by Colin Grant
Listen Randolph: We have been watching your writings in all your papers for quite a while, but we want you to understand before we act. If you are not in favour with your own race movement, you can’t be with ours. There is no space in our race for you and your crowd. We have sent you a sample of our good work, so watch your step or else …
Now let me see your name in your nigger improvement association as a member, paid up too, in about a week from now. Don’t worry about lynching in the South. If you were here, you wouldn’t talk about it. Now be careful how you publish this letter in your magazine or we may have to send your hand to someone else. Don’t think we can’t get you or your crowd. Although you are in New York City it is just as easy as if you were in Georgia.
The Times concluded that the threatening letter was ‘thought to refer to a controversy between Randolph, in his publication, and Marcus Garvey, self-styled President of the Provisional Republic of Africa’. A. Philip Randolph certainly concurred but then he was also the likely source of the Times’s speculation. Randolph later voiced his suspicion in the Messenger that the ‘Klan had come to the rescue of its Negro leader, Marcus Garvey’. Garvey was scandalised. But despite his protestations of innocence, others recalled a speech Garvey had made at the convention the month before, when he is said to have advised Owen and Randolph ‘and others who disagreed with him’ to ‘get themselves another job’, as he, Garvey, ‘could not be responsible for anything that might happen to them because they might come up with a hand or a leg or a broken head’.
Still, no one was ever arrested over the incident, and the UNIA leader was adamant that he had nothing to do with it. In his view, the bizarre event amounted to little more than a ‘publicity stunt’. It was to be expected, Garvey informed readers, because Randolph and his band of black Socialists ‘have been trying to steal some of my own publicity for a long time’.2
Envy clearly had a part to play in their enmity. By 1922, the Messenger, the fearless agent of subversion, had lost much of its power and many of its black admirers. Given the choice, the journal-reading black proletariat opted for the Negro World. The rival Socialist magazine conceded that Garvey had ‘inculcated into the minds of Negroes the need and value of organisation’, but it was the wrong kind of organisation. It was this sense, the lost opportunity effectively to evangelise among the black masses, as much as Garvey’s cosying up to the Ku Klux Klan, that drove the otherwise cool Randolph to a pitch of fury. As he later admitted, ‘Against the emotional power of Garveyism, what I was preaching didn’t stand a chance.’3
The affair of the severed hand served only to exacerbate their differences and unnerve neutral observers about when and how this quickening conflict might end.
Apart from the long-term undercover agent 800, the BOI now employed at least three others – one of whom, the black special agent James E. Amos, seemed specially adept at tracking down potentially hostile witnesses to Garvey and ‘bringing them in’. In a previous incarnation, James Amos had served as President Theodore Roosevelt’s bodyguard and valet; his graceful efficiency and disarming manner equipped him for this new and delicate task. Amos had been assigned to the case at the outstart, from Garvey’s arrest back in January 1922, and by the end of the year, he didn’t even need to venture from the bureau’s office to openly solicit information. All manner of associates of the UNIA presented themselves to him. Among those interviewed in September included the recently expelled Dr Gibson and Reverend Eason, who were willing to provide ‘letters, papers and … anything else that will be of service … when Garvey is tried … and are willing to testify for the Government anytime they are called’.4 Rumours of the scale and success of Amos’s investigation were sufficiently worrisome to Garvey for him to send his attorneys to see whether it might yet be possible to broker a deal with the investigator. Amos dutifully reported back to his superiors ‘a proposition to have the Department of Justice quash the indictment if Garvey would pay back dollar for dollar to all the stockholders. The funds for this compensation would be generated from a tax levied on each member of the UNIA – a suggestion which Amos laughingly dismissed as ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’.
No matter the difficulties that daily threatened to envelop him and the movement, Garvey was determined to push ahead with new ideas. Not for him the caution that might be expected from a frightening glimpse over the precipice. As even his enemies acknowledged, Garvey was a superb organiser and promoter. By its very nature, promotion is attached to risk; some promotions will succeed and others will fail. Garvey would answer his critics by asking them what they had done for the race; where were the hundreds of thousands of black people that they had inspired; where were the enterprises that they had launched to employ black people? He had given the black race new thoughts about itself and convinced a whole people that, contrary to what they were led to believe, they were not necessarily born to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. Success was not finite and might best be measured decades hence – in the achievements of subsequent generations. At one stage, when asked about the failure of the Black Star Line, Garvey snapped back, ‘We have succeeded in the sense of our desire for success.’5
September brought further opportunities for a capacious imagination which was constantly running ahead. Barely a week after he had closed the convention, Garvey once again selected from his wardrobe the ceremonial garments of office, ‘a flowing robe of crimson slashed with green’ – replacing the traditional scarlet and blue, worn by an English honorary doctor of civil laws – complete with Oxford academic cap, in preparation for the unveiling of the Booker T. Washington University. The educational institution, housed in the UNIA-run Phyllis Wheatley Hotel at 3–13 West 136th Street, was planned as a memorial to Washington. Garvey conceived it as building on the ideas of the famous Tuskegee Institute, and more than 100 students (from around the world) were expected in the first intake. At its core was the principle that graduation from the Booker T. Washington University would be a requirement for each future representative of the UNIA.6
Education was also the credo of the UNIA’s theatrical presentations. A racially edifying impetus underscored the midnight staging of the dramatic club’s Tallaboo at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre. The play might not be able to compete with the glamour and pizzazz of Shuffle Along, the record-breaking Negro musical comedy, but then it had no intention to. Tallaboo was a corollary to Shuffle Along which, at its heart, was the ‘burlesque of two ignorant Negroes going into “big business” and opening a grocery store [which] was a never-failing producer of side-shaking laughter’.7 Tallaboo, with its equally impressive cast of thirty characters, never offered such comic diversions, but rather promised to interpret the ideals of the UNIA – perhaps not a winning formula for a sell-out show. Wavering prospective punters, though, would soon be able reach a decision by reading a review in the organisation’s new daily newspaper, the Negro Times.
The Daily Negro Times came courtesy of a new printing press costing $12,000 which Garvey had installed in 2305 7th Avenue, and made ready for its launch in September. Aided by a regular United Press ticker (which ticked away with copy from all of the major news agencies) the Daily Negro Times aimed to cover world news from a black perspective.For the executive editorship of the paper, Garvey took the kind of bold and far-sighted decision that he was famed for, and which, perhaps, no other newspaper proprietor in the whole of America would have considered. He appointed a sixty-six-year-old man who, at various times in the past two decades, had been more commonly associated with hobos and other unfortunate destitute alcoholics. For more than twenty years, from 1880 onwards, Timothy Thomas Fortune had been the leading black journalist in America. He’d owned and edited the Globe which metamorphosed into the Freeman and finally the influential New York Age. A handsome and erudite man, great things had once been expected of T. Thomas Fortune in the last flush of the nineteenth century; he’d been an electrifying race leader of some import. But by 1907, he was well on his way to becoming a tragic
and embarrassing figure. He’d succumbed to the ravages of alcohol and poor mental health, and sold his controlling interest in the Age. Thereafter, he had eked out a living as a freelance writer, during the lucid intervals that punctuated his addiction. Timothy Fortune was an old friend of Bruce Grit. Bruce vouched for him, and Garvey gave the old man a chance; perhaps his last chance to be reunited with his former splendid self. Other newspaper proprietors had averted their pitying gaze when the etiolated Fortune came knocking. But for a brief and exciting time, in his last years, Timothy Thomas Fortune would find a home on a Garvey newspaper, and be reacquainted with a consistent journalistic and literary life long forfeited.8 ‘Newspaper’ would have been a generous description of the Negro Times as far as Garvey’s critics were concerned; they considered it to have been conceived by Garvey pri marily as a vehicle for propaganda. If true, then there was plenty of adverse propaganda to counter, particularly the allegations of Garvey’s self-aggrandisement. The most fantastic claim, spouted by his old enemies at the Chicago Defender, was that Garvey was building a palatial dwelling for himself, rumoured to cost $45,000, in Larchmont, NY – one of the most exclusive and fashionable colonies. It was a claim which drew deep draughts of laughter from Garvey. Surely, it was, he said, akin to Moses building a mansion on the banks of the Nile ‘while the people were passing in the wilderness’.
There were signs that Marcus Garvey was growing tired of the constant sniping from the black press and less able and inclined to shrug off the negative comments as the carping of inferior Lilliputians who were excited by no other sport as much as binding a Negro Gulliver. Increasingly, he saw the black press as simply instruments of ‘a people who are enemies to themselves’. Everywhere he went now, he was called the Negro Moses – sometimes sarcastically. He was prepared to pay the cost of leading black people out of the wilderness but still he was surprised by their ingratitude. He shared such dark thoughts with an audience at Liberty Hall and reminded them that the Israelites – buoyant on setting out – had begun to propagandise against Moses ‘when they had gone not even half the journey … [and] started to doubt his ability to lead them to the promised land’.9
Counter-propaganda was the impetus behind Garvey’s first published book. It had been his young wife, Amy Jacques’s, idea to put together a collection of his speeches and epigrams ‘to educate the reading public … and to help to counteract many of the misquoted statements attributed to my husband’.10 That calm, unflustered statement of intent belied the urgency felt by Jacques to put out something that might act as a corrective to the degrading vitriol swirling around Garvey. The book The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey was much needed as an unthreatening apologia to white America. Some of Garvey’s intemperate, fiery and rebellious language would have to be smoothed over. Any suggestion of settling of scores, retaliatory lynching of white people, ‘sharpening of swords’ for the conflicts ahead and pushing forward through ‘oceans of blood’ would be excised.
The aim, therefore, was to present Garvey to the larger white world in the way that his followers saw him. To them, Garvey by his own example, by his learning and dignified bearing, was not only a symbol of the utmost humanity of the Negro but also of the overlooked and repressed talent of people of African descent. With dissertations that ranged from evolution to world disarmament, Garvey emerged from his Philosophy and Opinions as the embodiment of an idea: that the African was just as capable of erudition, scholarship, refinement and leadership as anybody else.
The problem, though, for the UNIA leader was that whenever he spoke now there were enemies (especially amongst African-American leaders) ready to pounce on every word so that a typical ‘tough-love’ speech was characterised as the twisted logic of a Negro-hater. At the state fair in Raleigh, North Carolina, he meditated on a favourite theme: Negro indolence. Robert Poston, a UNIA officer, stood by his side ‘constantly chiming a string of approving “all rights”’, as Garvey sought to inspire by berating the black audience for its laziness: ‘If I waited for Negroes to convey me from New York to Raleigh,’ he lamented, ‘I would be walking for six month[s].’ Curiously, reported Greensboro Daily News, even as Garvey ‘took the hide off his hearers … they cheered’. The architects of the ‘Garvey Must Go’ campaign were condemnatory. Months later, the Messenger depicted Garvey in an editorial cartoon wearing his familiar academic cap, but with the body of a donkey, and a caption which referred to a previous editorial, branding Garvey, ‘A Supreme Negro Jamaican Jackass’.11
In seizing on Garvey’s West Indianness (and this was increasingly the case) his African-American critics defaulted to prejudices that had characterised much of the internal conflict in America’s recent history. The Red Scare of 1919 was predicated on much the same assumptions; in that case on the un-American Bolshevist activities of recent migrants. But the nativism cost the editors of the Messenger little save for the wrath of their present Caribbean allies such as Wilfred Domingo, Garvey’s former friend. Domingo detected a hypocritical willingness on their part to exaggerate the differences between black Americans and Caribbeans, in much the same way that they had accused Garvey of overstating the class differences between the various shades of black Americans. Supplicants to Garvey, who’d previously claimed the singular honour of being first to introduce him to the African-American masses, were now competing for the title of being the first to unmask the West Indian enemy within their midst – a man who ostensibly looked like any other African-American but who had subliminally and successfully introduced dangerous, foreign ideas, having cast a spell over their earlier impressionable selves.12
Reverend Eason’s expulsion from the movement also opened up another potentially dangerous front against Garvey. The reverend was a powerful orator whose standing had not waned with his removal. Indeed, prior to his expulsion, he had voiced a popular sentiment that West Indians were looked on more favourably in the hierarchy of the movement than their African-American counterparts; that Jamaicans, Trinidadians and Barbadians, for example, were over-represented in the high command. The thirty-six-year-old Eason may have been discarded but he was not about to accept early retirement and to relinquish his ambitions and his own vision of the future of African-Americans. In September, much to Garvey’s annoyance, James Eason announced the launch of the Universal Negro Alliance, and bragged of wrenching Garvey’s followers away from him. Both men would be appealing to the same audiences. Though Eason would stress that once his programme was up and running, it would focus on the near and attainable, not the far and fanciful; there were ample concerns for the black man to address right on his doorstep in America, never mind chasing sunsets in a mythical African homeland or sending delegates on fool’s errands to the League of Nations.13 But if Eason stood any chance of making inroads into Garvey’s substantial movement, he would have to tap into prime audiences, such as those in Pennsylvania and Louisiana, where he would often find himself trailing in Garvey’s footsteps; his rival had been there well before him. Once the ‘mouthagram’ (as his wife Amy Jacques affectionately referred to him) got on the road, there was no stopping him; Garvey talked and talked and never stopped, although there were intermittent attempts by the authorities to muzzle him.
The staunch Garveyite, Queen Mother Audley Moore, recalled a UNIA delegation besieging the Mayor of New Orleans to permit Garvey to come into the city and speak in the middle of 1922. It was an extremely tense and volatile occasion. Garvey had received death threats, and a huge audience, protective of their leader, turned out to hear him: ‘We all was armed. Everybody had bags of ammunition too.’ Even Queen Mother Moore was packing a couple of pistols – little 38 specials – ‘one in my bosom and one in my pocket’. There was the possibility that the authorities might ban the rally at the last minute. ‘So when Garvey came in, we applauded, and the police were lined man to man along the line of each row.’ Audley Moore’s memory focused on the pivotal moment when Garvey began to criticise the mayor for being a stooge and the police chief interrupted
and threatened to arrest Garvey. ‘When he did this, everybody jumped up on benches and pulled out their guns and just held the guns in the air and said, ‘Speak, Garvey, speak.’ And Garvey said, ‘As I was saying’, and he went on and repeated what he had said before, and the police filed out of the hall like little puppy dogs with their tails behind them.’14
On his return to New York, Garvey would tell of the dramatic events slightly differently. He had indeed been prevented from holding a meeting on his first night in New Orleans but through his lawyers, Garvey obtained an injunction restraining the chief of police from interfering with his speech. The next night thousands of supporters turned up to hear him speak at Longshoreman’s Hall in New Orleans. ‘Several dozen Secret Service men and detectives lined up at the front of the platform,’ said Garvey and ‘things got so hot that the police chief rose’ at one point and threatened to arrest him. Garvey told the man to ‘Sit down there! Sit down!’ The humbled police chief then marched his men down the aisle; lined them up outside the hall, brought up a patrol wagon and waited for the meeting to end, and unwittingly, concluded the UNIA leader, provided ‘a guard of honour for me to march through’. A lynching party was said to have lain in wait for Garvey at the end of his speech in New Orleans and was only foiled by the presence of police who had lined his route from the Longshoreman’s Hall to the place where he was to sleep that night.15
Garvey’s telling of his time in New Orleans was not as colourful as Queen Mother’s rendition but they shared the same sense of triumph that he would not be silenced.