares in the Black Star Line instead. The theory did not seem probable, but neither did the rumour circling Harlem that Tyler had confessed to his cellmates that he’d been sent by the District Attorney ‘to get Garvey’.
The morning after the assassination attempt, Tyler was to be taken from Harlem police station to the courts. Two guards were escorting him back to his cell ‘for his coat and hat when he suddenly wheeled about and leaped over the edge of the third floor’. Landing face down thirty feet below, Tyler fractured his skull. In a bid to escape he’d leapt to his death.32
Garvey lay recuperating in his hospital bed from the bullet wounds when the news of his assailant’s accident (later updated to suicide) came through. Garvey had survived with injuries that were not life-threatening, but the New York Times was among those papers who’d flashed confusing reports that the UNIA leader had been shot in the head, just over the right eye, and was said to be critically injured. Before the attack, Marcus Garvey had planned to give a talk in Philadelphia and, defying his doctors, he set off for the People’s Church just five days later. When, at the appointed hour, their president mounted the stage, limping on the cane that would always accompany him thereafter, the congregation erupted in boundless jubilation and ecstasy. After the reports of his demise, some believed they were witnessing a miracle. It was a hugely transformative moment. From then on, according to Professor Robert Hill, the curator of Garvey’s papers, the career of the UNIA leader took on quasi-religious proportions. He’d been shot in the head and survived: the faithful thought him immortal.33 Overnight the purchase of shares in the Black Star Line shot up. Marcus Garvey seemed to anticipate the response when he assured the audience that ‘if the shots caused the organisation to advance 2,000 per cent, then I am satisfied to die’. Days before the 31 October deadline, thousands of dollars poured into the UNIA’s recently re organised offices. A poorly paid longshoreman named Cornelius Martis became one of the biggest investors. As recently as 2005, documents discovered by Rachel, the great-granddaughter of Martis, included two certificates issued in 1919 with Marcus Garvey’s signature that showed Cornelius Martis had purchased 80 shares amounting to $400 (equivalent to $5,000 today) – an extraordinary testament of faith in Garvey and the BSL.34
On 30 October 1919, the UNIA rented one of the biggest venues in Manhattan, Madison Square Garden, to mount one final push towards reaching the level of funds needed to secure the release of the Yarmouth over to the Black Star Line. A Lusk Committee Intelligence Report estimated 6,000 people at the meeting, most wearing ‘the colors of the new UNIA flag, red, green and black’ – red for the red blood spilt, green for the green pastures of Africa and black for its chosen people. The Lusk Committee’s Doris Henry conjured up a frightening mélée of passion and fanaticism, of wild singing interrupted when Captain Cockburn and ‘the crew of the new Black Star Liner [all in uniform] came in and the howling and yowling of the mad mob drowned all the music’. The pale face of Doris Henry quivered when she recalled how Garvey raged: ‘We Negroes are now whetting up the swords to fight for freedom and if the white people treat us right we will combine, otherwise the Negroes will join Japan and the East.’35 Pamphlets and handbills scattered around the Garden emphasised the redemptive power of the Black Star Line. One advert stood out from the rest. It pictured a black woman kneeling with her arms outstretched, her desperate children clinging to her side, and a burning cross towering over the flames from her ruined home. The caption above read, ‘Negroes Awake! The hour has come to save your Race from the burning stake. Invest in the Black Star Line.’
An evangelical fever matched the enthusiasm of the eleventh-hour stock-buying, marking a subtle and psychic shift in the transferral of emotions away from the abstract Garvey movement and towards its personification. Even amongst lapsed Christians and agnostics, Marcus Garvey’s near-death and resurrection appeared God-given. The Lord had delivered unto black people a latter-day Moses, who through the purchase of ships, was going to lead them to the Promised Land. Professor Buck typified the sentiment of the speakers that night when his voice thundered over the auditorium: ‘God is saying I have heard the call of Ethiopia and 400 million strong they are coming out and they are going to march under the leadership of the one man I have selected in the person of Marcus Garvey.’36
The next day, on 31 October at noon, just as Marcus Garvey promised, the Yarmouth weighed anchor at 135th Street pier on the Hudson River. A crowd of several thousand jubilant supporters had marched to the pier to witness the launch of the ship; one of the greatest moments in Negro history. The UNIA band struck up, hundreds jostled up the gangways, having paid the dollar to take part on its maiden voyage, and a cloud of flying boaters and hats of every description pierced the cold October air. The Yarmouth moved off and the vestiges of scepticism around the UNIA leader and mockery of him disappeared overnight.
‘The Eternal has happened,’ Marcus Garvey proclaimed from the pages of the Negro World. ‘For centuries the black man has been taught by his ancient overlords that he was “nothing” is “nothing” and never shall be “anything” … Five years ago the Negro … was sleeping upon his bale of cotton in the South of America; he was steeped in mud in the banana fields of the West Indies and Central America, seeing no possible way of extricating himself from the environments; he smarted under the lash of the new taskmaster in Africa; but alas! Today he is the new man.’37
10
A STAR IN THE STORM
What we need is another Emancipator who will tell the Negro youth, ‘You can succeed in big business just as you succeed along other lines of intellectual and mechan
ical endeavour. [Once you] learn the detail necessary to success, you can even sail the high seas and run a steamship line …’
William Ferris, Negro World
11 October 1919
‘When the Garvey organisation purchased two trucks the people were exuberantly enthusiastic,’ wrote Claude McKay. ‘When it acquired an old boat and manned it with a Negro crew, they went delirious.’1 The delirium continued throughout the day of the Yarmouth’s maiden voyage. Unknown to the jubilant crowd, their celebrations were in real danger of being spoilt by a mix-up over the transferral of the insurance for the vessel. Leo Healy, the representative of the anxious vendor, had hurried to the pier with orders to stop the Yarmouth sailing. But with a wary eye on the crowd, whose excitement was at fever-pitch, Healy reached a compromise with the ship’s new crew. Along with his port captain, Leo Healey would chaperone the Yarmouth which would be allowed to sail out of sight of the crowds further down the Hudson but only as far as 23rd Street.
A couple of days afterwards, the insurance was placed on the boat and with the crew and fifty passengers, including Henrietta Davis, on board, the Yarmouth was made ready to sail for Cuba. But it had been an inauspicious start, an omen which taxed the limits of the sailors’ superstition. Captain Cockburn, who now commanded a salary of $400 per month, at the head of the Yarmouth slipped her out to sea under the cover of darkness because, he informed his boss, ‘I felt there was some trick or scheme [a]foot to prevent my sailing.’2
An air of heightened suspicion had crept over the movement following the attack on their leader. Members generally concurred with Garvey’s assertion that the shooting had been part of a sinister plot to get rid of him. It was a strange coincidence that in the forthcoming criminal libel charge against the UNIA leader, the only witness whom the district attorney aimed to call was the assailant, George Tyler; it struck some as even more of a coincidence that Tyler had, twenty-four hours later, committed suicide – apparently.