Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  ‘Speak, Garvey, speak’ – the same cry was chanted wherever Garvey went on his tour. Speaking was his great gift and Garvey generated such excitement that no admirer would risk failing to catch a glimpse of him. It was this ability to articulate the ‘submerged thoughts of an awakening people’ that sustained Negro belief in Garvey and bemused and befuddled enemies such as Du Bois. The list of those who doubted Garvey was growing daily but then there was also a concomitant expansion in new recruits to Garveyism. Even now, and amongst African-Americans who should, Du Bois believed, have known better. William Sherrill, a successful businessman, a black freemason and comfortably insured for a lifetime, if not of the American dream, then its near elite African-American equivalent, was clearly NAACP material. But one night, as he later told it, on the way to the theatre, he saw a huge crowd outside a church and was drawn to enquire what was going on. ‘A lady turned to me and said, “Man alive, don’t you know that Marcus Garvey is there talking.”’ Sherrill purchased a ticket and squeezed in at the back of the church and ‘heard a voice like thunder from Heaven’. Garvey was in full flow: ‘Men and women, what are you here for? To live unto yourself, until your body manures the earth, or to live God’s Purpose to the fullest?’ After an hour Sherrill realised that he was going to miss the theatre. ‘I stood there like one in a trance, every sentence ringing in my ears, finding an echo in my heart.’16 William Sherrill was converted that night, and within a year, at the end of the international convention, he’d been made a key appointee in the UNIA, replacing Eason as leader of American Negroes.

  If Sherrill gave testimony to Garvey’s continued ‘magnetism and persuasive eloquence as a speaker’, there were other indications that the president-general and his movement might be forced to share the limelight in the near future. Months after his own visit to New Orleans, he was receiving reports that the local branch were flirting with the enemy, his former right-hand man, Eason. A bullish officer from HQ, Thomas Anderson, was charged with enforcing discipline, and with some relish he set about reminding the secretary of the New Orleans division that ‘an enemy of the President General … is an enemy to the organisation’. Anderson expressed some sympathy with the secretary, whose long-standing association with Eason was perfectly acceptable during the two years when the American leader was still favourably regarded, but now that Eason had fallen from grace and was persona non grata, if by some oversight, ‘Mr Eason is still in your community,’ the secretary was cautioned, ‘you know what attitude you should assume, and this is expected of you.’ In case the New Orleans secretary should be in any doubt, Anderson underlined the point: ‘At this time the Parent Body is not in attitude to tolerate the slightest suspicion of disloyalty.’17

  A lower threshold of intolerance seemed to infect the movement generally. The Norfolk Journal (a black paper) bemoaned the fact that Garvey’s supporters drew little distinction between news and editorials. ‘We have become weary of trying to reason with them … they are going to fume and fuss and slander all who do not agree with them anyway.’18 On 21 October, the fuss turned into a riot at the Sterling Hotel in Cincinnati when Samuel Saxon, a lecturer from New York, weighed into Garvey at the start of a meeting aimed at exposing the UNIA. Garveyites in the audience took exception; knives were brandished and, trying to flee the auditorium, Saxon was stabbed and hit over the head with upturned chairs.19

  William Pickens also claimed Garveyites tried to intimidate him when he was about to give a talk at the AME church in Toronto. They barred his way at the entrance to the church and, ‘fingering their hip-pockets’, cautioned him against criticising the movement. Pickens allegedly answered back in kind that he would ‘not be frightened for the millionth part of a second by any lily-livered, coconut-busting monkey chasers, even in Canada’.20

  One clue to Garveyite hypersensitivity to criticism lay in the final line of Pickens’s anecdote: ‘coconut-busting monkey chasers’ was shorthand on the streets of Harlem for West Indians. Foreign-born UNIA members especially resented the way that Garvey’s nationality – his being Jamaican or West Indian – was highlighted, and instinctively closed ranks and rallied round their man. Poring over the volumes of abuse heaped upon Garvey, they could be forgiven for believing that the UNIA leader’s most serious crime was not the content of his programme but his nationality. The xenophobic stench was fresh in the nostrils of Wilfred Domingo who resigned his commission from the ranks of the Garvey-baiters, his former allies on the editorial board of the Messenger, who led the ‘Garvey Must Go’ campaign. ‘I will not point out,’ wrote Domingo, deliberately pointing out in an open letter to the Messenger in March 1923, ‘that it is incompatible with your professed Socialist faith for you to initiate an agitation for deportation or to emphasise the nationality of anyone as a subtle means of generating opposition against him.’

  Such sentiments amongst West Indians were not so delicately expressed the month before. Then James Eason addressed an anti-Garvey meeting in Chicago which ended in mayhem when a policeman who sought to apprehend a disruptive Garveyite was shot and wounded.21 But it wasn’t just West Indians who were sensitised to perceived acts of betrayal; black America was steeped in a tradition of pathological in-fighting and a visceral hatred of duplicity that went back to the days of slavery when even the smallest act of rebellion might be foiled by informants. ‘There was a terrible oath you had to take,’ remembered Mariamne Samad. ‘It was, “May my tongue cleave to the top of my mouth if I were to do anything to hurt my race.”’

  There is no evidence that any of these assaults by Garvey supporters were coordinated. But certainly anxiety about loss of control and over-sensitivity – if not paranoia – had crept into the organisation. HQ was particularly vexed by the perceived lack of compliance from the division in New Orleans. Something had to be done. Garvey fastened onto a more subtle approach. On 9 November, he dispatched Esau Ramus to New Orleans with a letter of introduction to William Phillips, the secretary of the local division. The letter requested that the secretary ‘find some organising work for him [Ramus] to do for the Division in going around enlisting new members and helping generally’. Phillips wrote back that he was happy to oblige, that he was arranging for Ramus to visit members in their homes with items such as ‘[the] new constitution, buttons, anthems etc’, with a view to ‘selling such articles as he can get from the Parent Body’.

  Two days later, Phillips wrote again. He had learnt that Ramus was intent on offering an altogether different kind of service. Rather than retailing UNIA memorabilia, ‘Mr Ramus is endeavouring to organise a police and secret service.’ The secretary hoped to minimise any obstacles but Ramus’s efforts, to date, had ‘not met the approval of the majority of the officers’.22

  Esau Ramus (sometimes John Jeffries), it now transpired, was one of the chiefs of the secret service for the Garvey organisation, which had grown out of Garvey’s ceremonial, uniformed African Legion, following the attempt on his life in 1919. Operatives of the secret service were secret in name only: the membership knew that it counted amongst its number UNIA police and secret service agents who masqueraded as janitors and vendors of the Negro World. Ramus had formally joined the UNIA in Philadelphia where he worked ostensibly as the janitor at the local Liberty Hall. New Orleans had about thirty men on the force and, with or without help from the secretary, Ramus was determined to bind them together under his authority. Sometime in November, Esau Ramus moved into the home of a forty-two-year-old Jamaican longshoreman and local chief of the UNIA police, Constantine (Fred) Dyer, and, as might be expected of a competent secret service agent, quietly went about his work.

  The trial date for Marcus Garvey and the other defendants in the mail fraud case was set for 15 December, but, as had already happened on several occasions, the proceedings had to be postponed (due to the deferral court’s crowded calendar) and a new date scheduled for the first week in January. Garvey had made plans for a new European fundraising and lecture tour, and whilst they were set aside, his rival
James Eason pushed off to the South once more to bolster his support in New Orleans, assuring the BOI agents that he would be back in New York on 2 January should he be called as a witness.

  Reverend Eason had been invited by a committee of members of his new Universal Negro Alliance to preach to the congregation of a local Baptist church, St John’s on 1st Street. The congregation was mostly made up of African-Americans, but that night there were about half a dozen Jamaicans in the church. The presence of one of the Jamaicans, later identified as Constantine Dyer, struck some parishioners as odd because they knew him but had never known him to set foot in the church before. At the end of the service, at about 10.30 p.m., Eason left St John’s and was greeted on the steps by a number of old friends. They were walking away from the church when there was a sudden commotion behind. Three strangers had been following Reverend Eason’s group; they ran up now and one of them pulled out a gun and fired. The first shots struck the pavement. The next bullet went into the back of Eason. He stumbled and half-turned to see his assailant fire another shot into his forehead. The reverend collapsed. Some of Eason’s friends chased after the assailants but they fired back at the pursuers, leapt a fence and made their escape. The grievously wounded Eason was taken to the Charity Hospital. He survived long enough to give a description of the events. He told reporters that he was in no doubt as to the motive of the shooting. ‘I am positive,’ he asserted, ‘that my assailants were acting on instructions to put me out of the way and prevent my appearing as a witness at the Garvey trial.’ Eason was in a critical condition but, dipping in and out of consciousness, he appeared not to understand the seriousness of his injuries. He would, he said, be able to identify the gunmen. But in the early hours of 4 January 1923, Reverend James Eason died from his wounds.23

  The parishioners of St John’s were able to identify two of the assailants as Garveyites. Soon after, newspapers reported the arrest of William Shakespeare, Negro ‘chief of police’ of the UNIA and Constantine (Fred) Dyer, Negro member of the ‘force’. Both men were charged with Eason’s murder. Neither man claimed responsibility for the attack but they were quoted in the New York Amsterdam News as saying they were glad and that ‘Eason richly deserved what he got’. Shakespeare and Dyer were indicted for his murder. But there was a third man. The BOI quickly dispatched its undercover agent 800 to New Orleans to investigate; Garvey had already sent Thomas Anderson, a UNIA official, from Harlem to New Orleans to liaise with the local New Orleans division. Anderson now wrote back to the secretary-general, Robert Poston in Harlem, of the unexpected arrival of Captain Jones: ‘That stout bright fellow, formerly connected with the Negro World, is here and is making himself active, we are informed, as regards this Eason matter. We are convinced that he is in Federal employ.’ Even though the local division suspected that Captain Jones was a federal agent, he was able to confirm the identity of the third man: Esau Ramus.24

  Ramus had skipped town and was rumoured to be in Detroit. His ‘mysterious trip to New Orleans’, coinciding with Eason’s murder, only confirmed J. Edgar Hoover’s suspicions of a direct UNIA involvement; but, in their eagerness to support his hypothesis, junior BOI agents appear to have marshalled hearsay rather than facts. According to theinvestigating agent Amos, Marcus Garvey was informed of the assassination of Eason within minutes of the shooting. Amos alleged that a telegram had been sent to Garvey’s wife simply stating that ‘the work had been done’.25 In an interview with the New York Times on 21 January, the UNIA leader stated vehemently, ‘We have absolutely no connection with the murder of J. W. H. Eason, and the statement that Eason was a star witness against me is without foundation.’ With the UNIA now under enormous pressure, it might have been expected to distance itself from Shakespeare and Dyer; instead Garvey called for a defence fund to be established for the two men, and put out an insipid obituary of Reverend Eason in the Negro World which suggested his death was the result of an unsavoury love tryst with a married woman.26

  Esau Ramus was eventually apprehended by the BOI a couple of months later. He claimed (off the record) to have received instructions from Garvey that when Eason spoke in New Orleans ‘his meeting must be broken up or he (Eason) must not return to New York alive’.27 The word from UNIA HQ offered a far less sinister explanation for Ramus’s visit to New Orleans; the secret service man had proved a nuisance in New York and he was simply sent south – out of a sense of exasperation – to get him out of the way. There was never any direct evidence, despite the rumours, to implicate Garvey in Eason’s murder. Although Garvey could be violent in his language with talk of ‘wading through oceans of blood’ and ‘sharpening swords’, these were the words of rhetorical speech of a conservative man steeped in the ‘fire and brimstone’ of the Old Testament. It was the kind of language which the authorities always worried might incite excitable, less grounded individuals to violence, and perhaps on this occasion did so. Ramus’s allegations were never put in court, as he was wanted, tried and sentenced for a previous armed robbery. By then the prosecution of Dyer and Shakespeare was well under way. In April, both men were tried and convicted of Eason’s killing and sentenced to eighteen-to-twenty-year prison terms.

  Black newspapers deplored the murder of Eason. They were, by turns, alarmed and deeply fearful; but mostly they were embarrassed by the odium it brought on the race. Perhaps the New York Amsterdam News expressed the sentiments of the majority when it issued a dire prediction for the UNIA following the reverend’s fateful shooting: ‘We are not willing to go so far as to say that Marcus Garvey was implicated directly or indirectly in the cowardly assassination of J. W. H. Eason … The men who actually shot Mr Eason may have thought they were doing the UNIA a service, but they are mistaken. What they actually did was to give it its first serious blow – a blow from which it will never, never recover.’

  Events moved very quickly thereafter. The murder of Eason acted to release the ‘Garvey Must Go’ group from any trace of restraint. They were in constant communication with agent Amos of the BOI, and included him now in the coordination of the release of an open letter to be sent to the Attorney-General, Harry M. Daugherty, and copied to as many sympathetic newspaper editors as possible around the country, drawing his attention to ‘a heretofore unconsidered menace to harmonious race relationships’. The letter, signed by eight of ‘the most distinguished and responsible businessmen, educators and publicists among the colored people of the United States’, was no less than an attempt to discredit and finally destroy the Garvey movement. It began, ‘There is in our midst certain Negro criminals and potential murderers, both foreign and American born, who are actuated by intense hatred against the white race.’ The UNIA was, according to the authors, ‘composed in the main of Negro sharks and ignorant fanatics’, led by a man who wasn’t even a citizen of the United States but rather was ‘an unscrupulous demagogue who has ceaselessly and assiduously sought to spread among Negroes distrust and hatred of all white people’. The letter went on to catalogue the incidents of thuggery, violence and intimidation that had culminated in the murder of Reverend Eason. The eight respectable authors called on the Attorney-General to ‘use his full influence completely to disband and extirpate this vicious movement, and that he vigorously and speedily push the government’s case against Marcus Garvey for using the mails to defraud’. The signers of this letter were:

  William Pickens

  Robert Bagnall

  Chandler Owen

  Robert Abbott

  George Harris

  John E. Neil

  Julia P. Coleman

  Harry H. Pace28

  A. Philip Randolph and W. E. B. Du Bois declined to add their signatures to the letter. Though both men had done much to lay the ground work for it, they were more politically attuned to the possible fallout from such an overt act of aggression against a black organisation and, worse still, collusion with the government. Marcus Garvey was apoplectic when he eventually got sight of the letter. The NAACP members and the editor of the
Messenger formed the core of the eight angry coloured plaintiffs; and Garvey seethed, lashing out at them as informants, as modern versions of the faithful house slaves who ran and alerted their beloved master whenever there was a hint of trouble brewing among the field slaves on the plantations: ‘Like the good old darkey, they believe they have some news to tell and they are telling it for all it is worth’.29 In prejudicing him and his organisation in the minds of white people, Garvey fumed, they had committed ‘the greatest bit of treachery and wickedness that any group of Negroes could be capable of’. The letter to the Attorney-General was shocking and unprecedented and its authors, Garvey vowed, had ‘written their names down everlastingly as enemies of the race’.30

  It took another black man – distanced from the two rival groups (the NAACP and UNIA) – to unpick the crusts of malice and self-righteousness and to elucidate what was really going on. The name Perry W. Howard came attached with numerous epithets, including ‘the highest paid Negro in government’ and ‘the smartest Negro in politics’. President Harding had appointed the shrewd Mississippi lawyer as special assistant to the Attorney-General, and when Howard reflected on the spat between the two black organisations (‘a case of my being a Methodist and assailing the other fellow for being a Baptist’), although he confessed to having ‘blood in my eyes for the NAACP’, he worried about the public perception that the NAACP and Department of Justice were working hand-in-glove. Writing to Hoover’s boss at the BOI, William Burns, he assured him that he held no brief for the UNIA leader, and yet believed that the attack on Garvey ‘reduces itself to a cannibalistic scheme of one rival getting rid of the other by annihilation or otherwise’.31 Perry W. Howard was a beneficiary of the patronage system, the political horse-trading between the Republican and Democrat parties through which they parcelled out key governmental positions. Nonetheless, he was primarily a ‘race man’ who lamented the gulf between the two black organisations.