by Colin Grant
Aside from its filmic novelties, and powerful and melodramatic script, Birth of a Nation succeeded largely because it pandered to a revisionist idea of the American Civil War in which the innocent South is beaten but unbowed. As the film opens, the war is over; the world of the defeated South is inverted. White Northern ‘carpetbaggers’ have snapped up business and plantations for a pittance. In league with the newly appointed black legislators, they keep the Southern white population in subjugation. In 1915 and beyond in cinemas across the country, white jaws dropped as the villainous Gus, a freed slave, appeared on the screen. He wears the uniform of the victorious Union army. Gus has been loitering ominously outside the home of the family who used to own him. He follows the lily-white virginal Southern belle, Marion, to the woods. There, in the words of the author, Thomas Dixon, ‘the black brute, Gus, his yellow teeth grinning through thick lips’, makes a preposterous proposal of marriage to Marion. ‘Marion’s delicate lips trembled with fear colder than death … Gus stepped closer with an ugly leer, his flat nose dilated, his sinister bead-eyes wide apart, gleaming ape-like.’ The innocent maiden recoils in horror. She flees through the woods pursued by Gus and eventually scrambles onto a mountainous ridge. A soundless scream fills the screen, and rather than surrender to the rape that Gus surely intends, Marion leaps to her death. Towards the end of the film, the chivalric Ku Klux Klan night riders, in their terrifying white gowns, track down the monstrous Gus, and lynch him.1
Despite black protests, D. W. Griffiths’s Birth of a Nation was screened in thousands of cinemas in the USA. In the months after the film’s release thousands of recruits, fired by its perpetuation of the myth of the South’s ante-bellum Eden, built on a benign system of slave-holding plantations so cruelly destroyed, signed up to the white supremacist secret society. The Klan had been in decline since its post-Civil War and Reconstruction heyday. Back in the 1860s and 1870s, according to legend, the avenging nighthawks of the Ku Klux Klan restored the old chivalric concepts to the South in the aftermath of her traumatic defeat; they saved white women from the lustful and rapacious instincts of the freed black man. The Klan was romanticised. Men who’d never even been on horseback claimed to have ridden with the Ku Klux Klan, and to have put an end to ‘the Negro’s pernicious domination’. In reality the Klan terrorised the black population, burning down black schools and churches, drumming out of town, maiming or executing ‘highfalutin’ niggers’ who did not know their place.
Fifty years on from the Civil War, Birth of a Nation resurrected a Southern cultural romanticism, clustered around the idea of a Lost Cause, and a defeated but defiant South that still dreamed of recapturing the old glory. Membership of the Ku Klux Klan (open solely to white Protestants) soared: black people, along with Jews and Catholics were the degenerate enemy. The Klan was widely assumed to be at the back of many of the atrocities, beatings and barbaric lynchings perpetrated against African-Americans, who lived in fear of the midnight knock on the door, the burning cross on the lawn and the disappearances of neighbours of whom it was unwise to enquire.
The Klan was feared but it was also reviled. Black people were revolted by its activities; they raged at the violence and at their own impotence to do much about it. At the turn of the twentieth century, when W. E. B. Du Bois wielded his pen in the defence of a black labourer, Sam Hose, who had killed his landlord in self-defence, the Klan would reveal what little difference his intervention would make. Du Bois wrote out ‘a careful and reasoned statement’ and was on his way to the offices of the Atlanta Constitution when ‘the news met me: Sam Hose had been lynched … they said his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking. I turned back to the University.’ Thoughts of the murder of Sam Hose and the ghoulish display of his remains were too much for the young, idealistic Du Bois to bear. He wrote that something died in him that day. There was a sense of the futility of his scientific learning: ‘I began to turn aside from my work.’2
The figures made for gruesome reading. From 1865 and the ‘surrender’ of the South until 1922, more than 3,000 black Americans, their bodies defiled and burnt, were lynched with the connivance – and often at the instigation – of the Ku Klux Klan. Such acts of barbaric mob rule were carried out with impunity: no one was ever arrested. By 1922, African-American leaders had settled on a plan they hoped and prayed would temper the murderous influence of the Klan. Organisations like the NAACP pumped all their energies into the promotion of an antilynching bill. But Marcus Garvey had a more direct approach in mind.
On 25 June 1922, Marcus Garvey stopped off at Atlanta and did what no black person in America had ever contemplated: he headed straight for the offices of the Ku Klux Klan. The UNIA chief had an arrangement to meet the Klan’s Imperial Wizard which, when it was made known to the wider black public, would mark the most significant turning point in his popularity, as even his most ardent fans were confused as to what it all meant.
The turn towards Atlanta, Georgia and the South came out of a ratcheting up of the pressure on Garvey and the movement. The Black Star Line was perilously teetering on the edge of collapse; the first ship, SS Yarmouth, had been sold for scrap six months previously; the derelict crew of the Kanawha were stranded in Antilla, Cuba, without food or coal, aboard a vessel whose boilers were beyond repair; and the pleasure boat, the Shadyside, was last seen banked and rusting on the Hudson. The future of the Black Star Line rested on the Orion (Phyllis Wheatley). Although the corporation had dispensed with the services of its broker, it had not yet abandoned hope of eventually acquiring the ship. Garvey’s unequal optimism, if not as infectious as in previous dark periods, was at least enough to sustain the fiction of an imminent revival in their fortunes. He was not to know that lawyers for the US Shipping Board were advising that ‘the Black Star Line be given one more chance to comply with the contract’. Provided the BSL could meet and honour a performance bond, the sale might still go through; at the same time the council was adamant that if, however, ‘a bond with satisfactory surety [is not] furnished promptly the sale will be cancelled’.
UNIA businesses had settled into a mode of operation, commonly known as ‘kiting’, where all income is channelled into one pool and moved from profitable enterprises to failing ones, simply so that the businesses are kept going. In an effort to rationalise the organisation’s losses, Marcus Garvey had asked for and obtained (not without some resistance) greater executive powers over UNIA funds. Its headquarters had been inundated with demands for missing wages, fees and other payments. The entire crew of the SS Kanawha, the Liberian commissioner, Cyril Crichlow, and the Pan Union Company (seeking compensation for the failed delivery of its liquor) formed part of a long line of recalcitrant plaintiffs who were suing the UNIA. Garvey ordered a list to be drawn up, prioritising payment to the potentially most troublesome. Even if no one else was paid, staff were to ensure that ‘Dusé Mohamed Ali [the UNIA’s ‘foreign secretary’] received his money promptly, every week’.3 Hubert Harrison was also high up on the list. Bizarrely, Harrison, who held nightly meetings attacking Garvey (and had especially done so in his absence, during Garvey’s extended Caribbean tour), was still being paid as an editorial writer on the Negro World ‘although’, noted one Military Intelligence Officer, ‘he does not send anything in for the paper’. The most likely conclusion believed the officer was that ‘Garvey is afraid to dismiss him’.4
There was also trouble in the divisions. The parent body in Harlem was struggling to maintain its control over prosperous branches like those in California which sought greater autonomy, and threatened to opt out altogether if they didn’t get it. Garvey sent the head of the African Legion, Captain Gaines, to Los Angeles to put down the rebellion. But the unsubtle Gaines, with military, ramrod bearing and accompanying unyielding manner, managed only to alienate his hosts and accelerate their secession.
Garvey found himself assailed on a bewildering myriad fronts; his enemies had an uncanny knack for f
inding each other – with a little help from the bureau’s special agent 800. As well as infiltrating the UNIA, 800 had been sworn into Briggs’s African Blood Brotherhood and had even taken their secret oath. In over two years working undercover, 800 had become adept at manipulating Garvey and his opponents in a practice commonly known in Jamaica as ‘carry go/ bring come’. 800 was passing on information, informing on both to each other and withholding just enough for rivals to feel indebted and dependent on him. In one memo he outlined how for several nights he’d been rummaging through files at the UNIA offices trying to find Cyril Crichlow’s confidential report on the Liberian mission to Garvey. But now that Crichlow and Bishop McGuire had also aligned themselves with the Brotherhood, they might be induced to make public what they saw as the corruption at the heart of the UNIA. They’d also be stepping out from underneath Garvey’s shadow. After all, McGuire had joined the African Blood Brotherhood ‘because it welcomes into service strong and intellectual men of the race without attempting to dwarf them before one giant mastermind’.
On 18 December 1921, they took their first tentative steps, taking over the Rush Memorial Church, to deliver their message to the people of Harlem. The church hall crackled with the kind of illicit excitement more readily found in the gambler’s bear-pit. But the risk that the conspirators knew they were undertaking misfired. Crichlow, McGuire and their new associates had woefully underestimated the depth of Garvey’s support and the great outpouring of antipathy that would be directed towards the traitors whom he had warned his followers to expect. In front of a noisy and expectant crowd, ‘Dr McGuire rose to speak,’ reported the Negro World, ‘[but] hardly had he begun than the audience laid a verbal barrage against him. Invective after invective was hurled like rapid fire at the bishop which even his stentorian voice could not withstand.’ Subsequent speakers met with the same response.5
Garvey was loved by thousands of black people in a way that his critics consistently failed to understand, partly because it went beyond reason. They could see that he was loved, when there seemed every reason to despise him. It was not rational; it was emotional. Garvey was loved because he was persecuted, just as his followers were persecuted; and when he alluded to the stoical black man, as he often did, as a modern-day Simon of Cyrenia who had helped Christ bear his cross, then the thousands in the audience looked up to see in Garvey, a bleeding black Christ, with a shimmering crown of light over his head.
To many at the Rush Memorial Church, who had invested not only money but their hopes and dreams in the UNIA, the treachery of McGuire and Crichlow was akin to the officers abandoning ship while they, the loyal crew, remained below deck, bailing out the waters from a vessel that still stood a chance of staying afloat. Garvey’s plight was their own; if he was brave enough to tie himself to the mast and weather the storm, then so too were they. Ordinary UNIA members were heartened by Garvey’s fearlessness, and mistook the law’s delay in prosecuting their leader, not only as an indication of the weakness of the case against him but also as a sign that perhaps Garvey had already defeated the unfair challenge. Besides, what else could they do but stick and stay? The alternative was far too dreadful to contemplate.
The UNIA’s sense of triumph, though, of seeing off the enemy, was short-lived. 800’s memoranda detailed the prevailing gloom that had settled over some of the more enlightened members of the inner circle, over the certainty that something bad was about to befall them: ‘Tobias tells me that he can’t sleep at night,’ wrote 800, ‘for he knows this thing can’t go on for ever and he is afraid that he will have to pay.’ The wretched Tobias’s nightmares were filled with the insuperable tangle of the UNIA finances. They were made all the more real when reading the Crusader. In its pages, Cyril Briggs had let loose Garvey’s erstwhile boyhood friend, Wilfred Domingo who, with the fastidiousness of an investigative journalist, set about uncovering the trail of money. His essay, ‘Figures Never Lie but Liars Do Figure’, charting the flow of credits and debits, was an unsparing audit of UNIA accounts that must have made for painful and deeply embarrassing reading by Tobias and the rest of Garvey’s high command. Hubert Harrison also confided unwittingly to the undercover BOI agent that he was sure something shortly was going to happen to Garvey, ‘and if Garvey wasn’t such a fool, he would go to him and tell him about it and tell him how to make a getaway’.6
The leader could not remain unaffected indefinitely by the anxiety swirling around his camp. Curiously, at about this time, a statement was issued by the UNIA – without an obvious cause – which read as a defence of Garvey for having ‘risked his future, his money, his reputation, his all to start the organisation when all other educated Negroes called him a fool for doing so’. It went on to chastise his invisible enemies, ‘a congregation of dismissed, disgraced and so-called resigned employees of the UNIA, Negro World or Black Star Line’. Neither were the strains and stresses of the workplace relieved by the doom-laden atmosphere at home. One night Garvey returned to the apartment in the dark to find that his sister Indiana and her husband had ‘packed their bags and sailed for Jamaica, without even leaving a note’. According to Amy Jacques, Garvey’s dismay was overridden by a feeling of relief. ‘At least,’ Garvey is said to have told his wife, he would no longer have ‘to feel her [Indiana’s] pitying eyes’ following him around the apartment.7
If only the Black Star Line could clinch the deal on the Orion (Phyllis Wheatley) then the organisation might yet begin trading almost immediately, and gain some kind of a reprieve. Remarkably, at the beginning of 1922, the Black Star Line appeared to be inching towards satisfying the demands of the US Shipping Board. But the panel’s decision was to be irreversibly influenced by a newspaper headline its members sat down to read over breakfast on 13 January 1922: ‘Garvey, Financier and “Sir President of Africa” Is Held’. The New York World went on to report that detectives had visited ‘Harlem’s wizard of the Black Star Line’, at his apartment on 129th Street and arrested him on a federal charge of mail fraud. Garvey was bundled into a police car for the short ride to the Federal Building and later released on bail of $2,500. The World depicted the arraigned leader as an ungracious, ‘portly figure wrapped in a fur-collared overcoat’ who seemed ‘irritated at the proceedings and refused to talk with reporters’. Specifically, Garvey was accused of sending circulars through the postal system, advertising the sale of stocks in a ship, the Orion, that his corporation did not yet own. The circular included a photograph of the ship, presumably the Orion but with its name scratched out and Phyllis Wheatley written in its place.
Marcus Garvey was deeply affronted by the ignominy of his arrest; particularly by the accusation that he stood to gain personally by duping naive stockholders into investing in a phantom ship. Newspapers were quick to sketch him as the equivalent of a fancy and flamboyant medicine man dispensing snake oil to ignorant black folk. Garvey winced at the headlines. In a hurriedly prepared statement, he wrote, trusting that ‘no one from the people would believe that I could be so mean as to defraud a fellow Negro’. The allegation was a blow to his dignity even though he doubted whether anyone who knew him would question his sincerity: ‘I have an ideal that is far above money,’ said Garvey, ‘and that is to see my people really free.’ There was malice at the back of his arrest which was the unholy work of thieves, rogues and vagabonds whom he had kicked out of the movement and who were now bent on revenge; they had judged him, he wrote, from the corrupt standards of ‘the thief who does not like to see another carry a long bag’. Garvey’s protestations might have sounded convincing to his own ears but the test would come when he chose to reply not through a newspaper editorial but directly to the people, and brave an audience in Harlem.8
The night after his arrest, a tremulous but indignant Garvey appeared on the platform at Liberty Hall and, even before he’d said a word, reported the New York World, ‘was hailed tumultuously as the “Prince of Men” … [by] more than 1,000 Negroes [who] cheered wildly for the Provisional President of Afric
a and booed the newspapers’. Similar scenes were repeated across the country when Garvey embarked on a tour to limit the damage done by his arrest and to promote further stock-buying. If anything, his popularity had increased as his followers proved sympathetic to his assertion that the plot had been laid long ago and that the Post Office department was merely being used ‘to carry out the designs of enemies of the race who had opposed the UNIA over the last four years’. The ‘sawn-off, hammered-down’ little general had the overwhelming support of a membership who, though not inured, had grown used to attacks on him; they were more inclined to agree with Garvey that the Black Star Line’s failure was the work of saboteurs, ‘paid by certain Negro Advancement Associations … to dismantle our machinery and otherwise damage it so as to bring about the downfall of the movement’. Although the NAACP was not directly named, the inference was clear: the rival organisation was to blame, Du Bois in particular, possibly in league with government secret service agents, the French and British colonial authorities, and conservative black newspapers; all united in a conspiracy to destroy the UNIA leader.9 Du Bois took his cue from the arrest to publish a salvo against a demagogue from whom, courtesy of the authorities’ timely intervention, black people had been delivered. ‘From now on in our new awakening, our self-criticism, our impatience and passion, we must expect the Demagogue among Negroes more and more.’ Du Bois left readers in no doubt that Marcus Garvey was in his mind’s eye when he described the demagogue as one who ‘will come to lead, inflame, lie and steal. He will gather large followings and then burst and disappear.’ It had been a near miss. Disaster had been averted but Du Bois’s sigh of relief was accompanied by a further warning: ‘Loss and despair will follow his fall until new false prophets arise.’10 The political death notice that Dr Du Bois composed for his nemesis was premature. In fact, his note struck falsely; the reaction of many Harlemites showed that black people were far more likely, at this juncture, to judge that the nation’s premier black leader was the victim of a conspiracy. From the pulpit at Liberty Hall, Marcus Garvey returned the faith the membership placed in him when he defiantly warned the authorities that the movement he had started would never be crushed: ‘Put me in jail; put me in the gallows [or] put me in the electric chair … the [African] programme shall go over.’ A thousand Garveys would spring up to take his place.11