Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Marcus Garvey’s most fervent admirers, the type of West Indian whom Hubert Harrison characterised as the ‘hoe-handle and cow-tail brigade’ might well have considered their countryman immortal but it was not a view likely to have been held by the subject of their idolatry.3 After all, to be shot and wounded is to be undermined and stripped of any delusions of invincibility. Though his appetites for power, dignity and recognition were not diminished by the gunshot injuries, one of the first things Marcus Garvey did after the attack was to solicit the services of a bodyguard. A committee of members had impressed upon Garvey the need for him to arm himself. He’d turned down that suggestion but agreed to a bodyguard. The appropriately named Marcellus Strong unplugged himself from his former job as switchboard operator and took up a gun; he would remain faithfully at Garvey’s side throughout his time in Harlem.4

  Later in the year the BOI informant whose dispatches were signed P-138 seemed to be under the impression that Marcellus Strong had multiplied. P-138 wrote that he had detected at least five bodyguards in the UNIA’s secret-service squad. Following at a distance as Garvey walked down Lenox Avenue, the agent observed ‘two of the guards some distance in front of [Garvey], one a little nearer to him in front, forming a triangle, the other two men came behind about thirty feet apart … When anyone passed near Garvey these men closed ranks.’ P-138’s reports always contained more heat and drama than those of the other two informants, and, on this occasion, he was particularly agitated and eager to report that ‘one of the fellows put his hands behind his back, clasping them together thereby lifting his coat tail, exposing the shining butt of a revolver’.

  Whether aware of it or not, the BOI agent was pandering to his paymaster’s dark and foreboding fantasies of armed Negro men running amok on America’s main streets. The appearance of black men with rifles on their shoulders, snapped to attention, in dark blue military uniforms parading through the streets of Harlem, had already begun to cause alarm in Hoover’s circles. These were the men of Garvey’s newly formed African Legion, a ceremonial outfit whose future presence at UNIA parades would enhance the spectacle and boost the drama of the occasion. The men in uniform looked fabulous, remembered Mariamne Samad, whose father was in the legion and later a key figure in the secret service which evolved as an offshoot. The African Legion appealed to Garvey’s romantic side, the crystallising sense of the uniqueness of his role in instilling pride and creating a parallel world equal to that of the white man. The former Jamaican Prime Minister, Edward Seaga would later applaud his intentions not to rely on the white man, ‘not to knock on gates where they were not wanted but to build their own castles; not to respect uniforms for which they were not given the opportunities to play a role in the hierarchy of whatever uniform system but to create their own uniform regimes’.6 Ex-combatants from the Great War formed the backbone and cadre of the African Legion but it also drew in raw recruits seduced by the glamour. This was yet another manifestation of Garvey’s shrewd understanding of psychology. ‘To most white people, Garvey seemed a figure out of vaudeville,’ observed the social worker and NAACP founding member, Mary White Ovington. But she quite clearly saw the effect Garvey had on black working lives, in his own semi-military attire and in the uniforms for the Legion: ‘[He] appealed to the love of beauty and colour so keen in the African, and aroused his self-respect and pride. The sweeper in the subway, the elevator boy, eternally carrying fat office men and perky girls up and down a shaft, knew that when night came he might march with the African army and bear a wonderful banner to be raised some day in a distant and beautiful land.’7 Reports of these African storm troops in Harlem and other divisions in Newport News and elsewhere caused brows to furrow in the corridors of the BOI. Furthermore, British Military Intelligence had received disturbing anonymous communications. British Cabinet Office files for April named D. Shirley, a partner of the S. G. Kpakpa Quartey, a merchant of the Gold Coast, as the commander of the Universal African Legion. Shirley was alleged to have hatched a plan to smuggle these men (the battle-ready amongst them) into Africa and the West Indies as Black Star Line passengers – though to what end it is hard to imagine.8 Whilst the British didn’t take the tip-off too seriously, the BOI decided, on 13 February, to investigate more thoroughly. Agent 800, James Wormley Jones, a former captain in the US army, was the first black man to be appointed as a full-time agent of the bureau. He’d served in the disgraced 368th Infantry of the 92nd division during the Great War, and was one of the few black officers to escape censure after the disastrous retreat from the Argonne forest offensive on the French front. The division’s commander, General Ballou, had vented his spleen in a briefing to the accredited war correspondent: ‘I regard the colored officer as a distinct failure,’ the general raged. ‘He is cowardly and has none of the traits to make a successful officer.’ That vitriolic newspaper copy and its uncontested conclusions had been wired round the world and had been scorched into America’s collective memory.’9

  Partly motivated by this opportunity to redeem himself, if not the regiment, through important work, Jones was also driven by a sincere belief that Marcus Garvey was sowing pernicious seeds of discontent between the races in America. Jones’s reputation in Newport News (a stronghold of the Garvey Movement) grew at lightning speed and he quickly managed to infiltrate the UNIA. Despite, initially, having to address suspicions aroused by his very light complexion, Jones would soon be privileged to address a full house at Liberty Hall. The Negro World reported how Mr Jones, ‘mistaken by the audience for a white man’, spoke passionately about his racial identity and seemed to embrace the so-called ‘one drop rule’ whereby having literally one drop of black blood meant you were considered a Negro. ‘I have no more privileges than the blackest man in the eyes of the white man. He considers me a Negro just as any Negro,’ Jones assured. Moreover, in his speech he went on to condemn the race’s own colour and class distinctions.

  Within weeks, brother Jones had gained the confidence of his super iors to such a degree that he was instructed to help train the paramilitary UNIA legionnaires.10 They drilled every Thursday night at Newport News, and Captain Jones reported ominously that they had appropriated the oath of allegiance that every US soldier takes, and altered it so that they no longer pledged their loyalty to the President of the United States, but to the Honourable Marcus Garvey instead. The potential threat from these 200 volunteers was largely overstated. As Mariamne Samad recalls, ‘the rifles were ceremonial – the pins had been removed so that they couldn’t fire – the men were fabulous to look at, drew a lot of admiring attention from the ladies and would not have wanted to get those creased and starched uniforms dirty.’11 However, there were others, such as the rough-house war veteran of the British West Indies Regiment, Sergeant William Wellington Wellwood Grant, for whom the veneer of a smart uniform could not disguise the sheer brutality of the man within. Grant – later, in charge of the local Harlem African Legion known as the Tiger Division – had a propensity to crack heads rather than attempt persuasive argument, which eventually led Garvey to expel him from the UNIA ranks.12

  From hereon in the BOI kept a detailed and open file on Garvey and his movement; the records gave Hoover and his superiors a comprehensive account of the daily inner workings of the UNIA. Captain Jones was one of three black BOI agents to infiltrate the UNIA. He was preceded by Special Agent C-C and later overlapped with P-138. All three were able to provide intimate details of the day-to-day running of the organisation. C-C was the code-name given to Dr Arthur Ulysses Craig, an accomplished teacher who came to prominence in the parlours of the African-American educated elite when he qualified as the country’s first black electrical engineer. C-C had no difficulty convincing Captain Cockburn to take him on as a technical assistant. From that close vantage point, he chronicled the negotiations for the SS Yarmouth – a vessel he considered in very poor condition – and Cockburn specifically requested his help in testing the boilers of the tired old tramp steamer. There was no place
for pathos in his reports. But though Dr Craig was a patriot, he was also black. He would not have been immune to the conundrum of black life which W. E. B. Du Bois memorably labelled as ‘double consciousness’ – one couldn’t just be an American; one was conspicuously, for ever, black and American.13 Craig well understood the burdens of being a ‘first black’ in whatever chosen field, and he would have taken no joy from observing Garvey’s inexperienced black directors being so mercilessly exploited as they tried to establish a footing in a hostile white business world.14 Though Cockburn had pronounced the Yarmouth seaworthy, it was soon apparent that it needed extensive repairs. In Hugh Mulzac’s estimation ‘her boiler crowns were in need of repair and her hull was practically worn out. She could not have been worth a penny over $25,000 when the Black Star Line acquired her for $165,000.’15

  Captain Cockburn was presented with a final bill amounting to a whopping $5,000 just to get the ship out to sea; he baulked at the extortionate cost but the repairers held the ship to ransom, threatening it with an order of attachment if the bill was not met. This was news he deferred in relaying to Garvey because as he later confessed, ‘I did not care to disturb your feelings before sailing.’

  The $5,000 trick was, Cockburn gradually gleaned, the prelude to a plot to sabotage the Yarmouth. The firemen shovelling coal into the furnace could not raise more than 65 pounds of steam, so that the ship trundled along at a mere 7 knots per hour. A watchful eye was kept for ships on the seas that the Yarmouth would not have the speed to avoid crashing into should they get too close. Some members of the crew were also proving difficult to control. Though trumpeted as having an all-black crew, the Yarmouth had trouble filling the most senior posts with able seamen, and two white men had been recruited – the chief engineer and the chief officer. These two resentful sailors now began to show a distinct lack of respect for the chain of command. In the blackest night, whilst Cockburn took a nap, the chief officer somehow managed to steer the Yarmouth onto the Cay Sal bank, sent out an SOS and gave the order to abandon ship. Cockburn woke to find the passengers issued with lifebelts and the lifeboats being swung out from the davits. Overriding his fellow officers, he had to threaten to shoot in order to restore command, and eventually managed to refloat the ship.16 The captain suspected the accident to have been deliberately engineered by the two white men and prayed daily ‘to keep my temper and patience until I can be rid of them’.

  Marcus Garvey had already been through sufficient intrigues and reversals not to discount his captain’s theory, but Cockburn’s rumblings of treachery were out of sync with his employer’s joyous telegrams of near-complete vindication – save from an expected core of residual resentment. The much-heralded launch had silenced all but the most pathological critics who were soon spreading malicious rumours; that of the fifty passengers on the Yarmouth only a handful were paying; the majority were stock-salesmen; and finally, that the ship was only ever a clever inducement for the gullible to buy even more shares.17 A scan of the passenger list casts doubt on such a cynical claim: only three of those who boarded the Yarmouth had any involvement with the Black Star Line, and the success its president was counting on was one of expansion. Garvey envisioned a future with not one or two ships but a whole fleet put into service for the benefit of the race. The news from Cuba was far more encouraging when the Yarmouth docked at Sagua, La Grande. ‘People here are just crazy about the organisation,’ Joshua Cockburn enthused. ‘The stevedore’s gang containing just a handful of men brought up two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of shares in just a twinkle.’ On a more sober note, Cockburn hinted that he planned to discharge the chief engineer and pleaded with Garvey to find him a replacement from Cardiff (home to many black seamen awaiting berths on tramp ships). If all went to plan, the Black Star Line would need to recruit another crew as well. For Garvey now promised the faithful that the company would launch its next ship by the end of February 1920.

  Marcus Garvey was in a hurry to make amends for his forebears’ narcolepsy. ‘The Negro who slept and wallowed in the mire for centuries has just begun to turn and he has now placed his hope in God and himself and he is going forward to achieve.’18 He didn’t quite say it but this was a version of that old Negro expectation from emancipation: ‘Massa day done, it’s our turn now.’ The launching of a Negro steamship was such a spectacular achievement that he had plenty of reason to crow – even former adversaries agreed. John Banton’s heartfelt and contrite apology printed in the Negro World was typical of the violent swing towards Garvey: ‘When you first launched [your] ideas, I had the misfortune of butting up with men of your own race … and criticising you to the detriment of your character, and even expressing their opinions in regards to the soundness of your mental facilities, but in the shortness of time they have confounded themselves, and, like the dog, they have returned to their own vomit.’19

  Even the frosty W. E. B. Du Bois was forced to admit his qualified admiration of the man. William Du Bois kept his distance from Garvey, and at first simply tried to ignore him, hoping that the man, and his movement, would fade away. But Garvey was impinging on African-American life in a way that was impossible to ignore, though Du Bois still refused to accept the UNIA as anything more than a foreign/largely West Indian movement. In his magazine Crisis, the editor conceded that ‘Garvey was an extraordinary leader of men … [who] with singular success [has] capitalised and made vocal the great and long-suffering grievances and spirit of protest among the West Indian peasantry’.20

  Du Bois wasn’t yet ready to surrender to the Jamaican immigrant the mantle of the leader of the black people in America. His logic and intellectual tidiness would not permit such a notion to take root, but on an emotional level he must have realised that he was losing ground to the Jamaican. Though he’d never heard Garvey the orator in full flow, he would have been aware of the endorsements from high-profile African-Americans such as Henrietta Vinton Davis and William Ferris (whose judgement couldn’t be ignored) that Garvey was the ‘real thing’. The problem for Du Bois was that although he spoke clearly and passionately in his prose, he was not, in person, an inspirational or magnetic character. ‘Meeting Du Bois was something of a personal disappointment,’ Claude McKay observed. ‘He seemed possessed of a cold, acid hauteur of spirit, which is not lessened even when he vouchsafes a smile.’21 Physical distance was also a factor. Garvey had established himself in the heart of the pulsating, vibrating, dirt and detritus of Harlem. Du Bois and the talented tenth were enshrined in fastidious offices downtown. And decry as he might the Garvey theatrics up in Harlem, up in Harlem was where, in 1920, the head Negro-in-charge needed to be.

  When Marcus Garvey and Amy Ashwood were reunited in 1918, he explained that he’d failed to contact her in the first years of his arrival in the USA partly because he wanted to make something of himself before sending for her. By most standards of excellence, he’d certainly made something of himself now. Still, the character of their relationship from the reunion in 1918 until late 1919 was awkward, businesslike and subservient to the growth of the organisation. That all changed at 11 a.m. on 14 October. Ashwood’s disregard for her own safety in preventing the assassin from further firing on Garvey had a profound effect on her former paramour. Whilst he was in the Harlem hospital, Ashwood collected up all his possessions from his furnished room and removed them to the apartment at 522 Lenox Avenue which she shared with her father. She subsequently devoted herself to nursing the wounded leader back to recovery. Soon afterwards, Garvey proposed marriage to her; the date was set for Christmas Day.22 It promised to be a hectic couple of months in both their private and professional lives, with the couple planning for an elaborate wedding at Liberty Hall, and Garvey and Cockburn negotiating for the Black Star Line’s first major contract. Ashwood invited her close friend Amy Jacques to be her maid of honour and to help with the wedding preparations. In a sense, the forthcoming marriage was UNIA business, and Ashwood believed she was grooming Jacques to take on a more substantial r
ole in the organisation. Her confidence in the other Amy was matched by Garvey who on 12 December sent a note to the New York Postmaster revoking all previous orders and henceforth arranging for Jacques to be specially authorised to sign for all registered letters delivered to him or the Black Star Line.

  The Yarmouth was now steaming between Cuba and Jamaica where excited crowds daily lined the pier at Kingston harbour anticipating her arrival. Once she docked, the Yarmouth would pick up additional passengers for the return leg of the journey back to New York. The Black Star Line expected a full complement of passengers to take advantage of its widely advertised offer: ‘We Will Take You 25% Cheaper Than You Can Go On Any Other Line’. The directors were also hoping to extend that promise to the Green River Distillery Company in securing what they imagined to be a lucrative contract to ferry $5,000,000 worth of whisky, champagne and wine from the USA by 17 January. The date was critical, for on 16 January 1920 the ‘noble experiment’ of Prohibition would come into force in America.

  Once the contract was agreed, Garvey could concentrate on fulfilling the pledge he’d made to Amy Ashwood at the start of their courtship five years earlier. In recognition of their public and private personae, two ceremonies were planned for the wedding, and for Garvey, at least, two separate dress codes. A commemorative photograph of the groom on Christmas Day shows him in a traditional morning suit with a perfectly pinched cravat, ornate cane and silk gloves in one hand and a top hat in the other; in the top right-hand corner of the photo is a graphic inset of the African continent. That morning, Amy Ashwood, in a trailing silk gown, joined him at the altar for the private Catholic church wedding. It was followed by an extraordinarily elaborate affair at the organisation’s headquarters at Liberty Hall.