Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Despite the obvious affection for him, Garvey left Panama with only a tenth ($5,000) of the contributions he’d collected in Costa Rica. Without the vital visa to take him on to America, he had few options open to him other than to sail back to Kingston. Charles Latham speculated that Garvey would try to smuggle himself into the USA disguised as one of the crew of the Kanawha that had now finally made its way to Kingston – a suspicion that appeared to have been borne out by a curious headline that made the front page of the Negro World soon after: ‘Garvey Sends Message of Appreciation to Members and Friends of Liberty Hall – Early Return Now Expected.’ A flurry of cablegrams followed, sent out from Washington to its consuls in Central America, with instructions to deny visas to the entire crew should Garvey’s name appear on the list. On 25 May, the Kanawha set sail for Panama. Although the president of the Black Star Line did persuade Captain Richardson to sign him on as purser, when Garvey boarded the Kanawha he found its boilers still spluttering and groaning, the crew nearly mutinous and the handful of passengers complaining about their foul language. Captain Richardson and Purser Garvey were soon embroiled in disputes as to who was in charge – the master with a decade of experience or the novice purser. After three days at sea the Kanawha limped back to Kingston in some distress.

  When Marcus Garvey had set out from New York in February, he had scheduled a trip of no more than six weeks. But now, four months later, he was still languishing in Jamaica, repeatedly denied a re-entry visa to America every time he applied. Rumours were rife on the streets of Harlem that Garvey would never be allowed re-entry and the UNIA executive council was beginning to panic: members’ loss of faith would have disastrous consequences. Garvey’s generals voted to send the counsellor general, William Matthews, to Washington to lobby the state department on the paramount importance of their chief’s return. Without Garvey’s galvanising influence, their business ventures (already in a parlous state) might tip over and fail completely. Matthews also made discreet overtures towards staff at the visa control section but the days passed without progress, and the longer his courtship of officialdom went on, the more his client’s chances seemed to recede. Garvey was approaching desperation. Then suddenly, one morning, there was a hint of good news. Armed with a new set of instructions from the lawyer, Garvey once more visited the American consul, but this time to ask them to send a cable to the state department (at his own expense) requesting a visa. It was not standard practice but two days later, the state department wrote back, ‘Visa authorised Marcus Garvey. Cable name of steamer and date of sailing.’ When Hoover was alerted to this unexpected development, ‘in case you may wish to give Garvey a thorough overhauling upon arrival’, he ordered an immediate investigation into how this extraordinary volte-face could have come about. Whether or not there was any truth behind the rumour that a $2,000 bribe had been paid, by the end of June there was now no way to stop Marcus Garvey heading back to New York.53

  The UNIA high command gave a collective sigh of relief. They had explored all possible angles to secure the return of their leader. Garvey’s iron hand would be welcomed to strengthen the stalled negotiations on the elusive Phyllis Wheatley and to exert some discipline (albeit long-distance) over the representatives in Liberia. Relations between the appointed secretary, Cyril Crichlow, on the one hand and the elected deputy and supreme potentates, Marke and Johnson, on the other, were, as far as could be gleaned from cryptic cablegrams, deteriorating at an alarming rate. The trouble between the three centred on the control of funds (sent out monthly from the UNIA HQ in Harlem). Crichlow, with a commendable accountant’s diligence, would not relinquish his hold on monies sent to him without being clear with regard to the purpose for which the money had been sent. Events took a decidedly dark turn when the potentate stopped talking to Crichlow and instructed a solicitor to communicate with him instead. Crichlow had grown alarmed by his seniors’ calculated policy of sidelining and undermining him.

  Crichlow sadly reached the conclusion that headquarters had all but abandoned him. He festered in Monrovia, visited by malarial fevers and a declining bank balance and the alarming prospect that he would not even be able to afford his passage back to America.

  In his increasingly alarming reports to his political master, then stranded thousands of miles away in the West Indies, the loyal Crichlow mapped out a landscape of staggering Liberian corruption: a scientific expedition, ostensibly to research the mineral wealth of the interior, metamorphosed into a luxurious and cripplingly expensive safari. Crichlow catalogued an inventory of financial mismanagement, painting a bleak scenario on the prospects of a reasonable return for UNIA investment. He was desperate to return to Harlem to give his side of the events of what had befallen the movement in Liberia, and he was rewarded with Garvey’s stinging criticism of his accountant’s pedantry. In attacking the messenger, the UNIA leader ignored the crux of his message.

  For all of the UNIA president’s careful wooing of the Liberian administration, it was, maddeningly, Garvey’s rival, W. E. B. Du Bois, who seemed at this crucial point to have the ear of the authorities. With some gentle prodding from Du Bois, President King had taken up his offer to clarify in the pages of his Crisis magazine, the Liberian government’s position vis-à-vis the UNIA. The president duly obliged with an open letter, overturning ‘some wrong impressions [that] seem to exist about the present conditions in Liberia’. Whilst acknowledging that his country could not accommodate ‘large, miscellaneous numbers of immigrants’, the president welcomed ‘strong young men trained as artisans … [and] engineers’. But finally, with Garvey’s movement unmistakably its target, he warned, ‘Under no circumstances will Liberia allow her territory to be made a centre of aggression or conspiracy against other sovereign states.’ It was not quite the knockout blow to the UNIA’s ambitions that Du Bois was hoping for, but the organisation, along with Garvey, was left reeling.54

  13

  NOT TO MENTION HIS COLOUR

  A little fat black man, ugly but with intelligent eyes and big head, was seated on a pink platform beside a throne.

  W. E. B Du Bois, ‘Back to Africa’, Century Magazine, 1923

  ON his way to breakfast at 10.00 at the Sheraton Hotel in Cincinnati, on 19 May 1924, W. E. B. Du Bois, the foremost scholarly black man of his day and exemplary critic of Garvey, stood waiting with his host, Professor Wendell Phillips Dabney, by the elevator that would take them to the restaurant. With a ping, the doors suddenly opened and out stepped a group of splendidly costumed black ladies, who formed a guard of honour, a phalanx around a ‘stout dark gentleman, gorgeously apparelled in military costume’. ‘Ye Gods,’ exclaimed Dabney in a later account, ‘’twas Garvey. He saw me, a smile of recognition, then a glance at Du Bois. His eyes flew wide open. Stepping aside, he stared; turning around, he stared, while Du Bois, looking straight forward, head uplifted, and nostrils quivering, marched into the elevator.’ The two men never spoke. The doors closed comfortably and the editor of the Crisis (having pretended not to see his rival) ascended. ‘Du Bois and Garvey Meet!’ screamed the headlines of the Cincinnati Union (a weekly black paper) the next day. ‘No Blood Is Shed!’1

  The ‘no exchange of blows’ report of that meeting alluded to the fierce, almost visceral hatred, ‘a hate that only kin can feel for kin’,2 that Du Bois and Garvey felt towards each other by the middle of 1924. Of his enforced, but temporary, exile in the Caribbean, Garvey had become convinced that the influential editor of the Crisis had somehow played a part. Neither was forensic dust-powder needed to detect Du Bois’s handprint on the damaging open letter of the Liberian president published in April’s edition of the Crisis. Battle had clearly been enjoined by 1921. At stake was nothing less than the future determination and direction of 14 million African-Americans and countless other black people in Africa and the Caribbean.

  Dual membership of the UNIA and NAACP was not yet being discouraged but Du Bois was increasingly perplexed to witness that, in spite of his obvious faults and m
istakes, Garvey’s influence over black people continued to grow, not just amongst his natural constituency (the so-called cow-tail and hoe-handle brigade) but also as a result of defections from the margins of the NAACP. Educated African-American integrationists shook their heads along with Du Bois. Samuel Redding, whose father was a stalwart of the NAACP, recalled his bewilderment when a Garvey rally came to Wilmington Delaware in the early 1920s: ‘They came with much shouting and blare of bugles and a forest of flags … Among the marchers my father spotted “black yeomen” – dependable attendants at meetings promising Negro uplift, and loyal though somewhat awed members of the NAACP. Some of them my father had personally recruited, and low groans of dismay escaped him when he saw them in the line of the march.’3

  Garvey communicated on a level that ‘black yeomen’ could understand, and touched on the emotional intelligence of his audience in a way that Du Bois never could. In Harlem he was in the mix, at the very centre of black America. He understood the temper of black people and wove himself and his movement into the tapestry of their lives. Harlem made Marcus Garvey; it energised him, fed him with ideas, and kept him on his mettle. And although by temperament and inclination the upper mid-town gentility of the NAACP suited William Du Bois, even he proposed moving its offices up to Harlem, to be closer to the people.

  It might also have made for better relations with Marcus Garvey. The lack of contact between America’s two black leaders only exacerbated their problems. Du Bois kept a studied distance in his comfortable offices on 7th Avenue. Garvey was just as cocooned up in Harlem. As the UNIA leader’s status and paranoia grew, he surrounded himself with an ever-thicker wall of armed bodyguards. It was left to each other’s publications to do the talking. Du Bois’s high-church official tone in the Crisis was more than matched by Garvey’s Negro World: punchy, street-level sarcasm from editors who had honed their skills atop soapboxes at Harlem’s Speakers’ Corner.

  According to Hubert Harrison, as well as his magnificent skills of oratory, Marcus Garvey had one other significant advantage over Du Bois: his colour. ‘Every Negro who has respect for himself and for his race will feel, when contemplating such examples as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Phyllis Wheatley … and Marcus Garvey the thrill of pride that differs in quality and intensity from the feeling which he experiences when contemplating other examples of great Negroes who are not entirely black.’4

  William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was, by his own admission, not entirely black. He revelled in his mixed heritage: Dutch, French Huguenot, ‘a flood of Negro blood’ but ‘thank God! No “Anglo-Saxon”.’ Marcus Mosiah Garvey was, by contrast, determinedly 100 per cent black. This was at a time when African-Americans were prone to fabricate hereditary lines that accentuated their differences from the common Negro stock – a sentiment satirised wickedly by Zora Neale Hurston when she wrote of her origins, ‘I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.’5

  Garvey was unique in that he ‘sold the idea of the black man to himself’, recalled S. A. Haynes, ‘with the same zeal and enthusiasm that white Americans, Englishmen [and] Frenchmen use[d] preserving their racial identities’. It was this idea of solidarity that first drew the young, fair-skinned Amy Jacques to Garvey. In their first meeting he ‘stressed the fact that the skin-colour class system did not exist in America, as all strata of the race were treated as one’.6 A concept of racial purity evolved into a fundamental belief during his time in America. Garvey never exhibited the kind of racial antipathy towards mulattos articulated by his spiritual mentor Edward Blyden. He did, though, hold reservations about Du Bois that, stripped bare of his unease over the professor’s complex character, came down to his suspicion of the mulatto Harvard man’s inequitable diffusion of blood. Educated in his formative years in Jamaica, Garvey was not inoculated against the prevailing racial theories of the time, expounded by amateur anthropologists such as W. P. Livingstone. ‘The root stock [Negro] possesses all the fundamental virtue of virgin races,’ Livingstone scribbled in Black Jamaica, whereas ‘the [mulatto] hybrid is a compound of both; the intelligence of one [white parent] meets and amalgamates with the animalism of the other, producing a strange nature.’7

  In his personal life, Marcus Garvey stepped back from such certainties, especially when they began to complicate a blossoming romance. By the prevailing standards of the day, Amy Jacques, his secretary and travelling companion over the last year, was considered a mulatto. When, in a rare unbuttoned moment, Jacques wrote of their growing intimacy, it was clear that her boss and paramour was, in part, attracted to her mulatto comeliness: ‘My hair, let down, thrilled him. It was long and naturally wavy; he asked me never to cut it. The first time he saw it down, curiously he felt some strands and said, “Why, it is so soft.” As I tossed my head, he exclaimed, “Oh, but it is so alive!”’8 In the racial orientation of Jamaica, ‘good hair’ (wavy hair was good) accompanied a ‘good colour’ (anything but black, and the fairer the better). Jamaica, and the British West Indies at large, had evolved a system of ascending miscegenation, that is, blacks rose through ‘genetic association’ with whites.

  Over decades the practice had left a psychic scar on Jamaican society. Pondering what he’d observed when he’d previously visited the Antilles, W. E. B. Du Bois concluded that islands like Jamaica had ‘become disgusted with their old leadership. These are largely mulattos and it was British policy to induce them by carefully distributed honours and preferment, to identify their interests completely with whites.’ America by contrast was not so plagued by disunity between the different shades of black people, largely because a system of descending miscegenation had evolved, where the progeny of any amount of mixing (even if only the recipient of one drop of black blood) descended to the Negro race. As Gilbert Thomas Stevenson pointed out in Race Distinction in American Law, ‘miscegenation has never been a bridge upon which one might cross from the Negro race to the Caucasian’. Keen students of racial distinction had developed their own idiosyncratic tests to unearth blacks posing as whites where no documentary evidence was immediately available. The NAACP field operator Walter White was so fair-skinned that the organisation would send him undercover to the South to investigate lynchings. Walter White would recount stories of being petrified by bigots on trains who were convinced that a close inspection of the cuticles of his fingernails would flush out the ‘yaller niggers who look white’ and determine their true race. The ‘cracker’ (Southern gentleman) took Walter White’s hand and said, ‘Now if you had nigger blood, it would show here on your half-moons.’9

  There was a black aristocracy in America. They were numbered primarily amongst the blue-veined families of Washington whose skin was so light their veins could be made out underneath. This group, sometimes called the ‘upper tens’ or the ‘pink tea set’, had emerged in the midst of the opportunities opened up by post-bellum reconstruction. They were said to comprise 400 old families (an earlier incarnation of Du Bois’s Talented Tenth) whose self-regard caused Garvey’s ally John E. Bruce to lampoon them as ‘a species of African humanity which is forever and ever informing the uninitiated what a narrow escape they had from being born white … [who] wouldn’t be caught dead with an ordinary Negro’.10

  As the conflict between Garvey and Du Bois began to take shape, the African-American leader would accuse the Jamaican immigrant of misconstruing the relations between the light-skinned high yallers (yellows), cinnamon-coloured and coal-black Negroes in America. Garvey was guilty, charged his rival, of importing a Jamaican concept of racial orientation which overstated the real but minimal tensions between the social classes of black Americans. There was a ‘kernel of truth’ in Garvey’s observation but, as far as the black aristocrats were concerned, it was not only ill-mannered to advertise it but naive and politically damaging, playing right into the hands of the race’s delighted white enemies.

 
Du Bois’s criticisms of him in the Crisis had stung Garvey into answering back in kind (actually with interest) at Liberty Hall in an especially advertised evening for Sunday 2 January 1921 in which the UNIA president devoted over an hour to ‘W. E. B. Du Bois and His Escapades’. A packed house assembled to witness the tirade. To rolling applause, Du Bois was dismissed as ‘the white-man Negro who has never done anything yet to benefit Negroes’. Du Bois was a friend of the ‘upper tens’ whilst he, Marcus Garvey, was ‘along with the working class Negroes’.11

  In saying so, Garvey reiterated the kind of aspersions that Du Bois viewed as intolerable. He conceded that ‘the ties between our privileged and exploited, our educated and ignorant’ were not as strong as they should be. Nonetheless Du Bois warned Garvey, ‘American Negroes recognise no color line in or out of the race, and they will in the end punish the man who attempts to establish it.’12

  There was still the slight possibility in 1921 of an accommodation between the two men. Garvey reached out to his nemesis on several occasions, inviting him to attend UNIA conventions and in December to pen a Christmas message for the edification of the Negro World’s readers. Each time he was politely but firmly rebuffed, and Garvey’s overtures were not reciprocated. On the contrary, Du Bois seemed determined to put as much distance between the two associations as possible. Garvey’s second International Conference for the Negro Peoples of the World, planned for August, would overlap with his rival’s Pan-African Congress, and Du Bois was horrified when uninformed critics confused both approaches to Africa as one and the same: the work of ‘delusionists and dreamers’. Not only was Marcus Garvey excluded from the guest list of the Pan-African Congress but an alarmed Du Bois hurried to correct ‘some public misapprehension of our aims and purposes’. On the eve of the congress, he wrote to the Secretary of State, Charles Hughes, to assure him that ‘it has nothing to do with the so-called Garvey movement and contemplates neither force nor revolution in its program’.13