Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  With Garvey sidelined and the organisation still riven with the same financial reversals, former adversaries began to contemplate that they might have been too narrow and selective in their criticism; they started to take a softer, more sympathetic stance towards the man whom they’d previously demonised as a demagogue. Cyril Briggs, who even up to Garvey’s incarceration had maintained an undiluted animosity towards him, now wrote chastising those who ‘in a brazen effort to pass the buck’, conveniently sought to make a scapegoat of the fallen leader. Over the debacle of the Booker T. Washington, he asked cogently, ‘Will Marcus Garvey, in his prison cell at Atlanta, be blamed for this loss too?’ The farce would not end there. The Sherrill and Weston group refused to accept the legality of the emergency convention. Although Sherrill and Co. had been deposed from their positions in the Parent Body of the UNIA, they still remained as leaders of the local New York division, and a dispute soon arose centring on Liberty Hall. On 1 August the local New York leaders mounted their own rival convention.

  Months earlier, an officer, whose loyalty to Garvey was intact, had alerted Garvey to looming trouble at Liberty Hall because Sherrill’s allies had ‘sowed the seed of doubt and misapprehension in the minds of the membership’. The loyal Garveyite was so disaffected that he had stopped attending as he couldn’t abide ‘to have to sit and listen to discrediting speeches of you and members of the Council’.19

  On the first day of the rival convention, Garvey loyalists tried to prevent it opening by nailing shut the doors of Liberty Hall. In the resulting fracas, the Garveyites relented, the boards came down and the convention went ahead without them. By 3 August, there were signs that this truce was merely a lull, when the New York Times reported George Weston’s speech from the podium of Liberty Hall: ‘Although the schism in the association seemed to be widening, all members would be welcome in the hall.’ However, Weston warned, ‘Garvey’s adherents could not speak from the floor unless they retracted accusations made against William Sherrill.’ Weston was adamant, and if the pro-Garvey group refused to cooperate, he added ominously, ‘we will have to travel along our own lines, for our own success and toward our own objective’.

  There were no retractions. There was, conversely, a cementing of opinions on both sides, and an animosity aggravated by a determination to criminalise each other. Garveyites brought charges of burglary against their opponents after Sherrill’s allies raided UNIA headquarters and removed confidential records, financial ledgers and even cheques from the offices on 135th Street. At the end of the two-week convention, the rival UNIA group issued a damning press release in which they lambasted their ‘swollen headed’ former leader for ‘lavishly misappropriating [funds] in a grandiose effort to keep from paying the penalty of his crime in the same fashion as he had before appropriated them to advertise his name and grandeur’.20 The claims and counter-claims against each group culminated in them both seeking resolution – particularly over the legal status of Liberty Hall – through the courts. By the time the lawyers were brought in, all possibility of rapprochement was lost. The courts ruled that the two distinct groups, the pro-Garvey UNIA parent body and the New York local division, should jointly share Liberty Hall for the month of October 1926, with each group occupying the building on alternate weeks. Thereafter, from November onwards the New York branch was granted full possession – although the parent body retained the mortgage.21 It was a sad end to Garvey’s tenure of the spiritual seat of the organisation, and it must have been hard for the lonely and dejected inmate of the Atlanta penitentiary to resist the thought that they were fighting over the dying coals of a once great movement.

  Buoyed by their success, Garvey’s rivals eyed other prizes and assets whose ownership might be contested. The UNIA leader was particularly vexed by ugly and underhand attempts to attack him by attacking his wife. Sensing danger, he sent an urgent telegram to Jacques on 29 July which simply stated: ‘Keep out of all disputes. Love Popsie.’

  In Garvey’s reading, enemies within the UNIA were lending themselves to renewed efforts by the BOI to ensnare his wife in the financial difficulties over the organisation’s acquisition of a failed school in Virginia. The BOI – fed malicious rumours by the rival UNIA – alleged that Garvey’s wife was somehow working on instructions from her husband to fraudulently solicit funds for the school. Prisoner 19359 appealed to John Snook, the warden of Atlanta penitentiary, to intervene on his behalf. Snook was sympathetic. Whilst he might not have shared Garvey’s outrage over the plot ‘against a lonely woman who is to be hounded in the name of the government to please a group of real-estate sharks, crooked lawyers and other enemies of mine who think they can completely crush me through … injury to a loyal and loving wife’, Snook discounted the theory that Garvey (whose correspondence was censored) could have been issuing instructions to his wife as alleged by the BOI.22 Marcus Garvey’s impotence even to protect his wife was dispiriting.

  The very foundations of his marriage to Amy Jacques were also under attack throughout 1926. Lawyers acting on behalf of his first wife had applied to the Supreme Court to review the case. Amy Ashwood still maintained that Garvey’s divorce from her had been hurried through a court in Missouri whilst she was out of the country, that Marcus Garvey was guilty of adultery prior to his marriage to Jacques and that in any case, that marriage was illegal.

  Ashwood was back in Harlem, living at 666 St Nicholas Avenue. Garvey’s lawyers, with their client’s consent, decided now to launch a counter-offensive. They hired a black private detective, Herbert S. Boulin, to gather information on Ashwood’s personal habits. Boulin was not too fussy about which briefs he accepted; as P-138, he had previously been in the employ of the BOI, spying on Marcus Garvey. Now, acting incognito, the private detective managed to secure a room as Amy Ashwood’s lodger in Harlem. By 8 April 1926, Boulin was ready to strike. At 3.30 a.m. (with several witnesses/spectators, including Garvey’s bodyguard Marcellus Strong, in tow) Boulin returned to the apartment. In the dark he crept into Amy Ashwood’s bedroom, and claims to have discovered her undressed and lying in bed with a man, later identified as Joseph Fraser. Sparing its readers’ blushes, the Chicago Defender rushed into print the next day with the headline, ‘Detectives Surprise Pair in Bed: former imperial couch room had been turned into a love nest.’ Amy Ashwood was reported to have launched into a bitter tirade against her former husband, before recovering her composure to condemn the American concept of moral turpitude. Her companion was merely keeping vigil while she was ill, she said, and ‘the raid was a mere scheme of followers of the imprisoned leader of the UNIA to defame her character’. By the time the revisited divorce case came to court in New York, on 15 December, her stance as the blameless, virtuous and wronged woman had been severely undermined. The jury had seemed receptive to the suggestion that Marcus Garvey had committed adultery – a former lodger, Mrs O’Meally, testified that she had, on innumerable occasions, seen Garvey and Miss Jacques retire at night and come out of the same room in the morning. But then the trial suddenly swung against her when Hubert Harrison (father of five), who held no brief for Garvey (having previously offered his services to the prosecutors in the mail-fraud case) was called to the witness stand. Reaching into his briefcase, Harrison produced a bunch of letters written to him by Amy Ashwood. A letter dated 24 February 1925 proved most damaging when it was read out in court:

  My dearest,

  You are a wonderful man and I could die in your arms. You are so fascinating and tender. I am going to remain in America for one year. If I may, and I know it is going to be a blissfully happy mental communion of souls – maybe I have it but perfect – the combining of one nature with tender impression, the meeting of their lips and then the climax. Oh the ecstasy of it is an art …

  Dearest love, as soon as I can I’m going to fix up a love nest … I know how you stand financially, don’t think I ever cared about that. I love you for yourself.

  Your love ADE23

  Both Garvey and Ashwo
od were found guilty in the trial. ‘Victory, if there is such a thing in this case,’ wrote the Gleaner, ‘has been scored by Garvey in that … Mrs Amy Jacques Garvey, wife N°. 2, is still the legal wife of Garvey until the court sets aside his Missouri divorce.’ The report of the trial, with its salacious headlines and ‘spicy’ letters was an unsavoury episode in Marcus Garvey’s life about which, from his cell in Atlanta, he did not much care to read.

  Increasingly, towards the end of 1926 and the beginning of 1927, Garvey sought refuge in literature. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius was a constant companion, and he now borrowed and built on his reading, composing poignant but consciously accessible verse, forged from the heat of his prison life. The Meditations of Marcus Garvey was perhaps the most transparent example of literary sources. But Garvey’s theme always came back to Negro identity. He articulated the black man’s lot – and his own – of being trapped in the white man’s world and at his mercy in an epic poem he began in 1927 called ‘The White Man’s Game, His Vanity Fair’. Garvey’s poem, inspired by John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, was written he said, ‘in [a] peculiar form … it is not verse, neither is it orthodox prose, but it is a kind of mean adopted for the purpose of conveying desired thought’.24 The thought being that Marcus Garvey was innocent:

  In the vicious order of things to-day,

  The poor, suffering black man has no say:

  The plot is set for one ’gainst the other

  With organisation they mustn’t bother.

  ‘If one should show his head a leader,

  Whom we cannot use, the rest to pilfer,

  We shall discredit him before his own,

  And make of him a notorious clown.’

  On the anniversary of his second year in jail, Garvey once again appealed to the President to free him. To strengthen his application for executive clemency, Garvey imaginatively enlisted the support of the original jury who had found him guilty. Nine of the ten members who could be contacted endorsed Garvey’s plea in the belief that he had been ‘sufficiently punished’. But the government was still nervous. Despite all the signs that his organisation was imploding, the selective perception of him remained intact. ‘Owing to his great popularity with the colored race and their unbounded confidence in him and his failure to recognise that he has done anything wrong,’ wrote James Finch, the Pardon Attorney, ‘the chances are that if, or when, released he will again exploit these willing victims with the same result.’

  Amazingly, the people’s sympathy for Garvey multiplied the longer he remained in jail. When, two weeks later, news spread of a deterioration in his physical condition, they redoubled their efforts and renewed their call for Garvey’s release. Following an acute flare-up of his old bronchitis, Garvey was admitted to the prison hospital suffering from influenza, ‘with a temperature’, reported the physician, ‘somewhat in excess of 102 [degrees]’. UNIA members flooded the Department of Justice with letters and further appeals. Earl Little, the father of Malcolm X, led the way from Milwaukee, Wisconsin with a petition which suggested Garvey’s release would be the President’s ‘priceless gift to the Negro … causing [his] name to be honoured with generations yet unborn’.25

  J. A. Marshall wanted the Attorney-General to know that ‘while the world is rejoicing over the new “Hero of the air, Lindbergh”, the Negro is worrying over their leader, Marcus Garvey’. Even Amy Ashwood added her voice to the calls for her former husband’s release. In writing to President Coolidge, Ashwood’s consideration of the well-being of prisoner 19359 played only a walk-on part in her quickening emotions; self-interest was her primary motivation. With Garvey locked up, she would not be receiving any alimony. The followers of Prophet George Hurley were more exercised by the surety of Garvey’s innocence; Hurley delivered a petition on behalf of 700 members of his Hagar Spiritual Church. The bid to free their leader was also on the agenda of the UNIA Chattanooga division, when they met in Steele orphanage, their local Liberty Hall, on 4 August. But their experience that evening highlighted the extent to which the authorities, in some parts of the country, still clung to the view of Garvey and his agents as ‘belligerent negro radicals’. A police squad which attempted to raid the meeting was debarred from entering by an armed member of the African Legion on the door. Shots were fired, UNIA men joined in and when the gun battle was over, one policeman and two UNIA members lay fatally wounded.26

  The adverse publicity from Chattanooga caused a blip, nothing more, in the momentum behind the campaign to secure the release of Marcus Garvey. Letter writers in Detroit took their plea to the streets when the local UNIA division staged a silent parade through the city. A huge picture of Marcus Garvey was balanced on the back seat of the open-topped high-powered vehicle that would ordinarily have been reserved for the president-general. Thousands of protestors turned out to cheer the marchers, led by three contingents of African legions who displayed banners including ‘Free Garvey and Bring Joy to Negroes’. Black newspapers also joined in the accelerating campaign to free the UNIA leader. ‘Why is Garvey in prison, anyway?’ the Detroit Independent wanted to know, speculating that ‘the same lamentable fate that befell Marcus Garvey, regardless of innocence or guilt, might probably befall any other Negro leader’. The Chicago Whip went even further, romanticising the tragedy of the fallen leader: ‘Behind his sordid, sombre prison’s walls this black man with Napoleonic vision sits crushed in body and mind.’ The Whip willingly surrendered to sentimentality in its depiction, informing readers that ‘the glint of steel that once burned in his eyes is fading out and he sits, thin and emaciated, gazing always forward with a far-away stare’, and ended by urging black leaders to emerge from their shameful indolence and ‘march to the front in behalf of Marcus Garvey’.27

  Remarkably, William Pickens was one of those whose conscience whispered to him uncomfortably in the night. Pickens had been one of the most vociferous cheerleaders of the ‘Garvey Must Go’ campaign, and Garvey’s memory of their last encounter was unpleasant: he’d observed how, on the announcement of his sentence, Pickens had rushed over to congratulate his prosecutors, patting them on the back. The same William Pickens now wrote in the pages of the New Republic that ‘Garvey was not at heart a criminal … [but] believed, foolishly of course, that by taking in more money he would rescue the enterprise and save everything’. The sad truth, Pickens concluded, was that Garvey was ‘a visionary, a bold dreamer … who helped to jail himself by being braver than the others’.28 Towards the end of 1927, the calls for Garvey’s release were binding his supporters and sympathisers into a raucous mass that caused unease in government circles. But Garvey left his attorneys to press his case with the authorities; he was distracted by the impending loss of the Liberty Hall in Harlem. Though weakened by his chronic illness, he still had the will, if not the energy, to embark on a fevered, last-minute round of letters and cables to UNIA officers in a desperate bid to save the very cradle of the organisation from foreclosure. The new UNIA leader (more accurately described as the personal representative of the president-general), E. B. Knox, visited Garvey on 23 August ‘to get detailed instructions’. But by then the end was almost in sight. Liberty Hall had been remortgaged on several occasions in order to satisfy other creditors. Several potential saviours had intervened along the way, most tantalisingly the numbers runner, Casper Holstein, who at the start of 1927 paid $36,000 to redeem all of the outstanding mortgages. Holstein assured a mass meeting of the faithful at Liberty Hall of the purity of his altruism and ‘asked for nothing but the execration of Negroes throughout the world if he … attempted to do anything which would hurt the interest of the membership or imperil their property’. But a few months later, Holstein’s natural business acumen had reasserted itself when the UNIA failed to meet its payments to the previously inexecrable Holstein. When Liberty Hall was put up for sale, Garvey, who had not wanted to enter into any arrangement with the ‘policy king’, wrote despairingly to Knox, ‘I have no more advice to give,’ and, his mood da
rkening as he conceded defeat, added, ‘If the people are too ignorant to protect their interests I can do no more.’

  Though E. B. Knox was prepared to carry out the president-general’s bidding to the very letter, Garvey’s effectiveness was undoubtedly limited by his imprisonment. It was too late for Liberty Hall, but there were hints now of the US administration beginning to buckle under the weight of support for Garvey. On 12 November, the Attorney-General John Sargent compiled a detailed brief for President Coolidge. Garvey’s case was ‘most unusual’, Sargent opined, ‘notwithstanding the fact that the prosecution was designed for the protection of colored people, whom it was charged Garvey had been defrauding … none of these people apparently believe that they have been defrauded, and manifestly retain their entire confidence in Garvey.’ The great danger foreseen by Sargent was that ‘instead of the prosecution and imprisonment of the applicant being an example and warning against a violation of law, it really stands and is regarded by them, as a class, as an act of oppression of the race in their efforts in the direction of race progress and discrimination against Garvey as a Negro. This is by no means a healthy condition of affairs.’ There was but one conclusion for the President to draw: Garvey’s sentence must be commuted to expire at once. On 18 November President Coolidge issued the instructions but the celebrations of their leader and his delighted supporters were to be muted by one all-important caveat: Garvey was to be set free on the understanding that he would be deported immediately.29

  A few days later immigration officials arrived at the penitentiary in Atlanta and Garvey was discharged into their custody. Instead of a welcome return to the UNIA fraternity, the supreme leader was escorted onto a train bound for New Orleans where the SS Saramacca awaited his immediate deportation. There was still a faint possibility that he might escape expulsion. Under the law, aliens resident in the US for less than five years who had been convicted of mail fraud and given sentences of more than one year in prison were liable to expulsion. But Garvey had arrived in America six years prior to his conviction and so did not fall under the provisions of the Deportation Law. That argument, though, was weakened by the fact that Garvey’s residence had not been continual. It had been broken by his fateful tour of the Caribbean back in 1921 when he’d been kept out of the country for five months; the years prior to his readmission in July 1921, government lawyers could argue, would count for naught.