by Colin Grant
The first days of the conference confirmed how such constraints had isolated black people from each other, such that there was little commonality of feeling, and debunked the myth, for example, that Caribbean people were a homogenous group: the man from Kingston in Jamaica knew about as much of conditions in St George’s, Grenada as did the migrant from Memphis, Tennessee. The UNIA forum would effect a change in their relations; delegates would come to recognise themselves in one another. And it was from the soundings of their collective grievances that Garvey would begin to frame a Declaration of Rights for the Negro people of the world. Conceived as a bill of inalienable rights, modelled on the United States constitution, it would put right the wrongs of 300 years – all approved and signed off in less than a month.
All through August urgent discussions swirled around Liberty Hall, throughout the day and long into the night. In between the sessions, the UNIA band struck up with mood-mellowing numbers that offered some relief from the intense debates. Garvey allowed himself little time to pursue interests outside the event, other than perhaps reading in the specially upholstered chair that grateful members had presented to him. ‘He had no recreation, as it was dangerous to go to theatres,’ Amy Jacques recalled. There were numerous rumours of what seemed like credible threats to abduct Garvey. The theatre was ruled out of bounds, in any event, for the UNIA leader because of the kind of shows that were on offer in Harlem. As pointed out by Hubert Harrison, the Negro World’s chief critic, even at the Lafayette theatre the sensitive punter would struggle to find a show that ‘pleases without dirt and tickles, without the usual contemptible “niggerisms” which so many of our actors insistently obtrude even into a Broadway show’.261921, though, marked a turning point in the history of black theatre in New York with the opening of a novelty revue show, Shuffle Along. Not only did that show make a star of the singing and dancing comedienne, Florence Mills; but Shuffle Along boasted a cast that included the then unknown performers Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson. It heralded a great outpouring of black artistic talent that came to be labelled the Harlem Renaissance. Black performers, writers and visual artists headed for Harlem, and white cultural tourists followed hard on their tails – not just in search of illicit Prohibition-busting entertainment. Now, as well as the unedifying but good-time swinging hi-de-ho cabarets, audiences might savour the energy, exuberance and unrivalled talent of performers such as Florence Mills, Bessie Smith and Ethel Walters who teetered on the edge of being risqué but were never vulgar; and theatres, too, opened their doors to a crop of dramatists, singers, songwriters and composers who would eventually count Amy Ashwood amongst their number. In the years after her expulsion from the UNIA, as well as taking an active role in Pan-African movements, Amy Ashwood transformed herself into a lyricist and musical director of shows like Brown Sugar and Hey Hey, produced, at the Lafayette theatre, in collaboration with her business partner and chaperone, the Calypsonian musician, Sam Manning.
Even though there was scant possibility of bumping into Amy Ashwood at this stage of her musical career, Marcus Garvey absented himself from public performances other than his own. One relaxing hobby that he enjoyed with Amy Jacques was the amateur collector’s search for fine pottery. His idea of relaxation was for him and his secretary (accompanied by his secret security shadows) to wander round antique shops and flea markets purchasing old ceramics. ‘When he brought them home,’ Jacques wrote admiringly, ‘he would spend time and patience placing them in the right setting, colour scheme and the most effective lighting … He enjoyed sitting in an easy chair and contemplating the beauty of the setting he had created, or the exquisite workmanship of a Satsuma piece from Japan, a Delft vase from Holland, or the delicacy of an eggshell goblet.’27 Garvey started to build up a collection of antique vases and other objets d’art that gradually took over his home on 129th Street. A New York Herald reporter noted hundreds of vases ‘in his luxuriously furnished apartment. Large palm plants were all about the room, which was virtually filled to over-flowing by vases and bric-a-brac of every possible description and period design.’28
The journalist from the Herald may have intended to mock Garvey’s ‘court’ but the UNIA leader was quietly thrilled by the portrayal. Starting from a standpoint of assumed inferiority, Marcus Garvey had promised (in the build-up to the convention) that the events of August would reveal to the world the true face of the race’s leaders – the ‘big Negroes’, who would be honoured for their services to the race. Du Bois might recoil at the idea of a black leader prancing down main street in a gauche outfit, but Garvey would argue that Du Bois was the kind of ‘lost’ figure whose sense of worth was only given validity once it was bestowed by the white man. In 1919 Du Bois shared with readers of Crisis a Negro triumph in Paris. ‘My eyes have seen and they were filled with tears. The mighty audience filled the Trocadero, and in the centre of the stage stood a black man, lithe, tall and straight; on his breast were orders (crimson badge of the Legion) … A general of France stepped forward, touched him on either shoulder with his naked sword and said, “I nominate you Bkhone Diop, chevalier of the Legion of Honour.” The great audience arose and roared.’ So Du Bois could write frothily with moist eyes about the honouring of a black soldier by the French, but Garvey, embracing similar ideas of dignity, honour and recognition was somehow distasteful. Marcus Garvey saw himself as a model for a whole group of despised people who aspired to a greater idea of themselves; dressed in his Victorian military regalia he was the embodiment of that idea. His supporters luxuriated in his success and took vicarious pleasure in it. Garvey’s transformation, on another level, was a Negro version of the American Dream that Ralph Ellison was to capture in Invisible Man: ‘You could actually make yourself anew … All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.’ Garvey made things possible and the people responded in kind. There was no tradition in their culture that black people could return to, no chevaliers of the Legion of Honour, no Victoria Crosses. Garvey was working in the dark and his imagination led him to established models; he borrowed from royal Anglo-Saxon pageantry, from the Prince Hall freemasons and from Caribbean carnival, and he fashioned something new. The newspapers might scoff at their efforts as a risible circus show or pathetic imitation but amid all the pomp and ceremony the convention was underpinned by serious intent. As far as Garvey and his delegates were concerned, they were participating in a parliament of Negroes.
If the UNIA president was guilty of making too much of their equal status, defining their worth by a white man’s yardstick, then this was largely explained by the great weight of negativity saddled to the black man. Even as late as 1920, mainstream American publishers such as William Randolph Hearst could make reference to black people as the missing evolutionary link between man and ape without fear of censure. As the conference entered its second week and the framers of the Declaration of Rights sharpened their thoughts for the task ahead, Marcus Garvey couldn’t resist taking a swipe at the dilettante Social Darwinists in the press. ‘The newspapers have been speculating. Hearst a few days ago told us that [the pugilist] Jack Johnson, being a Negro, was only a few degrees removed from the gorilla … [But] apes never wrote books. Apes never wrote a bill of rights.’
But who should be the authors of the Declaration of Rights and what of the wording? The wrangling over the terms began straight away. The committee comprised a majority of UNIA delegates and a handful of independent associates including the radical young editor of the Messenger, A. Philip Randolph, and the ‘Black Socrates’, Hubert Harrison. Since his appointment as associate editor, Hubert Harrison had been the writer most responsible for injecting pith and pungent prose into the columns of the Negro World. He now attempted the same at the convention: to breathe fire into the resolutions and to stiffen the backbone of the Bill of Rights, or as agent P-138 put it, ‘Harrison insisted that the majority of the bills were not strong and outspoken enough; the white man must be denounced in t
he strongest language in the Bill of Rights. On his suggestion, a number of them were sent back to the framers (he offering his help), to put the necessary “kick” in them.’ Hubert Harrison’s militant position was the same as the one he’d been advocating for years, that ‘we cannot abdicate our right to shape more radical policies for ourselves’.29 Hubert Harrison may have provided much of the intellectual rigour at the heart of the conference but he was all too aware of the limits of his influence over Garvey. Harrison wrote publicly with fiery optimism, but, in his diaries, he chafed at his own impotence and straitened circumstances. He had made a necessary compromise in accepting the $30 weekly salary for the editorship of the Negro World. The movement gained much kudos from its association with a man of such gravitas. But ultimately Garvey treated Harrison as a trophy – to be displayed rather than deployed.
‘Today, most Negroes in and out of the UNIA … assume that the men of abilities like Ferris and myself who are with Mr Garvey, are, somehow, permitted to lend the aid of their knowledge and abilities to the work in hand,’ he sighed, ‘but it isn’t so at all.’30 The Negro World lauded Harrison as ‘the most scholarly and learned member of the convention’ but as even the BOI informant could see, despite all Garvey’s assertions that his will was sublimated to the common purpose of this parliament of Negroes, it was ‘Garvey [who] still rule[d] with an iron hand’. By way of example, agent P-138 cited the angry discussions around resolution 47. ‘No Negro shall engage himself in battle for an alien race,’ the bill declared, ‘without first obtaining the consent of the leader of the Negro people of the world, except in a matter of self defence.’ Several nervous delegates immediately saw the danger in what was being proposed and opposed it on the grounds that if implemented, its adherents might stand accused of breaking the law. The opponents, led by Reverend McGuire, wanted the wording softened so that instead of ‘refusing’ Negroes might ‘protest’ conscription. When reason did not prevail the arguments turned personal. Delegates wanted to know whether Garvey would take a moral stance in any future military conflict, and suffer himself to be jailed just as the Socialist leader, Eugene Debs, had been during the Great War. Debs was still serving a ten-year sentence in the Atlanta Penitentiary for interfering with the draft. Following America’s entry into the Great War, he had told a crowd at Canton, Ohio, ‘You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder’ – words which could so easily have come from the pen of Marcus Garvey. But the UNIA leader sidestepped the question, and merely reiterated that the Negro’s future allegiance was to himself; the time had long passed when the Negro would be prepared to die for the white man. The resolution was adopted, with thirty-six voting in favour and twenty-four against. The final count highlighted the extent to which Garvey had blurred the distinction between delegates and attendees – for propaganda purposes. Though thousands attended the convention, the majority were, of necessity, excluded from the final debates and voting. Eventually, the committee of just over one hundred delegates would actually decide on the Bill of Rights and the subsequent election of officials.31
In all, fifty-four resolutions were passed, and the Declaration of Rights, when it came to be written included:
‘We deprecate the use of the term “nigger” as applied to Negroes and demand that word “Negro” will be written with a capital “N”.’
‘We declare the League of Nations null and void as far as the Negro is concerned, in that it seeks to deprive Negroes of their liberty.’
‘We strongly condemn the cupidity of those nations of the world who, by open aggression or secret schemes, have seized the territories and inexhaustible natural wealth of Africa, and we place on record our most solemn determination to reclaim the treasures and possession of the vast continent of our forefathers.’
On the evening of Sunday 15 August, the UNIA president general strode onto the platform with the declaration in his hand. The Legion of Honour stood to attention beneath him, holding aloft the flags from each member nation. As Garvey read out article by article of the declaration, ‘the audience broke out into uproarious applause, cheering, shouting, whistling and waving handkerchiefs’. And as he reached the conclusion, the audience sprang to its feet and sang most fervently the new anthem of the association, ‘Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers’. Garvey announced the distribution of 100,000 copies of the document which, he stated, ‘had received the signatures of every official of the UNIA and of every accredited delegate. Every coloured man, woman and child should possess a copy of it and have it in their homes.’
More than one hundred delegates on the committee had put their signatures to the declaration. They included physicians, Booker T. Washington’s former lawyer, pastors, Socialists and Freemasons. But there had been a couple of high-profile abstentions. Hubert Harrison refused to sign because the Bill of Rights wasn’t strong enough, and William Ferris declined because the Declaration had gone too far. The declarations were bound to reflect predilections of the committee members. The physicians’ concerns, for example, found their way into the body of at least one of the bills.32
Few would have denied Garvey’s impressive achievement to have marshalled such competing forces so quickly and to have pressed them into agreement. Without Garvey’s ‘iron hand’ there was the real danger that the convention might just have acted as a vent for Negro frustrations, as similar smaller events had done in the past, and led to the interminable meditations on the intractable problems that the Negro faced and the special grievances that were his lot. There were inevitable mumblings and grumblings over the UNIA leader’s alleged autocratic stance but Garvey seems to have acted more like an impassioned foreman of the jury pressing for unanimity rather than a majority vote. Along the way he dispatched other more naked challenges to his authority – the most explicit coming from a Nigerian delegate, Prince Madarikan Deniyi. The prince (later denounced as an impostor in the Negro World) and the small West African contingent were most incensed by the suggestion that no native-born African should be elected provisional president of the continent. Garvey argued that such an appointment would serve to antagonise the colonial powers who would soon engineer a way of getting rid of him. The African prince smarted at the impertinence, and even more so when, at precisely 1 p.m. on 31 August 1920, Marcus Garvey, in flowing robes of scarlet and a gold-tasselled turban (denoting the insignia of office) stepped onto the podium at Liberty Hall and was greeted with loud cheering on his inauguration into office. There may have been some element of self-aggrandisement in Marcus Garvey donning the robes of emperor but, in a selfless way, the new African president was also advancing himself as a model, one in who, as he rose, black people could take vicarious pleasure. As reported in the Crisis, Garvey graciously accepted the signal honour of being provisional president of Africa and the responsibilities that went along with it: ‘It is a political job; it is a political calling for me to redeem Africa. It is like asking Napoleon to take the world. He took a certain portion of the world in his time. He failed and died in St Helena. But may I not say that the lessons of Napoleon are but stepping stones by which we shall guide ourselves to African Liberation.’33 Towards that end Garvey would eventually launch an Africa Redemption Fund. He’d already set his sights on a new headquarters for the UNIA in Monrovia and had even sent out a UNIA official, Elie Garcia, to conduct a report on the country.
On Garvey’s enthronement, Prince Deniyi’s sarcastic mutterings, hitherto confined to the corridors of Liberty Hall, now exploded into print in a letter to the New York Tribune. ‘The descendant of slaves like Marcus Garvey’ had no mandate from the chiefs or princes of Africa to start an African Redemption Fund. Deniyi raged that ‘the so-called Negro Moses is using his fraudulent schemes to catch suckers easily as molasses always catch[es] the flies without any molestation’.34 Garvey’s supporters were becoming increasingly familiar with the angry and intemperate outbursts of former allies directed at their chief. Criticism, from a haloed Afr
ican delegate, was particularly embarrassing. But if the ire of the new provisional president of Africa was piqued then he resisted the temptation to descend into an undignified squabble. The president left it to others to reveal the real motives actuating such baseless claims. John E. Bruce, the journalist with a sharp eye for hypocrisy, sprang into attack. Bruce reminded readers that Deniyi had appealed to the convention for funds for his passage back to Nigeria to carry out the organisation’s work. Prince Deniyi’s sincerity was now in doubt for had he not ‘appeared in a gorgeous robe and turban … resplendent in his African royal pompery and marched with the marchers with heaving breast and the pride born of fiction’. Even so, Deniyi’s vituperative criticism was always going to find a willing home at a number of newspapers who considered Garvey’s coronation absurd and only made possible through the patronage of gullible fantasists. The African president-in-waiting’s claim to 3 million supporters was to be applauded, in the opinion of the sardonic editor of the Baltimore Observer, and due recognition given to the labouring ranks from which they were drawn: ‘Marcus should have on the official seal of empire, a washtub, a frying pan, a bail hook and a mop.’35
The more success Garvey gained, the more opinion of him polarised. The conservative black paper, the New York Age, noted for its gentlemanly criticism of the anti-Negro policies of Woodrow Wilson, was not so assiduous in its treatment of the race leader of the hour and the ambitious convention that he’d presided over. Away from the elaborate robes of office and impassioned oratory, the Age suspected that the real intention of the mass convention was to be gleaned from the insistent demand for support for the Black Star Line and the various enterprises promoted by the leaders ‘which gives the whole meeting the appearance of a gigantic stock jobbing scheme, put forth under the guise of racial improvement’. The Age’s editor, Frederick Moore, went even further in an interview with the young historian, Charles Mowbray White. In an astonishingly unguarded attack Moore predicted that the funds collected by Garvey to fuel his African dream republic would quickly dry up. ‘He won’t hold that money long enough after landing as the natives will pounce on him and sack his treasury so clean that he won’t have enough to finance a meal for himself in a quick lunch counter.’36 Moore’s unfortunate comments highlighted the extent to which the established African-American middle class were perplexed and embarrassed by Garvey. His tightening grip on a constituency of the black labouring and artisan class, which should, by rights, have been their own. To the same historian W. E. B. Du Bois added rather forlornly, ‘It may be that Garvey’s movement will succeed. I shan’t raise a hand to stop it.’37 To the impartial observer, it looked as if Marcus Garvey had already seized the ground once complacently occupied by Du Bois’s Talented Tenth. His critics seemed churlish and to have been subject, of late, to a diet of sour grapes. Even if Du Bois had raised a hand, he would have had little chance of stopping the Garvey juggernaut that was pushing on towards its programme for Africa.