by Colin Grant
The machinations of a black leader convening with the Ku Klux Klan made the front pages of many black papers, with worrying signs that the meeting was not going to be portrayed in the victorious manner in which Garvey had conceived it. The New Era dismissed Garvey’s intervention as the work of one who did not ‘fully understand the heart and aspirations of the race’, and a future, chosen leader would be ‘a son of the soil and not a foreign-born would-be diplomat’. Further evidence of looming trouble came with William Pickens’s rejection of the medieval ‘dishonour’ of becoming ‘a Knight, or Duke or some other breed of Nobleman’. Reflecting on what he perceived as Garvey’s new alliance, the honour might just have well been offered by the Ku Klux Klan, and Pickens ‘would rather be damned or murdered by such an organisation than to be … rewarded by it’.27
Since its opening in 1919, Liberty Hall had become the ever-rejuvenating nerve centre of the movement and, on a personal level, a place of safety and sanctuary for its leader. It was to Liberty Hall that Garvey now returned. But amongst the cheering of 3,000 members who turned out to hear their leader was the previously unfamiliar sound of dissenting voices and murmurings of discontent. For gone was the raging general of previous years who had defiantly screamed for armed self-defence, to answer a black lynching with a white lynching. In his place was a much more sober pacifier who acknowledged the superior and destructive power of his white adversaries, whom black people were best not to aggravate. In Garvey’s conception the Ku Klux Klan represented the invisible government of America that was determined to keep the country white. In his defence, Garvey expounded on the need to get up close and study one’s enemy in order to be effective. Several months previously, in its exposé of the Klan, the New York World had ridiculed it as a money-making organisation in which the ‘Klan itself owns the company manufacturing the regalia of cotton robe and hooded cap, which is sold to members for $6.50 and costs $1.25 to make. Its lucrative possibilities have recently been increased by the decision to admit women as well as men to membership. The sisters can now come on in with the brothers – at only $10 per come-on.’28 Initially Garvey had praised the New York World’s journalistic investigation of the Klan as rendering ‘a splendid service to this great Republic by its exposé of the underhand methods of this anti-American society’. Members of the Klan, he warned, ‘seek to outrage and endanger the lives and property of others through their unlawful attacks’. Bizarrely, the World’s mocking of the ‘invisible empire’ had had the unexpected consequence of boosting membership ten-fold; even ‘New York [had become] a stronghold of the Klan’. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, though, was where Klan activity mostly thrived, and Garvey, rethinking his position, was especially scathing about those brave African-Americans who spoke defiantly from a position of safety in the North, leaving their poor brethren in the South (neighbours of hateful white ‘crackers’) to pick up the bill for that defiance. He heaped scorn on the NAACP’s attachment to an anti-lynching bill (sponsored by Senator Dyer) which he rightly predicted would never be approved by the Senate. The Klan, Garvey believed, was represented through all walks of white American life – the postman, the teacher, the policeman, the politician. And he concluded by pleading with his critics not to rush to judgement until the word-for-word account of his meeting with the Imperial Wizard was published in the Negro World and the Klan’s Searchlight.
It was a vain hope. Schadenfreude slid from the lips of the gossips in the parlours of the Talented Tenth in black America where Garvey’s coup was seen rather as a titanic blunder. Walter White was shown a memorandum of the Ku Klux Klan meeting which, he claimed, amounted to a Faustian pact ‘whereby Garvey was to be allowed to come into the South to sell stock to Negroes in his various enterprises … and in return [would] seek to break up organisations among Negroes opposed to the Klan, particularly the NAACP’.29 Acting as secretary to the NAACP, White had tried but failed to obtain the actual transcript of the meeting which was never published. Given the climate of hostility between the two rival organisations it’s not surprising that Walter White was all too ready to portray Marcus Garvey as a latter-day Mephistopheles. White’s assessment came after a significant hardening in the NAACP’s public stance towards Garvey. But if the attitude was uncharitable, then the language was, at least, temperate. By contrast the radical journal, the Messenger, dispensed with any pretence towards civility. From its offices in Harlem, in the same building and the floor above the UNIA Publishing and Printing House, the Messenger published a vicious and vituperative editorial that signalled the start of an irreparable break with Garvey. On the front page of its July 1922 edition, above a headline noting ‘Negro homebuyer’s anxiety over falling rents’, the Messenger made plain its disgust with the UNIA leader: ‘Garvey, Black Eagle, Becomes Messenger Boy of Clarke, Ku Klux Kleagle.’ The paper’s co-editor Chandler Owen’s loathing took a particularly nativist turn, lambasting him for the ‘fool talk [that] emanates from a blustering West Indian demagogue who preys upon the ignorant’. The fearless editor put Garvey and his supporters on note that the Messenger was ‘firing the opening gun in a campaign to drive Garvey and Garveyism in all its sinister viciousness from the American soil’.30 True to his word, Chandler Owen and his co-editor, A. Philip Randolph (who’d sportingly introduced Garvey to the street audiences back in 1917), went on to spearhead a ‘Marcus Garvey Must Go’ campaign. They were joined by William Pickens (fresh from penning his rejection of a knighthood) and another NAACP man, the Detroit preacher, Robert Bagnall – forming a union of convenience (the editors of the Messenger had previously, contemptuously, labelled their new ally Pickens as a stalwart of ‘the conservative Negro leadership). Together they announced a series of public forums to be held every Sunday in August, in the Lafayette Building, just a few streets down from where Garvey was presiding over the UNIA’s third convention. In their minds Garvey had sinned, not just in convening with the masked devils of the Ku Klux Klan, but in the implication of surrender, that black Americans should forfeit their rights to life and liberty in America. A statement to that end, that Garvey is alleged to have made in New Orleans, was also printed on the handbills advertising the meetings. It read:
This is a white man’s country. He found it, he conquered it, and we can’t blame him if he wants to keep it. I am not vexed with the white man of the South for Jim Crowing me because I am black. I never built any street cars or railroads. The white man built them for his own convenience. And if I don’t want to ride where he’s willing to ride then I’d better walk.31
A boisterous crowd of 2,000 packed into the Shuffle Inn Music Hall in the Lafayette Building to hear Pickens deliver a sharp rebuke on ‘what to do when Negro leaders league with Negro lynchers’. At least half the audience were made up of Garvey supporters who reacted indignantly when Pickens exaggeratedly claimed that his life had been threatened, but refused to name by whom. The local police department, fearing trouble, stationed patrolmen throughout the hall but, apart from a regular chorus of ‘Garvey Must Go’ from the most vociferous Garvey-baiters, the event was a relatively tame affair in which the worst abuse hurled at the absent UNIA president was that he was ‘a little half-wit lil[l]iputian’.32
The playground name-calling would not have prepared Garvey-watchers for the farrago of shrieking malevolence that was to come. First out of the blocks was the NAACP heavyweight, Robert Bagnall, who published a piece of literary assassination in the Messenger which began and ended in bile. Garvey, he maintained, was ‘a Negro of unmixed stock, squat, stocky, fat and sleek, with protruding jaws, and heavy jowls, small bright pig-like eyes and rather bull-dog-like face. Boastful, egotistic, tyrannical, intolerant, cunning, shifty, smooth and suave, avaricious …’
Bagnall’s nauseating assault marked a new low in black solidarity. There had been fundamental disputes between rival groups before, most notably between the pro- and anti-Booker T. Washington camps, but never had there been such an open and public display of disdain and contempt by a black thinke
r towards one of his own. Bagnall crossed a line and made it possible and probable that others would follow. Though his admirers would rush to Garvey’s defence and take issue with Bagnall, it was Pickens’s attack that seemed more disturbing to Garvey; the sense of his desertion and betrayal was especially hurtful. Garvey would have rejoiced in Pickens’s return to the fold more than he would over a hundred righteous new recruits to the movement.33 As it was, Pickens, high on the NAACP-roasted hog, had chosen to sup with the devil: ‘I wonder if anybody has patted Pickens on the shoulder,’ mused Garvey, or ‘taken [him] by the hand. I would not doubt [it] … because I have seen him recently very much in the company of white folks, and any time a Negro gets into the company of white folks he becomes a dangerous Negro.’34 Garvey’s critics could easily have roared back that especially dangerous was the Negro who sits down with men wearing white hoods. ‘The bite, bitterness and fire in the belly of Marcus Garvey’ was a return to a familiar theme of treacherous black brothers who only trusted in their validation through proximity to the white man. It seems that its very closeness to the truth is what so enraged Garvey’s rivals. ‘Now back of his exaggeration,’ Dr Du Bois would admit, ‘lies a “kernel of truth” that gains him his following; there are plenty of black folk who are bitterly ashamed of their color.’ Though it was perhaps forgivable that they shrank ‘with blind repulsion from the uglier aspects of their race’s degradation’.35
The Negro World would charge that Du Bois was really writing about himself, that he who hailed from a Brahmin caste refused to accept the pre-eminence of someone deemed of the lower caste, such as Garvey. A Negro World essay entitled ‘With Apologies to Shakespeare’ likened the UNIA president to Julius Caesar, and Du Bois and the anti-Garvey cabal to Brutus and the unscrupulous and inferior plotters. In Act XCIX, Senator (James Weldon) Johnson echoed the dismay of the plotters:
Why, man, he doth bestride the world of Negroes
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves,
Now, in the names of all the Gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Garvey feed,
That he is grown so great.36
J. Edgar Hoover was equally irritated by the continuing menace of the ‘notorious Negro agitator’ and frustrated over his stalled prosecution. On 10 August he wrote to the relevant department urging ‘early action upon the prosecution … in order that he [Garvey] may be once and for all put where he can peruse his past activities behind the four walls of the Atlanta clime’.37 Hoover’s anxiety over Garvey’s renewed activities stemmed from the spectacle of the opening of the latest international convention which on 1 August came with an added attraction.
A biplane swooped down over Liberty Hall, roaring back and forth over the heads of the delegates. At the controls sat the beaming twenty-five-year-old Trinidadian, ‘Colonel’ Hubert Fauntleroy Julian – the first black man in the western hemisphere to qualify as a pilot.38 Even in a black metropolis bulging with eccentric characters, ‘Colonel’ Julian stood out in his plus fours, long woollen socks, two-tone brogues, striped silk tie and tight leather skullcap. Once removed, his aviator’s goggles revealed a Hollywood matinee idol’s good looks: a pencil-thin moustache lined lips that were always on the verge of breaking out into a smile. He was immodestly handsome, and at air displays did a brisk trade in autographed photos as well as kisses, sold at $5 a time and ‘if the girls were young and pretty, they got their money’s worth’. In the spring of 1922, the ‘colonel’ had already achieved a measure of fame when he descended on Harlem, literally, parachuting from his plane, avoiding skyscrapers, radio masts and telephone wires, on a publicity stunt for a local optician. He’d quickly gravitated towards the UNIA, joined the African Legion, and been praised by Garvey as a credit to the race. Julian didn’t have the field entirely to himself. ‘Brave’ Bessie Coleman, who’d learnt to fly in France, was also introduced to adoring audiences at the convention. She gave flying exhibitions to the Harlem crowds and, though she wasn’t as spectacular as Julian, she surpassed him in competence. Nonetheless, it was the flamboyant Julian whom Garvey enlisted as an officer in the UNIA; thereafter, as a speaker, the aviator packed out Liberty Hall with his simple message: ‘You can do anything anyone else can do. Just get up and try.’ Try and try again were fitting words to describe the young and somewhat inconsistent pilot. His pioneering parachute jumps – yet to be perfected – were preceded by huge billboard advertisements on 139th Street that encouraged Harlemites to ‘Watch the Clouds This Sunday – Julian is Arriving from the Sky Here’. Amateur bookies offered short odds on his survival, and local undertakers bid for the rights to bury him. On his maiden jump, dressed in a theatrical devil’s costume, Julian leapt clear of the plane, opened his ’chute, struggled with the guidelines, missed his target and landed on top of the post office. Six months later, he jumped again, this time playing the saxophone, and crashed through the glass skylight of Harlem’s police station – a performance that thereafter earned him the sobriquet ‘The Black Eagle of Harlem’.
‘Colonel’ Julian was both a colourful distraction and a useful promoter of Garveyite ideals, none more so than when he planned a solo intercontinental flight from America to Liberia – a project which he envisaged would be funded by Negro donations. Early on, ‘Colonel’ Julian moved to scotch rumours that investors would be throwing away their money on an aeronautical equivalent of the phantom Phyllis Wheatley. He arranged for the plane to be brought to a vacant lot in Harlem where it was christened Ethiopia 1 and the legend, ‘Dedicated to the Advancement of the Race’, was inscribed on its side. On 4 July, Julian arrived at the 139th Street Pier. The flight plans for Ethiopia 1 had met with the same kind of scepticism that Garvey and the BSL had suffered before the launch of the Yarmouth. Critics wrote off the Black Eagle as a showman and opportunist. Raising funds had proved difficult, especially as the NAACP had refused his request to endorse the project. Nonetheless, at the appointed hour of 3.00 p.m., in front of a crowd of tens of thousands and a grandstand packed with UNIA dignitaries and the uniformed Legion, ‘Colonel’ Julian loaded his suitcases, labelled ‘Tropical’, ‘Arctic’, and ‘Stormy Weather’, into Ethiopia 1. Julian reviewed the final preparations, and his patched-together Boeing hydroplane was blessed by the West Indian revivalist preacher, Reverend Theophilus Martin. But just before take-off, three men, frantically waving bits of paper, emerged from the crowd. They were Julian’s creditors and they threatened to ground the plane until their demands for an outstanding payment of $1,500 were met. Into the mêlée marched the irrepressible Sergeant William Wellington Grant and a squad of African Legions. ‘We’ll raise that fifteen hundred in an hour,’ promised the sergeant. Two hours later the plane was cleared for take-off. Ethiopia 1 bombed along the Harlem River, bouncing intermittently, and climbed to several thousand feet. After only a few minutes in the air, it appeared to be in trouble; it kept tilting heavily to starboard and couldn’t get level. A pontoon had been damaged. During take-off the float had scooped up gallons of water, and approximately 3,000 miles from its destination of Monrovia, Ethiopia 1 nosedived into Flushing Bay. ‘While more or less on his course,’ noted the New York Times, the bay ‘had not been a scheduled stop’. The ‘colonel’ was dragged out of the water and ferried to the local hospital, vowing to make another attempt as soon as his dislocated shoulders, broken leg and pride had mended.39
During the 1922 convention it was proposed that the Black Eagle be appointed to head a new aeronautical department in the UNIA. That decision was one of the few areas of agreement in an otherwise fractious month-long gathering. It had all begun so promisingly. ‘Harlem was in gala attire,’ reported the New York World; 5,000 people joined in the march and to an impartial observer the parade ‘did not suffer by comparison with that of 1921’. The respectable turn-out was a relief but even more exciting to Garvey was the news that his strenuous lobbying, for the movement to
be assigned a place at the League of Nations, had paid off. At its inception, Garvey had declared the league ‘null and void as far as the Negro is concerned’. He’d since had a change of heart, implementing a policy that strained a point or two beyond dignity, for recognition. League officials had conceded that the UNIA had ‘a real case which we cannot totally ignore and should not greatly encourage’. They suggested rather haughtily that ‘[Reserved] seats for the Assembly would seem to be the least, and the most, we can do.’40 Memos between European ministries also attested to the inexplicable but undeniable fact of a sustained UNIA influence in Africa. ‘Although the outward appearances and the pompous parades … [were] expressions of the infantile psychology of the Negro race,’ the Italian Ministry of the Colonies counselled against complacency for the showmanship did not diminish the importance of Garvey’s ‘back-to-Africa’ principle – and further, he warned, ‘An Africa which gives hospitality to Negroes who have the education, instruction, feelings and lifestyles of the Americans would be more difficult to colonise than the one before the war.’41
The nine candidates, proposed for the honour of representing the Negro race at the League of Nations, were whittled down to five. Garvey explained that he couldn’t spare more than that number and calibre of men required for the task, when there was a pressing need for them in New York. A modest crowd turned out to send off George O. Marke and the other UNIA delegates to Geneva ‘to petition the League for the granting of German territories in South-West Africa to the black peoples of the world’. At almost any other time the news would have elicited a crescendo of self-congratulation from the executive body, but as was evident right from the start of the convention, Garvey and his officers were suffering from a chronic fragility; were beset by seemingly intractable financial difficulties, and under siege from transparent and hidden adversaries. Even though the body of the New York World coverage of the opening parade was favourable, its headline, ‘Garvey Reviews his Nobility Amid a Few Nosebleeds’, alluded to dissension and scuffles on the fringes of the parade which for the first time was not just guarded by a cordon of police, but a battery of black private detectives and ‘a score or more of uniformed men of the Association’. They shielded the UNIA president and the other dignitaries when they alighted from the vehicles and took their places on the reviewing stand in front of 2305 7th Avenue – the site of the Universal Publishing House. A key photograph of the reviewing stand that day accidentally illustrated the uncomfortable predicament that Garvey found himself in at the beginning of August 1922. Keen-eyed patrolmen stand to the side and in front of the UNIA leader, on the lookout for trouble, but sharing a casual conversation; on the makeshift stand, four rows back from Garvey, and enjoying the view as the sun bounces off their straw boaters, are Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, his rabid critics who were pumping out their ‘Garvey Must Go’ pamphlets from the same building on 7th Avenue which they shared with his publishing house. Indeed, Owen and Randolph had purposefully planned to hold their anti-Garvey Sunday meetings during the same month of the convention. With potential enemies in front and back and swirling all around him, Garvey had nowhere to hide; Harlem was his nerve centre but was now also home to a self-righteous and resourceful enemy; and further, Garvey was increasingly apprehensive about whom he could trust.