Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  With little deliberation on the part of Judge Mack, Marcus Garvey was sentenced to five years in jail and ordered to pay a fine of $1,000. Joel Rogers was amongst those who thought the sentence harsh and that the judge – predisposed to be especially fair to ‘coloured’ defendants – had been swayed at the end to impose the maximum penalty after Garvey’s unseemly comments about a Jewish cabal. Several hundred weeping and wailing supporters gathered around the Black Maria outside the court-house and surged forward as their handcuffed leader was bundled into the van and taken back to the Tombs. The court had refused to fix bail but granted a stay of execution pending Garvey’s appeal. If the appeal failed, then it was designated that he serve his sentence at the Federal Penitentiary at Atlanta, but then on 22 June 1923 the New York Times reported the rumour that ultimately, Garvey would be ‘sent to Leavenworth, Kansas, because he objected to a Southern prison, fearing hostility’.

  Garvey’s conviction came towards the tail end of the Harding administration – judged, as we’ve seen, to be one of the most corrupt governments in its nation’s history. Although the jails weren’t filled with corrupt politicians and businessmen who’d benefited from their association with them, there were a significant number of high-profile figures such as the former Governor of Indiana, Warren T. McCray, to keep Garvey company whilst incarcerated. Their sentences weren’t always commensurate with the crime. The Financial World, for one, believed Garvey had good reason to feel aggrieved. ‘Here we have Fuller and McGee, the plundering brokers, who succeeded in getting away with more than $6 million through their crooked bucket-shop, receiving a sentence of less than a year … Over in the Federal Court, Marcus Garvey, an intellectual Negro … was sentenced for five years … It would appear that the greater the loot the less severe the penalty upon conviction.’45

  In the black American world, critical response to Garvey’s sentence formed along expected lines. Hubert Harrison doubted Garvey’s assertion that the trial had been a ‘frame-up, to get him alone’ and that the later inclusion of the three other defendants served as camouflage. Garvey’s five-year sentence, Harrison believed, was entirely self-inflicted and could be traced back to the folly of Garvey discharging his lawyer.46 Du Bois would go further, arguing that Garvey ‘convicted himself by his own admissions, his swaggering monkey-shines in the courtroom with monocle and long-tailed coat and insults to the judge and prosecuting attorney’.47 In his loathing of Garvey, Du Bois had some keen competition from Wilfred Domingo. The first editor of the Negro World would eventually send a congratulatory telegram to the district attorney which suggested that ‘right-thinking Negroes everywhere will applaud you for having caged the tiger at last’.48 But apart from Domingo, there was very little clucking or crowing over Garvey’s demise.

  Garvey’s and the Black Star Line’s failure was every aspiring black American’s failure. Months, sometimes years later, it produced a dull referred pain, whose source was not always immediately obvious, but was reminiscent of so many aches that had gone before. James Saunders Redding recalled how the collapse of the Brown and Stevens Bank – ‘the richest and safest Negro bank in the world’ – in which the Black Star Line had some deposits, brought his father to the verge of tears ‘not because he lost money in that disastrous collapse – he didn’t – but because that failure cast dark shadows over the prospects of a self-sustaining Negro culture’.49

  In the mainstream press, there were some who were already mourning his loss; sorry that all the fun and sport Garvey had given would also be lost. Theirs was an echo of Arthur Brisbane’s lament on Garvey’s original arrest. Brisbane, a wry and sardonic business partner of the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, thought it was ‘too bad [because] the Distinguished Son of Ethiopia makes the world more interesting than before he came … to jail Marcus Garvey would dim romance, like jailing a rainbow’.50

  At least 2,000 protestors assembled at Liberty Hall the week after the sentencing of their UNIA leader. Many were angered by what they saw as a politically motivated plot to remove the head of the organisation, to strike the shepherd, as Garvey had always foretold, and thereby scatter the sheep. The most vocal called for the signing of a petition, asking the US President to free Garvey, but the petition was not uniformly taken up. The Bureau’s special agent Andrew Battle attended the meeting and, to the relief of his paymasters, reported the divisions that he claimed had opened up, along national lines, between West Indian members – who approved the Negro World’s denunciations of the governmental intrigue – and African-Americans, such as the international organiser, Henrietta Vinton Davis, who counselled against dissent that might be regarded as unpatriotic and work to the movement’s detriment. From the prism of his cell, Garvey saw a kaleidoscope of conspiracies. If there was to be a coup, now, with the president-general locked up in Tombs prison, was the time to strike. During the trial, when friendly UNIA witnesses, called by the defence, were questioned by Garvey, they’d been nervous less they incriminate themselves, and their responses had been guarded. Ruminating on the failures of his court case, that caution was now cast in his mind, at best as ‘inspired disloyalty’ and at worse as treachery. Amy Jacques shuttled between UNIA headquarters and Tombs prison, briefing her husband on the machinations of the movement. Despite his incarceration, Marcus Garvey was still able to issue edicts to the governing body. Within days, he had instructed that senior officials, including Henrietta Vinton Davis and the head of the African Legion, Captain Gaines, be taken off the payroll – a decision that was made in anticipation of any challenge to his authority, but that was also one that would reduce the financial burden of meeting their salaries.

  Gaines was, in any event, considering his resignation. He’d been made anxious by all the talk and rumours over arms and ammunition, even though a police raid on UNIA offices in Harlem had not discovered so much as a ‘wooden pistol or grain of ammunition’.51 Gaines was wary of any attempt to link him with some of the more volatile officers of the African Legion, men such as William Wellington Grant, known for his hair-trigger potential for violence. For her part, Henrietta Davis would be put on a kind of probation; she would draw no salary, but be sent out as a fieldworker, and allowed to claim a 15 per cent commission on funds collected for the organisation. The urgent task of accumulating sufficient funds for his own defence was entrusted by Garvey to a committee headed by his wife.

  Garvey wrote his last will and testament, naming Amy Jacques as the sole beneficiary in the event of his death. Jacques’s faithfulness and commitment to her husband were beyond question. She continued to make her regular pilgrimage to the gloomy prison, to the visitors’ room and the tiny screened compartments. The middle-class, great-great-granddaughter of the first Mayor of Kingston struggled to keep the tears from her eyes and her sense of shame in check in surroundings that Bertram Reinitz of the New York Times described as ‘a deafening chorus … carried out in many languages … [of] women heard pledging their loyalty in tones an octave higher than a Commanche yell’.52

  Ostensibly, Garvey was not diminished in spirit by his incarceration but a flood of letters, articles and written denunciations spoke to his state of heightened anxiety and deep humiliation. Vernal J. Williams was an early target of his wrath. Garvey lashed out unsparingly at the ‘ingratitude’ of the UNIA lawyer, whom he had found work for in the organisation when Williams was a struggling law student. Imprisoned and without funds, Garvey was outraged at what he saw as the lawyer’s betrayal, in withholding official UNIA papers until his salary had been paid. But Garvey’s sharpest invective was reserved for the NAACP, for whom he now had nothing save contempt, nor they for him: ‘The leaders of it hate Marcus Garvey because he has broken up the “Pink Tea Set”,’ wrote the UNIA leader. They had launched a conspiracy to do away with him after he had forced them to recognise ‘black talent in the Association equally with the lighter element’. Venom and anxiety scratched at the back of his throat, and there was a previously unfamiliar sensation: panic over the unkno
wn impact of his incarceration on the organisation.

  Marcus Garvey’s imprisonment did precipitate a significant drift of members from the organisation, although the sound of nervous feet heading for the exits did not yet suggest a stampede. There were those, too, who went to great lengths to disassociate themselves from Garvey. Dr Du Bois was among those who had printed the deliciously scandalous news that the eminent Emmet Scott, the former private secretary of Booker T. Washington, had accepted a knighthood from the UNIA in 1922. Scott denied the allegation and wished it known as widely as possible that he did not kneel, nor receive ‘Garvey’s foolish decoration’.53 The Reverend Ethelred Brown, also, evidently felt tainted by his association with his compatriot. His embarrassment actuated a sermon that Brown delivered on unwarranted ‘Garvey-istic Devotion’ during which the reverend, nonetheless, counselled his congregation against jeering at his former employer, even though Garvey had exposed the race to the ‘humiliation of hearing the funeral march played once again over one more pretentious Negro reform movement ended in dismal failure’.54

  Garvey wrote that he was treated kindly by the warden and prison officials, but the months rolled on interminably, as each application for bail was rejected. Whilst Garvey languished in Tombs prison he had ample time to reflect on the cause of his organisation’s dismal failure. He sat down and tried to order his amazing story in a long essay, later published in pamphlet form, which charted his journey from the pearl of the Antilles to his oppressive cell in Tombs prison. The essay was understandably self-serving. Firstly, it aimed to neutralise his enemies. As he explained, ‘Being black, I have committed an unpardonable offence against the very light-coloured Negroes in America and the West Indies by making myself famous as a Negro leader of millions.’ Secondly, the essay presented a palatable picture of himself to white America. Who could argue with his desire to head off the approaching apocalyptic collision between the races by ‘pointing the Negro to a home of his own’? If Garvey had a deep sense of foreboding about the race, then he also hinted at his fears for his own future, whether intentionally or not. The description of his father – ‘a man of brilliant intellect and dashing courage. He was unafraid of consequences. He took human chances in the course of life, as most bold men do, and he failed at the close of his career’ – might so easily fit a word picture of Garvey himself.

  Garvey gave his essay the title ‘The Negro’s Greatest Enemy’. That idea, and favourite theme, that the black man was his own greatest enemy, was one that he held all his life. It was also a belief which curiously sustained him now in his darkest hour, in the grey gloomy surroundings of the prison. It helped explain the failure of the Black Star Line.

  On starting the Black Star Line, Garvey would later write, he had ‘the greatest confidence in every Negro at first’. It had been his dream to have every position from pantry boy to captain filled by black people. He had done so, and appointed a black board of directors. Garvey had thought to himself that, ‘every Negro felt like I did [and was] a great enthusiast to see the race go forward in success’. Now, after several months in a dark and cramped cell, the unbearable truth had crept up on him: ‘I gave everyone a chance, and the story is that very nearly everyone that I placed in a responsible position fleeced the Black Star Line.’55 It would be several years before Marcus Garvey would commit such thoughts to print. But, alone in the Tombs prison, in the summer of 1923, awaiting a decision on bail – which might never be granted – he clearly felt betrayed. The black man had no respect for another in a position of authority above himself. This explained the rationale behind the failure of the Black Star Line, but also too many of the other enterprises that the association had begun, that had now gone to the wall. The steam laundry on 142nd Street that employed fifty people had to close down after too much infighting; the printing plant followed soon after: ‘Men who would work honestly and uprightly with white men started to work as they felt when they came to our [printing] plant,’ Garvey complained.56 It wasn’t his theory alone. It explained why the black aristocrats up on Sugar Hill preferred Scandinavian maids to black ones.

  When the gloom lifted and the morning sun rose again Garvey might forgive himself, and even congratulate himself for the chance he had given to thousands of black employees. After all, as he told the jury, he had taken ‘girls who could only be washerwomen’ in middle-class white homes, and made them ‘clerks and stenographers … in the Black Star Line offices.’

  After three months, doubt was even further banished when Judge Martin Manton (standing in for the appeals judge who had gone on holiday) answered Garvey’s and the whole movement’s prayers when he announced that the UNIA leader would be set free, provided his supporters could raise $15,000 for his bail. Amy Jacques embarked on a feverish campaign to raise the money; through promissory notes extracted from arm-twisting phone calls, wired cash and a round of personal appeals to members, she managed to secure the full amount by 10 September 1923.57

  Liberty Hall was a riot of applause, ‘Amens’ and ‘Hallelujahs’ the night their founder returned to them three days later. He was greeted by another returnee, Bishop Alexander McGuire, who had pitched in and rallied to Garvey’s colours during the build-up to his prosecution. McGuire had found himself once again smitten by ‘the binding spell, the indefinable charm which Mr Garvey exercises over us’. The bishop drew the parallel, as so many had done before, between Garvey and Moses. ‘We have reason to believe that his enforced solitude has clarified his vision,’ and just as from Horeb and Mount Sinai, ‘Moses came back to Israel with new revelations,’ then so too, ‘Negroes everywhere will be the beneficiaries of the NEW IDEAS … he has gained during his vacation [in the Tombs].’58

  Once the ‘Tiger’ was free of his cage, he was keen to take his new ideas out on the road to test them on the people, and to savour the great expanse of the country after his captivity. He had also promised his wife a holiday that naturally would be combined with work. One of the highlights of the tour was a stopover at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Tuskegee was cemented in the nation’s imagination as a beacon of virtue, and a successful Southern example of African-Americans benefiting from liberal white philanthropy. Garvey had clashed with the principal Dr Moton in the past; he’d even ridiculed Moton as an old fuddy-duddy, hat-in-hand Negro, genuflecting in front of the white man. The fact that Robert Moton would now invite the convicted criminal, Marcus Garvey, to address the students in the Chapel at Tuskegee, was a huge testament of faith in him. The UNIA leader’s guilt may have been proven in court, but, for a large number of black people, his reputation as a sincere and honest race leader remained intact – a point that was further underlined when the institute accepted a small donation of $50 from Garvey.

  Marcus Garvey was gratified by his reception at Tuskegee, but it was more like work than rest. During their two weeks in California Jacques was more successful in persuading her husband to take time off, particularly for a tour of the Hollywood studios in Los Angeles. Postcards of their vacation have not survived, but the tourist photograph of Amy propped up on a beach donkey with her unsmiling husband in a heavy overcoat does not suggest a man at ease with the concept of leisure.

  Though he might look glum, Marcus Garvey carried no bitterness in his heart. It was an attitude that even surprised his wife. By temperament, he was and would always remain a ‘romancer and poet’. Marcus Garvey’s capacity to shrug off disappointments was remarkable, but the injuries he’d suffered at the hands of W. E. B. Du Bois, the ‘Garvey Must Go’ campaigners and the NAACP could not be dispelled; they were elusive sirens – tantalising and tormenting. They followed him throughout his two-month tour and vexed his spirit. They, in part, informed the new ideas that he’d conjured up in prison, which, stripped of the rhetoric of racial uplift, centred on withdrawal and flight. There was no long-term future for the black man in America. In all the speeches that he made, Garvey seemed increasingly convinced of that now. Arriving in Oakland, he spelt out his belief that ‘Americ
a will always be a white man’s country … ’Tis hard, ’tis woefully hard for a Du Bois or a Weldon Johnson to admit this, but how can one wisely “kick against the pricks”?’ He was tired of those friendly whites who would make the Negro ‘the wards of a mistaken philanthropy’.59

  During his visit to St Louis, to the Negro section represented by the ‘famous anti-lynching advocate’, Congressman Dyer, he howled, ‘I was not allowed to be served a chocolate sundae in a drugstore because I was black.60 … I could not get a soda served even by a dirty Greek, who kept his so-called white soda fountain in a Negro section!’ So much for social equality and the NAACP’s foolish dream of integration, Garvey seemed to be saying. ‘Between the Ku Klux Klan and the Morefield Storey NAACP, give me the Klan for their honesty of purpose towards the Negro.’61 In Youngstown, Ohio, Garvey delivered an appeal to the ‘liberal, philanthropic, liberty-loving’ soul of white America, where he elaborated on his apocalyptic treatise on the doomed relationship of the races. ‘So long as white labourers believe that black labourers are taking and holding their jobs … so long as white men and women believe that black men and women are filling positions that they covet; so long as white men believe that black men want to associate with and marry white women then we will have prejudice and not only prejudice, but riots, lynchings, burnings, and God to tell what next to follow!’