Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  The purging continued in Garvey’s professional life. Despite the fanfare of the returning Yarmouth, the stock-holders’ annual report showed the company operating under great financial distress. The secretary, Smith-Green, was severely criticised for the disarray in the accounts of the Yarmouth’s expedition but the bigger culprit appeared to be its captain.47 There were so many unreliable sources that it was difficult to unravel the cause of the misfortunes that had befallen the organisation’s first ship. Conspiracy theories and other speculations swirled around the Harlem offices of the UNIA and Black Star Line. The dark excitement drove the BOI informant, Herbert Boulin, to even greater heights of melodrama, reporting to his paymasters that, on learning of the Yarmouth’s first tragic running aground, Garvey had confessed to him that he had contemplated suicide. P-138’s memoranda always erred on the side of hyperbole, especially when he strained to deliver news of UNIA conflagrations and self-inflicted injuries. A more cynical man than Garvey would have been alert to Boulin’s sycophancy and ingratiating attempts to make himself indispensable. But cynicism was not a quality that Garvey possessed in great store; for all of his worldliness, Marcus Garvey was prone to the kinds of fits of surprise that are the preserve of the optimist; and, in his isolation, he reached out and innocently confided in undercover BOI agent P-138.48

  As well as Captain Cockburn’s incompetence, ugly rumours had now reached Garvey about the captain’s graft. It was an unsavoury catalogue of corruption. Cockburn had received a secret commission from the Yarmouth’s vendors; from the Green River Distillery Company he had accepted $2,000 reward, a ‘consideration, as a present for the extra amount of energy that I put into getting the cargo off the dock’;49 he had also colluded with the ship’s repairers and pocketed a percentage of their exorbitant fees; and finally, the near-ruinous running aground of the Yarmouth on its maiden voyage was less likely due to sabotage than to the fact that the captain was drunk. On 31 July 1920, the Negro World notified UNIA members and stock-holders in the Black Star Line that both Cockburn and Smith-Green had been sacked, having failed to give satisfaction as to their ‘honest integrity’.

  Several seething directors at the earlier board meeting wanted to pursue the corrupt captain through the courts, but others were ‘against antagonising [him] as he was in a position to cause much harm and embarrassment in consequence of their delicate situation’. Put bluntly, the annual report showed incomings of $763,124.14 and outgoings of $763,124.14. Dividends would have to be deferred (indefinitely) because the Black Star Line had not made one red cent.

  11

  HE WHO PLAYS THE KING

  The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.

  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro Problem, 1903

  ‘ALL Negroes who are interested in themselves, in their race, and in the future generations,’ the Negro World trumpeted, ‘will wend their way to New York City to form part of this great convention assembled.’ The first international conference of the Negro peoples of the world, organised by Garvey to begin on 1 August – the anniversary of the slaves’ emancipation in the Caribbean – was the apotheosis of everything he stood for. After months of planning, the last nail had been hammered into the new improved Liberty Hall – expanded to three times is original size to accommodate the thousands of expected delegates. Though dark skies rimmed Manhattan, the thunder came from within the hall. Marcus Garvey stretched forth his arms and spoke: ‘For over three hundred years we who are denizens of this Western Hemisphere have been held in slavery. For that period of time we have been separated from our brothers and sisters in the great continent of Africa, but this Sunday morning brings … Negroes from every country together.’ His greeting was the prelude to a great opening procession to be staged the next day.1

  At precisely 2 o’clock, the parade set off from the UNIA offices on 135th Street. All along 7th Avenue, crowds jostled for the best view of the spectacular procession weaving through Harlem. Four mounted policemen led the way. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, resplendent in his majestic robes and plumed bicornate helmet, followed in an open-topped sedan with the Honourable Gabriel Johnson, Mayor of the Liberian capital, Monrovia. The sun caught the glint of brass of the UNIA marching bands; 100-strong choirs accompanied them. And then the Black Cross nurses in their stiff white tunics and flowing caps; sabres clanked on the thighs of uniformed legions. Next came the UNIA divisions, identified by their state or country banners; still others bore inscriptions such as: ‘Down With Lynching’; ‘The Negro Has No Fear’; ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture Was an Abler Soldier than Napoleon’; and ‘Garvey, the Man of the Day’. A great roar went up with the sighting of the all-black crew of the Yarmouth (minus its captain) in their gold-braided jackets; and about 500 automobiles brought up the rear. It was an amazing display that jolted New Yorkers out of their complacency, seasoned as they were to all of the hullabaloo of grand parades and the climax of political elections. Hugh Mulzac, whom Garvey had appointed master of the SS Phyllis Wheatley (even though it had not yet been acquired), marvelled at the crowds: ‘As far as I am aware it was the greatest demonstration of coloured solidarity in American history, before or since.’

  In part, Garvey had conceived of the event as a version of the coronations so beloved of the British and her sons and daughters of empire, with all the stage props of a royal court. Though this would be no formal inauguration of a hereditary succession, the UNIA-sponsored international convention would culminate in the crowning of a provisional president of Africa. His Majesty would be elected by the delegates, and would be charged with governing an as yet undelin-eated African Empire constituting the 400 million Negroes of the world. The system of honours that Garvey proposed and the conferring of titles on an imagined African government-in-exile was the one aspect of the convention that would receive the most unflattering rebukes from Garvey’s critics. He thought his proposal no more absurd than Eamon de Valera’s appointment that year as the provisional president of Ireland.

  The UNIA leader should have been alert to the fun that news papers would make of his assumption, given that, as he later noted, when English journalists printed de Valera’s new title alongside his name they enclosed it ‘in inverted commas, to try to show those who were his enemies that his claim to that title was ridiculous’.2

  The possibility of a provisional president of Africa seemed a lot further away in 1920. There was the small matter that there were only two independent states in Africa (Liberia and Ethiopia), and the inconvenient fact that European colonial powers had not shown any signs of tiring of their possessions. The lack of consultation with the people and (perhaps more importantly) the chiefs and local rulers on the African continent was also problematic. Finally, Garvey would have to reckon with prominent African politicians, such as Blaise Diagne, whose elevation to the French Chamber of Deputies was seen by the urban African elite in Senegal as a triumph of accommodation. Garvey, though, was not so naive as to assume their endorsement but he recognised the validation that the inclusion of indigenous Africans would give the movement. On the podium beside him was George O. Marke, the official representative of the Freetown division of the UNIA in Sierra Leone; next to Marke was the man who would be elected Potentate Leader of the Negro Peoples of the World, otherwise known as Gabriel Johnson. Described by the stenographer of the convention as ‘haughty and aristocratic’, Johnson had every reason to be pleased with himself; he was a member of one of the powerful Americo-Liberian families and ruling elite in Liberia. His father, Hilary Johnson, had been elected president of Liberia in 1884; the latest president, C. D. King, was married to his niece; his brother was the attorney general; for his part, Gabriel Johnson had been a brigadier general in the army and was the current Mayor of Monrovia. Once the convention was over, Johnson would, presumably, put away the gowns of the potentate and return to Liberia in hi
s more humble capacity as mayor of the capital. As with many of Garvey’s earlier promotions the idea of African titles, unrolled at the convention, was meant more in gesture, albeit a grand gesture intended to inspire and unify the Negro world.

  The possibility for black unity had been extended to all potential friends and established enemies alike. Aside from the election of the continent’s provisional president and potentate, a number of other equally grand-sounding appointments would be made. In the spirit of solidarity and democracy, Marcus Garvey had written to enemy headquarters at the NAACP, specifically to W. E. B. Du Bois to inform him that, at the convention, the leader of the American Negro people would be elected by popular vote. Du Bois was an obvious candidate, and Garvey wondered whether he would be ‘good enough to allow us to place your name in nomination for the post’. The suggestion had caused the noble Du Bois nostrils to flare. ‘I beg to say that I thank you for the suggestion,’ Du Bois wrote back tersely, ‘but under no circumstances can I allow my name to be presented.’3

  Since the beginning of the century, Du Bois had carefully plotted a course towards a Pan-African goal. Through cunning and diplomacy he’d overcome the enormous resistance of the post-war powers and engineered the African conference in Paris. Du Bois hoped to build on that success and host another conference in 1921. Even at this early stage there were rumblings of opposition from the Europeans and then, as Du Bois later reflected, ‘there came, too, a second difficulty which had elements of comedy and curious social frustration, but nevertheless was real and in a sense tragic. Marcus Garvey walked into the scene.’ As he saw it, William Du Bois now had to contend with a noisy and insouciant Marcus Garvey making absurd claims to an African empire. The clumsiness and weakness of its conception ‘lay in its intemperate propaganda, and the natural fear which it threw into the colonial powers’.4 On a purely aesthetic level, the NAACP leader believed Garvey’s convention to be something of a circus; also that it undermined his carefully orchestrated attempts to uncouple the negative imagery of the black man widely promulgated in the mainstream culture. The Brahmin in Du Bois was especially sensitive to vulgarity. Depictions of black life which played into the hands of white-held stereotypes particularly irked. Years later, Du Bois would famously comment on reading Claude McKay’s highly peppered tale of fecund Negro life, Home to Harlem, that it left him feeling as though he needed to take a bath. As to Garvey’s ‘pranc[ing] down Broadway in a green shirt’ it was equally distasteful and he would have no part of it.5

  The thousands who lined the route of the parade were, however, enthralled. Harlem hadn’t seen such sights since the ticker-tape celebrations that marked the return of the Harlem Hell Fighters. Now that famous regiment’s band struck out together with the bands of the UNIA and the Black Star Line, swinging along Lenox Avenue, breaking out from military marches and wowing the crowds with popular jazz scores and finishing with ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ as they marched into the great hall of Madison Square Garden.

  An estimated 25,000 Negro participants filed into the stadium. A podium, specially constructed to accommodate more than 200 dignitaries, towered above the masses. It was festooned with flowers and ringed by the Star-Spangled Banner, intertwined with the red, black and green flags of the UNIA. At 8.45 p.m. the president-general of the UNIA, the honourable Marcus Garvey, led the high officials and distinguished guests towards the speakers’ stand; the audience rose en masse and a great wall of applause reverberated round the building. Gazing down magnanimously from the platform the UNIA leader saw himself reflected in all the glory of the occasion.

  An intense but gentle-seeming man, with eyebrows forked in a semi-permanent frown, was the first to speak. The Reverend George Alexander McGuire (the first black man to be appointed an archdeacon of the Protestant Episcopal Church), set a tone of dignified gravitas in his opening invocation. Finally, Garvey stood. He removed a scented handkerchief from his breast pocket, cupped it over his nose and inhaled (a ritual he now performed before major speeches). At length he hushed the audience. ‘I have in my hand two telegrams,’ he bellowed. The first from Louis Michael, a prominent Zionist in California, congratulated the movement and drew parallels with the Zionist cause. ‘I join heartily and unflinchingly in your historical movement for the reclamation of Africa,’ Michael wrote. ‘There is no justice and no peace in this world until the Jew and the Negro both control side by side Palestine and Africa.’ Pushing on through the rising applause, Garvey proceeded to read out the other telegram that he had sent to the Irish Republican leader, Eamon de Valera: ‘We believe Ireland should be free even as Africa shall be free for the Negroes of the world.’ The crowd roared its approval – Garvey had been saying much the same with uninterrupted vigour for the last year, but in August 1920 it echoed with even greater resonance.

  ‘We are assembled here tonight as the descendants of a suffering people and we are determined to suffer no longer,’ Garvey trembled. His powerful voice called out and the people responded with ‘amen’s and ‘praise the Lord’s. ‘Wheresoever I go, whether it is England, France or Germany, I am told, “This is a white man’s country.” Wheresoever I travel throughout the United States of America, I am made to understand that I am a “nigger”. If the Englishman claims England as his native habitat, and the Frenchman claims France, the time has come for 400 million Negroes to claim Africa as their native land.’ And on now through the great thunderclap of tears, screams and applause, Garvey asked, ‘If you believe that the Negro should have a place in the sun; if you believe that Africa should be one vast empire, controlled by the Negro, then arise.’ The gigantic assembly rose and sang the National Anthem of the UNIA. They had no trouble singing in unison; after all the crowd was mostly made up of members of UNIA branches that had been established throughout the USA, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. Marcus Garvey’s determination to convey the impression of a global conference meant that occasionally long-term residents of New York found themselves corralled into representative roles other than their Harlem addresses would suggest. Hubert Harrison recorded the ‘opening fanfaronade’ in his diary and noted wryly that ‘Garvey insisted on recognising me when I rose to speak as ‘the gentleman from the Virgin Islands’ – which sent no delegates, although Virgin Islanders among the Liberty Hall entourage had brought a banner and marched behind it in the parade.’6 For the most part though, there was no reason for exaggeration or marshalling of the facts: official estimates were of a crowd of up to 25,000 inside the Garden.

  Though the name ‘Marcus Garvey’ had not yet penetrated the African continent in any significant way, by the conference’s end, largely through its worldwide newspaper coverage (including the Negro World), the UNIA’s stock would begin to rise throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Such that in less than a year, Belgian officials would be expressing disquiet about unrest among American Negroes in Belgian Congo and would launch an investigation to ‘discover how the Negro World found its way into our colony and possibly to look for the troublemaking agents whose influence might spread from this country throughout Africa’.7

  Dotted around the enormous auditorium of Madison Square Garden, in ones and twos, a small number of sceptics remained firmly planted in their seats as Garvey towered above them on the podium. Despite his disavowal of the movement, W. E. B. Du Bois is said to have snuck in at the back. The Negro World’s new editor, William Ferris, claimed to have spotted the familiar noble head of the patrician leader amongst the assembled crowds.8 His curiosity had been sufficiently aroused to include a questionnaire along with his rejection of Garvey’s recent offer. The full name of the organisation, number of members, kinds of property held, and other seemingly candid questions were requested simply so that readers might glean something of Garvey’s life and organisation from an article Du Bois intended to write in the Crisis. Garvey had, quite rightly, considered the request anything but guileless and had refrained from answering.

  Du Bois had kept his distance and arrived at a policy
of wilful ignorance. He now set himself the task of discovering all there was to know about the Garvey Movement. Infiltration was, of course, out of the question. Instead he’d solicited details (with the offer to pay) from a range of organisations including the US Shipping board, Lloyd’s Register and educated Jamaican correspondents to help him get a fix on his formidable adversary. The material they provided might, in the short term, seem to complicate the puzzle of Marcus Garvey but, in any case, inside information was no guarantee of greater comprehension. Two BOI agents mingled with the adoring masses. Both Agents 800 and P-138 remained bewildered by Garvey’s success. Another agent, WW, who’d earlier claimed to be able to discern a West Indian from an African-American just from their features, now wasn’t so sure in his conviction of it being a largely Caribbean organisation. And bizarrely, ‘So far as I can see,’ wrote P-138, ‘the movement has ceased to be simply a nationalistic movement but among the followers it is like a religion.’9 As far as one delegate, Reverend Brooks, was concerned there were but two great things in his life: two Gs. There was God and following close behind there was Garvey.10 This adoration had a particularly Caribbean essence; the yearning for black success. Growing up in Trinidad a generation later, the writer V. S. Naipaul observed how the first black leaders answered a need that almost seemed visceral. ‘In colonial days in the British West Indies the black people had no heroes,’ wrote Naipaul, ‘for the early leaders who were their very own, West Indian blacks had more than adulation. They wished their leaders (who had started as poor as everybody else) to be rich (by whatever means) and powerful and glorious … The leader lived (or lived it up) on behalf of his people; and the people lived through their leader.’11 The BOI agents witnessed how Garvey had become a vessel for the emotional needs of the people, but they didn’t understand what was going on. The attraction of Marcus Garvey seemed beyond reason.