Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  The Negro World reporter commissioned to record the daily workings of the month-long convention wrote, without irony, that Marcus Garvey was the one man who was capable of ‘holding together and in harmony the various elements and forces composing the present convention’. Perhaps the writer had been tipped off about the unprecedented step the UNIA leader was about to take. For the first time ever, Garvey assumed the role of Speaker of the Convention, presiding over the hall in the place of the elected speaker, Adrian Johnson.

  The morning session of 4 August began with singing and prayers before delegates settled down to business. Speaker Garvey startled the convention with the news that immediately set the tone for the month-long convention. The first item on the agenda would be the impeachment of the Hon. Adrian Johnson, charged by the president on three counts – neglecting to pay his dues to the movement, lacking in the intellectual rigour required to carry out his tasks in office, and disloyalty. Johnson was outraged and ‘hastily left … in a disgruntled and ugly mood … shouting back at the chair’, threatening to sue the organisation for his unpaid salary.

  The incumbent surgeon-general, Dr J. D. Gibson, was also impeached for making false presentations about his qualifications as a physician, and for ‘disloyalty’. Those who doubted Dr Gibson’s guilt had their misperceptions corrected when witnesses later reported – after the recess – that Dr Gibson had made derogatory remarks about President-General Garvey. Gibson had allegedly grumbled from the back of the hall, ‘If the people are going to sit still and let the “Tsar” rule the organisation, there will be no organisation; it will be smashed.’ Dr Gibson was hurriedly impeached.

  A happier note was struck by the delegate from Bocas del Toro in Costa Rica who enlivened proceedings with a rendition of a song that was the biggest hit at their meetings. It was called ‘Garvey is the Leader in Whom We Trust’. But the first week of the convention ended with rumours of a private conference at the UNIA’s Phyllis Wheatley Hotel, attended by Reverend Eason (the leader of the American Negroes). Allegedly the purpose of the meeting was ‘to curtail the power of the president-general’. A motion expressing confidence in the president-general was passed unanimously by the convention without debate. But with the ‘Garvey Must Go’ campaigners mustering just a few blocks away from the UNIA convention, amid speculations, rumblings and carping ‘off stage’, a vote of confidence was cold comfort.

  Halfway through the convention, the most bizarre rumour of all was reported in the Negro World. Under the headline, ‘Enemies Plot to Do Away With Hon. Marcus Garvey’, the paper detailed a plot to assassinate the president. A ‘reliable source’ had attended a secret meeting in Harlem where in the midst of a heated discussion ‘an avalanche of cheers’ greeted one of the conspirators who’d suggested ‘the only way to get rid of him [Garvey] is to get him’. The paper assured concerned readers that though the UNIA leader was convinced that ‘there wasn’t any of the burlesque’ in the threats to his life, when questioned about whether he was afraid he said calmly, ‘They may assassinate me but the fight for Africa will not lessen.’

  On 18 August, when Marcus Garvey mounted the podium to present his president-general’s report for the year, all equilibrium seems to have deserted him. He lashed out at the ‘incompetent, disloyal, dishonest and characterless individuals’ who constituted the majority (eighteen out of twenty) of his executive council, who instead of performing their functions had ‘carried out intrigues, plots and other evil designs’ against him in the course of the year. He declined to name the culprits or elaborate further except to confirm that he had decided ‘to work no longer with such individuals’ and that, in the future, the cabinet should not be elected but appointed. Having detonated his unexpected bomb, Garvey sat down and pandemonium broke out over the convention centre. ‘Many officers,’ reported the Negro World, ‘desired that Garvey exclude them from the general imputations contained in his remarks’, but the UNIA leader declined to comment further.

  The convention report for the next day carried a strange announcement: ‘President-General Resigns!’

  Marcus Garvey formally tendered his resignation as leader of the UNIA and provisional president of Africa. The news was accompanied by sarcastic cheers from some sections of the hall. Garvey gave as his reason for resigning that ‘he refused to associate any longer with a body of men who were not honest enough to do things above board’. But he left the way open for his return with the explanation that ‘when one resigns because of his conviction, he sometimes comes back a more dangerous fighter than ever before … Some say, “Garvey must go,” but we shall see in a short while who must go … before the UNIA can indulge in a clean fight with those from without, now we have to clean from within.’ Garvey appeared to be trying to force the wholesale resignation of the executive council, to flush out the enemy within. A ‘copious influx of resignations’ followed – but they were invariably those closely associated with Garvey, such as Henrietta Vinton Davis and William Ferris. The majority stubbornly held out, including the man on whom he had most firmly set his sights, the American Leader, J. H. Eason.

  Trouble was certainly coming but in the interim a phoney war would reign with some delightful distractions that focused on Africa. The colourful and eccentric delegate Harry W. Kirby kept popping up with chimerical suggestions to be adopted by the convention. His recommendation that a secret society, ‘The Order of Ethiopia’, be established, whose members could be ‘taught the mother language of the Negro, by which, in whatever part of the world he may be, he can converse with his fellow brother without anyone else being able to understand’, introduced much mirth into the galleries and ultimately ‘fell rather flat’. Perhaps alarmed that Kirby’s ideas of Africa were indicative of the delegates’ overall ignorance of the continent, Dusé Mohamed Ali offered a lecture that served as a ‘rapid sketch or survey of political conditions existing in Africa at the present time’. But the highlight of the convention’s entertainment was a grand fashion parade and pageant ‘of women of African nobility … Escorted by the Universal guards, [they] walked in procession half the length of the hall to the platform, where they were seated on either side of “Her Royal Highness the Queen of Sheba”, represented by Lady Henrietta Vinton Davis.’ She was eventually joined by more than a dozen others. Mrs E. M. Barber caused a flutter of additional excitement as she displayed her costume representing ‘Her Royal Highness Ato Herony, wearing an original Abyssinian dress woven and hand embroidered by African natives, and original ostrich plume’.

  Once the gowns were put away, war was resumed. A rather innocuous report (which appeared in the convention bulletin) of a wrangle between Garvey and Eason over salaries (Eason claimed to be owed more than $1,000) was the prelude to an outright attack on Eason. For as well as acknowledging the legitimacy of the reverend’s salary claim, Garvey was able to inform the convention that inadvertently the investigation had thrown up examples of impropriety. Three days later Garvey provided a detailed list of Eason’s transgressions and duly charged him with serious and impeachable wrongdoings.

  It was a dangerous moment. The ‘silver-tongued Eason’ was a tough and resourceful orator – a much-admired lieutenant, especially by African-Americans, and effectively second only to Garvey in his influence within the movement. The case against Eason would have to be carefully framed and rock-solid. It was not. Instead, the pettiness of the charge, when it was articulated, was almost beyond belief. As outlined by Garvey, Eason had erred by selling pictures of himself and the president-general of the UNIA and of pocketing the proceeds; other questionable instances of financial dishonesty (borrowing money from UNIA members) were added to strengthen the case against him. The real unstated charge was that in the rancorous bear-pit of Liberty Hall, in the fevered atmosphere of betrayal that whispered from every wall, Eason could not be trusted. It was, in a sense, a reasonable assumption.

  Eason had bristled at Garvey’s encouragement of the cult of personality that had grown up around him. President-G
eneral Garvey had become, of late, far too imperial for Eason’s republican tastes: the phonograph recordings of Garvey’s famous speeches on sale at the convention; life-size portraits of the UNIA leader that graced the walls of HQ and the line of march on UNIA parades, might be excused as necessary propaganda rather than projecting the eminence of the leader. They were just about acceptable to Eason (after all his own souvenir medallion might also be purchased by the faithful); but, recently, the UNIA leader had all but abandoned any lingering pretence of collective decision-making. The debacle over the Ku Klux Klan was the clearest example. In October 1921 Eason told a Liberty Hall crowd, ‘It is laughable to hear some people here in Harlem say they are ready for the Ku Klux Klan, when they have not even a pop gun with which to defend themselves.’ The threat of violent self-defence, Eason maintained, was the watchword of the UNIA – an organisation that he was proud to be part of because it was ‘trying to create a force, a power among Negroes, by getting them all lined up, that will enable them successfully to combat against the Ku Klux Klan or any other band or group of people whose purpose and object is to destroy or oppress Negroes’. He was proud also of the sign that had subsequently been erected at Liberty Hall which read, ‘The New Negro is Ready for the Ku Klux Klan’. Now, less than a year later, came the galling and unforgivable news that Garvey had met the Imperial Wizard. In two hours of self-righteous diplomatic folly, Eason believed, Garvey had stripped the movement of its popular militancy and irreversibly tarnished its reputation with a despicable act of appeasement. Eason had held his silver tongue in the interests of unity but Garvey rightly anticipated that it would not be much longer before it would be let loose. By levelling a charge of malfeasance against the American leader, Garvey had pre-empted Eason’s public attack on him that was bound to come.

  Reverend Eason consented to being put on trial but only if he could state his counter-claims to the entire convention. Garvey agreed. But during Eason’s trial the reverend was to find that the charge sheet against him had expanded. Witnesses were encouraged to come forward with other accounts of Reverend Eason’s behaviour that was unbecoming of a man who held such a high office; in particular that he was a ‘whisky-head’ who, when on the road with female officers, had drunkenly barged into their hotel rooms, late at night, and tried to climb into bed with them – before passing out.

  Predictably, Eason spelt out much graver accusations against Garvey on 22 August, though couched in generalisations – ‘incompetence, forming an alliance with a discreditable organisation and creating an unfriendly feeling among American Negroes’. No one from inside the organisation had ever publicly spoken about its leader like that before. That such words were pronounced by one of its most revered members aggregated the offence; Eason’s allegations struck Liberty Hall like an almighty thunderclap. ‘An air of disgust and displeasure pervaded the entire audience,’ noted the convention report, and when the American leader itemised his charges against Garvey, ‘outward expressions of wrath were registered … [with] hisses and derisive remarks arising from all parts of the hall’.42 In a lengthy, pedantic and angry exchange – with both men relying on the services of the organisation’s attorneys – the outcome was not unexpected. Garvey was vindicated; judgment was found against his assistant. Eason was dismissed from his cabinet position and expelled from the UNIA for a lifetime (99 years). Reverend Eason’s subsequent attempts to take on the agreed role of plaintiff and have Garvey tried, foundered immediately on the technicality that the reverend was now no longer a member of the organisation; he was not privileged to level such an accusation.

  With Eason out of the way, there was diminished resistance to Garvey’s suggestions that the rest of the cabinet be requested to resign; they were given ten minutes to do so and duly obliged. At the end of the month when nominations for the vacant post of president-general and provisional president of Africa were called for ‘the convention was literally stampeded … it seemed as though every delegate rose simultaneously and vied with one another to place the name of Hon. Marcus Garvey’. No count was needed for the unanimous re-election of Marcus Garvey, and following the revisions to the constitution, he was then free to make his own appointments.

  The newly re-elected president-general had banked on the necessary but unpleasant business of purging the high command to bring an end to the infighting. ‘No great movement,’ he had said, ‘can successfully lead itself on to victory against any opposition while having within its ranks those who give aid and comfort to the enemy’. But a pall of discontent settled, like a damp and persistently cloying fog, over the remaining days of the proceedings. Eason’s allies struggled to rid themselves of the thoughts of the injustice meted out to their man; they consoled themselves with the spurious argument that the dastardly deed was not the fault of Garvey but the work of new confidants who’d inveigled themselves into positions where they were more than capable of ‘putting devilment in the president’s head’.43 These Garvey boosters who justified, without irony, the need ‘to weed out the figureheads who seem to think that we come to destroy all the Negroes who do not agree with us’, had not bargained for the BOI informants who waited at the gates of Liberty Hall for the resigned and expelled former executive officers. They constituted a group who now more than ever was disinclined to be governed by the dictum, ‘If you can’t bring yourself to praise then at least “do no harm”.’

  At the conclusion of the convention, Garvey strove for an amicable separation from those officers who voluntarily retired or were forced to do so. Now that the deed was done, he spoke sympathetically about the sense of loss they might feel. Garvey bid them think beyond themselves for the good of the organisation. Their removal was purely business and the retiring officers should feel proud of their past contributions. In a gesture of magnanimity, Garvey invited them each to make a final farewell address to the hall.

  The former high chancellor was the first to speak, followed by the commissioner-general and lastly the Honourable U. S. Poston, the exminister of labor. With a sweep of his arm, Poston turned to the new executives lined up alongside Garvey and offered a word of warning. Conjuring the spectre of Napoleon, years after his many glories, now exiled on St Helena, he bid Garvey to reflect on the wisdom of the petit général’s painful reminiscence: ‘Had my council properly advised me, had they opposed me at times, France would have ruled supreme.’44

  There were still powerful and forthright individuals on the fringes of Garvey’s movement but after the purges of 1922, their numbers were severely depleted. Similarly, too, the voices of moderation in the ‘Garvey Must Go’ collective were drowned out by bellicose and belligerent opponents, girded to tell the most unflattering truths. As the convention drew to a close, and each side slid towards a modus operandi bereft of limiting rules of engagement, their internecine squabble was about to take a dark and sinister turn.

  15

  CAGING THE TIGER

  To jail Marcus Garvey would dim romance; like jailing a rainbow.

  New York Journal, 18 January 1922

  ON the afternoon of 5 September 1922, A. Philip Randolph was working at his desk in the cramped offices of the Messenger at 2305 7th Avenue (two flights up from UNIA Publishing House), when a brown paper package was delivered, addressed to him. On the back, in place of the name and address of the sender, was simply written, ‘From a Friend’. Randolph sized up the package, pondering its New Orleans postmark. As he began to rip open the paper he noticed some ‘whitish powder’ falling out. It stopped him in his tracks. Randolph, a smooth and elegant fellow, had a reputation for being unflappable, but the anonymity of the sender and the strange powder alarmed him, and aroused his suspicions. A. Philip Randolph telephoned the local police precinct and suggested they send over someone from the bomb squad. The police took the call seriously and dispatched detectives straight away. Arriving at the Messenger’s offices, the detectives took the precaution of lowering the package into a bucket of water. Doing so removed the chance of any explosio
n. Once everyone was satisfied, they could then inspect the content. Randolph later reported to readers of the magazine that ‘to the utter amazement and horror of everyone, upon opening the package a human hand was found’.1 The hand had been severed at the wrist. As ‘the back [was] covered with red hair’, reported the New York Times, it was ‘evidently that of a white man’. The clue as to the identity and motive of the sender came with a letter that accompanied the package, signed KKK: