by Colin Grant
Perry Howard believed there were more obvious candidates worthy of government investigations into allegations of malpractice. President Harding had only recently died. He had presided over one of the most corrupt governments in America’s history, most manifestly so in the infamous Teapot Dome Scandal. The fallout from Harding’s maladministration was only just beginning to be felt. Such was the depth of the corruption that the Attorney-General would soon be ensnared. By the prevailing standards of the day, even according to his more sympathetic critics, Garvey was guilty of no more than sincere but staggeringly incompetent management. However, stalwarts of the NAACP such as Samuel Redding’s father and its leading light, W. E. B. Du Bois, feared wholeheartedly that the real danger was that if the UNIA failed then they would all fail; the reverberations would be felt throughout Black America. In its promotion of the core ideal of black economic independence, Du Bois conceded that the UNIA had stumbled upon an immensely worthy mission. Nonetheless, when he surveyed the dire circumstance of the UNIA business empire and the Black Star Line in particular, Du Bois saw lamentably ‘the collapse of the only thing in the Garvey movement which was original and promising’.32
The feud between Garvey and his detractors continued well into the New Year. Garvey published a pamphlet responding to the composers of the letter to the Attorney-General in which he could not help but scratch at an old wound. Focusing on the complexion of the signatories, he noted that, ‘nearly all [are] Octoroons and Quadroons. Two are black Negroes who have married Octoroons. One is a mulatto and Socialist, a self-styled Negro leader who expressed his intention of marrying a white woman but was subsequently prevented from doing so by the criticism of the UNIA. With this lone exception all of the others are married to Octoroons.’
Up until this point, Du Bois had maintained a dignified distance from the turmoil surrounding the death of Eason and the contentious letter to the Attorney-General. Now, as if in answer to Garvey’s latest provocation, Du Bois devoted an essay to him and his spurious dream of ‘Back to Africa’, in the February edition of Century magazine. Du Bois once again wrote of his nemesis, more in hope than in actuality, in the past tense. He strived to be fair – within the limits of his prejudice – towards a confused, bombastic but sincere race leader. At this critical time in the nation’s history, a West Indian demagogue had appeared, ‘not the worst kind of demagogue but, on the contrary, a man who had much which was attractive and understandable in his personality and his programme’. Garvey was an implacable Moses who inspired ‘orgies of response and generosity’. Nonetheless, Dr Du Bois lamented, as anyone with common sense would, the ‘utter futility of his programme’. His essay was imbued with pathos, for Garvey, he felt, was leading the Negro to the very edge of despair, and his failure would be theirs too. Around the edges of Du Bois’s assessment there leaked an uncontained disgust. Ultimately, his lowly educated adversary was ‘a little fat black man, ugly, but with intelligent eyes and a big head’, who ‘screams his propaganda’ from a serio-comic seat of empire, ‘a low rambling basement of brick and stone … this squat and dirty Liberty Hall’. Set beside the patient striving of the American Negro, Garvey had achieved ‘nothing in accomplishment … only waste’.
Marcus Garvey could not have been expected to let the matter rest there. The opportunity for any rapprochement, if it ever existed, had long since passed. Back and forth, thrust and parry, punch and roll. The two men squared up to each other like evenly matched pugilists; but there would be no sweaty embrace of camaraderie after the bout was over. To the pamphlet excoriating the ‘Eight “Uncle Tom” Negroes … Who wrote the infamous letter to the Honourable Attorney-General’ Marcus Garvey appended a supplementary chapter, ‘W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, As a Hater of Dark People’, written in a crucible of injustice which dribbled with hate. Booker T. Washington used to say, ‘To keep a black man in the gutter a white man must stay in the gutter and hold him there.’ On 13 February 1923, Marcus Garvey, the ‘little, fat black man’, descended into the gutter and waded through the excrement and thick slime to meet Du Bois the ‘unfortunate mulatto who bewails every drop of Negro blood in his veins’.33
In his article Du Bois had characterised Garvey as the heir to Booker T. Washington but whereas the earlier man had merely put forward a programme of accommodation for African-Americans which eschewed politics, in his courting of the Ku Klux Klan, Garvey’s greater evil was his advocacy of a policy for black Americans, amounting to wholesale, unilateral capitulation. It was a policy that said, ‘Give Up! Surrender! The struggle is useless; go back to Africa and fight the white world.’
Garvey was neither pushed nor drawn to defend the untenable association with the Klan; he simply cared not a jot about the interpretation put on it by others, least of all Du Bois, the ‘lazy dependent mulatto’, and his cohorts at the NAACP. Equally, he claimed to have paid little attention to the legal charge against him and the upcoming trial. The evidence, however, suggests entirely the opposite. From the outset of their indictment, Marcus Garvey had shared no code of silence with the accused; on the contrary, he’d emphasised in speeches and in the columns of the Negro World that he’d been out of the country when the allegedly illegal practices of mail fraud had been carried out. In the intervening months, any vestige of trust he’d had in his co-defendants had been wiped out by an incremental, niggling anxiety. The vice-president, Orlando Thompson, had already been relieved of his power of attorney over Black Star Line affairs, and the secretary of the Line and auditor of the UNIA, Elie Garcia, was about to be made aware that, come the trial, it would be every man for himself. One night in early January, Garvey was going through the lodgement of takings at the end of the working day when he stumbled across a forged cheque for $47, ostensibly signed by Elie Garcia. The secretary was out of the building, and Garvey ordered immediately that Garcia’s office be vacated and the door nailed up. The president-general later related how Garcia, who’d been tipped off, ‘came back into the building in a crestfallen and crying attitude. I stared at him and he voluntarily confessed … He beseeched me to give him another hearing before I took steps to prosecute.’34 Garvey would not relent. Garcia was arrested and tried for petty theft. On his conviction, the Negro World pointedly speculated – with a nod towards the pending mail-fraud trial – about further revelations of illegality: ‘Mr Garcia has handled thousands of dollars of the Association’s moneys, and it is understood that an examination of his books is being made to find out the extent of misappropriations.’35
On 18 May the year-long delay in the mail-fraud case came to an end. Each of the defendants, Garvey, Garcia, Tobias and Thompson, retained individual counsel. Garvey objected to the trial being presided over by Judge Julian Mack, who was rumoured to have connections with the NAACP. If true, there would be an obvious conflict of interest as the rival NAACP was resolutely opposed to Garvey. Mack was a prominent Zionist and social reformer with sympathies for the uplifting programme of the NAACP but he had no direct proven link with that organisation. He rejected the implication of bias. In his ruling – a kind of legal clearing of the throat – Mack conceded that ‘the parties are entitled to understand the state of mind of the Judge in this case’. He assured Garvey that his attitude was ‘one of extreme friendliness toward the colored people’, and refused to step down.36
There was heightened security at the court-house amid rumours, reported by BOI agents, that UNIA divisions were stockpiling arms and ammunition, and that some of Garvey’s supporters attending the trial would be carrying weapons. From the very beginning, the judge showed that he would take a severe line against any suggestion of interference or intimidation of government witnesses. A number of anonymous threats had been made, and the Black Star Line naval officer, Hugh Mulzac, who’d been subpoenaed by the government, claimed to have been warned by the UNIA legionnaire, Linous Charles, that ‘if he testified against Garvey, he would get [him] if it took the rest of his life’. The judge sentenced Charles to six months in jail and set bail at $
10,000.37
The night before the start of the trial, Garvey spoke to a rapt audience at Liberty Hall. He was on fine rhetorical form, assuring his followers that the coming events in New York’s Southern District Court marked a new ‘guide post for the race’. Personally, it would test his manhood like never before but he was prepared to ‘face the arrows of hell for the principles of the UNIA’. He summoned the ancestors in whose name he’d first been drawn to serve the race, when ten years ago swept along in an epiphany, at the end of his time in England to Jamaica in a third-class cabin, he’d asked himself, ‘Where is the black man’s government? Where is his king and his kingdom?’ Then, as now, he was motivated by the crying voice from the grave that said, ‘Garvey, we have suffered for 250 years for your day and for your time; we expect something of you at this hour.’ Having thus steeled himself for battle, Marcus Garvey was affronted, when on the first morning of his day in court, his African-American attorney, Cornelius McDougald, counselled surrender. McDougald advised him to enter a plea of guilty on a technical charge with the expectation that this would elicit a minimum sentence. Back in the apartment later that night, Amy Jacques recalled how the roiling argument exploded and caused a rift between the two men: ‘Garvey felt that his attorney was being used innocently to trap him, and asked [McDougald] to withdraw from his court defence. In leaving, the lawyer warned, “It will go hard with you.”’38 McDougald was referring to the decision that Garvey now proposed to conduct his own defence.
Marcus Garvey would have been familiar with the maxim, ‘The man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client.’ But Garvey had such confidence in his powers of persuasion that he considered himself the exception that proves the rule – a man of Ciceronian oratorical skills who could move an audience of tens of thousands must be able to hold sway over a dozen of his peers. But therein lay a potential booby-trap for Garvey: the question of scale. As the trial unfolded, Garvey would struggle to contain a style and voice tuned to the demands of the ecstatic massed meetings in huge venues, and adapt them to the quiet intimacy of the chamber room. Without the restraining influence of his own counsel, Garvey strutted across the courtroom floor, bellowing at the prosecution witnesses; growing hot and irritated by their evasions or unintelligence. Too often, Garvey was distracted by insignificant facts or inadmissible evidence, and taxed the judge and jury with his pedantry. For more than a month, the hot days of hairsplitting deliberation dragged on. Only occasionally did the judge betray signs of tetchiness at Garvey’s ignorance of legal matters, reminding the novice attorney that he was a trial judge and was not meant to be ‘conducting a law school’.39
Mostly, the latitude that Judge Mack granted him was generous, but Garvey was tripped up more by himself than by the prosecuting counsel. In one instance, he called a defence witness who, when asked to comment on Garvey’s character, answered, ‘Doubtful.’ Worse still was to come when Garvey put the BOI agent Amos on the witness stand. When it became clear that Amos could not be prised away from answering in a manner that was damaging to him, Garvey pleaded that Amos’s testimony be struck from the records but the judge, opening wide his hooded eyes, reminded him gently that Amos was a witness that the defence had called.
In order for Garvey to be found guilty of fraud, the prosecution would have to prove that the president-general had sent out adverts through the post, encouraging investors to buy shares in the Black Star Line knowing that those shares would be worthless. Strangely, the case turned on an empty envelope. The prosecution maintained that its witness, Benny Dancy, had been sent a BSL circular advertising shares in the SS Phyllis Wheatley, but Dancy’s only proof was an empty envelope bearing a BSL stamp. Dancy had received envelopes previously that contained BSL letters, and assumed such was the case with this envelope now being put forward as evidence; it was just that the letter contained in the empty envelope had been mislaid. An experienced lawyer would have easily exposed the flaws in the prosecution witness’s testimony but Garvey struggled to make his point. His cross-examination of Dancy was torturous and, ultimately, revealed Garvey’s lack of legal training.
Garvey: Can you remember what you saw in the letter positively?
Dancy: I just told you I couldn’t remember all – do you understand it?
Garvey: I am not vexed with you.
Dancy: I am not vexed with you; you raised your voice to me; I raised mine to you.
Garvey: I am not vexed, I just want to hear what you say.
Dancy: Take your time.
Garvey: Would you really swear …
Dancy: I just told you I couldn’t remember all the letter. Bring the letter up here.
Garvey: None of the letters that were shown you were the letters?
Dancy: What?
Garvey: The letters that the District-Attorney showed you, they weren’t the letters?
Dancy: They weren’t the letters?
Garvey: Yes.
Dancy: Yes, they were the letters.
Garvey: And you don’t remember what was in them?
Dancy: I can’t remember all of them; I got so many letters.40
As counsel for his own defence, Garvey was on surer ground with the former officers of the Black Star Line who formed the majority of the prosecution witnesses. Tellingly, though, as the trial progressed, it revealed the idiosyncratic and shoddy inner workings of the organisation, and the degree to which most of the important decisions were only ever taken with Garvey’s cognisance or approval. Garvey was the big ‘I am’ of the movement, and each new piece of evidence that clicked into place only seemed to confirm that impression.
In Garvey’s interminable three-hour-long closing address, he portrayed himself as an unfortunate and selfless leader, surrounded by incompetents and thieves. Edgar Grey was ‘a reckless, irresponsible man, full of talk, representing nothing’. Richard Warner was ‘a rubber-stamp man without character’, Sidney de Bourg was ‘the aged man … who has sent his soul to hell’, and Captain Cockburn was simply ‘the swindler’.
Garvey was belligerent where perhaps grace, humility and even humour were called for. He was preceded by Henry Lincoln Johnson, the attorney for another of the co-defendants, and might have been wiser to adopt Johnson’s approach. Johnson likened the Black Star Line’s difficulties to a nursery rhyme: ‘For the want of a nail a shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe a hoof was lost, for the want of a hoof a horse was lost … all for the want of a horseshoe nail.’ And the Black Star Line owed its ills to the want of a Phyllis Wheatley. ‘But for the loss of the [SS] Phyllis Wheatley, Negroes would have been now captains of the sea. There would certainly have been no trouble between [Captain] Cockburn and Garvey. They would have been in faraway Africa enjoying the tropical breezes.’ Reflecting on the gulf between the dream of the Black Star Line and the actuality, Johnson’s witty, pungent and succinct summation left the jurors with a plea for compassion that was compelling and almost impossible to discount. ‘The truth is there is no such thing as any conspiracy. [But] if the indictment had been framed against the defendants for discourtesy, mismanagement or display of bad judgement they would have pleaded guilty,’ said Johnson. In paying close attention to testimonies, Johnson realised that of all the defendants, Garvey was the most vulnerable, and he implored the jury to consider that ‘the innocence of one would affect the innocence of all and there was not one dime lost that could be traced back to Mr Garvey.’41 That point had been made most emphatically by an emotional Marcus Garvey in his final exhortation to the jury: ‘If you believe … that I would look upon the struggles of a people to rob them of a penny, I should die, and not only before man, but to be sent to the farthest depths of hell by my God.’42
The prosecuting attorney Maxwell Mattuck closed his delivery, honing in on Garvey, whom he believed to be the biggest and most dangerous culprit, with the simple but passionate appeal to the jurors: ‘Gentlemen, will you let the tiger loose?’
After four gruelling weeks, just after 12.30 on 18 June, the jury ro
se and, closely guarded by US marshals, retired for deliberation. The anonymous threats had continued throughout the trial, and ranks of special patrolmen and members of the bomb squad decorated the corridors and courtroom. Garvey remained in the courtroom throughout the long wait, pacing the floor, occasionally fanning himself and mopping his face with a handkerchief. Ten hours later the jury returned. His co-defendants were found not guilty. The verdict on Marcus Garvey was, ‘Guilty.’ ‘Mr Garvey immediately burst into a storm of rage,’ reported the Kansas City Call. ‘An undignified tirade of foul abuse and low language’ followed, according to Hubert Harrison, in which ‘both judge and district attorney [were described] as “damned dirty Jews”.’ And the Call painted a final pitiful picture of the convicted UNIA leader ‘escorted to the elevator … by eighteen marshals through a crowd of sobbing sympathisers’. Garvey was led across the ‘bridge of sighs’ that connected the court-house to the Manhattan Detention Centre, commonly known as the ‘Tombs prison’.
In a previous incarnation the Tombs had been designed in a style patterned on an Egyptian mausoleum. That building had been torn down in 1897 and in its place a granite prison had been constructed that, though now resembling a medieval castle, had retained its moniker, the Tombs. It was grim and forbidding, ‘as depressing within as without’, housing 400 inmates in cells that were designed ‘on a none too liberal basis’.
Marcus Garvey’s rage was still boiling over when the cell door closed on him at the Tombs. Fuming at the injustice, he divined a sinister plot which he scribbled feverishly to alert his followers about: ‘The peculiar and outstanding feature of the whole case is that I am being punished for the crime of the Jew, Silverstone … who has caused the ruin of the company … I was prosecuted in this by Maxwell Mattuck, another Jew, and I am to be sentenced by Judge Julian Mack, the eminent Jewish Jurist. Truly I may say, “I was going to Jericho and fell among thieves.”’ Continuing with the biblical allusion, he concluded, ‘Christ died to make men free; I shall die to give courage and inspiration to the race.’43 Prior to the trial, Garvey had never displayed any anti-Semitic tendencies.44 Rather he had celebrated Jewish thrift and group solidarity, and voiced common cause with the concept of Zionism. He escaped the kind of public censure that might have been expected from his ugly remarks, but numerous black commentators, such as the Jamaican historian and journalist Joel A. Rogers, believed it had some bearing on the eventual outcome when he was returned to court for sentencing.