by Colin Grant
That legacy was now transferred, temporarily, into the care of a small, bony man, spiked with ambition, who was soon caught up in a set of Machiavellian machinations all of his own making, borne of a determination to free himself from the constant threat of Garvey’s overpowering influence – no matter that the chief was locked up more than 800 miles from Harlem.
The NAACP’s Mary White Ovington strained to be fair when she visited Atlanta and interviewed Garvey for her book Portraits in Color. She found his enthusiasm for his race undimmed by the humiliations of his imprisonment. Ovington wrote of her interview with Garvey that though he saw ‘no hope for the American Negro … [because] this is a white man’s country, and he will be pushed harder than ever against the wall. In the British West Indies there is more hope. There, some day, by the force of his numbers, the Negro may dominate. But Africa is still the one land where it is possible to build a Negro state.’ In taking her leave of the prisoner, Ovington was cheered to note that he was not ultimately dispirited: ‘Garvey can talk to you upon this theme hour after hour. You feel it continually passing through his mind as he goes about his monotonous prison tasks, that it is his last waking thought.’10
The UNIA was a huge, unwieldy organisation and the stand-in president, Sherrill, suffered from too great a gulf between ambition and ability. He was clearly out of his depth, or so a significant number of UNIA veterans thought of this latecomer to the cause, especially after Sherrill remortgaged Liberty Hall to liquidate debts, but at the risk of creditors eventually foreclosing on the UNIA’s hallowed headquarters. His vacillation over the management of the SS Booker T. Washington at one stage led to a near mutiny on board. Garvey was later informed that the ‘crew, being dissatisfied, have refused to raise steam’, and matters were further complicated by the fact that the ‘Steamboat Inspection Department [would] not permit us to replace crew until paid’.11 The intransigence over back-payment claims by the crew would eventually have to be brought to an end. If the crew sued and the case went to court there was a real danger of history repeating itself and the company being forced to sell the ship, invariably at a loss, to satisfy the crew’s and other suits brought against it. Garvey saw it as yet another example of the black man’s curse; of his reluctance or inability to take orders from a fellow black.
Marcus Garvey still entertained ideas of an early release from Atlanta to help the movement resolve some of its present difficulties. One of his biggest gripes against Sherrill was that the stand-in president expended too little effort in agitating against his imprisonment, in lobbying and launching petitions and appeals on Garvey’s behalf. Sherrill, it seemed, was in no great hurry to see his boss released. The acting UNIA leader only visited Garvey after he had been in prison for three months, and even then it was to brief him against his rivals in the movement. Sherrill’s opponents were, in turn, sending cables to Garvey informing him that ‘membership [was] unitedly opposed to any attempt to Americanise the association and ignore you as active head’, and requesting his endorsement, perhaps in the form of a ‘helpful’ statement from him, to ensure that such a desirable state of affairs was maintained.12
Whilst the men of various factions lined up against each other, Garvey could at least count on the devotion of a handful of women to put his needs and desires above all else. The exceptionally loyal Ethel Collins kept a watchful eye over excesses and shenanigans in the central UNIA office in Harlem. Henrietta Vinton Davis and Maymie De Mena – an odd pair, the former had undergone a matronly transformation during her service for the UNIA, the latter resembled nothing so much as an elegant flapper – were effective troubleshooters, willing to be dispatched to the regions whenever necessary. But Garvey leant most heavily on his stoical wife who made the trip to the penitentiary every three weeks. Occasionally, outside this routine, she later wrote, Garvey would summon her, and travelling down ‘the suspense and anxiety until the express reached there was awful. If there were any manoeuvres going on that made him suspicious … then I had to spread joy, and plenty of it.’13 During his imprisonment, Garvey suffered increasingly from ill health, from lung infections and chronic bronchitis, and Jacques ensured his supply of remedies and tonics, along with occasional food parcels to relieve him of the prison diet. In fact, apart from the first few months of humiliation and poor health, Garvey did not appear to suffer too greatly from the strictures of the new regime. The Bible was a source of refuge. He told E. B. Knox that he ‘kept his hand in the hand of God’. But as well as spiritual comforts there were material ones; Garvey received considerable amounts of money during his time in jail – several hundred dollars a month. Garvey’s prison records reveal that whilst most visitors left only a few dollars or cents, more substantial amounts were wired to him regularly (the identity of the sender was not recorded by the penitentiary officials) and his wife also brought in dollars – usually twenty or thirty each month. Jacques was also relieved when ‘at times he telegraphed for more money, or special gifts … I was allowed to have [them] sent direct from big department stores such as Macy’s or Gimbels.’14
Occasionally, the wardens took exception to the bounty Garvey was receiving when it seemed at too great a variance with prison food. He was isolated and put on a restricted diet when discovered, on 22 March 1927, to be in possession of contraband food – a steak.15
But more than food or medicine, it was books and newspapers that Garvey craved. He fired off telegrams to his wife whenever the subscription to the Washington Post dropped off; other major newspapers were regularly requested, along with a steady stream of books.
Marcus Garvey was extremely lucky to have wed such a hardworking and resourceful partner, whom he continued to think of as ‘the bravest little woman’ even as he added to her load. Jacques shouldered the major responsibility for activating petitions when they lapsed, and ventured deeper into the dangerous South, in search of support and untapped sources of revenue for his defence fund. On one such occasion, Amy Jacques arrived in Baton Rouge, and learnt that a black man had been butchered and lynched the night before. Fearing for her safety, the local townspeople advised her to take the very next train out of town; she was adamant that she would not be intimidated: she stayed and preached. After the service, the local doctor offered to put her up in his home for the night. But before setting off in his car, she recalled, ‘he placed his shotgun in a contraption he had erected through the open windshield, took out a big pistol and placed that beside him; turning to me, he said, “Sister, get yours handy.” I took out my “Colt”. Now, said he, “We are ready to travel.”’16 Fundraising wasn’t always as memorable, but it was a constant – necessary to pay for the legal challenges to his sentence that Garvey continued to mount, and for the campaign to build up a critical mass of people who thought in a similar vein. Another book of the world according to Marcus Garvey, his ‘philosophies and opinions’ would be instrumental in such a scheme, and, at Garvey’s behest, his twenty-nine-year-old wife swung into action. Once she’d compiled the book – itself a Herculean task – she was instructed, particularly, to make sure that as well as sympathisers such as Mahatma Gandhi, influential American politicians received complimentary copies; acknowledgements of receipt of the book were treated almost as favourable reviews. In the preface to Philosophy and Opinions, Amy Jacques spelt out that her motives were ‘in order to give the public an opportunity of studying and forming an opinion of him, not from inflated and misleading newspaper and magazine articles’. Some of her husband’s more violent speeches were (of necessity) sanitised; context was key. It was appropriate to arouse an angry black crowd in the aftermath of a lynching with calls for vengeance but white readers might have been alarmed by the heat and militancy of the same speech at several removes from the incident that sparked Garvey’s violent eloquence.
Seeking to project a positive image of himself, prisoner 19359 faced constant and unexpected challenges. In the same month that he sent his wife the manuscripts for the second volume of Philosophy and Opinions, M
arcus Garvey was forced to issue a warning notice in the Negro World for the public to spurn ‘unscrupulous persons selling my picture handcuffed to two marshals’.
Amy Jacques kept up a constant stream of letters to the Attorney-General and US President, petitions and requests for interviews that might secure a commutation of his sentence. When she wavered, he implored her to ‘keep sending out the letters in lots of one hundred at a time’. Oftentimes the correspondence between husband and wife was curiously businesslike and dispassionate, with Jacques working herself to the point of exhaustion whilst worrying over his state of mind and frequent silences. Occasionally, Garvey’s letter betrayed a darkening, if petulant, depression:
No use writing when instructions are not carried out. When you were here I requested you to do certain things and they have not been done except in the case of Washington. Why then should you expect me to be writing without attention being paid? Love and happy [C]hristmas,
Popsie
At such times Amy Jacques questioned her value to him. What did he ever give in return? She imagined herself ‘like a gold coin – expendable, to get what he wanted, and hard enough to withstand rough usage in the process.’
When hints of her loneliness and vulnerability seeped through, her husband seemed genuinely surprised. ‘Why didn’t you turn on the radio when you were alone?’ he whispered tenderly on 9 June 1926. ‘Have you discarded it already?’ And in the same letter sought to reassure her that ‘your editorials are all good[,] Miss Vanity, that’s why I have said nothing, otherwise you would have heard from me on the subject … Be good to yourself and keep growing fat.’ Amy Jacques had lost a lot of weight. In her pursuit of justice for her husband, she had neglected her health. But then, one year on from his imprisonment, came startling news. On 16 January, Amy Jacques was alerted to a story on the front page of the New York Times printed in bold headlines that suggested that Marcus Garvey had been pardoned. The news was quickly picked up by black papers, including George Harris’s New York News, but as the day unfolded, it became clear that the story was a false alarm, based on nothing but rumour. Jacques steeled herself to bring the truth to her husband. The next morning she rushed to the post office with a sobering telegram: ‘George Harris published information in big headlines incorrectly.’
Two days later Garvey wrote back phlegmatically, ‘I am not surprised. I never expected it anyhow so I am not disappointed. The whole affair is an amusement to me … Cheer up and be not dismayed … Tell people pray for cause.’
By the end of the month, the Attorney-General, John Sargent, was briefing President Calvin Coolidge on the matter. Sargent admitted that he’d received an enormous petition for Garvey to be freed, ‘signed, so I understand it is claimed, by over seventy-thousand Negroes’. In addition, he had granted a lengthy interview to a delegation of ‘prominent Negroes, who seemed to regard Garvey with great veneration’. Sargent was mindful of Garvey’s controlling influence but while ‘his further imprisonment will result in dissatisfaction’ to many thousands of black Americans, the Attorney-General feared that ‘his release and deportation would by no means eliminate him as a menace’. Garvey then, was still thought of as a threat, and the country’s leading lawyer further discounted that the prisoner’s chronic lung condition rendered him a candidate for compassion.
Prisoner 19359 had been in and out of the infirmary. Garvey’s asthmatic attacks had increased during his prison term. He smoked Paiges, a popular brand of asthmatic cigarette that offered temporary relief. There was no tobacco in the cigarettes but a herbal remedy made up of anise, sage and thyme mixed with eucalyptus and atropine; inhaling the smoke dilated the bronchi in the short term, making it easier for Garvey to breathe. His condition was exacerbated by stress and judging by the repeated requests for the asthma cigarettes, the strain he felt under must have been considerable. Away from the bear-pit of intrigue that these days passed for UNIA HQ in Harlem, one might have imagined he’d surrender to the enforced tranquillity of Atlanta, but the truth was otherwise: Garvey’s physical marginality and his frustrations at control by proxy only magnified his anxiety.
One consequence of this was his over-reliance or even dependence on the Negro World in setting the future agenda for the association. If prison produced paranoia, it also allowed for moments of intense lucidity. ‘The time has come for the Negro to forget and cast behind him his hero worship and adoration of other races …’ So began the editorial on 6 June that was later recast as an essay on ‘African Fundamentalism’ where Garvey laid out a creed that would guide black people through life, and reunite them with some fundamentals of their history that had been denied them for so long. As black folk, he wrote, ‘we must inspire a literature and promulgate a doctrine of our own’. Black civilisation, he argued, ‘had reached the noon-day of progress’ in advance of the Caucasians: ‘When we were embracing the arts and sciences on the banks of the Nile, their ancestors were still drinking human blood and eating out of the skulls of their conquered dead.’ Finally, readers were reminded to work and pray for ‘the founding of a racial empire whose only natural, spiritual and political aims shall be God and Africa, at home and abroad’. Subscribers to the Negro World who missed the relevant edition could spend 50 cents and buy a page-sized pamphlet that the paper helpfully suggested should have pride of place on the picture rail. ‘Take down the white pictures from your walls!’ ran the advert. ‘Let them echo your racial aspir ations.’17 Earnest Sevier Cox was an unexpected purchaser for whom the text resonated. But it’s unlikely that the Southern separatist and self-published author of such contentious tomes as White America and Lincoln’s Negro Policy would have cleared space on his picture rail, mantelpiece or anywhere in his home for African Fundamentalism.
Earnest Cox had dedicated his adult life to solving the ‘Negro question’. It had taken him to the African continent where he studied ‘how other people control their Negroes’ and, on the home front, had led him to devise schemes for ‘the disposal of the Negro’ in America, principally through ‘repatriation to the African continent’. Cox and Garvey had found each other, much like the luckless unaccompanied seniors at the last dance of the prom. When the lights came on they were still together. Throughout his incarceration Garvey kept up a correspondence with both Cox’s White American Society and John Powell’s Anglo-Saxon Clubs. Powell visited him for ‘cordial talks’ in Atlanta and Garvey encouraged both men to address UNIA branches. Garvey even went so far as to repudiate Thomas T. Fortune, when the veteran journalist and now editor of the Negro World raised a literary eyebrow at this new alliance. Fortune had the temerity to protest that both white supremacists had ‘no authority to use Mr Garvey and the UNIA to further their infamous propaganda of isolation and degradation of the Negro in American life’.
Ultimately, Garvey was perhaps less concerned with this abuse of new white friends than the elderly Fortune’s fit of nostalgia for editor ial independence, no matter that it was at variance with ‘the policy of the organisation … defined by [the proprietor] more than a thousand times’. The absent proprietor couldn’t afford though to alienate staff at the paper, as it was his one effective tool to maintain some order and authority over the organisation. Their complaints of nonpayment of salaries were met by him with swift assurances. He viewed attacks on the staff as challenges to his authority, so that when UNIA officers tried to sack the managers of the paper, he responded angrily, ‘No one has any power to dismiss [them] … If they are dismissed you shall dismiss me and remove forthwith my name from the paper,’ he added petulantly. ‘I am sick of the tricks.’18
By 19 February 1926 Garvey had lost confidence in William Sherrill, the acting president-general; he’d had more than enough of his scheming and malfeasance. It was time to act. Garvey sent a telegram to the Negro World, whose editors printed it verbatim on the front page of the paper: ‘I endorse completely step taken by you and committee of presidents in exposing Sherrill. Weston who has encumbered Liberty Hall is equally guilty of d
eceiving people. The people should take immediate legal actions against them … They are unworthy men and no sympathy should be shown them.’
Garvey now enacted a plan to remove the acting president by calling an emergency convention – not at Liberty Hall in Harlem where Sherrill had now established a stronghold, but in Detroit. Garvey listed twenty-seven charges against Sherrill, each one a good reason to vote him out of office. The convention duly obliged and a tearful Sherrill, protesting his innocence, was deposed. Of all the charges, it was his handling of the doomed SS Booker T. Washington that had most aggrieved Garvey.
‘As the ship was lost to Negroes on the stroke of the auctioneer’s hammer,’ the Negro World lamented on 3 April 1926, ‘Sherrill … and officers of the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Company, exchanged sheepish glances with each other … What thoughts were theirs as they beheld the tragic climax to their mismanagement, God alone can tell.’ The Booker T. Washington was sold for a paltry $25,000, well short of the $100,000 that the company had first paid for it. The new officers, headed by Garvey’s appointee Fred A. Toote, also attended the auction but, reported the paper, ‘No one would have thought any of the one group [was] acquainted with the other.’ No record of what Marcus Garvey might have said on hearing the fateful news of the Booker T. Washington has been found; it is of course possible that his distress was so great that he could not speak.