by Colin Grant
18
GONE TO FOREIGN
Sometimes I long for peace, but where could I find it?
Marcus Garvey, Garvey and Garveyism
ON Sunday afternoons, when he kicked apart the legs of his stepladder and it snapped into an inverted V, Marcus Garvey climbed to the top, opened his coat, flapped it behind him, shoved his hands into his pockets and began to speak. A crowd soon gathered around him; their numbers swelled as his voice boomed out over the traffic, the cooing pigeons and the ineffectual competitors who immediately jumped down from their soapboxes and tried their luck further away. It was as if Garvey had found his way back to the beginning, to the time when A. Philip Randolph had introduced him to the crowds on 135th Street in Harlem – except that this was a park and the audience mostly white, tourists and students assembled at the north-east corner of Hyde Park: Speakers’ Corner. The opportunity to work on a crowd had always appealed to Garvey; to test himself against its volatility, to turn it, to take it over and harness its strength.
A visiting Grenadian politician, T. A. Marryshow, stood chuckling in the midst of the ‘immense crowds’ who pressed ever closer to the podium to hear the words and brilliant, rapier-like retorts to hecklers pour out of the new self-imposed Jamaican exile. ‘Garvey’s talk on “Abyssinia” on Sunday last, was magnificent,’ Marryshow reported. ‘He has a great stock of humour – I did not know it before – by which he ridiculed many an interrupter into embarrassing silence.’1 Marryshow silently cheered on his clansman, and so too, at a remove of 3,000 miles, did the Gleaner; now that Garvey was gone, the paper had forgiven him his transgressions. In an earlier report, the Gleaner had written with giddy delight that, in Marcus Garvey’s master plan, Speakers’ Corner was but a stepping stone to the Houses of Parliament. He was well on the way, the paper effused, to receiving a Labour Party nomination to become an MP (the first of the Negro race) in the forthcoming general elections, although there was almost certainly only one source (the prospective MP himself), for that astonishing and unlikely story.
In the same article the paper registered a more concrete achievement of another compatriot in London. Amy Ashwood had opened a nightclub and restaurant, the ‘Florence Mills’ (named after the African-American performer) on New Oxford Street.2 Amy Ashwood had never accepted the legality of Marcus Garvey’s divorce from her. She had lived in the margins and shadow of his life. Now in 1935, she’d moved closer to the foreground. It was a jubilee year; London was teeming with the most energetic citizens of Empire, and the Florence Mills – with Ashwood’s magnetism – had become, almost overnight, a hub for black intellectual life. Guests were attracted by the ‘rice’n peas’ West Indian cuisine. In the evenings they took to the dance floor as Ashwood’s business partner, the Calypsonian Sam Manning, and his orchestra broke out into Caribbean melodies and the foxtrot. C. L. R. James, Jomo Kenyatta, George Padmore and Ras Makonen were amongst the glittering clientele.
Marcus Garvey did not patronise the establishment run by his former wife. His period in London would be marked by a vain attempt to reposition the UNIA at the forefront of black life. The organisation was fractured and diminished. In London it clamoured for attention in an already crowded field of small but dynamic black organisations, groups such as the LCP, League of Coloured People; WASU, the West African Students’ Union; and IAFA, the International African Friends of Abyssinia. Nonetheless, Garvey attracted young and ambitious supplicants who wrote to him for advice and encouragement, from the outposts of empire, hoping for a head start at the beginning of their careers. Vivian Durham was typical. The twenty-five-year-old Jamaican journalist had served a kind of apprenticeship as Garvey’s campaign manager for the Kingston councillorship. But whilst Garvey sympathised with the young UNIA idealist, recognising that opportunities were limited for a bright and sensitive working-class activist in the Caribbean, he could not offer him the position he so obviously sought. London, he wrote, was ‘a bad place for you to come, except you have money’.3 He would have given his younger self the same advice. President-General Garvey, at the head of an organisation which could still boast tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands worldwide, could barely afford to keep on a skeleton staff in London. A nucleus of never more than three or four employees attended to his needs.
From a small office that must, in his darkest hour, have reminded him of the cramped hotel room in Kingston where he’d started out in 1914, Garvey pumped out missives to the world. The letterhead of the UNIA headquarters at 2 Beaumont Crescent, West Kensington, with its London postcode offered some kudos, but nothing more. A new monthly magazine, a reincarnation of the Black Man, took its bow in 1935. The Guyana-born Eric Walrond, who’d worked on the Negro World during its peak Harlem period, joined Garvey in London, and was kept on a small retainer as reward for his contributions to the Black Man. Una Marson, who would eventually head the BBC’s Caribbean Service, was grateful for her temporary position as his personal secretary, and augmented her salary with occasional pieces in the Black Man. The monthly journal offered Garvey’s readers a snapshot of the black world, from the glamorous heart of the metro polis. The proprietor’s column, ‘The World as I See It’, was an accurate index of his frustrations. The African-American actor and darling of left-wing circles, Paul Robeson, was a case in point. Robeson was the talk of the town in May 1935 when he took to the stage for the leading role in Stevedore. He played Lonnie, a dockworker, described by Time as ‘a big taffy-coloured buck’,4 who is falsely accused of raping a white woman. Lonnie’s rescue from the lynch mob by his fellow white workers hardly militated against the play’s stereotypical depiction of the brutalised Noble Savage. The average Englishman would leave the theatre with ‘contempt for the Negro’. It was no wonder, therefore, Garvey moaned, that ‘cultured blacks and respectable people of colour find it difficult to secure courteous reception and accommodation in England at the present time’. Garvey reprised the same attack that he’d marshalled against Claude McKay. There was no doubt that Robeson was a good actor but, argued Garvey with a sigh, Robeson was unwittingly being ‘used to dishonour and discredit his race’.5 The error was exacerbated by his acceptance of the role of the subservient Bosambo in the film Sanders of the River. ‘Paul Robeson has left London for Hollywood,’ Garvey growled in 1935, ‘to make another slanderous picture against the Negro.’6 His disappointment over Paul Robeson was perhaps spiked by his own partial eclipse, and by the undisputable contention that the African-American actor was by then second only to Emperor Haile Selassie as the most internationally recognised black man.
Selassie was more deserving of sympathy. Haile Selassie was an embodiment of a Garvey prediction. For nearly two decades Marcus Garvey had steered his listeners towards the passage in the Bible which foretold that ‘princes shall come out of Egypt’. In 1930, with Selassie’s magnificent coronation, it had come to pass. A crop of international dignitaries had been treated to the splendour of an African coronation with ancient Abyssinian exoticism and first-world modernity, but without the aeronautical display of the emperor’s favourite plane which his new instructor ‘Colonel’ Hubert Julian had managed to crash on the eve of festivities. Emperor Haile Selassie had been the beneficiary of Garvey’s advocacy, and was now even more so when in 1935 the ‘Beast of Rome’ Mussolini started assembling his troops on the edge of Ethiopia. In editorials in the Black Man, Garvey championed the petit Ethiopian, Ras Tafari, as the messiah the black masses had been waiting for, who was now defying the might of a militarised European power, rendered most visibly so with news photographs of Selassie standing on an unexploded Italian bomb. Blacks from around the world were fired by the inspir ation of Ethiopian resistance and outraged over the Italian aggression and its merciless use of mustard gas. ‘Colonel’ Hubert Julian, who’d been deported to America after the debacle of the emperor’s mangled plane, had been amongst those blacks in the diaspora who had rallied to the cause and made their way to Ethiopia, joining ranks with the emperor’s beleaguered forces.
Before Il Duce’s assault on Ethiopia, Garvey had found much to admire in the rise of the Italian nationalist. When his old friend Joel Rogers came to interview him in Beaumont Crescent, Garvey told him excitedly that Garveyites had an earlier claim on Fascism: ‘We were the first Fascists … When we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown, [and] Mussolini copied our Fascism. But the Negroes sabotaged it.’7 With his invasion of Ethiopia, Mussolini’s rapacious imperial instincts had come to the fore. For any Negro worthy of the name, it was monstrous and galling. In July 1935, Garvey wrote to dispel some of the misleading statements in the English press like the Saturday Review which had printed a fullpage photograph of the dictator under the caption, ‘Mussolini – the World’s Most Benevolent Ruler’.8 Garvey countered that ‘the real facts reveal Mussolini as a barbarian, compared to Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Abyssinia … the one man is a tyrant, a bully, an irresponsible upstart, whilst the other is a sober, courteous and courageous gentleman.’9
By October, Garvey was moderating and refining his position on the Italian–Ethiopian War, gradually shifting his gaze to the role Emperor Selassie continued to play. He began to think the unthinkable, that sadly Haile Selassie might well have brought on the disaster by his unpreparedness, which was ‘characteristic of the Negro, [and] contrary to the doctrine of the UNIA preached even from the housetops for the last twenty years’.10 The humiliation of Ethiopia, and by extension of the black race, could be traced to the rejection and betrayal of Garveyite principles, and the persecution of the man himself by sections of the race. At a time when black activists around the world were galvanising support and funds for Selassie and his countrymen, Garvey’s intervention and criticism made for uncomfortable reading. But there was worse to come. In the spring of 1936, Haile Selassie’s armies were in retreat. Heading south from Mai Chew, they were attacked by the Italian airforce, ‘bombed, strafed and gassed along the entire route … until [the emperor’s] army simply dissolved into nothingness’. Selassie escaped capture by fleeing first to Djibouti and then on to Jerusalem. In the Black Man Garvey lamented the emperor’s negligence in surrendering ‘the ancient sceptre wielded for ages by an historic line of black sovereigns’.11
From Jerusalem, the exiled emperor made his way to England. Crowds of supporters lined his route. George Steer, one of his advisers, had arranged for him to meet a party of British officials and dignitaries. Also awaiting Selassie at Waterloo station was Marcus Garvey and a coalition of black delegates who had assembled to welcome the monarch. But when they tried to address him, Selassie ignored them and carried on walking, and, reported Garvey later, ‘the address that the delegates had to present to him had to be handed in by the holder, by running after one of the ordinary officials of the Ethiopian Embassy’.12 Garvey said that he would not hold the emperor responsible for shunning his own race but thereafter the editor of the Black Man was more brutal in his assessment of Selassie. The emperor was a ‘feudal Monarch who looks down upon his slaves and serfs with contempt’,13 Garvey noted. The UNIA leader failed to insert his own name among the serfs and slaves but he clearly felt slighted. He suddenly remembered now that when he’d organised his mass international convention in Madison Square Garden in 1920, a host of African delegates had attended but Selassie’s government had returned the invitation unopened. In line with the Ethiopian ruling classes, believing themselves white, Selassie, Garvey maintained, had ‘surrounded himself with white advisers, [and] taken the first step to the destruction of the country’. Garvey could not forgive him for being ‘a great coward who ran away from his country to save his skin and left the millions of his countrymen to struggle through a terrible war’. The war was a lost cause and as far as Garvey could see, ‘the emperor’s term of usefulness is at an end for the present in Abyssinia’.14
To many of his admirers, Garvey’s stance seemed bizarre and incomprehensible. If any cause would unite black nationalists then surely it was the Italian–Ethiopian War. As Claude McKay wrote, the Ethiopian World Federation was sustained by the same pool of supporters ‘that gave power to the Garvey movement … Garvey’s denunciation [of Selassie] did not swing his people.’15 If anyone had transgressed it was not Selassie but Garvey. In America the UNIA leader’s views appeared not just to be out of step but dangerous and damaging to the survival of the remnants of his organisation. The national organiser, Samuel A. Haynes, publicly criticised Garvey because ‘reports from the field show that officers and members are deserting our divisions to join organisations and movements working to help Haile Selassie and Ethiopia … Disgrace stares us in the face. Mr Garvey is indifferent in the matter.’16 There were signs also of Garvey’s negative opinions on Selassie costing him friends and allies in London. When he mounted the steps of his ladder at Speakers’ Corner he incurred the wrath of angry and volatile crowds. The Marxist Pan-Africanist, George Padmore, remembered that his stand ‘made him very unpopular among the African university students, who attempted to break up his meetings’.17 Padmore was on the side of the students. As Chairman of the International African Service Bureau, at rallies and debates in civic halls, Padmore regularly locked horns with Garvey. Ralph Bunche was in the audience during one of their debates on the Italian–Ethiopian War when the crowd started to turn on Garvey after he called the emperor a dumb trickster. Bunche wrote up the event in his diary on 30 May 1937.
Padmore had to protect Garvey from the white proletariat audience when ‘Garvey attacked them as riff-raff, pointing out that the great empire would be lost if it weren’t for the “great men” at the head of the govt.’ Bunche noted that Garvey had particularly provoked the ire of the audience when he went on to attack ‘Selassie for having white advisors’.18
Garvey had stumbled in his attack on Selassie. Where he might have been advised to pull back, he drove forward, hardening his criticisms. It was a huge blunder. The powerful Harlem preacher, Adam Clayton Powell Snr, believed, ‘Garvey [had] signed his death warrant.’ Powell summed up the danger for Garvey when he wrote, ‘The halo around St Marcus’s head is rapidly growing faint, and with it Negro nationalism. The figure of Emperor Haile Selassie, commanding the intense admiration and support of all racial groups, gives the Negro his first vision of internationalism.’ Largely through his own devices, Garvey had been ostracised by former admirers. He’d also antagonised the key UNIA fundraiser in America, Captain L. A. King, by reprimanding him for collaborating with Socialists and enemies such as Du Bois on joint committees for the defence of Ethiopia. Once again Garvey was damaged and isolated. It was with exquisite timing, then, that Amy Jacques wrote to say that she was sailing with their sons to join him in England.
Amy Jacques, Marcus Junior and Julius arrived at Avonmouth in June 1937. The family had been separated for two years. Jacques recalled that ‘in appearance, he [Garvey] had not changed much, though his hair was thinning out front’. It was a restrained but emotional reunion, and Jacques remembered, in her typically understated way, that ‘he was pleased to see the children’.19 Junior was six years old and Julius had just had his fourth birthday. Their father would have preferred to send them to a private school but he couldn’t afford to, so they were enrolled in a free London County Council school in Kensington Gardens.
No sooner had Amy and the children settled into their new home and surroundings at Beaumont Crescent than Garvey announced that he’d be going away on business for three months. Amy Jacques was left in charge of the office whilst her husband set off on a lecture and fundraising tour of Canada and the Caribbean. He first went to Toronto for the annual UNIA conference. At the end of August, Garvey remained in Toronto to conduct lessons in a newly inaugurated course that he dubbed the School of African Philosophy. Over three intense weeks he gave tuition to a handful of select students in the history of the UNIA, as well as the art of diplomacy and other skills necessary for leadership. On his last night in Canada he gave a speech, determined to leave the delegates with one last
ing thought: ‘We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.’20 From Canada, Garvey continued to the Caribbean, where he charged himself with the task of reviving the movement and improving morale. He was so pleased with the outcome that he composed a little ditty:
My trip to the West Indies has proven a boon,
I hope to come this way again soon,
I met there men, and women too,
Whose hearts rang out with joys anew,
I ne’er shall such joys forget
As coming from those friends I met.
Garvey was lionised in the Caribbean. One might even imagine the poem accompanied by banjo and rendered as a calypso, but the idyll that the verse describes could not have applied to Garvey’s experience in Trinidad. In 1937, there was a widespread strike amongst the island’s oilfield workers. It was brutal and bloody, and Garvey arrived at the tail end of it. A small bearded preacher, Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler, had led the strike, inspiring the workers to a pitch of frenzy that bordered on insurrection. At one stage demonstrators had poured oil over a policeman and set him alight. The policeman had died. Bent on revenge, his colleagues armed themselves and took to the streets; riots ensued. By the time the strike was over, fourteen people had been killed, more than fifty wounded and hundreds arrested. Into this chaos walked Marcus Garvey and when the workers heard he was coming they naturally expected him to side with them. Garvey did not. Even before his arrival in Trinidad, he’d made clear his analysis that the strikers had been misguided, most probably by George Padmore’s International African Service Bureau. ‘Trinidad workers,’ Garvey is reported to have said, should not ‘risk their employment for the sake of these agitators in London who have nothing to lose.’21