Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  1 Exodus 12, 7–14.

  2 Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, written in 1922, worried the authorities who thought it potentially subversive. The BOI believed The Hairy Ape could easily lend itself to radical propaganda, and it is somewhat surprising that it has not already been used for this purpose.

  3 Charles Walker was a graduate of Yale who resigned his commission from the army in the summer of 1919, bought some second-hand clothes and, in disguise as a labourer, found himself in a steelworks near Pittsburgh. He described the pitiable conditions there, as well as the camaraderie of the mainly ‘foreign’ workforce at the open-hearth furnace.

  4 Reed, Chapter IV, The Fall of the Provisional Government, on 7 November 1917, p. 96.

  5 Lusk, pp. 167–171. From May 1919 Senator Lusk led the committee to investigate radical activities in New York state, which sanctioned illegal raids and searches of suspected radical institutions in order to secure evidence of violations of the Criminal Anarchy Act of 1901 – a little-enforced law which had been brought in following the assassination of President William McKinley. The act made it a felony to express, either by word of mouth or by writing, the doctrine that organised government should be overthrown by force or violence.

  6 Pfannestiel, p. ix (introduction). Between 1919 and 1920, thirty-two states passed criminal syndicalism laws. The loyalty of schoolteachers was screened by local vigilance committees. Hundreds of teachers lost their jobs for reading the wrong books, having the wrong friends, holding the wrong opinions, or joining the wrong groups.

  7 ‘Negroes Get Ready’, cited in Martin, p. 92.

  8 The 1925 special edition of the Survey Graphic, A Study of Negro Life, compared twelve leading black newspapers; routinely the Chicago Defender topped the poll as the most rigorous and professional.

  9 Clarke, p. 215. Clarke, an impressive African-American scholar, is particularly interested in the American and African antecedents of Marcus Garvey.

  10 Lagos Weekly News, VI, 16 March 1985. Quoted in Lynch, p. 136.

  11 Garvey Papers, I, p. 282.

  12 Estimations of the Negro World’s circulation vary widely. 10,000 was the conservative figure estimated by the conscientious journalist, Hubert Harrison, who became an associate editor in January 1920. Perry, p. 184.

  13 Negro World, 1 March 1919. Quoted in Garvey Papers, I, p. 383.

  14 There are a number of biographies of Madam C. J. Walker. Perhaps the most illuminating is by A’Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: the Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker. The author is the great, great granddaughter of Madam Walker. On her death, Madam Walker was succeeded by her only child, A’Lelia Walker. Her daughter introduced skin-lightening products, for example ‘Tan-Off’, and Garvey’s Negro World was at times forced, out of financial necessity, to take adverts for Madam Walker’s products. A’Lelia Walker was equally as generous a patron as her mother, most notably towards the arts – opening up her home in Harlem, nicknamed the Dark Tower, as a kind of permanent site for literary and other artistic soirees. The quotation ‘kinks out of your mind …’ is taken from Newman, p. 325.

  15 Anderson, p. 80.

  16 Domingo, March 1925, pp. 648–650.

  17 Johnson, p. 246.

  18 Locke, March, 1925, pp. 629–630.

  19 The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) took a pacifist line during the Great War. Its egalitarianism and militancy was more likely to strike a chord with potential black members than the Socialist Party. Hubert Harrison had marched with the IWW’s Big Bill Haywood on the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. Another example of black solidarity with the organisation was witnessed at the start of the Great War, when Ben Fletcher, a prominent African-American member, was arrested along with the other IWW activists under the Espionage Act.

  20 McKay, p. 27.

  21 Ibid, p. 61.

  22 Ibid, p. 109.

  23 Negro World, 29 March 1919.

  24 Marcus Garvey generated an extremely thick FBI file and military intelligence files in the USA and Britain. Many of the memoranda from the surveillance of Garvey are recorded in Robert Hill’s exceptional volumes of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers.

  25 Philadelphia Inquirer, 3 May 1919. There’s a wide selection of similarly hysterical editorials in the New York Times and Tribune from the same period, 1–3 May 1919. A comprehensive analysis of the Red Scare can be found in Robert K. Murray’s Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria. The workings of the Lusk Committee are considered in depth in Todd J. Pfannestiel’s Rethinking the Red Scare. Richard Slotkin’s Lost Battalions is insightful on the fear of the black Reds, namely the Black Scare, pp. 429–461.

  26 Lusk, pp. 167–171.

  27 Garvey often cited Toussaint L’Ouverture in the roll call of black heroes. The slave revolt in Haiti took its cue from the French Revolution. L’Ouverture waged an unremitting campaign which eventually secured Haiti its freedom and independence, an event comprehensively studied in C. L. R. James’s seminal work The Black Jacobins.

  28 Unusually large numbers of Irish immigrants were admitted to mental institutions in the USA at the start of the twentieth century. In the view of Senator Tom Hayden, this was the downside of conformism and assimilation. ‘Schizophrenia,’ Hayden asserted, ‘was commonly called an Irish disease’, but more accurately it could have been described as a disease of the immigrant. Medical research conducted throughout the immigrant Norwegian population of Minnesota had shown, for instance, a much greater incidence of schizophrenia than amongst their compatriots back home. The Norwegian psychiatrist Ornulf Odegaard studied numerous personality types which showed up the discrepancy in the figures. Immigrants were more likely to suffer from schizophrenia than their compatriots who remained at home. The figures were also reflected more generally amongst the Scandinavian population in the census of 1890 who were over-represented in the institutions for the insane. Tom Hayden’s Irish on the Inside explores mental illness amongst Irish immigrants to America.

  29 Garvey Papers, II, pp. 634–642, taken from the affidavit of Amy Ashwood on 30 August 1920. Marcus Garvey was then attempting to divorce his first wife.

  30 Ashwood, p. 345.

  31 Makonen, p. 89.

  32 Garvey Papers, I, pp. 361–362.

  33 The Nation, 17 April 1920.

  34 Smith, pp. 10–13. Smith’s article prompted much discussion amongst black intellectuals. James Weldon Johnson answered for them in the next month’s edition of Public, observing that Smith had now seen what many black people had been warning of for quite some time. Also quoted in William J. Gordon’s Black Newspapers and America’s War for Democracy 1914–20, pp. 130–131.

  35 Washington Bee, 20 December 1919, and quoted in Foley, p. 19.

  36 Arthur Miller, Interview with author, March 2001 (telephone).

  37 Paul Avrich’s The Haymarket Tragedy provides details on the day of the Haymarket bombing and background on the history of anarchism in America. In the hunt for the culprits of the 1886 bombing, scores of innocent anarchists had been rounded up and several of them were hanged. Their martyrdom later inspired Emma Goldman – the radical writer whose work was alleged to have, in turn, inspired Leon Czolgosz to assassinate President McKinley.

  38 Negro World, 14 June 1919, printed in Garvey Papers, I, p. 415.

  39 Palmer, pp. 185–189.

  40 The details of the Lusk raids are outlined in Pfannestiel. A brief sketch of Palmer and the Palmer raids is found in Harold Evans’s American Century.

  41 Domingo had been bold enough to write a provocative and unguarded missive in the Messenger, ‘Socialism: the Negroes’ Hope’, and signed himself as ‘Editor’ of the Negro World – cited by James in Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, p. 270.

  42 Ibid

  43 Garvey Papers, II, p. 40. Domingo’s jaundiced account of the break with Garvey was originally published in the Daily Gleaner, 15 June 1925.

  44 Ashwood, p. 19.

  45 Garvey Papers, II, pp. 634�
��642.

  46 ‘Of the Russian organ of Bolsheviki’ from the memo: J. Edgar Hoover, special assistant to the Attorney General, to Frank Burke. Washington DC, August 12, 1919. Printed in Garvey Papers, I, p. 480.

  47 Ibid, p. 480.

  48 Garvey Papers, II, p. 72.

  49 The bearded, wild-eyed bomber was a stock character for most of the newspapers. It was an image lampooned in a speech given by Harry Winitsky, executive secretary of the Communist Party of New York, on 22 December 1919 at 175th East Broadway. Winitsky was later arrested and jailed during the wide-scale round-up of radicals in the Palmer raids.

  50 Jacques, p. 225, originally printed in the Negro World, May 1933.

  51 Yard, p. 42. Also quoted in Judith Stein, p. 36.

  52 Garvey Papers, I, p. 446.

  53 The quotations are taken from George Schulyer’s autobiography, Black and Conservative. As a young man, newly arrived in town, Schulyer was thrilled to find a job with the left-wing Messenger whose editors he clearly admired. In a fairly short period, though, Schulyer had moved from the hard left to the far right, upsetting a lot of black folk along the way, particularly with his view that there was nothing special about African-American culture. African-Americans in his view were ‘lamp-blacked Anglo-Saxons’.

  54 Evans, p. 93.

  55 ‘Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes As Reflected in Their Publications’, reproduced in Garvey Papers, I, p. 488.

  56 Stowe, p. 203.

  57 Garvey Papers, I, p. 376.

  8. Harlem Speaks for Scattered Ethiopia

  INTERVIEWS: Sylvian Diouf, Howard Dodson, Arnold Rampersad, Mariamne Samad. PUBLICATIONS: Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem; W. E. B. Du Bois, Collected Writings; Crisis, January 1923; Crisis, 20 December, 1920; John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography; Robert Hill (ed.), Garvey Papers; Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition; Langston Hughes, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, Crisis, June 1921; Colin Legum, Congo Disaster; Alain Locke, The New Negro: An Interpretation; William Roger Louis, ‘The US and the African Peace Settlement of 1919: The Pilgrimage of George Louis Beer’, Journal of African History, 4 (1963); Claude McKay, My Green Hills of Jamaica; H. L. Mencken, Men Versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H. L. Mencken, Individualist; E. D. Morel, King Leopold’s Rule in Africa, edition with illustrations and maps. Heinemann 1904; New York Daily Tribune, 8 June 1890; Jeffrey B. Perry, (ed.): A Hubert Harrison Reader; Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: a survey of the supply, employment and control of Negro labour as determined by the plantation regime. D. Appleton & Co., New York, London, 1918; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1935–60; Arnold Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Vol. I; Yvette Richards, Conversations with Maida Springer: A Personal History of Labour, Race and International Relations; James T. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference; Lorthrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Colour against White World-Supremacy ; Jo Tanner, Dusky Maidens: The Odyssey of the Early Black Dramatic Actress; Arthur Walworth, Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference; Washington Bee, May 1884; Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells

  1 Rampersad, p. 39.

  2 ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ was published by the Crisis magazine in 1921.

  3 Grain Coast is the former name of a part of the Atlantic coast of West Africa roughly identical with the coast of modern Liberia. In the fifteenth century ‘grains of paradise’, i.e. seeds of the melegueta pepper, became a major export item; hence the name Grain Coast.

  4 ‘2 million followers …’, Garvey Papers I, p. 8; ‘300,000 paying members …’, Crisis, December, 1920. Three years later Du Bois in Crisis was to reduce his estimate of the UNIA membership to fewer than 18,000.

  5 Locke, (foreword).

  6 The Communist, Briggs 1931, quoted in Clarke, p. 175.

  7 Garvey Papers, II, p. 15.

  8 Washington Bee, May 1884. Quoted in Tanner, p. 31.

  9 Claude McKay, p. 80–81.

  10 Richards, p. 20–21.

  11 Ulrich B. Phillips’s American Negro Slavery provides details of the various Maroon treaties with the British. Maroon – the generic name given to runaway slaves is derived from the Spanish cimaron, meaning wild or fugitive.

  12 A. H. Foote commanded the SS Perry off the African coast and was particularly zealous in apprehending slavers; his book, Africa and the American Flag, published in 1854, influenced the public against traffic in slaves.

  13 Stoddard, citing Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1904. p. 92

  14 Mencken, p. 116.

  15 Hobsbawn and Ranger, pp. 211–262. Terence Ranger’s chapter on Colonial Africa provides background to the ways in which Europeans utilised their own traditions to assert their authority of their colonial subjects.

  16 Legum, pp. 29–30. Morel’s book catalogues the Belgian-inspired brutality in the Congo State. The following is a typical entry: ‘The hand of Eliba was also cut off and taken away in triumph, to attest that the sentries had done their duty and had punished the “rebel” town, which dared to fail in supplying the fixed quantity of Indian rubber’. From Morel, p. 377.

  17 New York Daily Tribune, 8 June 1890. See also Franklin, p. 201.

  18 Johnston quoted in Perry, pp. 205–206.

  19 Adam Clayton Powell’s essay was printed in the New York Age, 8 January 1914. See Anderson, pp. 72–91 for an account of the dance craze.

  20 In 1915, the US administration had sent 3,000 troops to restore order in Haiti after a bloody coup had led to the assassination of the island’s president and members of his government. The temporary American occupation would last for fourteen years.

  21 Bishop Reginald Heber, 1819. Heber was the Bishop of Calcutta who became better known as a hymn writer. Each meeting of the UNIA at its headquarters in Harlem began with a rendition of ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’.

  22 ‘rival and older NAACP …’, Garvey Papers, II, p. 28; Ida B. Wells confirms the nomination of emissaries in her autobiography, Wells, p. 379. The extent of the authorities’ antipathy towards the idea of a black delegation was apparent in a flurry of intelligence reports. For example see the Bureau of Investigation report, 5 December 1918, Garvey Papers, I, p. 305–306.

  23 Garvey Papers, II, p. 206.

  24 Shotwell, 14 December, 1918.

  25 Garvey Papers, I, p. 387.

  26 British military report, Garvey Papers, I, p. 405.

  27 Garvey Papers, I, p. 408.

  28 ‘ “candour” was quietly changed to “grandeur”’, Shotwell, Wednesday 18 December 1918. Background to the events at Versailles is taken from Walworth. The first chapter of Plummer is devoted to the earlier black aspirations at the Paris Peace Conference.

  29 Garvey Papers, I, p. 409.

  30 Du Bois, p. 879.

  31 Cadet survived through his skills as a mechanic. He didn’t return to the USA until the end of the year for a brief meeting with Garvey.

  32 Garvey Papers, II, p. 393. First published in Crisis, 20 December 1920, pp. 58–60.

  33 Louis, pp. 413–33.

  9. Flyin’ Home on the Black Star Line

  INTERVIEWS AND CORRESPONDENCE: Robert Hill, Mariamne Samad. SOURCES: History Detectives, Season 3, episode 2 (2005) ‘On the Black Star Line’, http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/investigations/302_blackstar.html PUBLICATIONS: American Mercury magazine, May–August 1926; Jervis Anderson, This was Harlem; Amy Ashwood, First Amy Tells All, Portrait of a Liberator; John H. Clarke (ed.), Marcus Garvey and his Vision of Africa; W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil; Robert Hill, Garvey Papers; Calvin Holder, ‘Making Ends Meet: Economic Adjustment in New York City, 1900–1952’, from Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and its Diaspora, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter/Spring 1998); Amy Jacques, Garvey and Garveyism; Amy Jacques, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, or Africa for the
Africans; Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long; Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home; Richard Moore, ‘The Critics and Opponents of Marcus Garvey’, extracted in John H. Clarke, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa; Hugh Mulzac, A Star to Steer By; Negro World, editorials, 6 December 1919, 16 October 1919 and 10 September 1921; New York Times, 17 October 1919; Opportunity, February, 1926; John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World; George Schulyer, Black and Conservative; Semi-Weekly Louisianan, 15 June 1871; Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice