Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  In the absence of a regular convention bulletin, the ABB published its own subtle and subversive version, the Negro Congress Bulletin and News Service – its title and layout intentionally giving the impression that it was the official weekly account of the debates, meetings and resolutions at the convention. Sharp-eyed delegates began to grow suspicious when the organisers (especially through its news bulletin) seemed to demonstrate signs of a hitherto unseen streak of self-criticism, low-key at first but then taking a more strident turn – criticisms that were then reproduced in black newspapers. Most embarrassing was the unanswered question about what had happened to the long-heralded SS Phyllis Wheatley. Delegates and Black Star Line investors were eager to see whether the ship lived up to the UNIA adverts. It was billed as being capable of carrying 4,500 tons of freight, as well as 2,000 passengers in luxurious style; equipped with electric fans, music and smoking rooms and refrigerating machinery. Typical of the complaints taken up by the California New Age was that of delegate Noah Thompson who said he ‘was in New York thirty-five days, and with others persisted in demanding to be shown the ships, but was told daily that they could see the ships “tomorrow”, and “later”, but “tomorrow” never came’.28 If Marcus Garvey was understandably irritated by the constant sniping of the African Black Brotherhood, then the sight of its vendors hawking the (anti-Garvey) Chicago Defender on the steps of Liberty Hall was a provocation too far.

  On the twenty-fifth day of the convention, Garvey was determined to call a halt to the distribution of the brotherhood’s ‘scurrilous pamphlet’ and put Bolshevism to flight. From the floor of Liberty Hall the names of the ABB delegates were called out for them to answer the charge of attempting to discredit the UNIA. No one answered and then, just as the chairman called for an examination of all delegates’ cards, ‘a man was seen to rise hastily and scurry across the hall, plunge through the doorway, beating his way in precipitate flight towards Seventh Avenue’. When the laughter in the hall had subsided Garvey addressed the audience. Cyril Briggs of the brotherhood was, in reality, he warned, ‘the paid servant of certain destructive white elements which aimed at exploiting Negroes for their own subservient ends’. The time for the masquerade was over. Communism was ‘a white man’s creation to solve his own political and economic problems’. The imbroglio engineered by the brotherhood would no longer be tolerated. Their delegates’ cards were ripped up and they were immediately expelled from the convention.29

  The ABB was routed. Briggs, now that his hand was revealed, evinced a sorrowful but righteous regret over this breach of unity. The spurned ally penned a political love letter to Garvey. There was still a chance for reconciliation. Despite their differences, which probably came down to style and temperament, ‘the main aim of both organisations is identical’. Briggs could even forgive him for ‘resurrecting medieval systems and titles and making the glorious UNIA movement into a tinsel show’, for their dispute was a quarrel between brothers and he refused ‘to engage in intra-racial strife that would weaken the race’.30

  Garvey’s response was swift and brutal. The UNIA ‘can form no alliance with any organisation of Negroes working secretly to attain and enjoy rights and privileges which ought to be won in a manly open fight’, the Negro World stated coldly. And with one eye on the Red-baiters in Washington concluded that ‘it [the UNIA] is not going to be tainted by personal or official contact with such a body’. Further, ensuring that the fair-skinned Briggs was left with no doubt about the possible restoration of relations, Garvey warned readers in the Negro World that the founder of the African Blood Brotherhood, Cyril Briggs, was in actuality a WHITE MAN masquerading as a Negro for convenience.

  In one hasty move, Garvey had severed contact with an organisation that had for over two years served to articulate the UNIA’s ideals, and by attacking Briggs in such a base and shocking way, he had made a personal and bitter enemy of a man who would soon be sharpening his sword with one aim: thrusting it in between the ribs of the provisional president of Africa. Briggs, who another paper had once dubbed ‘the angry blond Negro’, was livid. He sued Garvey for criminal libel and brought his ‘colored’ mother to the court to prove his origins. Even after Briggs had had his day in court, Garvey’s supporters continued to taunt the wretched man. On one occasion, recalled a fellow member of the brotherhood, Briggs marched to Liberty Hall and ‘amid a group of threatening Garveyites … temporarily overcame his impediment of speech … and made a long and powerful speech’, defending his position.31

  Briggs won his suit against Garvey but the legal satisfaction was evidently not sufficient. Thereafter Cyril Briggs steered away from any kind of cordiality towards the defendant. Marcus Garvey became his preoccupation; he breathed, ate, drank and slept with pathological thoughts of revenge. In page after page of the Crusader, acres of copy – all negative – were given over to the irreversible valediction of his former ally. When Briggs put the UNIA leader, and those around him, on notice that ‘the race will not forget nor lightly hold the fact that any Negro was too pro-Garvey to be really pro-Negro’, Garvey could not have foreseen the depths Briggs would go to in order to undermine him; his sense of betrayal and rejection cut so deep that the militant Socialist was even prepared to approach the intelligence agencies of the despised capitalist state and offer to inform on Garvey.32

  Extraordinary though Briggs’s response was, it paled beside the onslaught to come from Garvey’s primary ideological enemy, W. E. B. Du Bois. Hatred can perhaps thrive all the more thoroughly when applied in pure abstraction and at a distance. The icily silent encounter by the elevator at the hotel in Cincinnati in 1924 was the closest the two men ever came to meeting. In his first public pronouncement on his rival in December 1920, Du Bois had confided to readers of the Crisis that he had found Garvey ‘a little difficult to characterise’. By the end of the year he would begin to feel the need to respond to what he perceived as Garvey’s campaign against him, to the ‘unremitting repetition of falsehoods and personal vituperations’. The paradox of Garvey’s inconsistency towards him was never solved by Du Bois but scouring the pages of the New York Call on 1 August 1921 he might have found a clue. In an appeal for unity at the start of his conference, Garvey had written, ‘This is not a time for personal difference, not a time to ask a man what college he graduated from.’ That same month Garvey had felt confident enough to challenge Du Bois, with all of the Harvard man’s academic and intellectual armoury, ‘to meet me on the platform of Liberty Hall at midnight, at noon, at any time, and I will make you look like a bit of cotton’. Du Bois’s scholarship and credentials were impressive. His first-rate degrees from Fisk and Harvard and decades of scholarly writing had earned him the prestigious Spingarn Medal awarded annually for ‘the highest and noblest achievement by an American Negro’.33 By contrast, as a young man, Garvey had only managed to snatch a few evening classes in law at Birkbeck when struggling in London. Nonetheless, Garvey was a man of much learning; he’d benefited from his contact with amateur scholars such as Bruce Grit and Hubert Harrison; he’d read widely, had an insatiable appetite for history and natural love of the classics – but he had no degree.

  Critics and adherents of Sigmund Freud’s dazzling new theories discerned elements of an inferiority complex in Garvey’s unearned attribution of DLC (from the University of London) to his name and his stately costume, ‘an academic cap and gown flounced in red and green’. Ostentation was a constant charge levelled at him and his movement but Garvey never tired of questioning why great European powers should have a monopoly on pomp and ceremony. His former ally, Dr Gordon, summed up the UNIA philosophy of lifting the people from their stupor when he admitted that ‘if we had to hire a man and pay him a hundred dollars a week just to beat a drum and the beating of that drum created the proper impression, we would be glad to hire him’.34 Such ostentation, on Garvey’s part, was only ever for public consumption. Privately he was an extremely conservative man, Robert Hill believes, with manners best described as
Victorian. Amy Ashwood had considered this to be the source of their marital difficulties when she later reflected, ‘His psychosexual development and orientation while appropriate in a West Indian milieu of that period was outmoded in an American social climate where a wedding ring is not a symbol of total possession.’35 His private persona was at variance with his public stance; there he appeared a supreme promoter and self-styled performer. On top of which there was the accretion of public expectation – a view that even James Weldon Johnson (in the enemy NAACP camp) would have had some sympathy for, as professional titles created a conundrum for black public speakers. In his biographical writings Johnson remembered the time when, just before he was due to address the congregation in a Southern church, the local pastor leaned over to him and whispered, ‘“What might be your entitlements?” I whispered, “Just Mister.”’ The preacher looked alarmed. In front of him the audience sat in worshipful silence. ‘With deep sincerity he whispered back again, “I can’t introduce you to these people as just Mister.”’ And so Professor Johnson got up to speak.36

  Unquestioning acceptance certainly had its attractions over Du Bois’s jaundiced scepticism, which bordered on disdain. The Pan-African Congress was a vexed case in point. Through his lieutenants, Garvey would have Du Bois and the organisers of the congress believe that he was indifferent to the snub they’d delivered in declining to invite him. Rather, William Du Bois should be thanked for sparing him its ‘poetic vapourings and plaintive wailings’. The prospective cast list was also unappealing. While the Garvey of 1918 would have been delighted to receive Colonial Office representation at one of his meetings, the Garvey of 1921 considered Du Bois’s courtship of colonial officials ‘who will explain frankly the present government’s attitude towards Africa and its future’, perverse and pathological.37 Perverse because, as Garvey joked, it was akin to a congress of rats agreeing that a cat should oversee proceedings. Pathological, because it reinforced the suggestion that validation could only come from white colonial European powers.

  Towards the end of his convention Garvey would show Du Bois, and anyone who cared to pay attention, that there was another way. On 27 August 1921, the provisional president of Africa did not just recreate, he instituted a brand new tradition of the Negro Court.38

  The 500 guests began arriving at 7.30. They rolled up in limousines to the kerb outside Liberty Hall. A specially erected canopy extended from the lintel of the doorway over the pavement. Hundreds of onlookers pressed up against the African Legions who formed a guard of honour for the stiff-backed high officials, chaperoning their elaborately dressed ladies as they sashayed into the hall. Once through the doors, guests were admitted into an auditorium overflowing with ferns, daisies and bouquets of roses. The banquet would be served on two long rows of tables, decorated with fruit, viands and delicacies. The menu printed on gold-embossed card included, Punch Africanos, Liberian chicken, Liberty special ice cream and Black Cross Macaroons. Black, red and green streamers rimmed the hall which was illuminated by an enormous red lantern in the centre and smaller Japanese lanterns forming a chain from one end of the hall to the other. Up on the platform, overlooking this magnificent spectacle, the supreme potentate, Gabriel Johnson, with the president-general, Marcus Garvey, sat on mahogany parlour lounging chairs, generously loaned by the president-general for the occasion. President Garvey, sporting a new uniform, looked uncharacteristically discomfited by his military hat tipped with white feathers, black broadcloth trousers with a gold stripe down the side, a Sam Browne belt across his chest, gold epaulettes, a gold sword and white gloves. If he was anxious about how the event might be covered, he needn’t have worried. The press who’d scrambled for the limited tickets would overreach themselves in descriptions of the revival of these scenes from African antiquity, from the age of the Ethiopian empire and the Queen of Sheba. Marcus Garvey had envisaged just such an occasion when he’d sat down to write the UNIA’s constitution three years previously. The supreme potentate, Gabriel Johnson, was, nominally, the world leader but every dignitary who filed past and bowed reverentially knew that the man who stood to his right, fidgeting in his starched uniform, was really in charge. Several young ladies, making their social debut, were also presented to His Highness the potentate, but the primary object of the banquet was to honour a handful of outstanding individuals for their contributions to the race.

  All the while that the choir sang, it slowly built to a pitch of exaltation, and finally a bugle called the great mass to attention. The chaplain-general signalled for the great congregation to rise. Beside him were sealed envelopes containing certificates of knighthood. ‘For 300 years we have been imitating the social standards of alien races; copying their etiquette; bowing down to their grooves of society.’ The chaplain reached for the certificate. ‘But the time has come when due to this genius [Marcus Garvey] we see that for which we have long waited – the first court held by Negroes under their own leaders.’ The knights-to-be were summoned to the stage and knelt before him. First the Negro World’s literary editor, William Ferris, and then the veteran journalist John E. Bruce – both received the Order of the Nile. George Tobias was knighted with the Order of Ethiopia, and Lady Commander of the Sublime Order of the Nile was bestowed upon Henrietta Vinton Davis. They rose and bowed to the potentate and the hall exploded in cheers and clapping such that all those honoured were virtually lifted back to their seats on the crest of applause.

  After the supper, the Grand Court Ball began. Lady Henrietta Vinton Davis and the Supreme Potentate led the way with the first dignified dance. Soon the revellers would be pushing onto the dancefloor, kicking out their feet in one-steps, two-steps and waltzes. Harlem, after all, was at the beginning of a Negro renaissance and the spirit of Garvey’s UNIA – perhaps not quite at the hedonistic, Bessie Smith end of the spectrum – was part of it. ‘Home, Sweet Home’ playing out the evening on the stroke of midnight perhaps signalled the movement and Garvey’s inherent conservatism. But all would leave Liberty Hall that night with the memory of the haunting and melodious voice of their leader heralding the birth of a new and glorious era – a sentiment felt by all and expressed by the chaplain: ‘We [Negroes] are now about to set our own standards of society.’ That phrase queerly anticipated the cultural call to arms issued by Langston Hughes, the very personification of the Harlem Renaissance, a few years later. Hughes was to write:

  We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow …39

  That expression of non-alignment, of setting out one’s own standard of society, was to come. In 1921, Langston Hughes, with the blessing of W. E. B. Du Bois, reached out to white patronage and fertile, interracial relations, at a time when Marcus Garvey was more and more defining a world for himself and his followers that was universally black.

  14

  BEHOLD THE DEMAGOGUE OR

  MISUNDERSTOOD MESSIAH

  The mighty objects he beholds

  act upon the mind by enlarging it

  and he partakes of the greatness he contemplates

  Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1792

  At the end of each year W. E. B. Du Bois published a progress report of the race as an inventory of debits and credits. In the debit column for 1921, below the list of ‘fifty-nine Negroes lynched in Tulsa’ and ‘Harding’s “racial amalgamation there cannot be” speech at Birmingham’, Du Bois had typed in the name, ‘Marcus Garvey’. Though he increasingly considered Garvey’s contribution disastrous, it was a measure of the difficulties assailing Black America in 1921 that the president of the UNIA and moribund Black Star Line still ranked below the continued Ku Klux Klan-inspired atrocities meted out to the black population, particu
larly, but not exclusively, in the South.

  In the autumn of 1921, the New York World had decided to send a team of reporters undercover to investigate the depth of national support for the Klan. For several weeks the World ran articles which exposed the great popularity and influence of the Ku Klux Klan in America. The paper professed to be shocked but Klan watchers had been charting the extraordinary rejuvenation of the organisation over the last few years. It was commonly agreed that there was at least one attributable source to that expansion: the epic silent film, Birth of a Nation, which premiered in cinemas around the country and at a private screening room in the White House in 1915.