Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  The widespread reporting on the convention had done more than anything else to internationalise the movement, and popularise the idea of Africa as the motherland. Garvey expanded on his doctrine of ‘Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad’. He was not suggesting for ‘all the Negroes of Harlem and the United States to pack up their trunks and leave for Africa’. Marcus Garvey was enough of a realist to recognise that African-Americans would not forgo the comforts and benefits of living in places like New York unless the essentials of life there could be replicated in Africa – until Harlem was, as it were, reproduced in Liberia. There’d be no great black American exodus to Africa until the UNIA had established cities with the equivalent of Lenox and 7th Avenues, apartments and bellhops shouting ‘Going up!’ Nonetheless, Garvey was arguing for a kind of vocational talented tenth to volunteer as vanguards in the development of Africa. ‘The majority of us may remain here,’ Garvey argued, ‘but we must send our scientists, our mechanics and our artisans and let them build railroads, let them build the great educational and other institutions necessary, and when they are constructed the time will come for the command to be given, “Come home” to Lenox Avenue, to 7th Avenue.’38

  That vanguard would be travelling home on a Black Star Line ship. By the end of September the provisional president promised the faithful an ocean liner, to be christened the Phyllis Wheatley (after the pioneering black poet), that would run regularly between New York and Monrovia.

  The euphoria that followed the closing days of the convention, of the dreams of an African empire, contrasted with the parlous state of the Black Star Line coffers. When Hugh Mulzac presented an invoice for unpaid wages, the vice-president wrote back embarrassingly that the company was ‘practically in financial suspense’. Mulzac had been nominated to captain the future SS Phyllis Wheatley. The vice-president hoped to send a cheque in the near future but in the meantime, he advised Mulzac to ‘make a voyage on somebody [else’s] ship and be available in December [for the Black Star Line]’.

  As well as meeting the salaries of more than a hundred staff, repaying loans and servicing other debts, much more money would be needed to redeem Africa. Garvey, once again, reached for the successful model of liberty bonds which the USA government had successfully rolled out during the Great War. Black people had shown their patriotism and bought hundreds of thousands of these bonds. Instead of America first, the provisional president would now ask them to put their race first. ‘In a world of wolves one should go armed,’ argued an editorial in the Negro World, ‘and one of the most powerful defensive weapons within reach of Negroes is the practice of Race First in all parts of the world.’39 Adverts would soon appear in the Negro World posing the simple question, ‘Will Negroes Allow the Whites to Take Africa?’ If readers answered, ‘No,’ then they could demonstrate their conviction by sending in $5 to help the cause of liberty. Their forebears had been violently wrenched from their homes during the 300 years of the Atlantic Slave Trade; further sacrifices would be necessary to reverse that passage and carry Garvey’s programme through, perhaps even a blood sacrifice.

  Claude McKay believed that Garvey and his inner circle had an idealised view of the continent that could only be maintained in ignorance. ‘He talks of Africa as if it were a little island in the Caribbean Sea,’ complained McKay. He sensed that Garvey at least understood that Africa was not simply a large homogenous nation struggling for freedom; McKay doubted that the UNIA could be so naive, and yet ‘ignoring all geographical and political divisions, he [Garvey] gives his followers the idea that that vast continent of diverse tribes … [is] waiting for the Western Negroes to come and help them drive out the European exploiters’.40 But that is exactly what Garvey believed. What he planned was a wholesale rewriting of the old order. The Negro race was as scattered as the Germanic people had been before the appearance of Bismarck. And what had it cost to weld the scattered Prussian states into one great German empire? Blood and iron. ‘It cost the blood and manhood of the Teutonic race.’ And, vowed Garvey, ‘As of theirs, so will it be of ours.’41

  It wasn’t Bismarck but Napoleon that Garvey had in mind when it came, at the conclusion of the conference, to electing the men and women who would serve as an African government in exile. They included Reverend James Eason as the leader of the Negroes in America to reside in the ‘Black House’ in Washington DC; as expected, the Mayor of Monrovia Gabriel Johnson was appointed potentate, leader of the Negro Peoples of the World, and the Reverend George McGuire was named the chaplain general of the UNIA. Their generous salaries of up to $10,000, approved at the convention, reflected their dignity and responsibility – notwithstanding that there was presently no money to honour such a commitment. With munificence worthy of le petit general, Garvey would later shower his loyal inner circle and deserving members of the race with titles like ‘Duke of the Nile’ and ‘Baron of the Zambezi’. The veteran journalist Bruce Grit would be knighted ‘Duke of Uganda’.

  Marcus Garvey knew that he was a man of history, carrying the weight of black expectation. He had moved at great speed in the course of three years, from a penniless migrant to provisional president of Africa. He had a superabundance of confidence and yet Van der Zee’s photographic portraits of him at this time reveal a tender, sad-eyed, vulnerable man looking into a future reflected back into history. There is no consort at his side; the black Napoleon was in the throes of formally severing ties with his former Josephine, Amy Ashwood, and the inconvenience of a less-than-Godly domestic life. She had done much to boost him but had also anchored him, however briefly, to the social structures of marriage. Finally, her demands on him as a man were at odds with the self-sacrificing role he sought to inhabit as a symbol.

  Garvey embraced many traditions as he entered the triumphant years ahead. What he lacked after the spectacular August convention was the Roman tradition of the central importance of humility. At the height of empire, when the victorious general was honoured with a procession through Rome, he was required to include a slave in his chariot; when the praise from the adoring masses crested, the slave’s job was to whisper in his ear, ‘Remember you are only human.’ After 31 August 1920, to the hundreds of thousands of admirers who sang his name, the provisional president of Africa was no longer a mere mortal.

  12

  LAST STOP LIBERIA

  It is certainly better for American Negroes to die of African fever in the efforts to contribute to Africa’s development, than to be riddled by the bullets of the white mob who control the local government of the United States.

  Orishatuke Faduma (American Negro Academy, 1915)

  WHEN the card was posted through her door telling Josie Gatlin to get out of town before 1 June, she knew just what to do: she packed. The 3,000 black residents of Okmulgee, Oklahoma, had received similar threats, and a local white newspaper had published a warning on its front page: the entire ‘colored’ population was ordered not just out of the town of Okmulgee but out of the state of Oklahoma ‘or suffer the consequences’.

  A few days later, Josie Gatlin’s party of four gathered together their most precious belongings and set off from Oklahoma. Mrs Gatlin was convinced that if she got as far as the water then her great trek would be almost over. By the water she meant Manhattan. Once they reached New York, there was only ever one destination in mind for Josie Gatlin and the members of her impromptu emigration club – the headquarters of the UNIA in Harlem. All she’d need to do thereafter would be to make her way to the pier at 135th Street, and walk up the gangway of the Black Star liner that would carry her to Liberia.

  There was one major snag: Garvey’s clever propagandists hadn’t anticipated their arrival. The BOI informant in their midst reported how perplexed UNIA staff were at the sight of these natives of Oklahoma, laden with trunks and suitcases, besieging their offices. The vanguard from Okmulgee were proof not just of the fear of violence at the hands of a white mob, but also that the Black Star Line propaganda had been successful – perh
aps a little too much so, because the UNIA’s prospective ocean liner, the SS Phyllis Wheatley, was not yet in their possession.1

  Oklahoma had itself been the centre of an earlier migration of black families from the deeper South, lured by the prospect of open land and affordable homesteads; the discovery of oil had fuelled a mini-boom that peaked at the start of the twentieth century. Thousands of African-American households had followed the unpromisingly named ‘trail of tears’ and escaped the vagaries of their disenfranchised, dirt-poor existence in Mississippi and Louisiana. Many found the claims made for Oklahoma had been exaggerated and their lot only marginally improved; and further that with black elevation came white resentment. Josie Gatlin got out just before the start of a terrifying riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma just 30 miles from Okmulgee.

  It had all begun innocuously. A young black delivery boy, Dick Rowland, had been charged with attempting to assault a seventeen-year-old white elevator girl in the Drexel building. In fact, Rowland had merely tripped on entering the elevator and brushed alongside the girl. He was arrested nonetheless and a wild storm of rumours quickly spread. An angry, armed white mob converged on the jail. They were met by a group of young rifle-wielding black men determined to prevent Rowland from being lynched. Shots were exchanged and the mob chased the black men towards Greenwood, the part of town commonly referred to as ‘little Africa’. In the ensuing days, Tulsa erupted in flames of seething hatred, sections of the black population were rounded up and marshalled into makeshift detention centres, scores of people (mostly black) were murdered and the prosperous black quarter (including more than 1,000 properties) burnt to the ground.2

  Mrs Gatlin was lucky. The New York Times carried ‘many pitiful tales’ of the misery and suffering of the Negro refugees. Some survivors had ventured into the burned district ‘to come away with small bandana handkerchief bundles filled with their entire salvage from once excellent homes’.3

  Josie Gatlin had seen the trouble coming and escaped just in time. She needed no further proof that black people were not wanted, not just in Oklahoma but America. Arriving in Harlem, Mrs Gatlin and her group of refugees had a terrible tale to tell. In the pages of the Crisis, they poured out their grief: ‘The practice of peonage was common, colored farmers were kept always in debt, the planters taking their crops and giving them only a bare subsistence in return.’ The fear for one’s life was the only additional incentive they needed to quit the territory.4

  The exodus (proposed by Garvey’s movement) to Africa, and Liberia in particular, was an extension of that same impulse for sanctuary; for black people like Josie Gatlin to find their own place in the sun, and to shelter under their own vine and fig tree, as foretold in the Old Testament.

  Liberia was a gallant experiment. On the West Coast of Africa, 30 or 40 square kilometres of land bordering Sierra Leone had been sought by the American Colonization Society as the site for the return of free African-Americans. On 5 February 1820, Reverend Daniel Coker, ‘a descendant of Africa’ set sail on the Elizabeth with 90 migrants, Reverend Samuel Bacon and two other agents of the society, with whom Coker professed to be ‘fully satisfied, [especially with] their piety’. Indeed, the colonisation society was comprised of humanitarians such as the pious Samuel Bacon but the majority of its members were slaveholders, acting more perhaps out of enlightened self-interest.

  The first settlers, carried by the Elizabeth, were unsuccessful in their bid for land and took refuge in the British colony of Sierra Leone. It was not until the following year that Reverend Bacon, after patiently negotiating with the native ‘children of the forest’ and King Jack Ben of Grand Bassa, secured a tract of land around the mouth of Cape Mesurado. That settlement eventually became Monrovia – named in honour of the then United States President, James Monroe.5 Within the space of a few decades the African-American returnees had extended their control over tens of kilometres of the interior. By 1847 Liberia was recognised as an independent state, presided over by a small self-perpetuating elite. During the latter half of the nineteenth century their numbers were swollen by up to 20,000 pilgrims who made their peace with America and their God and braved the passage to Liberia.

  Crossing the Atlantic was always perilous. Of the dozens of voyages, that of the Azor, sponsored by Martin Delaney, was perhaps the most memorable. Delaney, a black doctor, galvanised a group of African-American businessmen into forming the Liberian Exodus Joint Steamship Company. Investors ploughed $10,000 into shares to buy the 400-ton vessel which was expected to complete a number of trips to West Africa. The story of the Azor’s first (and only) journey was captured movingly in the account of the journalist, A. B. Williams, who accompanied the ship. In the spring of 1878, 206 passengers sailed from Charleston on board the Azor sounding the chords to ‘The Gospel Ship is Sailin’’. The headings from A. B. Williams’s letters, charting their journey, make for sobering reading: ‘Out on the Deep, Deep Sea; No Medical Stores or Stimulants; The First Death and First Birth; Deception Practised by the Exodus Association; Measles Aboard; A Sudden Death; and Yet Another; Sixth Death; Two More; Ship Fever Certainly Aboard; Water Running Short; More and More Deaths; a Terrible Tornado; Fresh Provisions All Gone.’ By the time the Azor reached Monrovia more than 20 emigrants had died.6

  The bravery of these early pioneers to Liberia was matched by the conviction that they were forsaken in America. The committed needed little encouragement. Nonetheless, the Colonisation Society waged a subtly aggressive campaign highlighting the benefits of migration. In 1858, James Hall the Society’s agent in Maryland courted the state’s free people of colour in a speech which spelt out what all in the audience knew to be true: ‘You are disfranchised; you are liable to insult at every step, and even your private dwellings are not sacred from intrusion and violence of lawless ruffianism; legal redress you have none; what greater absurdity could be imagined than for a black man to present himself at polls; although born on the soil you must be considered aliens.’ The alternative, as Hall saw it, was to flee to Liberia: ‘Go and live, the saviour of yourselves, your families and your people, or stay and enjoy a living death.’

  Sixty years on, a living death was all that Josie Gatlin had to look forward to in Oklahoma. Distressed, dejected and demoralised, she had been persuaded by the logic of flight, of lighting out for the African territory. But she travelled under a deception, arguably self-inflicted. Along with her fellow travellers, Mrs Gatlin had convinced herself that transportation to Liberia would be free. After all, the gang of four were paid-up members of the UNIA, and at least one had a handful of shares in the Black Star Line. Their testimonies were reported in the New York papers and evidently prompted closer scrutiny from the BOI whose agents traced the trail of confusion back to the Okmulgee branch of the UNIA. An unidentified African ‘with pop eyes, and a double fold to his lip [who] spoke with a brogue’ was said to have gone among the UNIA membership propagandising. Investigators found that the ‘pop-eyed African’ had spread the news that a special train was being sent to take the willing to New York, all for a modest $15; they should be prepared to leave for Liberia soon after. Mrs Gatlin and Co. had packed for the future, pinned their UNIA buttons to their chests and hurried to the station.

  Had Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa idea been a novel venture then perhaps the would-be pilgrims might have been more cautious. But the programme enunciated by the provisional president of Africa was the latest of perhaps half a dozen previous attempts by black people themselves to establish large-scale African-American migration to Liberia – Martin Delaney was just one among them. Oklahomans with reasonable memories could recall the seductive power of Alfred Chief Sam’s emigration scheme of 1913. At its peak almost 200 Chief Sam emigration clubs had been formed throughout Oklahoma and the South-west – with shareholders entitled to free transportation to the Gold Coast.7 That scheme had eventually foundered but not before 60 club members had been successfully transported to the continent.

  Marcus Garvey saw himself as following in
a tradition that stretched back even further to the indomitable black Quaker, Captain Paul Cuffe. In February 1816, after a terrifying voyage of 56 days during which ‘the ship and crew seemingly were in jeopardy’, Cuffe sailed into Freetown in the British colony of Sierra Leone. The captain landed ‘nine [African-American] families, eighteen heads of families and twenty children [who] were well received both by the Governor and Friendly Society’. At the end of his perilous venture Cuffe was ‘not permitted’ by pedantic officials, ‘to land tobacco, soap, candels nor navel’, the trade of which would have gone some way to meet his expenses. But his obvious disappointment was offset by the promising prospects for his passengers whom ‘the Governor saith shall be intitled and have grants to them the same quantities of land as the former settlers had’.8