by Colin Grant
The language was critical but still, at this point, restrained. Du Bois might quietly congratulate himself that he had managed to quieten fears and garner some sympathy from the US government and colonial powers, but he was highly annoyed by the distraction caused by his noisy adversary. Years later he was still fuming over ‘the unfortunate debacle of his [Garvey’s] over-advertised schemes [which] naturally hurt and made difficult further effective development of the Pan-African Congress idea’.14
Garvey would also be accused of stymieing the slow but steady shift towards integration that the interracial NAACP and Du Bois were so cleverly and stealthily promulgating. One of its founders, Mary White Ovington, celebrated those ideals of racial interactivity in her memoir When Black and White Sat Down Together. But the optimism sounded in her title caused a shudder in mainstream America, especially in the South, with its allusion to social equality. Everyone knew that social equality was the code for an unspeakable and dreadful taboo: that if today the races were sitting down together, tomorrow they would be lying down together. Garvey rightly calculated that his conservatism would be comforting to the dominant culture.
During his tenure President Lincoln himself had at once broached the subject and put it out of bounds when addressing one of the latent fears of emancipation when he asserted, ‘Because I do not want a colored woman to be my slave, it does not follow that I want her to be my wife.’ The present incumbent, Warren Harding, on the election campaign trail in Birmingham, Alabama, to the delight of its Southern gentlemen, had recently put it more tersely: ‘Race amalgamation, there can never be.’15
Prior to June 1921 there had not been much talk, on Garvey’s part, of racial purity. His anger over the perceived mulatto assault, and conspiracy to keep him out of the United States, uncoupled reason and attached a freight of antipathy towards mulattos that had until now lain dormant. In a country infected with racial pathology, the promotion of a policy preserving separate races was not going to lose him many votes and it cast him in direct opposition to Du Bois and the NAACP. Du Bois had recovered some of the ground lost by his despised ‘Close Ranks’ editorial. Curiously lyrical essays once again mingled happily with sharp and forensic analyses and militant editorials. On the question of colour and commingling of the races, though, he was cautious and not so sure-footed. Setting out his views on social equality, ‘The Crisis [Du Bois] advised strongly against interracial marriage in the United States today because of social conditions and prejudice and not for physical reasons; at the same time it maintains the absolute legal right of such marriage.’16
Not until 1924 would such a possibility be rendered in fiction. Even then, Eugene O’Neill’s drama, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, managed to upset both black and white audiences. Black people felt the playwright had cowardly loaded the dice somewhat by engineering that soon after marrying the black protagonist, the white woman goes mad; and white people abhorred the very idea of a white woman in wedlock with a black man. In her critique of the play, Mrs W. J. Arnold spoke for every self-respecting daughter of the Confederacy when she said, ‘The scene where Miss Blair is called upon to fondle a Negro’s hand is going too far, even for the stage.’17
As if in response to Du Bois, President Harding had argued the same, that ‘men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of Social Equality’. Marcus Garvey devoted an evening of analysis at Liberty Hall to the president’s speech which he considered a well-aimed slap in the face of William Du Bois. Members rolled with laughter in the aisles as Garvey ridiculed Du Bois for having received ‘the unkindest cut of all’, when the president had implored that ‘the Black man should be encouraged to be the best possible black man, and not the best possible imitation of the white man’. The president, Garvey concluded, was, in fact, advancing a plank of the UNIA’s programme. Marcus Garvey had returned from exile with a determination to assuage the white power structure, and typical of the man who always favoured bold gestures, he was going to make it incontrovertibly clear that America had nothing to fear from the UNIA. At the same time the dangerous and hidden ideals of his black adversaries would be illuminated. The leadership of his organisation differed from that of the NAACP, Marcus Garvey spelled out, in maintaining that ‘not all black men are willing to commit race suicide and to abhor their race for the companionship of another’.18
Marcus Garvey was feeling his way towards an ideal of racial purity where ‘instead of encouraging a wholesale bastardy in the race, we feel that we should now set out to create a race type and standard of our own’.19 At the same time as this fine-tuning of a new black aesthetic, he was also sharing his apartment in Harlem with two fair-skinned (brown) women, one of whom – Amy Jacques – he now proposed to marry. In Jamaica, such a move would have been interpreted as the aspiration of an ambitious black man keen to marry out of his class and colour; there were few precedents. From Jacques’s perspective, it was not the kind of offer that a young lady, brought up in the milieu of middle-class life, would have come to expect. Since her arrival in Harlem and involvement in the UNIA, Jacques had travelled a long way from the society of debutantes, high teas and winter balls. The petite twenty-six-year-old Jamaican wasn’t the first choice. Garvey, she claimed, would have preferred to find an African-American wife to please the members. He had considered proposing to the elocutionist Henrietta Vinton Davis but she, at sixty-two, was far too old, and Garvey wanted a son.
Despite the ugly rumours of infidelity, there had been no hint of a romance between the secretary and her boss. When Jacques weighed the pros and cons of marriage, neither love nor desire figured in the equation. ‘I did not marry for love,’20 she confided to Robert Hill many years later, ‘I did not love Garvey. I married because I thought it was the right thing to do; in order to protect him and to be close enough to help him in the difficulties that lay ahead.’
In Jacques’s own account in Garvey and Garveyism, her future husband’s proposal reads like the minutes of a dutiful business proposition: ‘He turned to me, and very adroitly put the onus on me, stating that it was in my power to help the organisation in this crisis.’ Both parties understood from the outset that their marriage would be subservient to the needs of the movement. On the morning of 26 July 1922, Marcus Garvey sat at his desk and composed a careful request for an audience with the President of the USA. In the afternoon, he hosted a celebratory lunch for UNIA dignitaries on the anniversary of Liberian independence; and in the evening he and his bride-to-be slipped away to Baltimore for their wedding the next morning. Thereafter, it was down to UNIA business as usual. In fact, one of Mrs Garvey’s first marital duties was to lend her new husband $400 to meet an emergency for the organisation: a field officer of the rival NAACP was eager to defect to the UNIA and needed the $400 to relocate from St Louis to Cleveland, Ohio.
Tantalisingly, the NAACP’s William Pickens had also been on the brink of going over to the Garvey movement. For him to do so would have been something of a coup. Pickens had distinguished himself at Yale. The black Ivy League graduate had naturally gravitated towards the NAACP but had found neither the pay nor the position commensurate with his intelligence. Pickens was a professor of foreign languages and Dean at Morgan State University. He submitted his resignation (from the NAACP) in the summer of 1921. But what William Pickens did next is disputed. According to Jacques and Garvey he approached the UNIA for a job. According to Pickens, they approached him. What is beyond dispute is that the UNIA’s interest worked to the Yale man’s good fortune, prompting an improved offer from the rival NAACP to remain with them.21
The wavering of William Pickens was indicative of how unsure black activists were in the 1920s about the primacy of the role played by the NAACP relative to the UNIA. Many of the activists of black organisations were ‘itinerant joiners’, shuttling between camps as their philosophies or programmes developed. Loyalty was not a given. The future was a lottery, and it took a brave man to throw in his lot unreservedly with one group to the
exclusion of all others.
This, though, is just what Garvey demanded of his officers. Memorising the words of the new doctrine would take a little while. The old (pre-Caribbean tour) mantra of paying allegiance solely to the flag of the UNIA was returned to the think tank, to the vault of ideas that needed a little bit more work. In the meantime, pledging allegiance to the flag of the country in which members resided (most notably the USA), rather than a future African state, was just about OK – for now. The first signs of their leader’s new-found deference to authority and retreat from radicalism were evident even prior to his re-entry to the United States. On the way back, his ship had stopped off at Belize, and Garvey, eager to display the reformation of his character, requested an audience with Governor Eyre Hutson at Government House. Hutson considered the meeting of such importance that he commissioned a shorthand writer to record the interview. On 5 July, Governor Hutson sent a transcript of his interview with Garvey to the Secretary for the Colonies, Winston Churchill. It was soon apparent that Garvey had voluntarily walked into an interrogation. Early on, the Governor opened a file of newspaper cuttings which he considered ‘offensive to me as it is to every other loyal subject of His Majesty the King’, and slid them across the table for the subject’s perusal. Garvey’s eyes quickly alighted on the phrase, ‘Let us pray for the downfall of England’, that was attributed to him. There was worse to come with the prediction, ‘As the Tsar lost his throne some years ago, so I fear George of England may have to run for his life.’ The transcript of the interview did not note the degree of Garvey’s discomfort as the Governor continued to read from the ‘certified copy’, but it is apparent that the UNIA leader was embarrassed and shocked. He paused to compose himself before mounting a recovery. ‘Your Excellency will realise that we are seldom reported correctly in the press,’ Garvey replied blithely, waving away the cutting. It was an argument that the Governor would perhaps have found persuasive, ‘if the article had appeared in any other paper than the Negro World’.22
The files, of course, were never likely to disappear. Retrospectively, Marcus Garvey had to accept that he was always going to be considered of doubtful loyalty. But he hoped for a probation, so that, with time, the semi-dormant authorities (with one baleful eye on him) would go back to sleep. As soon as he touched down on American soil, Garvey set about ensuring that the high officers of the movement understood that a new course had been set – with immediate effect. ‘For some unknown reason,’ the slow-witted BOI informant was soon reporting, ‘all the officials of the Black Star Line are very patriotic in their speeches.’ P-138 was even more perplexed to hear Garvey ‘dictating a speech loudly to his stenographer [in which] he spoke of the kind treatment the government had accorded him … pledging his support to the USA always.’
Loyalty and betrayal were the qualities most keenly felt in the Garvey movement at this time. Delegates to the forthcoming UNIA conference were encouraged to identify and renounce the traitors in their midst – no matter their rank or how trivial the nature of their treachery. ‘If at any time you have met a representative of the council who was dishonest, immoral, who was untrue to this cause,’ Garvey advised delegates, ‘it is for you, let him be High Potentate [or] President-General, [to] bring your charge against him at the bar of this convention.’ There could be no confusion, in the minds of the salaried officers, over the requirement for absolute allegiance to the organisation. Even so, a number of senior officials had exploited Garvey’s absence in the Caribbean to pursue their own agendas – with differing degrees of legitimacy. And so the blood-letting began. The accused were now put on trial by the UNIA, charged with duality.
The chaplain-general, Bishop Alexander McGuire, known for the ‘vim and force’ of his oratory, was first among the defendants. Bishop McGuire had bided his time, waiting until Garvey was out of the country before stepping up his evangelism among UNIA members. He’d sifted through the records of the UNIA, obtaining members’ addresses, and planned to propagandise the idea of an independent black Episcopal movement as a seed-bed for his own fledgling African Orthodox Church. McGuire had taken it upon himself to draft the Universal Negro Catechism, providing a course of instruction in religious and historical knowledge pertaining to the race. He aimed to offer some relief for black worshippers whose entrée to the Old Testament was predicated on their association with the murderous Cain. Once Cain had killed his brother, Abel, and was for ever ‘marked’ (blackened) by it, there was nothing on offer for the black reader (whose skin bore the mark of Cain) but guilt and shame, and a cast of biblical characters who seemed to reinforce the myth that the Negro was cursed. The Universal Negro Catechism would break the spell – in subtle ways. So, for example, the passage in the Bible when Shulamith, the daughter of Pharaoh who was betrothed to Solomon, describes herself as ‘dark but comely’ was retranslated by McGuire as ‘dark and comely’. McGuire explained his belief that ‘white translators use “but” in preference to “and” to create the impression that one who is dark is not expected to be comely’. In part, the Catechism would also illuminate the virtuous black presence in the Bible or, as Garvey put it, ‘cut out all in the Bible that doesn’t suit us’.23
McGuire’s work was as quietly impressive as the man. Although moderate in the exercise of his authority, the bishop was a patrician whom Garvey suspected harboured larger ambitions to the detriment of the UNIA and of course its leader. When thus charged, McGuire proffered a dignified resignation which the executive council, after making a brief show of pained deliberation, speedily accepted. Allegations of dual service were also levelled at several other officers of the UNIA including Dr Ellegor, Reverend Tobitt and Dr John Gordon. A more obvious charge of embezzlement was laid at the absent feet of Reverend Brooks – a former UNIA executive who was accused of rendering unto himself $1,000 which rightly belonged to the organisation. Brooks hadn’t been seen for a number of months and wasn’t answering his mail or front door. When Amy Jacques later answered criticism over the high salaries paid to the executive officers she ventured that it was in part to withdraw the temptation that officers might have – aptly demonstrated by Brooks – to augment their salaries illegally. Nonetheless, it was an elementary mistake. The salaries that had been unanimously and self-righteously voted on and pledged after the first conference were an unsupportable drain on the organisation’s finances. Again, the inflated salaries exposed the complex relationship between the leadership and its members. With some pride, Garvey would tell a colonial audience in Jamaica that though he was entitled to draw a combined salary of $27,000 for the three posts that he held, he had made a sacrifice for the good of the organisation, and would only accept $11,000. But even with this reduced amount Garvey would boast that he was ‘getting more pay than the Colonial Secretary of Jamaica, and that’s a job for life’, knowing full well that the audience would dance a jig of joy and applaud this black success till their hands were red, as if the windfall was their very own.24 But as the losses, especially from the Black Star Line, began to mount up, Garvey called for similar sacrifices from his unenthusiastic cabinet. One of the most controversial (and least popular) measures advocated by the president-general, at the second convention, was that henceforth wages should be cut in half.
Lawyers would later be instructed to begin proceedings against Brooks to recover some of the missing money. The reverend was in disgrace and no one mourned his loss. The departure of some of the other executives was more problematic, particularly Gordon and McGuire, both of whom would subsequently defect to Cyril Brigg’s camp, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB).
As in the previous year, the brotherhood had accepted the open invitation to attend the second International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. This time they badgered and cajoled Garvey into permitting the Communist leader, the luminary Rose Pastor Stokes, to address the floor. Rose Stokes was a fabulously wealthy white Socialist, who’d earned her colours working in a cigar factory before marrying a millionaire and convertin
g him to the cause. Her militant track record included a jail sentence for a seditious speech on the eve of America’s entry into the Great War.25 Apart from a delegation of Irish activists who had been welcomed by Garvey at the end of the very first convention, there was no precedent for extending invitations to white people. After all it was an international convention of Negroes. An exception was made for Rose Pastor Stokes. Garvey had graciously given way to her on the platform at Liberty Hall, but nervously prefaced her speech by a semi-jocular introduction, insisting that the press in the gallery fully understand that his organisation would take the good from all the political ‘isms’ and that by providing a platform for Stokes to expound on the plight of bleeding Russia, he was in no way aligning the UNIA with the Soviets.
Garvey gave the impression of being slightly amused by the clenched-fist, chest-thumping, well-mannered activist, as if she were an eccentric aunt whom one had to humour. Briggs had dotted members of the brotherhood around the auditorium to cheer her on, and Sister Rose positively revelled in her moment of manna among Harlem’s workers.
Garvey’s good humour did not extend much beyond Rose Pastor Stokes’s address to the convention when her appearance at Liberty Hall was uncovered as part of a larger campaign to win over support from the UNIA membership. Stokes had approached Hubert Harrison who, when he wasn’t penning editorials for the Negro World, tried sporadically to garner enthusiasm for the Liberty League, his own moribund organisation that had been first into the field well before Garvey’s more spectacular UNIA. Stokes’s offer of funds to help resurrect the League had been spurned. For Harrison to have acted otherwise, having written extensively on the dangers of accepting white patronage, would have been to lay himself open to a charge of hypocrisy. With that route closed off, the Communists hoped – through the ABB’s Cyril Briggs and Claude McKay – to insinuate themselves into the UNIA’s ‘great army of awakened workers’ who, with careful handling, might yet be led towards ‘the finer system of Socialism’.26 The catastrophic riot in Tulsa had given a fillip to the African Blood Brotherhood when the rumour began to spread throughout the black belts of America that the ABB had smuggled guns into Tulsa. Briggs was loath to disabuse the public of the idea. The ABB was ‘essentially a secret organisation’ he confided to Garvey midway through the convention. Statements put out by the Associated Press to the effect that the ABB ‘fomented and directed the Tulsa riot’; e.g. agitated, supplied leaders, ammunition, etc., ‘while not literally true can still give you an idea of the nature of our organisation’.27 The misconception was too good an opportunity to pass up. Garvey, though, judged that the ABB had overstepped the mark in its political opportunism when some of its antics at the international convention (more sinister than mischievous) were brought to his attention.