Negro with a Hat
Page 56
Had she been ten or twenty years younger, the Glorious Glorias was just the kind of tasteful show that the grand dame of the movement, Henrietta Vinton Davis, would have signed on for. But Davis had sacrificed her stage career to serve the UNIA. Now approaching her seventieth year, and after almost a decade of working for the organisation, she began to agonise over her itinerant life and unstable finances. Henrietta Davis had been almost alone among the senior American figures of the UNIA in muting her demands for unpaid salary. Rumours that she was considering a formal request for the missing $12,000 due her from years of underpayment reached Garvey on the first day of the international convention in Edelweiss Park, with predictable consequences. The opening of the convention had started magnificently with tens of thousands accompanying the UNIA parade through the streets of Kingston. Marcus Garvey was ‘the most outstanding figure in the procession … and was cheered right along the way of the march’. The newspapers were especially struck by the glamour of M. L. T. De Mena, ‘a striking figure, also in uniform’, who strode towards Edelweiss Park, ‘mounted on a grey charger with drawn sword’.30 Garvey was joined on the platform by his wife, De Mena, Henrietta Vinton Davis and a host of other dignitaries including the Mayor and Custos of Kingston. ‘The morning was a trifle hot,’ the paper continued, ‘but no one appeared bored … because of the splendid music and oratory of the speaker.’ It should have been a triumphant day but Garvey was in a foul mood which could not be put down to the heat. Already irritated by innumerable financial niggles, the rumour of Davis’s imminent betrayal (as he saw it) brought forth an angry public denunciation from the platform of the convention: ‘I came here and started a new organisation, paid furniture bills out of my pocket, and now I learn that Miss Davis is demanding money on her back salary,’ and with his voice trembling with incredulity Garvey brutally declared, ‘I will not associate myself with any rascal that is dishonest.’31
Predictably, Henrietta Vinton Davis chose thereafter not to associate with Garvey’s branch of the UNIA, but she never pursued him through the courts, as others were now doing for their unpaid back salaries. An old successful claim from the USA was now attached to Garvey in Jamaica with immediate repercussions for the future of the newly-acquired Edelweiss Park. The convention solidified the break between the two rival arms of the movement, but wrangles would continue for many more years, over the final breakdown between the division of the remaining UNIA assets.
Whilst Marcus Garvey was fighting familiar legal battles, he also returned from Europe to enter into Jamaican politics in a more conventional way. He put himself forward and was elected as a councillor for Kingston, and simultaneously announced the formation of Jamaica’s first political party – the People’s Political Party to contest the forthcoming elections for the fourteen seats of higher office on the legislative council. With one or two exceptions – including Garvey’s first mentor, Dr Robert Love – the fourteen members of the legislative council had always been independent men, either white or ‘not markedly coloured’, usually of independent means, members of gentlemen’s clubs, and the favoured sons of the plantocracy. Marcus Garvey’s nomination marked a significant milestone in the nation’s history. He recognised it as such and revelled in the moment. The euphoria was not long lasting. On 9 September 1929, Garvey received a tumultuous welcome as he addressed a crowd of 1,500 supporters, and unveiled the key points of the new party’s manifesto. They included land reform, and here Garvey moved the crowd with a boyhood memory of his uncle, Joseph Richards, a hard-working Christian. ‘Between his Bible and his hoe you could not separate him,’ Garvey told the crowd, but the old man had been cruelly evicted from his farm on the whim of the landlord. Jamaica was populated by more than 100,000 tenant farmers, and Garvey’s party would right the wrong inflicted on his uncle for the present and future generations of Joseph Richards.32 Calls for a minimum wage would also be enshrined in the manifesto, as well as a pledge to build Jamaica’s first university, a first national opera house, and a proposed law to impeach and imprison corrupt judges.
Scanning Garvey’s manifesto, over breakfast the next day, caused no more than a ruffled brow on the foreheads of the king’s representatives on the island, but the criticisms of the judiciary caused them to choke on their ackee and salt-fish, and sent them into spasms of apoplexy that would not abate until the culprit was brought before the courts and forced to account for his contempt. The policy was composed in haste, and had been framed by Garvey’s belief about the injustice of the seizure of the Liberty Hall property in Jamaica. It seems naive, for the man who on his first return to Jamaica had written excitedly to his wife that ‘everyone is scared of me’, to expect such frightened adversaries to forgo the chance to do him damage, when such a splendid opportunity arose. In court, Garvey further compounded his mistake (in the ruling of Mr Justice Clark, the most sympathetic of the three judges) in seeking ‘to defend himself with the aid of grammatical quibbles, of unimportant discrepancies of his speech, and even of mere printer’s errors in his own newspapers’. For someone who was not long out of jail, the idea of returning so soon must have been particularly unnerving. But Garvey’s belated acceptance of the charge and apology was too late for the other judges who found him guilty of demeaning the judiciary and undermining public confidence in them; they rigidly imposed a three-month custodial sentence (with Clark reassuring Garvey that ‘there is no question of hard labour or anything of that sort’) and £100 fine. After a pitiful exchange in which Garvey pleaded for time to sort out unfinished business, he was taken by motor car to the district jail in Spanish Town. It was perhaps the visible start of a very British approach to the removal of a threat: quiet, legal, merciless, slightly pompous but above reproach.
Amy Jacques arranged for the proprietor of a nearby lodging house to keep Garvey in clean laundry and ensure delivery of meals. Garvey’s sentence was due to expire on Christmas Eve but the Governor thought it politic to bring his release forward, thereby reducing ‘the risk of an ebullition of popular excitement’.33
Whilst in jail, Garvey had been unable to attend local council meetings; in the meantime, the other members convened a meeting to debate his absence, and passed a motion declaring his seat vacant. Garvey was livid and chose to express his ire most forcefully in the editorial pages of the Blackman, with the perhaps not unexpected consequence of another invitation to attend a court hearing. The editorial entitled ‘The Vagabonds Again’ was critical of the councillors who had voted to declare Garvey’s seat vacant. Garvey was tried and found guilty of seditious libel and sentenced to six months in jail, but was freed on bond. He filed an appeal which he eventually won and the earlier court’s decision was overturned.
Between his release on the first charge and his prosecution on the second, the leader of the People’s Political Party managed to find time to campaign for the legislative council. In the Kingston parish of St Andrew, Garvey was up against the former representative of the council, George Seymour-Seymour, owner of the Jamaica Mail. Garvey accused his opponent of underhand methods of intimidation and bribery, of trying to buy votes through the rum shop. ‘The people of my race, unfortunately, were fed on rum, sugar and water and sandwiches as a reward for their votes,’ Garvey alleged.34 But a snapshot of the clientele of such establishments would have found few men possessing either the necessary acreage of land or annual income that would enable them to vote. The majority of the peasant population was disenfranchised. In 1930, out of a population of just over 1 million, there were only 80,000 registered voters. On the eve of the election, Garvey’s opponent wrote to Governor Stubbs recommending a heavy police presence at the polling stations to forestall any violence from Garvey’s supporters: ‘Hundreds of Garveyites pay taxes from 4/- up to 9/6. They think they are on the Voters List but [they] are not. Many of them will invade the Polls and demand that they register their votes. They will probably refuse to believe they are not on the list so block the booths. Can we have strong bodies of Police to move them o
n?’
Seymour-Seymour conceded that he might be exaggerating the threat but argued that ‘even if it might appear that I propose to use a 9.2 gun when a Webley might prove enough, one cannot be too careful at a time like this’.35 Not only was it an exaggeration but it was based on an assumption about the aggression and violence of the lower orders from which Garvey drew his support. Garvey was always a staunch advocate of courteousness and respect and stamped out loutishness whenever it arose in the ranks of the UNIA. When Sergeant William Grant returned from New York, Garvey was appalled to learn of his well-earned reputation for indulging in bruising street-corner encounters. Grant’s former loyalty could not shield him from what was to come. Garvey denounced him as ignorant, irresponsible and boisterous; he vetoed Grant’s bizarre proposal for all members of the UNIA to be photographed and fingerprinted, and expelled him from the organisation.36 The perception of the UNIA membership put out by opponents was at variance with the idea that Garvey held fast to; of building a self-respecting body of people who’d become known for being well-mannered and well-spoken.
Nonetheless, Seymour-Seymour’s position on Garvey and Garveyism was, in line with much of the establishment, based on florid newspaper reports as well as memorandums from the continued police surveillance of the UNIA leader and now prospective legislative councillor.
When Garvey spoke at St Ann’s parish, his undercover police shadow reported that though his meetings had ended with the singing of the national anthem, it was his opinion that Garvey’s ‘speeches are and will have a disturbing effect among people and if kept up will lead to riot and bloodshed’. Just as Garvey had been accused of exporting the invalid and foreign (Jamaican) concept of a colour line within the race (with light-skinned blacks dismissive of their darker brethren), he now stood guilty in the eyes of Inspector H. J. Dodd of St Ann’s parish of importing a false and alien (American) concept of antagonism between the races. The inspector signed off his report with an ominous conclusion: ‘His remarks tend to antagonise the Black Race against the White and create a feeling similar to that which exists between the two races in America.’37
In the event, Seymour-Seymour defeated Garvey by an almost two-to-one majority, receiving 1,677 votes whilst Garvey only managed to poll 915. It would have been a great surprise to the Gleaner if the wealthier citizens had done anything other than to ‘support Mr Seymour down to the last man’. Having trembled at the prospect of a Garvey victory, the nation could now relax for, according to the Gleaner, the result showed that ‘the vast influence that Mr Garvey was supposed to have exercised over the minds and actions of the majority of our people existed only in the imaginations of those who most dread his propaganda’.38 The editorial writer on this occasion failed to mention that his paper had taken a leading role in the scare-mongering.
Garvey was now stymied at home and abroad. Increasingly, he faced difficulties in maintaining contact with UNIA divisions in America and, more importantly, in ensuring financial support from them.
The operation of the UNIA had been enormously hampered when Garvey was censored by the American Postal Service for using the mails illegally to sell UNIA lottery tickets.39 The Postmaster-General had immediately issued an order barring not just correspondence related to the lottery but all mail from the US to UNIA headquarters in Jamaica. One by one, Garvey was running out of financial options, and trying the patience of his wife. Amy Jacques only discovered that he had attempted to cash in life-insurance policies when the bank required his wife’s signature as well, and she began to harbour dark thoughts that the organisation would always come before family life. By 1930, Jacques was expecting their first child and one evening, during the latter stages of her pregnancy, she recalled ‘[Garvey] brought home an acceptance for me to sign, so that he could pay pressing bills of the UNIA … I was lying down, too worn out and disgusted for words; I shook my head in disgust.’40 The first child, Marcus Garvey Junior, was born on 17 September 1930 and his brother Julius three years later.
The pernicious effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s was magnified in already impoverished societies like Jamaica. Travelling round the country, Marcus Garvey was appalled by the conditions he met. It was a time prosaically recalled by Vivian Durham when ‘poverty wore rags and rascality wore robes’. Garvey formed a delegation which asked for an audience with the Governor to state their findings and call for large-scale social intervention, instead of just continuing on the ‘narrow policy of getting bridges built, a stretch of road repaired or a water tank erected’. There would be no New Deal policies instituted to alleviate hardship, partly because that suffering was not recognised. When Governor Jelf updated his file on 30 June 1930, he wrote to the head of the British Secret Service that Garvey had ‘put forward the most grotesque proposals for the improvement of the human race and Jamaica in particular, which could not bear even looking into, still less encouraging’.41
In addressing his own poor personal finances Garvey attempted to diversify into small business, principally operating as an auctioneer from his office at Edelweiss Park. But he was continually under siege from creditors. The month after the birth of their second child, Amy Jacques was served a summons for non-payment of the year’s taxes, and spoke of the shame and indignity of her court appearance. In her gloom she wondered about the comfortable life someone of her class would have expected to be living at this stage of their life relative to the discomfort she had chosen through an association with Garvey. The extent to which she had departed from the normal course expected of her was brought home forcefully shortly afterwards. Pushing the pram with her newborn on the main street of the capital one afternoon, Jacques was stopped by an old schoolfriend whom she hadn’t seen in years. Years later Julius recalled his fair-skinned, middle-class mother’s memory of that incident. Jacques’s friend looked into the pram and asked in all innocence, ‘What are you doing with this little black baby?’42
The Garveys struggled on through to 1935, drawing heavily on Jacques’s savings but with diminishing returns as funds became depleted. When Garvey could obtain no more credit, out of desperation he steeled himself to compose a round of begging letters. Earnest Cox received an urgent letter dated 18 May 1933. Garvey had already remortgaged his house and personal properties, and now he wrote, ‘I am about to lose my home and all I possess [unless] in the next thirty days at most I can pay off $10,000 of liabilities incurred to help the cause.’
That particular financial crisis was averted but soon after, he lost control of his own headquarters at Edelweiss Park when the mortgage on the property was foreclosed in 1934, and it was sold at public auction. The Depression roared on through the early 1930s.
Answering an inquiry from America as to the possibility of enforcing judgments against Garvey, the American Consul, Paul Squire, wrote back that it was impossible as Garvey was ‘financially embarrassed, that even his water service has been shut off’. Garvey’s periodical the Black Man, which only occasionally raised ‘the fiery cross’, Squire noted ‘[has] ceased to appear … and he is contemplating sailing for England’. After conducting interviews with a range of informed individuals, the consul concluded that they all agreed that ‘Garvey has lost his local following’.43
The international convention held in 1934 was one last throw of the dice, an attempt to rally the organisation and raise morale. It failed to do so. It also failed to lift Garvey out of his sense of heavy and oppressive gloom, and to shut out the echo from voices of past officers of the movement who seemed to have foretold the passing of his power. Men such as Ulysses Poston had warned him of the danger, in the end, of being subject to the same fate as Napoleon – broken and pitiful on the island of St Helena. Though Jamaica was no St Helena, it was small and diminished him. ‘From my observation,’ Garvey wrote, ‘I am forced to conclude that Jamaica is indeed an ignorant community; it is limited in intelligence, narrow in its intellectual concept, almost to the point where one can honestly say that the country is ridiculous!’44
Garvey announced that he would leave the island and set up new headquarters in London. In anticipation he agreed to an auction sale of all the furniture in Somali Court. The day after, his wife recalled, ‘we stood in an empty house, except for … the books, two large pictures [of Garvey] and vases left unsold’. Two days later, he left for England (‘Gone to foreign’ as Jamaicans say). Jacques was instructed to rent out Somali Court, and find smaller accommodation until such time as he was able to send for her and the boys.47
Marcus Garvey sailed for England aboard the SS Tilapa on 16 March 1935, endeavouring to be upbeat about launching yet ‘another colossal programme aiming at stirring the Negro’, from London.48 But Amy Bailey, an old friend whom he soon met up with in London, recalled a tearful encounter with a saddened Garvey. She suspected him to be homesick and was surprised by his answer to her question about why he’d ever left Jamaica. ‘Because I came to friends. I couldn’t trust Jamaica any more, and so I came to my friends in England, in London,’ he confessed. ‘I left Jamaica a broken man, broken in spirit, broken in health and broken in pocket … and I will never, never, never go back.’49