Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Kofey’s death did not much affect Garvey’s standing amongst UNIA members in Central America and the Caribbean, but it certainly caused further ructions in the USA, where the invocation to the divisions and chapters for the parent body ‘to function as before’ sounded like gallows humour. In the final year of his imprisonment in Atlanta, Marcus Garvey had written the lyrics to a popular song called ‘Keep Cool’ but in 1928 and 1929 that record was not being played on phonograms of UNIA divisions. Bitter rivalries caused splits in numerous branches, most notably in New York where Sergeant William Wellington Grant once again captured the headlines of the New York Times: ‘Sabers Used in Fight of Negro Factions.’ The Times detailed a battle in the streets of Harlem when ‘fifty members of the UNIA, resplendent in blue uniforms with gold braid and armed with unloaded Springfield rifles and with sabres … tried to force their way into Liberty Hall … where the Garvey Club, a rival Negro organisation similarly equipped, was holding a meeting.’ In the ensuing mayhem, Grant found himself numbered among the wounded combatants who were subsequently hospitalised.16 Such thuggish behaviour was a long way from the climate Marcus Garvey was cultivating in his Jamaican headquarters with the resurrection of elocution contests and music-appreciation evenings. Garvey certainly did not approve of the Sergeant Grant approach to conflict resolution.

  Soon after Princess Kofey’s death, Garvey summoned E. B. Knox, the titular head of the UNIA in America, to Jamaica, making it clear that it was not a request but an order. Notifying members back in the US of his safe arrival, Knox explained the purpose of his mission was to ‘receive instructions over the future operation of our great organisation in America’. Though dry-eyed over the murder of Laura Kofey, the president-general was livid about the indiscipline, lack of cohesion and potentially disastrous consequences for the UNIA. Garvey had summoned his pliant appointee for a lightning refresher in the requirements of leadership. Knox wrote diplomatically that he was ‘making the rounds with [Garvey] every night’ in his hectic lecture schedule around the island and was ‘being drilled in the work’, before Garvey set sail for England in the middle of April.17

  England wasn’t the preferred destination for the resurrection of the UNIA. The first choice had been Central America and the Caribbean, but Garvey found himself blocked and stymied by the British and American authorities at every turn. The wording may have differed but the sentiment was the same: Garvey was to be denied. Meriweather Walker, the Governor of the Panama Canal, was inclined ‘to refuse [Garvey] to land … on the ground that his presence would be disorganising to our West Indian employees’.18 Costa Rica had been a plum source of support and revenue for Garvey in 1921, receiving monthly subscriptions of approximately $2,000. But at the beginning of March 1928, in a memo to Washington, the US minister to Costa Rica, Roy T. Davis, had the ‘honor to report that Garvey recently has been denied admission to Costa Rica’.19 The Governor of British Honduras, John Burdon, likewise informed the Secretary of State for the Colonies that he had prohibited Garvey from landing, adding drily that a recent call for a mass meeting of local UNIA members had been ‘a complete fiasco’, answered by just twenty-seven people. ‘There [is] fair ground for hope’, Burdon concluded, ‘that it will break up before long.’ Alerted about Garvey’s intention to visit Trinidad, Governor Horace Byatt quickly convened a meeting of the governing executive council, at which it was decided vis-à-vis the ‘undesirable immigrant’, that an order should be issued ‘prohibiting him from landing in Trinidad’.20

  Though plans had been cemented to render the British West Indies out of bounds to Marcus Garvey, no such restrictions were put in place to deter his travelling to England. On the eve of Mr and Mrs Garvey’s departure, the couple hosted a farewell reception. Accepting the presentation of a purse containing £50, Garvey confidently predicted that he would receive an equally hearty welcome in England, for he was going to a country ‘where he would be heard by men, who knew the sympathy of humanity … men who were themselves reformers’.

  The Garveys must have felt that confidence was misplaced when seeking hotel reservations. None of the first fifty establishments that they tried could accommodate them. ‘The clerk generally [offered] the excuse that all rooms have been taken.’ The Garveys lodged for the first two nights in the Cecil which Amy Jacques recorded approvingly was ‘a swanky London Hotel where gartered flunkeys bowed us in’. Their budget would not stretch to a third night, and thereafter the couple rented a private house at 57 Castletown Road, West Kensington, where they remained for the next four months.21 In order to make contact with the small but committed branch of the UNIA, the Garveys would have to travel to the other side of town. Black men in London – mostly former seamen from the Caribbean far outnumbered black women and ‘somewhat destructive of [their] principle[s]’ the London Garveyites had largely taken white English wives. ‘These women,’ wrote Joel Rogers, ‘take great interest in their men’s activities, and at the Marcus Garvey hall of the East End of London … shouted the “Back to Africa!” battle cry as enthusiastically as the men.’ Their eagerness called for and elicited a generous response from Marcus Garvey. ‘Only persons of African descent could become registered members of the organisation,’ recalled Amy Jacques, but as the English wives were so very helpful and sincere, ‘an Auxiliary was formed for them.’

  Readers of the Negro World could follow Garvey’s British adventure in regular updates sent in by the president-general. On 21 May, he quivered with excitement about his plan to take over the Royal Albert Hall, a vast Victorian structure with seating for 3,901 for a landmark speech on 6 June: ‘All London already is talking about this meeting and we’re hoping for a big time,’ he clucked. A soprano accompanied by a pianist also featured on the bill that evening. Curious black Londoners, seamen, students and local members of the UNIA along with their English wives attended, and a smattering of liberal intellectuals.22 President-General Garvey was introduced to the hall by Charles Garnett, a leading member of the liberal group called the English League of Universal Brotherhood and Native Races Association. Garnett had made shrewd suggestions to Garvey about the necessity of tweaking his speech towards the sensibilities of an English audience. But when the UNIA leader, who’d grown accustomed to addressing thousands in venues like Madison Square Garden, looked out to the masses in the Royal Albert Hall, he was confronted by row upon row of empty seats. There was no sudden loss of appetite on the speaker’s part. He waded through the disappointment and gave a résumé of his life in the UNIA, presented with both a dignified earnestness and easy humour. His enemies had tried to label him a ‘Socialist’ and ‘Bolshevist’, he said but had reluctantly settled for ‘crook’; he went to prison for an ‘empty envelope’; and England could have South Africa but the Negro should have his slice of the African pie. And as Garvey neared the end of his speech, he directed his final words at the missing thousands: ‘Any rebuff you give as touching the representation I make on behalf of the people will not only be an insult to me but to 280 million Negroes whom I represent.’ On 23 June, underneath the headline, ‘A Nightmare Negro: Black Rascal’s Platform Ramp’, the reporter for the weekly John Bull had evidently declined to heed the advice of Garvey, whom he considered ‘one of the biggest scoundrels and impostors that ever blushed under the ebony hue of a Negro skin’. Garvey immediately lodged a libel suit against the paper. The British authorities, if not nearly as nakedly disdainful of the black leader, also treated him in an offhand manner. Garvey was aggrieved at being shut out from British territories in the Caribbean, and sought an interview with the Colonial Secretary, Leopold Amery, who simply and deftly sidestepped the request and was artfully perplexed as to why Garvey would think it had anything to do with the Colonial Office.

  Later in the year, the couple travelled to Paris where they were more graciously received. It was a good time to be black in Paris. The city was gearing up to a sustained period of Negrophilia; in 1925, Josephine Baker had wowed audiences wearing nothing but a belt of bananas,
and now, three years later, the Harlem Renaissance (or at least some of its luminaries) had transferred partially to the French capital. In a sense, Paris was better prepared for Marcus Garvey. It could even boast its very own French-African equivalent in Prince Kojo Tovalou Houenou. French African colonials in Paris found themselves in a delightful paradox: they were permitted to utter the near seditious sentiments about French Imperial rule for which they’d be locked up at home; but their metropolitan candour elicited little more than a serial Gallic shrug. After the very disagreeable and turgid dealings in London, Paris was a refreshing sorbet for the Garveys. Sounding more like the Francophile Du Bois on his mission to France after the Great War, Garvey eulogised the French who had admitted a Negro (Blaise Diagne) to the Senate, whilst America had no black representatives in the national governing body ‘except, perhaps, a Negro doorman or janitor who might be seen in the House of Congress’. On the night of 6 October, Garvey was pleased to estimate his audience at the Club du Faubourg comprised ‘about 1,500 white people, Frenchmen and women, and scattered Americans, as well as about 70 Negroes’, including the Prix Goncourt winner, René Maran.23 Amy Jacques noted wryly that her husband’s appreciation of the interest shown in him cooled when it was also extended to his companion. Charmed by Amy Jacques and her halting schoolgirl French, a member of the Comité de Défense de la Race Negre sought Garvey’s permission to meet his wife at a later date to continue their interesting conversation. Monsieur Garvey replied curtly, ‘She is my wife!’24

  In her black flaminga coat and elegant cuffs and scarves, Amy Jacques was the very picture of Parisian chic. Whilst Jacques wrote effusively of Paris and of their trips to the Louvre and Notre Dame, her husband worried over the possible perception that they were pampering themselves on a luxurious Grand Tour. His trip, he assured subscribers to the Negro World, bore no comparison to the way that his nemesis Dr Du Bois had previously cavorted round Europe, ‘attempting to solve the most vexing problem of the age by attending garden parties of the near-great, then returning to America to write engaging travel stories and heavenly poems and to revel, in retrospect, in the exquisite delights of a tête-à-tête with H. G. Wells or Lady [Nancy] Astor.’ One of the paradoxes of Marcus Garvey is that, at a fundamental level, the respect and recognition of such eminent folk is precisely what he sought: he craved the very thing that he professed to reject. But it was only personal gratification in the sense that he saw himself as the personification of the race.

  At a fundamental level this is the role Garvey conceived for himself. Black people had lagged so far behind that they needed to catch up more speedily than a considered chronological development would allow. Therefore, the answer was to skip a few stages, so that what was lacking in substance could be made up by gesture alone. ‘Gesture buoyed the Negro’s self-respect,’ wrote S. A. Haynes, one of the new intake of UNIA officials, ‘and gave him a new hope and new vision.’

  Gesture lay behind the UNIA leader’s train journey to Switzerland. From the Hotel Victoria in Geneva, on 11 September, Marcus Garvey wrote to the Secretary-General of the league of Nations, Sir Eric Drummond, to renew the petition for a fairer deal for the black race, that his representatives had first put to the League in 1922. Adopting his most statesmanlike voice, Garvey assured Drummond that he and his international movement of black people were ready to comply ‘in the observance of any reasonable suggestion made to them by the League for an adjustment of the grievous complaints they have made and the horrible conditions under which they live’.25 The boldest point raised in the petition was that ‘the entire region of West Africa could be brought together as one United Commonwealth of Black Nations, and placed under the government of black men’. The fifty-six other points raised included grievances over the continued American occupation of Haiti, and the infringement of black people’s liberty to travel. By way of illustration, the petition rather coyly drew attention to the recent legislation and secret communications, between governors of British colonies, to impede the work of a ‘certain influential black’.26

  There would be no let-up in the unstated British policy of denying a platform to Marcus Garvey, as he was to find when attempting to speak in British Honduras, and even more poignantly so, when the Garveys travelled to Canada. Both passports were stamped without fuss when the couple landed in Montreal. They were detained only by reporters who wanted details of Garvey’s speaking engagements. They took a taxi to the address where they were staying, but then no sooner had they unpacked their bags than policemen were knocking on the front door, and Garvey was arrested on a charge of ‘illegal entry’. The next day the authorities conceded that they’d made a mistake, but not before Garvey had spent a night in jail, accompan ied by sensational and unflattering news bulletins of his arrest. The Canadians had panicked and the Montreal Gazette’s report of the need to ensure that ‘Canada shall not be used as a base for the purpose of the attack of neighbouring countries’, gave a clear hint about the method behind the mistake.27 He would be permitted to remain for a week in Canada provided he gave no public speeches. No such restrictions applied to his wife nor to her re-entry to the USA. They temporarily separated so that Amy could visit UNIA divisions in America to boost morale, as well as address the constant need for funds. Plans for him to speak in Toronto were also abandoned. En route back from Montreal, Garvey’s ship docked at Hamilton (another UNIA stronghold) but supporters there, too, were denied an audience with their leader: Garvey was forced back up the gangway of the ship by armed soldiers and policemen guarding the pier.

  The Garveys returned to Jamaica on 23 November 1928 and settled more comfortably into their home. Garvey’s niece, Ruth, recalled this as a happy period, with Garvey acting as a surrogate father to her. Garvey’s sister, Indiana, had been widowed and she and her daughter moved into a property close by. At that time Garvey did not have any children of his own and Ruth recalled him giving her free rein in his library with the instruction to ‘Read, read, read.’ As well as a library there was a music room with an ‘auto piano [in which] one could insert music sheets on rolls in a special compartment and then pump out the tune which was played automatically’. But the young girl’s strongest impression of her uncle was of his long walks ‘around the lawns with his hands in his pockets as if he were studying something’.28

  Garvey was never entirely relaxed, even on a seemingly leisurely stroll. One of the first announcements that he made on his return to Jamaica was his ambition to hold the next international convention in Kingston. If he couldn’t speak to UNIA followers in North America, then the only solution was for them to come to him. He secured a new property, Edelweiss Park at Cross Roads in north Kingston, which would become the new HQ of the organisation, and the site of the forthcoming convention. Edelweiss Park (‘the Wembley of Jamaica’) would also function as a cultural centre for the edification and amusement of local people, with a moving picture theatre and other recreational activities. Vaudeville shows were put on, along with dramas written by local people, including the aspiring playwright Marcus Garvey. His Coronation of an African King, with a cast of over 100, was performed on 18 August 1930. With scenes from Senegal to Dahomey, the three-act play culminated in a violent final battle, and the coronation of Prince Cudjoe of Sudan – anticipating the crowning of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, later that year in November. The same cast went on to stage several other plays including Slavery from Hut to Mansion. Unsolicited works from the country’s most famous literary export, Claude McKay, were unlikely to be staged. McKay had recently provoked the ire of the president-general with the publication of a rich and bawdy tale of black life in the Negro metropolis of the world. Home to Harlem, populated by pimps, prostitutes, jazz men and demonic preachers, was dismissed by Garvey as a salacious tale, designed to expose the worst traits of the race and whet white readers’ appetites about black fecundity and debauchery that was a ‘damnable libel against the Negro’. Home to Harlem was at the other end of the spectrum from the stirring revu
es of black beauty that punters at Edelweiss Park might expect from the ‘Glorious Glorias and Tropical Swains’. Garvey’s attitude to culture was closer to the position advanced by his enemy W. E. B. Du Bois who celebrated the idea of Negro literature that aspired to the standards of the established Western canon, and in so doing undermined the subtle and unsubtle ranking of a culture and its people that put the Negro at the bottom. Fine writing acted by stealth to achieve a state memorably described by David Levering Lewis as ‘civil rights by copyright’. Garvey thought along similar lines although his reasoning may not have been as subtle. He winced at the thought of black folk culture which retarded the race. Spirituals and jazz were created by black people, said Garvey, ‘simply because we did not know better music’.29 In Garvey’s conception the Leider Songs rendered by the demure and comely Glorious Glorias were always to be preferred to Bessie Smith’s ‘Black Bottom’.