by Colin Grant
Closer scrutiny of the president-general’s personal life yielded more confident interpretations. Mrs Garvey was nowhere to be seen. ‘On leaving the hall,’ P-138 reported, ‘Mr Garvey was accompanied by his girl [Amy Jacques], known as his secretary, without whom he never walks.’ Other agents went further in their conjecture, reporting rumours of improper relations between Garvey and his secretary. Allegedly on some trips made from Philadelphia to New York, they’d both travelled in a Pullman sleeper. The source of the rumours was the disgraced former official of the Black Star Line, Edward Smith-Green, whose own confidential informant was Amy Ashwood.12 But none of the agents questioned the motives of a man smarting from the humiliation of his recent dismissal. Rather, they licked their lips over the details that would surely emerge from a more thorough investigation. If true, in travelling across state borders with a woman (who was not his wife), Marcus Garvey might well have violated the Mann White-Slave Traffic Act. That legislation was originally designed to impede prostitution; to prosecute men who transported women and girls across state lines for immoral purposes. It had been on the statute books for ten years and rarely enforced except in a few celebrity cases; the irreverent black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, had been the first to be prosecuted for sending his future wife, Belle Schreiber (then a prostitute), a railroad ticket from Pittsburgh to Chicago. Though the allegation against Garvey was little more than spurious hearsay, over the next few months BOI agents were encouraged to elicit whatever information they could to justify a prosecution.
August proved a fallow period for the BOI snoops. Marcus Garvey hardly ventured outside Harlem. When he wasn’t presiding over the conference, the UNIA leader was answering a stream of journalistic bids for interviews. With the spectacular parade and gathering in Madison Square Garden, the mainstream press had woken up to Garvey’s rich potential for dramatic copy – much of it gently mocking. The Literary Digest’s headline on 4 September, ‘The Purple-robed Champion of “Africa for Africans”’, was fairly typical. Ironically, the sharpest criticism came from within his own camp from the pen of the Negro World’s literary editor, Hubert Harrison. The Black Socrates who had given Garvey his entrée to the masses back in 1917 had stood to one side and watched the movement take-off from the runway he had inadvertently provided. Claude McKay was amongst those artists and intellectuals who enjoyed Hubert Harrison’s company. He wrote that when Harrison laughed ‘he exploded in his large sugary black African way, which sounded like the rustling of dry bamboo leaves agitated by the wind.’13 Hubert Harrison bumped into his former protégé just before Garvey’s wedding in December: ‘After a hearty handshake, [he] told me that he had been looking for me for several weeks … he made me the offer of the principalship of the new college which he had projected as one of the main institutions of the UNIA. His office was a curious shambles. The work of the UNIA, of the Black Star Line and of the newspaper, were all jumbled together in one room. We went out onto the landing. There it turned out he wanted to associate me with Professor Ferris in editing the paper and later to assume headship of the college when it was organised.’14Harrison had gone to work on the paper and stripped it of ‘all the wasteful glory’. He carefully ‘tethered the literary effusions in which Ferris and his friends were prolific’, and cut right back on the endless editorials. There was not much that could be done with the chief’s lugubrious weekly missives which went in unchallenged. Nonetheless, everyone was pleased with the results, including the readers whose numbers swelled to 50,000 per week. Harrison was sufficiently content to add his initials to his contributions. His regular income of $30 per week was enough to assuage his wife’s ‘termagant temper’. After nine months of Harrison’s diligent and effective stewardship, old resentments were beginning to re-emerge as Harrison believed himself drowning in the ‘insane collection of bombastic rantings … delivered by pin-headed preachers and other ignorant howlers [in Liberty Hall]’. By the opening of the convention in August Harrison had become a hostile witness to the goings-on in Garvey’s organisation. ‘The man has a perfect mania for flamboyant publicity. And this, I think, will wind a rope around his neck later.’15 Such was his assessment but, luckily for Garvey, the editor of the Negro World considered it prudent, at this time, to confine his views to his diary.
As the convention unfolded over the month, the playwright Eugene O’Neill was putting the finishing touches to Emperor Jones – billed as a drama depicting the rise of a black man ‘from stowaway to Emperor in two years’. The protagonist, Brutus Jones, is a successful faker lording it over a group of his people in the style of an emperor. He is only able to do so because his people are ‘a mass of Negroes in a primitive state of intellect’. Harrison viewed the play as a fine picture of the Garvey Movement and believed it held the ashes of a prophecy. Brutus Jones is ‘an inflated mountebank with a ballast of shrewd’. If Harrison was thinking more of Garvey when he penned those words, it was a long way from their optimistic reunion nine months before.
Harrison’s previous magnanimity towards Garvey seems to have deserted him at this point – at least in private. Like so many talented people who flirted with the movement, what ultimately seemed to stick in his craw was the fact that the fates had bequeathed this wonderful opportunity and adoration to Garvey when there were others, less colourful but perhaps more deserving of the honours – such as Hubert Henry Harrison.
Such sentiments, though veiled, seemed to be at the back of the Crusader magazine’s approach to the convention. The Crusader’s incendiary journalism was the brainchild of the talented journalist (and by 1919, committed Marxist) Cyril Valentine Briggs. He’d sounded the chords of his leftward leaning earlier that year when the magazine posted an advert announcing the formation of a Communistic semi-secret society. There were no dues or fees to enlist in the African Blood Brotherhood, but there was one strict requirement: ‘Those only need apply who are willing to go to the limit.’ The satisfaction of taking a stance of uncompromising militancy paled when the Brotherhood proved too successful in its quest for exclusivity: too few candidates, it seemed, had sufficient daring to volunteer. From its inception in 1918, the Crusader had made overtures towards the UNIA. First published by the Hamitic League of the World, an outfit with a pristine racial orientation, the Crusader was in sympathy with the broad aims of the Garvey Movement and admiring of its popularity.
Cyril Briggs also envied Garvey’s commanding voice. But for his stutter, Briggs might have made a great orator; he was passionate in his commitment to the race, clear-eyed, persuasive and principled (he’d resigned from a well-paid post on the New York Amsterdam News when his anti-establishment editorials were censored by the proprietor). Subtle subversion was his literary forte. He was born in the British Leeward Island of Nevis, in the same year as Garvey, yet he adopted a headmasterly approach to the UNIA leader, upbraiding him for occasionally going awry and squandering his talent. A few blemishes on his report card but otherwise Garvey showed great promise, especially with his excitedly anticipated all-Negro Harlem conference. A Crusader article which previewed that event under the caption ‘A Paramount Chief for the Negro Race’ so pleased Garvey with its ‘most intelligent explan ation of the real purpose of our Convention’, that he commended it to readers of the Negro World. It appeared to Briggs though that Marcus Garvey had paid sole attention to the headline, for a closer reading of the text revealed its author’s anxiety over the conference’s presumption in electing high officials for a future African empire, to be drawn inevitably from the ranks of the UNIA. As a friend, the Crusader gently chastised Garvey for his oversight; he surely recognised the wisdom, if not necessity, of ‘a public invitation extended to all Negro bodies’? That was the Crusader’s view in April. By July (on the eve of the conference) the magazine was raising its voice. Whilst it praised the UNIA leader for heeding its advice and at last extending an ‘open invitation’, its editor was absolutely dismayed by the suggestion that only UNIA delegates would be allowed to vote for
the candidate who ‘will occupy the place of world leader of all Negroes’. Briggs and the Crusader were under no illusions as to who was earmarked for the role. They feared that the rapture of his audience was beginning to intoxicate the UNIA leader. ‘Our advice is to take the race and his associates more into his confidence as befits a democratic era. His mind had been imperialistic and arbitrary in the past.’16 Even if Marcus Garvey had been inclined to listen, he would have struggled to hear that whisper urging humility amidst the din of drum rolls and hosannas that swelled around him in the headlong march towards Madison Square Garden. Disillusioned, the Crusader concluded that ‘thus does a noble concept suffer from selfishness and smallness of mind’, thereby spoiling what should be ‘the greatest event in modern Negro history’. Hubert Harrison put it more tersely when he wrote towards the conclusion of the convention, ‘Thus ends the most colossal joke in Negrodom, engineered and staged by its chief mountebank.’17
British readers were apprised of the scale of Garvey’s ambitions for the first time in 1920 when the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent wrote of the goings-on at Madison Square Garden. Contrary to Du Bois’s estimate of colonial wrath, the Telegraph’s man was more amused than alarmed by what he found. The smirking newshound lampooned the ‘modest aims’ of the convention that could only be satiated ‘if all the white nations with colonial possessions in Africa [would] kindly clear out of the continent’. The logic which now said the time was ripe for Ethiopia for the Ethiopians was preposterous because it was undeniably the case that ‘the Negro race, with its many amiable qualities and fine physique, has never proved capable of self-dependence and self-government, except in the primitive tribal form’. The Telegraph also revelled in pointing out to its readers what it saw as Garvey’s laughable revisionism of the Negro’s place in civilisation: ‘History has never been able to find a time,’ the paper loftily proclaimed, ‘when the Negroid races were the real masters of Africa, unless it was in the Palaeolithic age’.
The Daily Telegraph’s correspondent didn’t envisage a return to the Palaeolithic age, though without Europe’s tutelage and protective civilisation the Negro race would succumb to the most base and aggressive stocks of the Bantu and Fulani, and go back to the bush.18
The benefits of the British civilising influence were keenly felt in the bosom of Samuel Duncan. Garvey’s former ally had been bitterly brooding in his impoverished camp (the West Indian Protective Society of Africa) whilst the ranks of the Garvey Movement swelled. Duncan was not generally disposed towards generosity. He did not consider Garvey harmless, nor was he inclined to treat the convention in the light of a joke. Earlier in the year, Duncan had worked himself up into such a frenzy that he’d fired off a letter to the British Secretary of State for the Colonies. In it he warned Earl Curzon of Kedleston and His Majesty of the dangerous propaganda peddled by the UNIA which if ‘not effectively checked by proper official action … will stealthily work among the natives and stir up strife and discontent among them’. In particular, Duncan hinted that a recent violent strike in Trinidad among the Workingmen’s Association and the subsequent disruption of colonial rule on the island could be traced back to UNIA involvement. Duncan’s message, stated plainly, was that Garvey’s ideas were souring the good work of ‘those of us who are endeavouring by every lawful and legitimate means to bring the two races together’. He ended his letter with a call for the governors on the British-ruled islands to ‘take energetic action to suppress this pernicious foreign agitation’.19
When news of Duncan’s treachery was leaked to Garvey, he reacted furiously and immediately sent out circulars to a number of Caribbean governors designed to limit the damage of a former friend whose poisonous pen was wielded through ‘jealousy of [my] success’. It’s unlikely that Duncan’s puerile missive achieved much more than antagonising Garvey. Embassy officials who sat in on some of the meetings of Duncan’s organisation took the view that he himself ‘appears to be something of an agitator’ and that as far as his complaints went ‘it is a case of the pot and kettle as between the two Societies’.20 In any event, Duncan was advocating a policy that the British had already largely enforced. A report from the British Cabinet Office on 10 November cited the disturbing propaganda of the Negro World and its editor who had proclaimed that ‘400 million black men are beginning to sharpen their swords for the war of the races’.21 Copies of the Negro World had already been seized in British Guiana and Honduras. In Jamaica, the Postmaster had instructed that copies be opened and retained; legislation had been tabled in the Windward Islands for executive powers to exclude the weekly paper; the St Vincent Government Gazette reported (in October 1919) that any person who knowingly brought into the colony any copy of the Negro World could, on conviction, serve a prison term (possibly with hard labour) of six months’22; both Antigua and Dominica had recently passed decrees against seditious publications like the Negro World; and Trinidad was soon to pass amendments that would prohibit its importation.
Negro World circulation was also being disrupted in Panama and Costa Rica, where agents for the paper complained 5,000 copies were seized on orders from the Governor, and, insultingly, were then being sold on to stall owners for use as wrapping paper at 40 cents per pound. Far more sinister than official harassment by Governors in Central America and the British censors’ response was the recommendation by one of the BOI infiltrators that the agency compile a list of all the agents and subscribers to the Negro World. Agent 800, who was now working in reception at UNIA headquarters, was pleased to be able to post the paper’s mailing list to his superior: ‘Most of these people are more or less radical and I thought it would be best to have their names and addresses in case anything may happen in their towns or cities.’
As yet there were no moves by the state against Garvey. The BOI’s J. Edgar Hoover, his appetite whetted by suggestions of violation of the Mann White Slave Act, merely advised that agents continue their investigations ‘but that no definite action should be taken towards the prosecution of Garvey at this time until all evidence is collected’.23
A more immediate threat came from the courts. Garvey’s trial for criminal libel against the District Attorney, Kilroe, and the two former UNIA colleagues, Warner and Grey, whom he’d libelled as crooks, was heard in the middle of the UNIA convention. P-138 warned his handlers that thousands of Garvey’s followers would descend on the court-house and were sure ‘to start trouble so as to make Garvey a martyr’, and that he had heard many alarming threats from the crowd to kill the traitors Warner and Grey. Tempers were running high but on the day, a public apology and the offer of a printed retraction proved acceptable to Kilroe and the court case was concluded. A subsequent civil suit from Warner was settled out of court for a modest $200. Garvey’s contrition was not interpreted by his supporters as a defeat, rather the opposite. ‘His followers were very jubilant and termed it a victory over the District Attorney and the law,’ reported the agent, and conversely Garvey was now ‘held in higher esteem than ever before’. Garvey wisely did not crow over the decision. The convention had stalled in his absence, showing up the fact that no important decisions could be made without guidance from its spiritual leader. Garvey possessed the supreme confidence and certainty that is the preserve of genius; and it was one of his many paradoxes that whilst he inspired those around him with ‘new thoughts’, his domination of the organisation robbed even the most able colleagues of initiative.
In the first week of the convention, fifteen minutes were given over for individual delegates to air the particular complaints of their representative group. By the end of the week, it was hoped that ‘every Negro [would] understand the universal situation of the race’. At the back of that desire was the question of representation and the presumption that the delegates represented anybody (especially in Africa) other than themselves. Garvey would argue that his convention with 25,000 attending was far more representative than the 57 delegates of African descent who would be invited to Du Bois’s Pan-Afr
ican Congress in European capitals the following year. The need for a collective African voice (at home and abroad) was beyond dispute. Only then might they raise their voices in such a powerful and disturbing way that they would be heard by the colonial masters of Africa and the Caribbean, and their equivalents in Washington. The founder of the Society of Peoples of African Origin, J. Eldred Taylor, recognised as much when, in the pages of the West Africa Mail and Trade Gazette, he reflected tartly on the failure of African leadership: ‘What have we done to merit recognition? … Here and there the voice of a leader has sounded in South Africa, in the West Indies, in West Africa, but we ought to follow the example of our people in America (not Garvey’s group) who have for years been toiling and agitating … to secure the redress of grievances and the adjustments of wrongs.’24
On the question of the value of the UNIA many delegates at the August Convention would have parted company with Taylor but there were also conflicting accounts of the benefits of belonging to the UNIA. In Guatemala, a UNIA-sponsored strike amongst United Fruit Company workers had led to the company capitulating to their demands to a 100 per cent increase on their $1.50 per day wages. However, in Panama, striking labourers on the canal had been greeted by soldiers with fixed bayonets and ousted from their homes, and were now stuck. ‘You cannot get a boat to leave there,’ complained the delegate. ‘If you go to the United Fruit Company and ask for passage, they say, “No, we have no passage for you; wait for the Black Star Line.”’25 The Yarmouth had indeed come to the rescue on that occasion. The delegate’s tale had also served to emphasise the dependency of a people, especially an island people, who might have to wait for months for one of the major shipping companies to dock at local ports. Furthermore, passage on the steamships was so expensive that it acted as an impediment to travel, even between islands that were only tens of miles away.