Marcus Garvey

• 1. Introduction

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  Marcus Garvey was declared Provisional President of Africa in August 1920, even though he had never set foot on the continent. The title came during a conference organized by his Harlem-based movement, while an estimated 25,000 people gathered in Madison Square Gardens. Delegates described the post as head of a government-in-exile, ready to take power once European rule ended. Garvey lived from 1887 to 1940. In that time he went from a Jamaican print worker to the head of an organization that reached across the Atlantic. How did a printer from a small Jamaican town build such a movement? What did he hope a fleet of ships would achieve, and why did that dream end in a federal courtroom? Why did some of the best-known black Americans of his day call for his deportation? And why do people still argue over whether he deserves praise or condemnation?

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• 2. Making Of An Agitator

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  Malchus Garvey, a stonemason in Saint Ann's Bay, kept a collection of books, educated himself, and served as a deacon at a Wesleyan church. He was also a punitive father who never grew close to his youngest son, Marcus. Malchus earned more than many of his peasant neighbours, yet he spent recklessly and lost most of his land over the years.

  The Garvey surname was Irish, inherited from the family's former enslavers. Marcus's paternal great-grandfather had been born into slavery before it ended in Jamaica. In the colony's colour-conscious social order, a child of full African appearance sat at the very bottom. Genetic research on his Y chromosome later found distant ancestors from the Iberian Peninsula.

  Until the age of 14, Garvey attended a church school, because the family could not afford more. Some of his childhood friends were white, and he later remembered a white girl as a close companion. He recalled, 'We were two innocent fools who never dreamed of a race feeling and problem.' He noticed that his white friends drifted away as they grew older.

  In 1901 he was apprenticed to his godfather, a local printer. In 1905 he moved to Kingston, boarded in the working-class Smith Village, and joined the printing division of the P.A. Benjamin Manufacturing Company. He rose to become its first Afro-Jamaican foreman.

  In January 1907 an earthquake reduced much of Kingston to rubble. Garvey, his mother, and his sister slept in the open for several months. His mother died in March 1908. That November he took a leading role in a print workers' strike, as vice president of the compositors' section of the Printers' Union. The strike collapsed within weeks and Garvey was sacked. Branded a troublemaker, he could not find private-sector work and settled for temporary employment with a government printer.

  In April 1910 Garvey became the first assistant secretary of the National Club, Jamaica's first nationalist organization. With fellow member Wilfred Domingo he wrote a pamphlet, The Struggling Mass. He also published a magazine, Garvey's Watchman, which lasted just three issues. He claimed a circulation of 3000, which was probably an exaggeration. To sharpen his speaking, he took elocution lessons from the radical journalist Joseph Robert Love, whom he came to regard as a mentor.

  Economic hardship pushed many Jamaicans to emigrate, and in mid-1910 Garvey travelled to Costa Rica. An uncle had found him work as a timekeeper on a large United Fruit Company banana plantation in Limón Province. Strikes broke out soon after he arrived, as the company tried to cut wages. Watching how the workers were treated angered him, even though his own job was to oversee them.

  In the spring of 1911 he launched a bilingual newspaper, Nation/La Nación, which attacked the company and upset powerful people in Limón. After he questioned the motives of the fire brigade in a report on a local fire, police brought him in for questioning. When his printing press broke and he could not replace the part, the paper folded.

  Garvey then drifted through Honduras, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, taking casual work along the way. In the Panamanian port of Colón he founded another paper, La Prensa. A serious bacterial infection in 1911 sent him back to Kingston.

  In the spring of 1912 he sailed for England, hoping to educate himself in the heart of the British Empire. He rented a room on Borough High Street in South London and visited the House of Commons, where the politician David Lloyd George impressed him. He also began making speeches at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. London held only a few thousand black residents, most of them labourers, and Garvey first found piecemeal work in the docks.

  In early 1913 he became messenger and handyman at the African Times and Orient Review, a Fleet Street magazine edited by Dusé Mohamed Ali. By 1914 he was writing for it. He took evening law classes at Birkbeck College and toured Europe, visiting Glasgow, Paris, Monte Carlo, Boulogne, and Madrid.

  In the library of the British Museum, Garvey discovered Up from Slavery, by the entrepreneur and activist Booker T. Washington. It influenced him heavily. Nearly penniless, he asked both the Colonial Office and the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society to pay for his passage home, and both said no. After saving the fare himself, he boarded the SS Trent in June 1914 for a three-week crossing. On board he spoke with an Afro-Caribbean missionary who had lived in Basutoland and married a Basuto woman. The missionary's stories about colonial Africa gave Garvey the outline of a movement to unite black people worldwide. He would found an organization for it soon after landing in Kingston.

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• 3. Building The UNIA

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  One Aim. One God. One Destiny. That was the motto of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, which Garvey launched in July 1914. It pledged to 'establish a brotherhood among the black race, to promote a spirit of race pride, to reclaim the fallen and to assist in civilising the backward tribes of Africa.' At first it had few members and operated from his hotel room on Orange Street in Kingston. It presented itself as a charity and hoped to open a vocational college modelled on Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It also pledged loyalty to King George V and the British war effort. Many Jamaicans disliked its prominent use of the word 'Negro,' often an insult, but Garvey embraced it.

  In August 1914 Garvey met Amy Ashwood at a meeting of the Queen Street Baptist Literary and Debating Society. She joined the association and rented better premises for it, secured with her father's credit. Her parents opposed the relationship, and the pair secretly became engaged in 1915. When she suspended the engagement, he threatened to kill himself, and she resumed it.

  Garvey won donations from the Mayor of Kingston and from the Governor, William Manning. By courting the white elite, however, he bypassed the brown middle classes, who saw him as a pretentious social climber. The Daily Chronicle printed a speech in which he called many black Jamaicans 'uncouth and vulgar.' A Dr Leo Pink wrote in reply that 'the Jamaican Negro can not be reformed by abuse.' Unsubstantiated rumours that he diverted funds to his own expenses cost the group further support. In March 1916 he sailed for the United States aboard the SS Tallac.

  Harlem, a largely black district of New York City, was where Garvey first lodged with a Jamaican expatriate family. At his first public speech he was heckled and fell off the stage. He still set out on a speaking tour that crossed 38 states. In Alabama he visited Tuskegee and met its new leader, Robert Russa Moton. After six months on the road he returned to New York.

  In May 1917 he opened a New York branch of the association, with membership at 25 cents a month for anyone 'of Negro blood and African ancestry.' He often spoke from a step-ladder at Speakers' Corner on 135th Street. There he met Hubert Harrison, who promoted black self-reliance and separatism. Garvey shared a stage with Harrison in June at the first meeting of the Liberty League of Negro-Americans, and the exposure won him public attention.

  After the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, Garvey tried to enlist but was ruled physically unfit. Following Harrison, he came to call it a 'white man's war.' The East St. Louis race riots that summer led him to call for armed self-defense. He wrote a pamphlet, The Conspiracy of the East St Louis Riots, and gave the proceeds to victims. The Bureau of Investigation began watching him, noting that he used harsher language in speech than in print.

  The journalist John Edward Bruce then gained influence over the association, and Garvey stepped aside as president. Bruce wrote to Dusé Mohamed Ali, who replied that Garvey ran it as a money-making scheme. Garvey resigned, formed a rival group at Old Fellows Temple, and sued Bruce and other leaders. The court ruled that the name and the membership, estimated at 600, belonged to Garvey.

  In April 1918 Garvey launched a weekly newspaper, the Negro World. Philanthropists such as Madam C. J. Walker backed it, but within six months it was appealing for donations. He refused to carry advertisements for skin-lightening and hair-straightening products, urging readers to 'take the kinks out of your mind, instead of out of your hair.' By the end of its first year, circulation neared 10,000. Several British West Indian islands banned it.

  In just over 18 months the association had branches in 25 American states, plus divisions in the West Indies, Central America, and West Africa. Garvey, who often inflated numbers, claimed two million members by June 1919. The older, integrated National Association for the Advancement of Colored People remained larger. Garvey's group accepted only black members and drew many poorer people and Caribbean migrants. He toured Harlem in a Cadillac, shouting slogans through a megaphone.

  The association bought a partly built church at 114 West 138th Street and dedicated it as Liberty Hall in July 1919. It also ran a restaurant and ice cream parlor at 56 West 135th Street and a millinery store. In January 1920 Garvey incorporated the Negro Factories League, which opened grocery stores, a steam laundry, and a publishing house. According to the writer Colin Grant, a personality cult formed around him. Life-size portraits hung at headquarters, and recordings of his speeches were sold to members.

  In October 1919 a part-time vendor of the Negro World, George Tyler, walked into the office and shot at Garvey four times. Two bullets struck his right leg and scalp. Tyler jumped to his death from the third tier of the Harlem jail, and no motive was ever revealed. Five days after the shooting, Garvey gave a speech in Philadelphia.

  On Christmas Day he married Amy Ashwood in a private Catholic ceremony, followed by a celebration at Liberty Hall attended by 3000 members. Three months later he sought an annulment, citing her alleged adultery. She countersued for desertion and asked for $75 a week. The court awarded her $12 a week and refused him the divorce. Garvey moved into an apartment on 129th Street with his secretary, Amy Jacques, and the actress Henrietta Vinton Davis.

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• 4. The Black Star Line

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  A name borrowed from the White Star Line gave Garvey's shipping venture its defiant edge. He wanted a black-owned, black-staffed line carrying black passengers between Africa and the Americas. He aimed to raise $2 million from African-American donors. He declared that any black person who refused to buy stock would be 'worse than a traitor to the cause of struggling Ethiopia.' Many buyers felt real pride in owning a share of their community's future, and Garvey promised returns once the company turned a profit.

  In September 1919 Garvey went to Chicago to sell stock and was fined for breaking the Blue Sky Laws, which barred unlicensed stock sales in the city. A three-man auditing committee then found the books unbalanced and the funds poorly recorded. Trust among the directors broke down. Garvey dismissed two of them, Richard E. Warner and Edgar M. Grey, and humiliated them at the next association meeting. Buyers kept buying, and the company gathered $50,000.

  That sum bought the SS Yarmouth, a thirty-year-old tramp ship. It was launched in a ceremony on the Hudson River on the 31st of October. The company could not find enough trained black seamen, so its first chief engineer and chief officer were white. After the first voyage, to Cuba and Jamaica, repairs cost $11,000. On the second voyage the ship met bad weather and the coastguard towed it back to New York.

  Garvey meanwhile aimed to acquire a second vessel by February 1920. The company put down a $10,000 deposit on a paddle ship, the SS Shady Side. In July 1920 he sacked the company's secretary, Edward D. Smith-Green, and its captain, Joshua Cockburn, whom he accused of corruption. In early 1922 the Yarmouth was sold for scrap, fetching less than a hundredth of what the company had paid. That fall the Shady Side was abandoned on the mud flats at Fort Lee, New Jersey, as the company collapsed.

  In 1921 Garvey sailed to the Caribbean on a company ship. In Jamaica he insulted his audience, saying 'Negroes are the most lazy, the most careless and indifferent people in the world.' Critics also noted that he had left his destitute father to die in an almshouse. The Gleaner carried the angry letters that followed.

  In Costa Rica, the United Fruit Company helped move him around the country, hoping to win his favour, and he met President Julio Acosta. At Almirante in Panama he doubled the advertised entry price and was booed. He answered by calling the crowd 'a bunch of ignorant and impertinent Negroes.' Panama City received him far more warmly. Back in Kingston, he was repeatedly refused a visa for the United States, and it was granted only after he wrote directly to the State Department.

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• 5. Rivals And Enemies

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  Major Walter Loving, sent by military intelligence in 1919, reported that Garvey was a 'very able young man' spreading 'clever propaganda.' J. Edgar Hoover of the Bureau of Investigation judged him subversive and put his name on the list for the coming Palmer Raids. The Labor Department under Louis F. Post refused to approve deportation, saying the case was not proven. The uniformed African Legion, which marched at association parades and supplied Garvey with a secret service, alarmed the Bureau further. It sent its first full-time black agent, James Wormley Jones, to infiltrate the group.

  W. E. B. Du Bois, who led the integrationist side, became Garvey's most famous opponent. In the Negro World, Garvey called him a 'reactionary under the pay of white men.' Du Bois tried to ignore Garvey, yet he wanted to learn all he could about the movement. In 1921 Garvey twice invited him to write for the association's publications, and Du Bois declined both times. By 1923 Du Bois was describing Garvey as 'a little fat black man, ugly but with intelligent eyes and big head.' Colin Grant suggests the two men hated each other by 1924.

  Garvey also turned on allies. He made his old friend Domingo editor of the Negro World, then grew alarmed by Domingo's socialist views and had him questioned by the nine-person executive committee. Domingo resigned and the two became enemies. Garvey expelled Cyril Briggs and other members of the African Blood Brotherhood. He then accused Briggs, who was of mixed heritage, of being a white man posing as black. Briggs sued him for criminal libel and won.

  In June 1922 Garvey met Edward Young Clarke, the Imperial Wizard pro tempore of the Ku Klux Klan, at the Klan's offices in Atlanta. In earlier speeches he had even thanked whites for Jim Crow. He said, 'You may call me a Klansman if you will,' arguing that every white man was potentially one in economic competition with black people. Grant called the meeting the most significant turning point in his popularity. Chandler Owen, A. Philip Randolph, William Pickens, and Robert Bagnall launched a 'Garvey Must Go' campaign, and some critics stressed his Jamaican birth and urged deportation. Randolph reported receiving a severed hand in the post with a letter threatening him to stop criticising Garvey.

  At the August 1922 convention Garvey called for the impeachment of senior figures and demanded that the cabinet be appointed by him instead of elected. When they refused to step down, he resigned as head of the association, probably hoping to force their resignations. He then pushed out Reverend James Eason, and Eason founded a rival group, the Universal Negro Alliance. In January 1923 Garveyites assassinated Eason in New Orleans. Garvey denied involvement but started a defense fund for the killers.

  Eight prominent African Americans then signed a public letter calling Garvey 'an unscrupulous demagogue' and urging the Attorney-General to prosecute him. Garvey responded with a pamphlet attacking their racial heritage, calling them 'octoroons and quadroons.' He called Du Bois 'a Hater of Dark People.' Garvey's allies had begun to doubt him too, as the criminal case against him approached trial.

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• 6. Trial And Prison

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  In January 1922 Garvey was arrested and charged with mail fraud for advertising stock in a ship called the Orion, which the Black Star Line did not yet own. He was bailed out for $2,500. Hoover and the Bureau were set on a conviction, helped by complaints from a few stockholders. Garvey blamed rival African-American groups, former members, and implicitly the NAACP, rather than the government. The mainstream press largely portrayed him as a con artist.

  On the 18th of June 1923, after a trial of more than a month, jurors returned from ten hours of deliberation. The judge was Julian Mack, whom Garvey distrusted as an NAACP sympathiser. His attorney, Cornelius McDougald, urged him to plead guilty to secure a minimum sentence. Garvey refused, dismissed him, and represented himself, struggling without legal training. In a three-hour closing address he cast himself as a selfless leader undone by incompetent and thieving staff. The jury found Garvey guilty of a scheme to defraud but acquitted his three co-defendants.

  Garvey exploded in the courtroom, shouting abuse and using an antisemitic slur against the judge and the district attorney. In The Tombs jail, he kept blaming a Jewish cabal. Before this he had never voiced antisemitic views and had supported Zionism. Mack sentenced him to five years and a $1000 fine, a harsher penalty than similar crimes drew, perhaps because of the outburst. In 1928 Garvey repeated his claims to a journalist. Yet on the 28th of March 1933, in an editorial, he wrote that 'the Jewish race is a noble one' and denounced Nazi intolerance.

  In September 1923 the appellate judge Martin Manton granted bail of $15,000, which the association raised. Free for a time, Garvey toured the country and lectured at Tuskegee. He called the United States 'a white man's country' and defended his Klan meeting, saying the Klan showed more 'honesty of purpose towards the Negro' than the NAACP. For the first time he urged the association to field election candidates, often against NAACP-backed ones. In October 1924 the Black Star Line bought another ship, renamed the SS Booker T. Washington.

  In early February 1925 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict. Judge Charles Merrill Hough wrote for a unanimous court. He acknowledged that 'Garvey fancied himself a Moses, if not a Messiah,' but held that a lofty purpose did not excuse false statements to sell worthless stock. Garvey was arrested on a train in Detroit and sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He cleaned floors, was reprimanded for insolence toward white officers, and developed chronic bronchitis and lung infections.

  Prison letters kept him in touch with members and with his wife, Amy Jacques, who visited every three weeks. He wrote The Meditations of Marcus Garvey, a title echoing Marcus Aurelius. He also wrote to white separatists, including Earnest Sevier Cox and John Powell, and Powell visited him. Ashwood challenged the divorce, which would have voided his marriage to Jacques, but the court upheld it.

  William Sherrill, acting head of the association, re-mortgaged Liberty Hall and sold the SS Booker T. Washington for a quarter of its price. Garvey tried to depose him from his cell, and rival conventions followed. Liberty Hall was later repeatedly re-mortgaged and sold. A petition with 70,000 signatures urged his release, and Attorney General John Sargent warned Calvin Coolidge that many black Americans saw the imprisonment as oppression. On the 18th of November 1927 Coolidge commuted the sentence, after about half the term, on condition of deportation. Garvey left New Orleans on the SS Saramaca on the 3rd of December, with a thousand supporters seeing him off. At Cristóbal, Panama, authorities refused to let him land.

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• 7. Ideas And Contradictions

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  'Race first' was the adage of Garveyism. Garvey believed that no race would give another 'a square deal in things economic, political and social' simply for the asking, so each group would favor its own interests. He rejected the 'melting pot' notion popular in American nationalism and dismissed legal campaigns for rights as ineffective. He thought white Americans would never accept social integration, and that pushing for it would provoke riots and lynchings. He and the association also insisted that 'Negro' be capitalized, to give those it described dignity and respect.

  Garvey's intellectual sources were wide. Colin Grant described his time in London as showing 'an amazing capacity to absorb political tracts, theories of social engineering, African history and the Western Enlightenment.' The writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden shaped his thinking on race, as did his work with Dusé Mohamed Ali. Prevailing ideas about race of the period also left their mark.

  Ireland offered Garvey a blueprint. The Liberty Hall in Harlem took its name from the Dublin hall linked to the 1916 Easter Rising. He backed solidarity strikes during Terence MacSwiney's hunger strike and appealed to the British government on MacSwiney's behalf. In 1922 he told Éamon de Valera that 'Ireland should be free even as Africa shall be free for the Negroes of the world.' In July 1919 he said the black race should offer up martyrs 'even as the Irish' had, from Robert Emmet to Roger Casement. He also praised Mahatma Gandhi as 'one of the noblest characters of the day.'

  An influence he is credited with in later accounts concerns skin tone. Garvey argued that darker-skinned black people were marginalized and challenged systems favoring lighter-skinned people in leadership and status. He urged black people to celebrate African features and reject Eurocentric beauty standards. This conviction also fed his clashes with Du Bois, whom he accused of catering to elite, lighter-skinned Black Americans.

  The Back-to-Africa plan was meant to give the philosophy a homeland. The association courted Liberia's government, which was heavily indebted, and in 1921 launched a campaign for a $2 million Liberian Construction Loan. The same year it sent a team to assess prospects for settlement. Gabriel Johnson, Mayor of Monrovia, had attended the 1920 conference. In February 1924 the association announced plans to bring 3000 migrants to Liberia, and President Charles D. B. King promised land for three colonies.

  When UNIA technicians reached Liberia in June 1924, they were arrested and deported. Liberia's government announced it would admit no American settlers. Garvey blamed Du Bois, who had links to Liberia's ruling elite, and Du Bois denied it. Later examination suggested Liberia had never seriously intended to permit colonization, since it would have strained relations with neighbouring British and French colonies.

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• 8. Exile And Legacy

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  Somali Court was the name Garvey gave to the large house he bought in an elite Kingston neighbourhood after his deportation. UNIA members had raised $10,000 to help him settle, and his wife shipped over 18,000 books and hundreds of antiques. He urged Afro-Jamaicans to raise their living standards and to rally against Chinese and Syrian migrants. In 1928 he spoke at the Royal Albert Hall, on the 6th of June, and later visited Paris and Switzerland before Canada detained him for a night and barred him from speaking.

  Edelweiss Park in Cross Roads became the association's new Kingston headquarters, and a parade through the city drew tens of thousands of onlookers. There the group staged plays, including Coronation of an African King, which Garvey wrote and which was performed in August 1930. It anticipated the crowning of Haile Selassie later that year.

  In 1929 Garvey founded the People's Political Party, the first in Jamaica, and was elected a Kingston city councillor. In September he addressed 1,500 supporters and unveiled its manifesto. It promised land reform for tenant farmers, a constitutional minimum wage, Jamaica's first university and opera house, and a law to impeach and imprison corrupt judges. That last policy got him charged with demeaning the judiciary. He pleaded guilty and received three months in a Spanish Town prison and a £100 fine. Fellow councillors removed him while he was jailed, and his furious editorial in the journal Blackman led to a seditious libel conviction and six months in prison, later overturned. In the legislative election in Saint Andrew Parish he won 915 votes and lost to George Seymour-Jones.

  The Great Depression left him working as an auctioneer. Edelweiss Park was foreclosed in 1934, and he sailed for London on the SS Tilapa in March 1935. He told his friend Amy Bailey he had 'left Jamaica a broken man, broken in spirit, broken in health and broken in pocket... and I will never, never, never go back.'

  From a new headquarters on Beaumont Avenue in West Kensington, he launched a monthly journal, Black Man, and returned to Speakers' Corner. Socialists harangued him over his conservative stances. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, he first praised Selassie's government, then blamed the emperor's lack of preparedness. At Waterloo station, Selassie rebuffed him. Garvey called him 'a great coward who ran away from his country to save his skin,' which isolated him from most activists, including many Garveyites. He also clashed with the Marxists C. L. R. James and George Padmore.

  In 1938 Garvey's wife took their sons back to Jamaica to treat the rheumatism of Marcus III, without telling him, and he was furious. In January 1940 he suffered a stroke that left him largely paralysed, and his secretary, Daisy Whyte, cared for him. George Padmore spread rumours of his death, and newspapers printed critical obituaries in late May. According to Whyte, Garvey read them, then suffered a second massive stroke. He died on the 10th of June 1940, aged 52, and was buried at St Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green. Both Ashwood and Jacques billed themselves as his widow. Some followers refused to believe he had died, even when shown photographs of his body in its coffin.

  Within a decade, the writer Richard Hart observed, 'a veritable cult' had grown around his memory in Jamaica, and by the 1950s politicians of many persuasions invoked his name. A Kingston real estate agent, Leslie Alexander, campaigned to bring the body home. In 1964 it was exhumed, lay in state at Holy Trinity Cathedral, and drew thousands of visitors. On the 22nd of November 1964 he was reburied in King George VI Memorial Park with foreign diplomats in attendance. Jamaica honours him as a national hero, the first person so recognized. His ideas influenced Rastafari, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement. Critics condemned his collaboration with white supremacists, his violent rhetoric, and his prejudice against mixed-race people and Jews, while admirers credit him with encouraging pride and self-worth amid poverty, discrimination, and colonialism. The monument, designed by G. C. Hodges, rests on a platform shaped like a black star, the symbol Garvey so often used.

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