2

“HIS FAILURE WILL BE THEIRS”

Why the Black Elite Resisted Garveyism and Embraced Ethiopia

Where I have thought Marcus Garvey to be right, I have said so. . . . In this Klu Klux Klan attitude, he is just about the wrongest [sic] black man that has even tried to lead American Negroes anywhere.

—William Pickens, open letter to Marcus Garvey, July 24, 1922

Marcus Garvey is either a crook or a liar. . . . People now are fighting for the erection of democracies not empires. The Negroes don’t want to be the victims of black despotism anymore than white despotism.

—A. Philip Randolph, speech on Garveyism before the Friends of Negro Freedom, August 25, 1922

On July 16, 1920, Marcus Mosiah Garvey sat perched in his office in Liberty Hall, the Harlem-based headquarters of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), drafting letters. The focal point of his correspondence that day was to invite members of the black elite to attend the UNIA International Conference, which was to take place in Madison Square Garden later that month. W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP and the principal architect of the Pan-African Congress Movement, was at the top of Garvey’s invitation list.

Garvey’s letter to Du Bois asked him to attend the proceedings as a candidate for election to the post of “leader of the American Negro People.”1 (Du Bois and the rest of the black world would learn one month later that the UNIA had already reserved the office of provisional president of Africa for Garvey.) According to the historical record, Du Bois wrote back to Garvey and emphatically declined both the invitation to the conference and Garvey’s offer to nominate him to any of his fabricated offices. Du Bois did request, however, that Garvey send him information about the convention for publication in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine.2

After Du Bois rejected his invitation, Garvey scrambled to find a presumptive leader for black Americans among other notable members of the black elite. When all the established black leadership rebuffed his advances,3 Garvey and the UNIA elected James W. H. Eason, a minister who was little known outside his native Philadelphia, to the post from the floor of the convention. These events typify the gulf that existed between Garvey and the U.S. black elite by the end of the period that Wilson Jeremiah Moses calls the “Golden Age of Black Nationalism.”4

This dynamic has been a central issue in the historiography of the U.S. black experience since at least the 1950s.5 The literature revolves around the question: Why did the U.S. black elite reject Garveyism, the most successful mass movement with Pan-African goals, at a time when they exhibited such a strong ideational commitment to transnationalism? Most of the literature on this subject points to an enduring theme in the study of the black elite—the clash of personalities.6 In other words, most studies suggest that the personal animus between Garvey and leading figures in the black American elite made cooperation impossible.7 A subtle variation on this argument often appears in the neo-Marxist historiography of Pan-Africanism. These largely pro-Garvey studies portray the UNIA head as a populist who tried to forge ties with the black elite in the United States but found himself rebuffed at every turn because the latter were jealous of his popularity among rank-and-file black Americans.8

In this chapter, I present a strong challenge to this notion that the tensions between Garvey and the black elite boiled down to a clash of personalities. I demonstrate that the opposition of black leaders to the Garvey movement was a function of their representational imperative, derived from their sense of linked fate with downtrodden blacks. They judged Garvey’s program to be a threat to the interests of the black masses for two reasons. First, his emphasis on repatriation to Africa revived the specter of the late-nineteenth-century emigration movements at a time when the New Negro elite saw opportunities for rank-and-file blacks on the political horizon. Second, the black elite feared that Garvey’s support for segregation (like Booker T. Washington’s politics of accommodation) provided legitimacy to the white supremacist cause in the South. These causal inferences emerge from both my reexamination of the historical record and new archival research.

The Age of New Negro Pan-Africanism

Members of the black elite had never been as unified about the connection of their community to Africa as they were between 1895 and 1930. Before this time, both the ACS and the grassroots exodusters had always found one or two notable allies among the black elite. As we have seen in chapter 1, both Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and Martin Delany, two of the most prominent black leaders of the Reconstruction era, supported Senator Matthew Butler’s 1890 bill calling on the federal government to provide assistance to blacks who wanted to repatriate to Africa.9

As black members of the Democratic Party, both Turner and Delany were, undeniably, far outside the mainstream by then. The vast majority of black leaders actively campaigned against the Butler bill, and when the bill was defeated in committee in the Republican-controlled 51st Congress, it represented a rare political victory for the black community in the Nadir period.10 But the fact of the matter is that the black elite won this day only because their interests converged with the majority of the Republican senators (and a few Democrats too), who continued to see the labor of black Americans as essential to capitalist development in the South.11

In light of this fact, it is fitting that Booker T. Washington—whose meteoric rise to prominence in national politics was pushed by this same constellation of interests12—proclaimed the death of emigrationism in his infamous 1895 Atlanta Exposition address. “To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land,” Washington told the (predominantly white) crowd at the Cotton States and International Exposition, “I would say cast down your bucket where you are—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.”13 Thus, Washington, like the vast majority of black leaders in the nineteenth century, saw facing the social and economic hardships that the United States doled out to blacks as preferable to repatriation in Africa.

Washington’s staunch repudiation of emigrationism is not the only similarity between him and the men and women from whom he claimed the mantle of leadership in the black community in 1895. On the contrary, Washington’s engagement with Liberia in the first decade of the twentieth century shows that he, too, believed that preserving the independence of the only black republic in the world was a crucially important act in the global theater that was black–white relations in the period. Between 1907 and 1910, Washington emerged as a strong advocate for the Republic of Liberia before both the Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft administrations.14 In 1909, for example, Washington used his influence with the Taft administration to secure the government of Liberia a loan for the sum of $1.5 million.15

At the same time that Washington was using his influence with the Roosevelt and Taft administrations to help preserve the sovereignty of Liberia, he was also engaged in partnerships with colonial powers that sought to spread his model of industrial education and accommodation among indigenous Africans. Indeed, after a speaking tour in Europe, Washington was deluged with letters from leading European colonial powers beseeching his help in training their “native populations” for second-class citizenship.16 Washington, who was a firm believer in the inferiority of African civilizations, eagerly accepted these opportunities to test his theories abroad.17

Even before Washington’s efforts on behalf of the Liberians, other members of the black elite were pushing for a more expansive notion of black America’s relationship with Africa at the Pan-African Congress of 1900. Henry Sylvester Williams, the West Indian activist, and W. E. B. Du Bois convened the conference in London.18 The organizers invited Booker T. Washington to attend the proceedings, but he was too busy with activities on the home front to cross the Atlantic to confer with the then-unknown Williams and Du Bois.19

It is hard to say how Washington would have viewed the proceedings had he chosen to make the trip. What we do know is that the “Address to the Nations of the World,” the main public statement of the conference, which Du Bois authored, contained at least some of the conservative language of social Darwinism that Washington had made the primary mantle of his approach to helping the Europeans with their colonial projects in Africa.20

Washington would have almost certainly rejected the remainder of the document because it evinced a radicalism that foreshadowed the rise of the New Negro on the world stage. “[W]e the men and women of Africa, in world congress assembled,” Du Bois wrote, “do now solemnly appeal; let not mere colour or race be a feature of distinction drawn between white and black men, regardless of worth or ability.”21 More important, the document made an explicit link between the racism that motivated abuses against black Americans and the forces that drove Europeans to “scramble” for Africa after the Vienna Conference of 1885.22 This element of the New Negro’s Pan-Africanism made a fundamental break with the transnationalism of their forebears, who largely believed (along with the Europeans) that Africa beyond Liberia and Ethiopia was a wasteland ripe for their evangelizing and civilizing missions.23

In terms of promoting social and political change in the world system, the London Pan-African Conference was not a success. The European powers completely ignored the “Address to the Nations of the World.” The delegates responded to this silence with a pledge of further activism. Indeed, the official report released by the conference announced plans to form a permanent Pan-African Association, comprising a headquarters in London and eleven branch offices around the globe, to lobby the great powers on black issues. The document also stated the delegates’ intention to reconvene every two years to gauge the progress of their efforts.24

Du Bois’s outstanding contributions to the conference made him an obvious choice for the post of vice president of the new Pan-African Association. His duties in this new role were to inaugurate an American branch of the association and lay plans for the 1902 gathering, which was supposed to take place in the United States.25 Nevertheless, “There is no evidence,” writes Clarence Contee, “to show that Du Bois made a substantial effort between 1900 and 1905 to develop a permanent Pan-African Association branch organization in the United States or to prepare for a meeting in 1902.”26

Historians have not judged Du Bois very harshly for his failure to achieve these goals for three reasons. First, the entire movement stalled because of a lack of funds.27 Second, it is clear that Du Bois was so heavily engaged in the campaign to topple Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee machine between 1900 and 1912 that he had little time for any other organizing efforts.28 Third, once he and the other New Negro radicals had toppled the tyranny of “King Booker,” as they mockingly referred to Washington in their internal communications, Du Bois reemerged as the driving force behind the resurgent Pan-African Conference movements between 1919 and 1930.29

It was Du Bois, for example, who urged the fledgling NAACP to issue a call for delegates to attend a Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919.30 His intention was to use the conference, which was to coincide with negotiations over the Versailles Treaty, to exert pressure on the great powers to extend the rights of self-determination to the African colonies. In Du Bois’s view, the integration of independent African nations into the new world order that Versailles would establish was a crucial first step to winning more freedoms for blacks living under white supremacist regimes in the diaspora.31

The U.S. and French governments must have seen at least some legitimacy in the case that the Pan-African Congress hoped to lay before the world community in Paris; the documentary record clearly indicates that both powers worked to quash the Pan-African Congress through administrative back channels. The Woodrow Wilson administration, for example, prevented most of the Americans slated to attend the conference from obtaining passports.32 Moreover, the French government denied entry to or deported many of the delegates who did make it to Paris.33 The deportations ceased only when Blaise Diagne, the highest-ranking African in the French government and a member of Georges Clemenceau’s war cabinet, interceded on behalf of the conference.34

In the end, fifty-seven delegates from more than fifteen colonies, territories, and nations attended the conference. Although the proceedings were lively and well attended;35 the conference fell far short of its primary objective of influencing the behavior of the Allied powers.36 Indeed, even with a powerful insider like Diagne in their corner, the delegates could not get an audience with any of the Allied governments. Moreover, it is clear that only small newspapers paid attention to the proceedings of the Pan-African Congress.37

Still, the 1919 gathering was a success in terms of its impact on Africans and blacks living in the diaspora. Before the 1919 conference, the black elite in the United States had consistently demonstrated ambivalent feelings toward Africans and European colonialism on the continent.38 After the conference, the notion that black Americans should work with Africans and other blacks living in the diaspora through the global system took root in the black community.39

The Rise of the Universal Negro Improvement Association

Born in Jamaica in 1887 into what Tony Martin calls “a peasant environment,” Marcus Mosiah Garvey received the standard education for someone of his station under the British colonial system.40 At fourteen, Garvey interrupted his formal education because of financial difficulties in his family and took an apprenticeship with a local printer.41 By the time Garvey reached the age of twenty, he was a master printer and foreman at a Kingston printing firm.42 When a strike broke out among the laborers at his firm, a sympathetic Garvey left the ranks of management to help organize the picketers.43 Although, by all accounts, Garvey was an excellent leader, the work stoppage failed to gain concessions from the plant managers, who simply replaced the strikers with lower-cost foreign laborers. Whereas the other printers were able to either return to their jobs or to find work elsewhere after the strike, their young leader was “branded a troublemaker” and completely blacklisted by the major printing firms in Jamaica.44 Ironically, this turn of events inspired Garvey to take on the ventures that would convince him that his destiny was in “race leadership.”45

Garvey’s experience with the strike, which he viewed in racial terms, convinced him that only coordinated action by Jamaican blacks would lead whites to give them a better deal. Believing that he could best help to bring this coordination about through journalistic work, Garvey founded two journals in Jamaica between 1910 and 1912.46 When both of these enterprises failed, the young rabble-rouser decided to seek further education in England. All of Garvey’s biographers agree that time he spent in London was transformative.47 Robert H. Brisbane, one of the first scholars to write about Garvey, describes his time in London:

In [London] the young provincial West Indian . . . met the members of other darker races who also had their grievances against the Caucasian. These men—followers of Ghandi, Mustapha Kemal Pasha, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, Saad Zaghlul, and Ibn Saud—had definite, clear cut programs to follow. Garvey heard such slogans as “India for the Indians” and “Asia for the Asians.” He became interested in the condition of the African Negro as a result of discussions with the followers of Chilembwe of Nyasaland and Kimbangu of the Congo. As a result of these experiences, Garvey’s vision broadened perceptibly.48

It was also in London where Garvey first became exposed to the ideas of his early role model, Booker T. Washington. Although, as Tony Martin and Colin Grant have demonstrated, Garvey was exposed to the writings of many black thinkers during his time working as a journalist in London, it is clear from his own testimony that Washington’s autobiography had a profound effect on him.49 “I read Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington and then my doom—if I may call it that—of being a race leader dawned upon me,” Garvey once confided to his wife and future biographer, Amy Jacques Garvey.50 Imbibed with this new sense of his life mission, Garvey abandoned his journalism career in London to return to Jamaica and start his career as a full-time “race leader.”51

Believing that he needed an organizational foundation to implement his vision of black uplift, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities Imperial League (UNIA) in Kingston in 1914.52 Although the UNIA manifesto spoke of such Pan-African themes as rehabilitating the race through a universal confraternity, the early program of the organization was, as E. David Cronon has pointed out, more Bookerite than radical.53 Unfortunately for Garvey, black Jamaicans were not ready for him to lead either a Jamaican Tuskegee or a confraternity promoting radical action on the island. Indeed, Garvey’s organization was stunted by his inability to make inroads with middle-class blacks and marred by Garvey’s financial improprieties during its one year of operations in Kingston.54 Ignoring his own foibles, Garvey chalked up his difficulties in his homeland to the fact that “[n]obody wanted to be a Negro.”55

Refusing to abandon his dream of uniting the black peoples of the world for their mutual progress, Garvey decided to seek fresher fields in the United States.56 After an inauspicious start on the thriving (and highly competitive) Harlem speakers’ circuit, Garvey began to find his stride in his adopted homeland.57 By the close of 1917, Garvey was successfully recruiting members to his reconstituted UNIA.58 Two years later, Garvey reported that his UNIA consisted of over thirty branches with 2 million members.59 By 1920, Garvey was at the head of a complex organization that consisted of a newspaper, several corporations, and a steamship line.60

It is clear that Garvey benefited greatly from the fact that he had arrived in the United States in the middle of the realignment of the black rank-and-file from Washington’s Tuskegee machine to the radical reformers of the NAACP. Although the black masses supported NAACP efforts to push legal reforms at home and abroad, the failure of the organization to articulate a message helping them to cope with the psychological hardships of daily life under Jim Crow during this period left the people hungry for the type of pro-black self-help messages that Garvey bandied about the black counterpublic. “The profound disillusionment felt by Negroes at the end of the war,” writes Cronon, “had much to do with their widespread acceptance of a new and alien leader with an extreme program of racial nationalism.”61

Most scholars assume that the conflicts that erupted between Garvey (and his followers) and other black advocacy organizations during the height of his movement were a function of their trying to wrest this mantle of leadership from him. On the contrary, my analysis of archival materials demonstrates that these conflicts were rooted in the paternalistic desires of the black elite to protect the masses and the broader civil rights movement from Garvey’s malfeasance.

Beyond the Clash of Personalities Thesis

Garvey’s relationship with the black elite has been the subject of numerous studies. The consensus is that Garvey and his rivals—W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, and Kelly Miller—missed a crucial opportunity to advance the black struggle for civil rights in the United States and black equality on the world stage by allowing their personalities to divide them.62 This literature also tends to stress the similarities between the Pan-African ideals espoused by Garvey and Du Bois. Nevertheless, the historical record does not bear out these claims.63

It is easy to understand why previous researchers have put so much emphasis on the personalities of Garvey and the leading figures of the black elite who shared the counterpublic with him between 1916 and 1940. Indeed, even a cursory examination of the documentary records of the UNIA reveals that Garvey saw himself as the victim of continual slights and attacks from the mainstream black elite. Moreover, it is clear that Garvey placed Du Bois, whom he had something of a fixation on, at the center of this movement to defeat the UNIA.64 It is also true that Du Bois and other members of the black elite did occasionally launch ad hominem attacks against Garvey. In 1923, for example, Du Bois described Garvey as “[a] little, fat black man, ugly, but with intelligent eyes and a big head.”65 This comment, however, which Du Bois penned in the middle of Garvey’s trial for perpetuating mail fraud against the black community, was particularly out of character for the NAACP activist.

In general, the historical record does not bear out Garvey’s claims that he was constantly under assault by the black elite after his arrival in Harlem. On the contrary, a few notable members of the black elite held out high hopes for Garvey’s UNIA in the early phase of its development. For example, A. Philip Randolph, who emerged as one of Garvey’s harshest critics after 1919, was instrumental in helping the West Indian immigrant gain a foothold in the thriving Harlem network of activists and politicians.66 In addition, the vast majority of the black elite seemed to be completely uninterested in Garvey or the UNIA during the early years of operation of the organization. Indeed, the records of the NAACP contain no mention of him or his UNIA until 1918.

Moreover, the first record of contact between Garvey and Du Bois appears in Garvey’s papers. On April 30, 1915, Garvey wrote to Du Bois to protest an NAACP operative’s praising the government of his native Jamaica for progress in race relations.67 There is no evidence that Du Bois ever received this letter.

Almost one year later, Garvey, who was now working from New York, wrote to Du Bois to ask him to moderate his first public lecture in the United States.68 Du Bois’s secretary returned a form letter to Garvey telling him that her employer was not available on the date of interest.69 Given that Garvey had yet to make a name for himself in either the United States or his native Jamaica, it is clear that these early dismissive contacts were more a function of his lack of stature than any animus that Du Bois had for the UNIA leader.

The first real notice that Du Bois took of the Garvey movement came in the months after the 1919 Pan-African Congress. On March 27, 1919, Garvey’s Negro World newspaper ran an editorial that charged that Du Bois had worked to “sabotage” the lobbying efforts of the UNIA emissary to the Versailles Peace Conference.70 Given the wide circulation of the Negro World, Du Bois had to respond to the charges or risk losing credibility with the masses. “The truth was,” Du Bois wrote in the December 1920 issue of the Crisis, “that Mr. Du Bois never saw or heard of [Garvey’s] ‘High Commissioner’ . . . and would have been delighted to welcome and co-operate with any colored fellow-worker.”71

Even after this incident, Du Bois continued to show great restraint when making public statements about Garvey and the UNIA. His treatment of the UNIA 1920 International Convention, the same one that he refused to attend as a nominee for the office of “leader of the American Negro people,” is illustrative of his temperate approach to the Garvey movement. In the midst of the convention, Du Bois commented to Charles Mowbray White, a journalist, that the success of the event was borne of the “frustrations” of black servicemen who returned from Europe to find that their “valiant campaigns for democracy” abroad did little to help them in their own communities. Du Bois also told White that he believed that the UNIA movement was likely to “collapse in a short time.” In the event that the movement did continue to grow, however, Du Bois pledged that he would not “raise a hand to stop it.”72 Although not exactly a ringing endorsement of Garveyism, these comments make it clear that Du Bois did not see himself as engaged in a turf war with Garvey over the affections of the black rank-and-file.

Black leaders demonstrated an even greater commitment to speaking about the Garvey movement in dispassionate tones in their correspondences with constituents. Between 1919 and 1921, figures such as Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and William Pickens were deluged with letters from black citizens who were interested in divining the purity of Garvey’s motives and whether his movement had a credible chance of accomplishing his lofty goals. On September 25, 1920, for example, E. G. Woodford of Seattle, Washington, wrote to James Weldon Johnson with hopes of securing accurate information about the “Back-to-Africa Movement” recently “organized by a Mr. Marcus Garvey in New York City.”73 Despite the fact that the leaders of the NAACP were already becoming concerned about the trajectory of the UNIA, a staff member responded promptly, reporting to Mr. Woodford that “Marcus Garvey’s address is 56 West 125th Street, New York City.”74

At the height of Garvey’s popularity in 1920 and early 1921, the more traditional civil rights organizations sometimes found themselves in correspondence with black citizens who wrote to express their enthusiasm about the UNIA. Charles Beasley of Ketchikan, Alaska, wrote to the organization to express his sentiment that “Marcus Garvey has done more than any Negro of [the] day to put a lime light on the colored race.”75 On that same day, Walter White, then serving as the assistant field secretary of the organization, wrote back to Mr. Beasley, “We have no quarrel with you if you feel that Marcus Garvey is doing more than any other Negro today for the colored man.”76 This spirit of equanimity demonstrated by the members of the black elite when talking and writing about Garvey and the UNIA from 1918 until the middle of 1921 undermines the view that they worked against the UNIA from its inception.

The measured approach that characterized the response of the black leadership to Garveyism between 1918 and 1921 provides a stark contrast to the way that the black press portrayed the UNIA movement. Indeed, when we chart the levels of positive, neutral, and negative coverage of the Garvey movement in four of the largest U.S. black newspapers between 1918 and 1923 (figure 2.1), we find that the view of Garvey in the black press was overwhelmingly negative. Moreover, by 1922, the year that the government indicted Garvey on charges of mail fraud, negative items in the black press about the provisional president of Africa outnumbered positive items by a ratio of eight to one.

As this negative commentary and coverage began to fill the pages of the black press, Du Bois and other black leaders began to speak out more forcefully against Garvey and his followers in the UNIA.77 Indeed, just one month after his interview with White, Du Bois began to express some real concerns about the Garvey movement in the Crisis. In particular, Du Bois warned that Garvey’s espousal of the virtues of black separatism and limited emigration to Africa was sending the wrong message to the U.S. power structure.78 In the September 1920 issue of the Crisis, for example, Du Bois urged Garvey and his mostly “West Indian” followers to beware of violating the political norms of the “12 million black men of America.”79

FIGURE 2.1 The Garvey movement in the black press, 1918–1923; numbers of articles, editorials, and letters.

Sources: Atlanta Daily World; Chicago Defender; New York Amsterdam News; Pittsburgh Courier

Some scholars have suggested that Du Bois’s essay was more propaganda than a dispassionate analysis of the Garvey movement; in other words, Du Bois tried to minimize the importance of the UNIA by portraying it as a movement dominated by foreign-born blacks. A quantitative content analysis of black print sources between 1916 and 1928, however, shows that Du Bois was certainly not alone in thinking that Afro-Caribbean immigrants were the backbone of the UNIA. The first two columns in figure 2.2, which summarizes the results of the content analysis, focus on the sixty editorials and letters that appeared in four leading black newspapers in this period and addressed the ethnic composition of the Garvey movement. The analysis shows that 53 of the items (88 percent) represented in these two columns framed the UNIA as a movement with a largely foreign-born membership base. By contrast, only 7 items (12 percent) in this sample saw the UNIA as a movement comprising mostly native-born blacks. Moreover, because 35 percent of the items that contain this frame appeared in print before Du Bois published his editorial in the Crisis, it is clear that he was merely reproducing a well-worn interpretation of the movement.

Whereas Du Bois’s essay was a not so subtle nudge for Garvey to take his cues on domestic issues from native-born blacks, other members of the black elite attacked the UNIA leader more directly. William Pickens, an officer of the NAACP, published an open letter to Garvey in the Chicago Defender in which he attacked Garvey for attempting to “decitizenize the American Negro” by stirring up the “foolish” ideology of emigrationism.80 Similarly, A. Philip Randolph—the man who had helped Garvey get his start in Harlem—rebuked him in the pages of the Messenger for selling downtrodden blacks the “pipe dream” of a better life in Africa.81 These responses show how deeply engrained negative sentiments toward emigrationism remained in the black elite even two generations after the end of the Civil War.

FIGURE 2.2 Black media frames of Marcus Garvey, 1916–1928. KKK, Ku Klux Klan.

Sources: Atlanta Daily World; Chicago Defender; New York Amsterdam News; Pittsburgh Courier

Although Du Bois was also deeply concerned about Garvey’s resurrection of emigrationism in the black counterpublic, he took greater issue (at least throughout 1920) with the UNIA chief’s rhetorical style and the disarray of his organization. In other words, the larger problem for Du Bois was that Garvey was becoming “bombastic, wasteful, illogical and ineffective” at precisely the moment that his movement was garnering more attention from the mainstream press.82 Even at this point, however, Du Bois maintained (at least in public) that Garvey was “essentially an honest and sincere man with a tremendous vision, great dynamic force, stubborn determination and unselfish desire to serve.”83 At the same time, he feared that Garvey’s inability to follow through on his increasingly grandiose claims would ultimately reflect poorly on the entire black community. Du Bois’s remark that he was worried about the rank-and-file blacks who joined the UNIA in droves because he did not want Garvey’s inevitable “failure” to become “theirs” eloquently sums up his sentiments during this period.84

Within two years of the publication of Du Bois’s assessment in the pages of Crisis, both Garvey’s sincerity and honesty were on trial in the black counterpublic and the federal courts. As Du Bois had predicted, Garvey’s tactics and management style led him down a path of self-destruction. Although Garvey’s deficiencies as a leader—particularly his tendency to delegate important financial and operational decisions to incompetent subordinates—weakened UNIA businesses across the board, the poor performance of the Black Star Line was the iceberg that ultimately sank his movement.

Garvey first floated the idea of establishing the Black Star Line to compete with the large steamship companies that traversed the Atlantic in a series of speeches at Liberty Hall in early 1919.85 Tony Martin has argued that “Garvey was attempting to fulfill a long-felt need [in the black community]” when he established the Black Star Line; in other words, Garvey’s vision was a direct response to the fact that blacks “were routinely subjected to racist practices on existing shipping lines.”86 The popular response to Garvey’s announcement of the formation of the Black Star Line in black communities certainly supports Martin’s interpretation.

Despite the timeliness of Garvey’s idea, however, it is clear that the Black Star Line was doomed from its inception because neither Garvey nor any of the other directors of the corporation had experience in the shipping industry.87 Because of this lack of knowledge about complex business and legal issues entailed by running such an enterprise, the group deferred to Joshua Cockburn, the man whom they had hired to captain the first vessel of the line, regarding the purchase of the first ship and most of the early business transactions of the corporation. There is no doubt that Cockburn had the credentials to captain the Black Star Line vessels. Indeed, the forty-three-year-old, who like Garvey was an Afro-Caribbean immigrant to New York, had served in the British Navy and was one of the few blacks living in the United States who was certified to captain an ocean-going steamship.88

The vessel that Cockburn recommended that the UNIA purchase and make the Black Star Line flagship was a thirty-year-old steamship, SS Yarmouth, that had been recently decommissioned from its role as a supply ship for the Allied powers during World War I.89 Although, as some employees of the Black Star Line later recalled, the poor condition of the ship was obvious to anyone who set foot on board, Cockburn assured the directors that it was seaworthy. He also convinced them that the $165,000 asking price for the vessel was reasonable.90

The first snag in the development of the Black Star Line was that, despite Garvey’s constant boasting about the financial successes of the UNIA business enterprises, the organization did not have the 10 percent cash deposit that the sellers required for him to take possession of the ship. Cockburn suggested that the directors resolve this problem by entering into a $2,000 per month lease agreement.91 In Cockburn’s view, leasing the ship would produce such a “psychological effect on the people” that it was bound to “boost the sale of stock” enough to raise the capital for the down payment.92 Because the entire Garvey movement was based on this type of prospective thinking, the Black Star Line directors enthusiastically embraced Cockburn’s proposal.93 Indeed, throughout the summer of 1919, Garvey raced around the country pushing Black Star Line stock on black audiences.94 Thanks to these engagements, the enterprise was able to accumulate enough capital to take possession of the Yarmouth and schedule its maiden voyage for October 31, 1919.95

Claude Mckay, a leading intellectual light of the Harlem Renaissance, reported in his landmark history of Harlem that a “delirious” crowd turned out to witness the Yarmouth sail for the first time as the flagship of the Black Star Line.96 What the crowd did not know at the time, however, was that the Yarmouth would only be allowed to sail down the Hudson as far as 23rd Street because the Black Star Line had not properly worked out the transfer of insurance from the previous owners.97 Although the insurance problem was corrected in a few days, this was only the first of the problems that the Black Star Line encountered in the field of transatlantic shipping.

Cockburn, who was drawing a princely salary of $400 per month from his captaincy, had been both a poor and dishonest agent for the Black Star Line.98 Almost as soon as the company took control of the Yarmouth, it became abundantly clear that both Cockburn’s valuation of the ship and estimation that it was seaworthy were false. Indeed, the Black Star Line had to spend $5,000 to repair the main boiler of the ship just to make it safe for its first scheduled run between New York City and Havana, Cuba. A Black Star Line employee later stated that the ship’s condition made it clear that it was not “worth a penny over $25,000.”99

Cockburn immediately proclaimed the boiler problem sabotage. It is possible that he might have actually believed this interpretation because he became increasingly erratic—even paranoid—about the movements of the Yarmouth after this incident. At the same time, the fact that Cockburn had received a kickback from the sellers for pushing the ship on the UNIA stands as clear evidence that he knew that the ship was overvalued.100 Thus, perhaps his behavior was just an elaborate ruse to help him maintain Garvey’s confidence and his lucrative position. Whatever Cockburn’s intentions, he did maintain Garvey’s trust in the first months of the operation of the line.

Despite the dark clouds that seemed to swirl around the venture from its inception, Garvey and the directors continued to push an aggressive plan for the Black Star Line. Indeed, even before the Yarmouth returned to port from its first run, Garvey negotiated an $11,000 charter with the Green River Distillery to ship its remaining supply of spirits, worth $4 million, out of the United States before the start of Prohibition. The contract showcased the inexperience of Garvey and the other managers of the Black Star Line—the fee was roughly 10 percent of what an experienced shipping company would have charged the liquor company for such a job.101 To make matters worse, the contract that Garvey signed violated the norms of the shipping industry by promising to fully indemnify the cargo.102

This indemnity clause ultimately proved disastrous when the Yarmouth encountered a storm soon after it set sail from New York to meet the obligations of the contract. Although the storm was minor, the Yarmouth—which was still not in good sailing order—began to list.103 To keep the ship from capsizing, Cockburn ordered the crew to throw five hundred bottles of whiskey overboard. In addition, an unspecified amount of the Green River Distillery shipment had been damaged due to the crew’s hasty loading job.104 To make matters worse, federal prohibition officers seized the cargo once the vessel was towed back to the port of New York; this meant that the Black Star Line failed to meet the agreed-on delivery date spelled out in the contract.105 As a result of all these problems, the Black Star Line ended up paying damages and delay penalties to the Green River Distillery that far exceeded the $11,000 pittance that it had been promised to carry the cargo.106

Yet the dismal performance of the Yarmouth during its first major shipping operation did not dampen Garvey’s belief in the enterprise. On the contrary, he announced his intentions to expand the Black Star Line fleet just one month after concluding the Green River Distillery contract.107 Garvey did make one major change in the operation of the company—he decided to fire Cockburn.108 But even with a new captain at the helm, the Black Star Line remained unprofitable. Indeed, the company spent every penny that it took in during its first year of operations.

Despite the fact that Garvey had lost faith in Cockburn after the Green River Distillery fiasco, he remained committed to the confidence man’s business model for the Black Star Line. In other words, Garvey continued to use the excitement that swirled around his acquisition of the Yarmouth to prop up the worthless company stock in the black community.109 This practice, as the more than $750,000 in revenue illustrate, was the only successful part of the Black Star Line operation. Of course, it was also a very volatile strategy because it increased the demands on the company to perform in an efficient and profitable manner. For example, there was considerable backlash among the shareholders when Garvey announced that the Black Star Line would yield no dividends for investors at the end of its first year of operations.110

By the middle of 1921, Garvey’s credibility in the black community began to sag under the weight of complaints from disgruntled investors in the Black Star Line. Many of these investors wrote to the leaders of other black organizations seeking counsel about how best to recoup their investments. It was in this context that some black politicians and activists began to talk openly among themselves about organizing a movement to lobby the federal government to press charges against Garvey and the UNIA.111

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had already been steadily building a case against Garvey since 1919. The government’s efforts were not motivated by a desire to protect the black community from Garvey’s malfeasance; on the contrary, the central aim was to suppress Garvey’s tendency to stir up the masses in large black population centers. J. Edgar Hoover, who led a campaign to undermine the entire movement for black civil rights when he took over the FBI in the 1950s, actually got his start in the agency by signaling to his superiors that Garvey was a “dangerous alien” who they should prosecute as soon as he gave them the opportunity by violating a federal law.112

The federal government, which integrated the FBI to infiltrate the UNIA, did not have to wait long for Garvey to provide them with enough fodder to press a case against him. By 1921, the entire Black Star Line was nothing more than a kiting scheme. In February of that year, Garvey announced that the company, which was now the owner of three decrepit ships that attempted to travel between New York and the Caribbean, would add a ship to its fleet that would travel to the coast of West Africa.113 As Garvey planned yet another stock offering to raise capital for the Black Star Line, he added a new dimension to his pitch—a flier with an image of the ship that he intended to purchase. Garvey did not tell his would-be shareholders that the ship depicted on the flier, the SS Orion, was not yet in the possession of the company. On the contrary, he encouraged potential investors to think that the Black Star Line already owned the ship by embossing the image of the Orion with the name SS Phyllis Wheatley, which was the name he had pledged to use to christen the new ship in several speeches and in UNIA propaganda.114

Garvey’s defenders in the historical literature have pointed out that the Black Star Line was engaged in negotiations to purchase the Orion at the time of the stock offering; nevertheless, the flier constituted fraud under most state and federal commerce laws.115 Moreover, Garvey’s decision to circulate the flier through the U.S. mail left him vulnerable to the very serious charge of mail fraud. And, indeed, this was the offense Garvey was charged with when he was arrested by federal agents (along with several of his subordinates) on January 12, 1922.116

Garvey wasted no time in rising to his own defense against the mail fraud charges in the black counterpublic. Indeed, he addressed a large rally of more than 1,000 supporters at Liberty Hall just one day after he was released from the Tombs prison on a $2,500 bond.117 Despite the facts that the SS Phyllis Wheatley circulars were a complete misrepresentation of the health of the Black Star Line and that the company was in shambles due to his own gross incompetence as a manager, Garvey laid the blame for his predicament on “Negro Advancement Associations” that had paid “saboteurs” to destroy the company.118 As Gary Grant has pointed out, Garvey clearly intended his remarks to suggest that W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP were to blame for the downfall of the Black Star Line.119

Pinning the blame on his rivals was a well-worn tactic that Garvey used quite frequently when something went wrong with one of his UNIA operations. Of course, Garvey’s claim that rival black organizations were behind the woes of the Black Star Line was preposterous. Despite this, some historians have maintained that the attacks that rival black leaders launched against the Black Star Line (and against the broader Garvey movement) in the black counterpublic provided the federal government with the necessary cover to move against Garvey.120

This interpretation ignores three facts: (1) the plaintiffs in the government case against Garvey were members of the black rank-and-file (not the rival organizations) who had a real stake in having the court provide them with a remedy, (2) Garvey’s own disgruntled employees (not the rival organizations) were the ones who first tipped off a government agency that the operations of the Black Star Line were legally suspect,121 and (3) the architects of the government case against the Garvey movement were certainly not inclined to form alliances with any organizations whose principal aim was the advancement of black equality in the United States. At the same time, it is certainly true that many black leaders became more forthcoming about their opposition to Garveyism after Garvey was arrested for mail fraud. Du Bois, for example, reversed his early public stance on Garvey’s character in a scathing editorial in the Crisis that labeled the UNIA leader a “demagogue.”122

Garvey organized a nationwide speaking tour to present his side of the Black Star Line story and to raise money for a dense fund. It was on this tour that he made the tactical error that proved to be the death knell of the UNIA. Believing that the Klu Klux Klan (KKK), an organization with one of the largest memberships in the United States in the 1920s, might be able to intercede on his behalf with the U.S. government and pump much needed cash into the Black Star Line, Garvey courted the favor of Edward Young Clarke, the KKK leader.123 In the aftermath of the Clarke meeting, Garvey’s many opponents within the black elite banded together in the Garvey Must Go! campaign to urge the federal government to remain vigilant in its prosecution of Garvey for mail fraud.124 Moreover, after the Clarke meeting, Garvey lost virtually all of his support among the U.S. black masses. Two years after this public relations fiasco, the federal government finally won its conviction against Garvey for mail fraud.

Ironically, jail time convinced Garvey that the failure of his movement was rooted in his lack of attention to the domestic issues. From his cell, Garvey instructed his remaining followers to convert the UNIA into an organization dedicated to achieving full citizenship rights and equality for blacks in the United States. In short, the man who once denounced the NAACP agenda as being “more dangerous” for black Americans than the activities of the Ku Klux Klan now shared the vision of that organization. Unfortunately for Garvey (and his followers), he was now saddled with such negative associations in the black counterpublic that there was no chance for his vision of a UNIA refocused on the domestic civil rights struggle in the United States ever coming to fruition. Indeed, as figure 2.2 illustrations, 129 (46 percent) of the items that appeared about Garvey in the four leading black newspapers between 1916 and 1928 framed him as a criminal. Seventy-six (27 percent) of the items framed Garvey as a nineteenth-century–style emigrationist who wanted black Americans to give up their citizenship rights in the United States. Finally, 14 items (5 percent of the coverage) framed Garvey as an agent of the Ku Klux Klan.

Pan-Africanism versus Black Imperialism

In 1955, Ben F. Rogers published an article in the Journal of Negro History entitled “William E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Pan-Africa.” This article is a seminal paper in the development of the clash-of-personalities thesis. In it, Rogers makes two central claims: (1) that both Du Bois and Garvey believed that “uniting all the Negroes of the world into one great organization” was the best way to advance the race and (2) that the two men allowed a “bitter” rivalry to prevent them from cooperating in achieving this common vision.125 But, as we have seen in the previous section, Du Bois and the other black leaders who opposed Garvey’s movement acted primarily out of a sense of linked fate with rank-and-file blacks, not out of personal animosity; in other words, the black elite opposed Garveyism because they saw the UNIA leader’s program as a threat to the masses. In this section, I show that this same dynamic was at work when the black elite confronted Garveyism in the external context. Moreover, contrary to the position taken by Rogers and a number of other scholars, most black leaders saw a world of difference between the Pan-Africanism espoused by figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and the vision of black world unity promoted by Garvey.

It is easy to see why some historians have argued that Du Bois and Garvey had similar visions of Pan-Africanism. This is so because throughout 1919 and the first few months of 1920, the UNIA’s engagement with issues in African affairs was essentially a boiled-down version of the Pan-African Congress movement. By the close of 1920, however, the same bombast and unsteadiness that undermined Garvey on the home front began to manifest itself in his statements about colonialism, issues in African affairs, and U.S. foreign policy.

The first UNIA foray into international affairs was an attempt to influence the behavior of the great powers at the Versailles Peace Conference. Indeed, like the delegates to the Second Pan-African Congress, Garvey saw the gathering as a prime opportunity to articulate the grievances of the black world to the dominant power structure. In December 1918, Garvey announced in the pages of the Negro World that he intended to dispatch an envoy to the conference to lobby the great powers to make “Africa for the Africans.”126 Garvey’s decision to appoint Eliezer Cadet the UNIA high commissioner to the Versailles conference further illustrates his penchant for assigning important roles to people completely unqualified to fill them.

Cadet was a twenty-one-year-old Haitian immigrant. Shortly after he arrived in his adopted home of West Virginia, he became an avid reader of the Negro World and eventually joined the local UNIA branch.127 Cadet came to Garvey’s attention after he wrote a passionate letter to the Negro World condemning the U.S. military occupation of Haiti.128 Beyond this editorial letter, Cadet’s only qualification for such a high-level mission was that he was fluent in French.129

Not surprisingly, the inexperienced Cadet, lacking accreditation from the French bureaucracy to attend the closed sessions of the conference, had no more success in influencing (or even contacting) the representatives of the great powers than did his rivals at the Pan-African Congress.130 During his brief time in Garvey’s inner circle, Cadet obviously had imbibed the central lesson that UNIA leaders should never let the truth intrude on the movement because the reports that he wired back to New York were pure fiction. In his first cable back to UNIA headquarters, which Garvey read to a gathering of the faithful, Cadet wrote that he had already hand-delivered the demands of the organization to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau.131

We know from contemporaneous accounts that Cadet found it impossible to get access to Clemenceau or any of the major players at Versailles. Moreover, Cadet also found himself rebuffed by C. D. B. King, the Liberian secretary of state and president-elect, and the only delegate to the conference who represented a functioning black republic. Henry Worley, an U.S.-appointed financial advisor who accompanied King to most of the sessions at Versailles, recorded in his journal that the president-elect scolded Cadet in their brief encounter because he was displeased with some of the outlandish statements that he had read in the Negro World.132

Perhaps it was Cadet’s recognition that there would be other records of his time in Paris than his own that prompted his next move. On March 22, 1919, Cadet wired UNIA headquarters to report that W. E. B. Du Bois was now sabotaging his efforts in Paris by speaking out against articles chronicling the horrors of lynchings in the United States that he had circulated to the French press.133 It is hard to know how seriously Garvey, who now routinely blamed just about every setback that the UNIA movement experienced on sabotage perpetrated by Du Bois and the NAACP, took Cadet’s charges. What we do know is that on receiving the cable he immediately convened a mass meeting at the Mother Zion AME Church in Harlem, where he denounced Du Bois a “race traitor” for interfering with his envoy’s mission.134 Garvey also sent a telegram “repudiating” Du Bois’s efforts to sabotage Cadet to the French press.135

Du Bois responded to Cadet’s charges against him in the pages of the Crisis magazine. “The truth,” Du Bois wrote in defense of himself, “was that Mr. Du Bois never saw or heard of [Garvey’s] ‘High Commissioner,’ never denied his nor anyone’s statements of the wretched American conditions, did everything possible to arouse rather than quiet the French press and would have been delighted to welcome and co-operate with any colored fellow-worker.”136 As Elliot Skinner has pointed out, the historical record clearly supports Du Bois’s interpretation of events.137

Cadet’s poor showing in France did not alter Garvey’s belief that the UNIA could make an impact on the international system. On the contrary, the UNIA chief decided to pursue further diplomatic operations on Cadet’s return to the United States. During the 1920 UNIA convention, for example, Garvey announced his plans to send a commission to the League of Nations to establish formal relations between the international organization and the UNIA. In May 1922, this commission, under the leadership of George Marke, an Oxford-trained UNIA official from Sierra Leone, traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to deliver a petition from the UNIA to Sir Eric Drummond, the League’s secretary-general.138

The petition articulately spelled out a number of grievances that the black world held as a result of exploitation at the hands of the great powers and other European nations. It also demanded that the League should give the UNIA control over the colonies that Germany had been forced to cede to the League as part of the Treaty of Versailles.139 From the perspective of the UNIA, handing over these mandate territories to the organization would be an important first step toward redress and racial reconciliation.

Although the Marke delegation did not meet with Drummond, they did present their petition to the head of the Mandate Section of the League. Moreover, as the historical record indicates, the secretary-general did eventually pass the petition on to the full membership of the League. But, because the great powers remained committed to holding on to their colonial possessions in Africa and Asia, it is not at all surprising that the UNIA petition and all subsequent overtures made by the organization to the League were patently ignored by the Secretariat.140

The actions of the Marke delegation in Geneva illustrate the crucial difference between Garvey’s vision of black world unity and that put forward by Du Bois and the Pan-African Congress movement. The First Pan-African Congress that took place in London in 1900 was flawed because none of the delegates was from Africa. As a result, the delegates to the gathering have been (justly) criticized for making the essentialist claim that their skin color enabled them to represent the interests of the continent. The push among the conveners of the Second Pan-African Congress to include African voices among the delegates was a direct response to this problem. But by petitioning for control of the German mandates without consulting even one inhabitant of these territories, the UNIA went far beyond the essentialist fallacy that marred the first Pan-African Congress. In short, the UNIA was advocating replacing European imperialism with imperialism in the name of racial advancement—a position that fueled much of the opposition that Garvey encountered from black leaders in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena and on the global stage.

We see this dynamic at work very clearly in the narrative of the UNIA efforts to establish a UNIA settlement in the Republic of Liberia. At the same conference where he divulged his plans to send the Marke delegation to the League of Nations, Garvey also announced that he hoped to secure a base in Liberia.141 Although he had not yet entered into formal negotiations for such a base, Garvey was confident that his relationship with Gabriel Moore Johnson, whom he bestowed with the title leader of the African people during the conference proceedings, would pave the way to such talks. Johnson was both the mayor of Monrovia (the Liberian capital city) and the father-in-law of Charles D. B. King (the Liberian president), so it is easy to see why Garvey believed he was the right man to help him curry favor with the Liberian government. On January 18, 1921, Garvey wrote to Johnson asking him to use his “good offices” with President King to help the UNIA secure 5,000 acres of land in Liberia.142

This display of political ingenuity not withstanding, Garvey remained the erratic man that Du Bois had described in his 1920 Crisis editorial. For example, in the same week that he secured Johnson’s support, Garvey undermined his new ally’s ability to work on his behalf by announcing that he was dispatching men from the UNIA to Liberia to facilitate the “conquest” of Africa.143 Garvey’s opponents in the U.S. black elite seized on this statement as evidence that the UNIA head, who had taken to calling himself the “Provisional President of Africa,” was committed to destabilizing Liberia. W. E. B. Du Bois, the man whom Garvey’s envoy had falsely accused of sabotaging his efforts during the Versailles conference, led the charge against the UNIA. “[W]ithout arms, money, effective organization or a base of operations,” Du Bois wrote in an editorial in the Crisis, “Mr. Garvey talks of ‘Conquest’ . . . and of himself becoming a black Napoleon!”144 A. Philip Randolph’s response to Garvey’s speech was even more direct. “Negro exploiters and tyrants,” Randolph wrote of Garvey’s plans in the Messenger, “are as bad as white ones.”145

The majority of editorialists and letter writers who commented on Garvey’s engagement with Africa in the leading black newspapers also saw the UNIA head’s stance toward Liberia (and toward the rest of Africa) as imperialistic. Indeed, a full 56 percent of the 108 items focused on UNIA activities in Africa that appeared in the four black newspapers with the largest circulation between 1918 and 1923 described Garvey as an imperialist. And according to the historical record, the leaders of the Republic of Liberia concurred with this interpretation of the Garvey movement.

Garvey’s statement, made at a crucial stage in the relations between the United States and Liberia, could not have been uttered at a worse time. In March 1921, almost two months after Garvey’s statement about conquering Africa, a diplomatic delegation from Liberia, led by President King, arrived in the United States to attempt to extract yet another financial lifeline from the U.S. government. The loan negotiations had started under the Wilson administration’s postwar program of economic revival for small nations trying to consolidate their democratic institutions. By the time the United States and Liberia really got into the thick of negotiations over the loan, however, Americans were exhibiting signs of revitalized isolationist tendencies. The Republicans capitalized on this sentiment in the election of 1920, and they quickly went to work dismantling the last remnants of Wilson’s foreign policy, including the loan.

Unlike the other nations trying to maintain aid flows from the United States to their coffers, however, Liberia had always maintained a special relationship with the United States.146 Because these historical connections were generated primarily to make an impact on the structure of race relations within the United States, it is not at all surprising that the nature of racial politics in 1920 helped save the loan to Liberia from the Senate Foreign Relation Committee chopping block. Although Republican Party members were eager to dismantle Wilson’s legacy, they were just as eager to consolidate their most recent round of success at the polls. One way that President Warren Harding proposed to do this was by reestablishing a positive relationship with black Americans. Like all previous Republican presidents, however, Harding was willing to reach out to blacks only on issue areas that would not cost him white supporters. Thus, the twenty-ninth president, who had been elected on a staunchly isolationist platform, sought to use the foreign policymaking arena to achieve these two competing ends. Liberia represented a win-win situation for the new president. Already garnering praise for returning to the practice of making black appointments in the civil service, particularly to foreign policy posts dealing with the black world, Harding knew that a well-timed gesture in support of Liberia would continue to strike a stark contrast to his thoroughly racist Democratic predecessor.

In this new, more open environment in the foreign affairs arena, mainstream black politicians were given a tremendous amount of access to the Liberian delegation when they arrived in Washington, D.C., to close the negotiations on the loan agreement.147 Because the great majority of these men viewed Garveyism as a distinct threat, it is not surprising that their closeness to President King of Liberia had a deleterious effect on Garvey’s negotiations with the Liberian government for land within its territory. On June 8, 1921, during the height of congressional action on the Liberian loan, President King published an open letter in the pages of Du Bois’s Crisis in which he denounced Garvey’s plan to make his nation a “center of aggression or conspiracy against other sovereign states.”148 On the heels of this statement, all negotiations between the Liberian legislature and the UNIA delegation headed by the mayor of Monrovia ceased;149 moreover, during their two months in the United States, King and his diplomatic team forged a strong working relationship with W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP.150

King’s cooperation with the NAACP and repudiation of Garvey demonstrate that the Liberian government, at least, drew a sharp distinction between the Pan-Africanism of the New Negro and Garveyism. This provides a serious challenge to the view that there was a fundamental basis for cooperation between the two camps in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena.

Psalm 48:31

After the European “scramble for Africa” in 1885 and 1886, Liberia and Ethiopia were the only two independent nations on the African continent. The Americo-Liberians faced constant threats to Liberian sovereignty from the colonial powers that shared their borders, and the U.S. black elite remained consistently engaged in the business of helping Liberians to preserve their independence in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite the depth of these ties between the black elite and Liberia, it was Ethiopia that played the leading role in the most important event in the history of black America’s connection with Africa prior to World War II.

Two critical events placed Ethiopia over Liberia in the consciousness of the black elite in the 1930s. The first was a report issued in 1930 by Charles S. Johnson, a leading black sociologist, which revealed that the Americo-Liberians were driving the indigenous peoples of Liberia into forced labor for multinational corporations.151 Given that most of the New Negro elite members were just one generation removed from the peonage of sharecropping, it is not surprising that they reacted to this news with outrage. In the wake of Johnson’s report, there was a significant cooling in relations between Liberia and black leaders in the United States.

Despite the importance of the Liberian labor scandal in reorienting the foreign policy goals of the civil rights establishment, it was the attempt by Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, to conquer Ethiopia, the only independent nation in Africa that black Americans still felt was worthy of their affections, that made Ethiopia the top priority of the black elite in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. It is also important to note that the black masses pushed their leaders to act in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena by making the preservation of Ethiopian independence an issue in domestic politics. This hypermobilization around the issue on the home front shows that many of Garvey’s lessons about their bonds of kinship with Africa remained salient for the black masses even though his own movement had ended in disgrace.

But, despite Garvey’s importance in laying the groundwork for many of the grassroots activists who would take center stage during black America’s response to the Italian-Ethiopian War, he was not the first person to make the black masses aware of the special status of Ethiopia in the community of nations. On the contrary, it was Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia who had first reached across the Atlantic to communicate a message of kinship to black Americans when his kingdom came under assault by the forces of King Umberto during the first Italian-Ethiopian War (1895–1896). Moreover, after his armies had repelled the Italian forces, Menelik, believing that modernization was the best way to protect Ethiopian sovereignty, encouraged skilled blacks from the diaspora to settle in Ethiopia and serve in his court.152

Emperor Haile Selassie continued his predecessor’s practice of reaching out to blacks in the diaspora when he ascended to the throne in 1918.153 In 1927, for example, he dispatched Azaj Workneh Martin, the Ethiopian ambassador to the United Kingdom, on a mission to the United States to renew diplomatic ties with the government and recruit skilled black Americans for the service of the kingdom. Although Martin received a warm reception from the black community in New York and Washington, D.C., his efforts were unsuccessful in terms of producing a migration flow.154 In light of these warm relations between the Ethiopian government and black Americans, it is not at all surprising that the second attempt by Italy to conquer the east African kingdom in 1935 “stoked deep passions,” to borrow the historian Robert Weisbord’s words, in the black masses.155

What is surprising is the level of grassroots mobilization that took place in response to the conflict. Indeed, even though many blacks believed that Selassie’s government was guaranteed a victory by the messianic prophecy at the heart of Psalm 48:31, which reads, “Princes shall come out of Africa: Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands to God,” black population centers erupted in mass demonstrations in support of the Ethiopian cause.156 In addition, as it became clearer that Ethiopia faced an uphill fight against Mussolini’s modernized Italian army, many blacks began to inquire about how they could volunteer for service in the Ethiopian army. “We earnestly pledge to you our support and assistance in every way possible for the cause of Ethiopia, our mother land, that we will dye [sic] if necessary for her protection to which we are interested,” wrote a group of black men from Philadelphia to the emperor.157 Even more impressive than black men pledging to fight in a far-off land they had never set eyes on is the fact that, in the pinch of the Great Depression, thousands of black Americans demonstrated their solidarity with Ethiopia by contributing their extremely hard-earned dollars to fund-raising drives in support of Ethiopia.158 Many historians of this period rightly see remnants of Garveyism in the willingness of black Americans to make these sacrifices.159

The Ethiopian government was pleased with these demonstrations, but it did not want to encourage black Americans to do anything to violate the laws of the United States. Because President Franklin Roosevelt had ordered Secretary of State Cordell Hull to declare strict neutrality in the conflict just a few hours after learning that Italian planes were bombing Adowa on October 5, 1935, there was no doubt that U.S. citizens’ enlisting in the Ethiopian army would be a violation of federal law.160 In this context, the Ethiopian government began to view its kith and kin in the U.S. black community more as a political ally in the fight to get the Roosevelt administration to reverse its stance than as a source of fighting men.161 Apparently this tactic worked because the leading civil rights organizations in the United States, the NAACP and the Urban League, undertook a lobbying campaign to get the United States to sanction Italy.162

But the fact that the Ethiopian government and the mainstream civil rights organizations of the U.S. black community had all turned away from the idea of black Americans entering the war as combatants did little to discourage rank-and-file blacks from continuing to advocate the idea themselves. The idea was also kept alive by a number of populist organizations.163 Most of these groups were led by entrepreneurial activists associated with the same Harlem tradition of soapbox oratory that had brought Marcus Garvey to prominence in the second decade of the twentieth century. Like Garvey, many of the most popular of these figures were West Indian immigrants; moreover, many of these speakers had initiated their careers as political agitators in the Garvey movement of the 1920s.164 Joseph Harris describes how the UNIA movement served as a training ground for some of the most prominent grassroots organizers who operated in black neighborhoods during the Italian-Ethiopian conflict:

Most of the street speakers . . . were blacks from the Caribbean affiliated with the Garvey movement. The principal speakers were James Thornhill, of the Universal Negro Improvement Association; William Jordan, of the Ethiopian Pacifist Movement; Ira Kemp of the African Patriotic League; Reggie Thomas, of a local branch of the International Labor Defense; and Charles Romney, of the American Civil Rights Association. The [FBI] report called Sufi Abdul Hamid, of the International Black League, a “decidedly interesting” speaker who dressed like an Arab and was a “linguist” commanding “about six languages.” Samuel Daniels was described as founder and spokesman of the Pan-African Reconstruction Association (PARA), the “largest and most active of the new organizations.”165

Hamid and Daniels seem to have been the most successful recruiters on this list of organizers. Through his leadership positions in the African Legion and International Black League organizations, Hamid was able to convince at least several hundred black men to join his volunteer rolls. Even after similar groups had abandoned the notion of enlisting black volunteers to remain in compliance with U.S. neutrality laws, Hamid openly defied the Justice Department warnings and continued his program. Hamid repeatedly claimed to have a legion of more than 3,000 troops training for service in Ethiopia at a military base in upstate New York. The lack of veracity of this statement is easy to assess given that he never produced any evidence of such a camp and Hamid had a well-known penchant for making untruthful statements. On a recruitment trip to Goldsboro, North Carolina, for example, Hamid told his black audience that it was he who dispatched Hubert Julian, a black U.S. pilot who had received a great deal of print in the black press, to take charge of the Imperial Air Force; clearly, because Malaku Bayen initially recruited Julian in 1930 to train pilots in Ethiopia, Hamid’s claim was completely false. The most striking thing about Hamid (beyond his tendency to bend the truth) was that he openly encouraged black Americans to renounce their citizenship to fight for Ethiopia.166

Daniels, too, had a penchant for hyperbole. Throughout the conflict, he claimed that his PARA organization maintained a membership of no fewer than 4,000 black Americans who were ready to lay down their lives to preserve the Makonnen dynasty. Although it has proven impossible to verify these claims, we do know that his Harlem recruitment fairs were attended by thousands of blacks claiming to be eager to “knock out Mussolini” like “Joe Louis had [done to] Carnera.”167

Although Daniels also used fiery rhetoric during recruitment drives, his portrayal of the Italian-Ethiopian War as the perfect opportunity for the black man to enact the tenets of Garveyism was what really set the PARA apart from other organizations operating in Harlem. Indeed, Daniels repeatedly told his black audiences that he hoped that they would stay in Ethiopia after the war to help not only rebuild the country after the expulsion of Italian forces but to launch a new black industrial empire geared toward liberating the entire black world.168 Although such statements were in line with those made by high-ranking Ethiopian officials about the need of their country for skilled black immigrants to help them rebuild after the war, there is no evidence that Daniels had any contact with the imperial government about any land grant that would facilitate this immigration.169

Neither Hamid nor Daniels ever sent any of their “recruits” to fight in Ethiopia. Despite the fact that their fiery rhetoric drew thousands of black Americans to their rallies in Harlem, obviously very few blacks were willing to give up their U.S. citizenship or risk imprisonment by violating the neutrality laws; indeed, even Hamid and Daniels themselves never went so far. Still, like Garvey, their Harlem pageants provided the black masses with forums for expressing their frustrations with the limitations they faced in the United States.

The street-level encounters that occurred between blacks and Italian Americans in the New York area serve as prime examples of this frustration. At first, the recruitment pageants of the Harlem soapbox speakers worked as an escape valve for the psychological pressures felt by the black community, although their ability to serve these needs in the black community was significantly reduced by the Roosevelt administration’s neutrality proclamation. Although it is now clear that that neutrality was based more on the strength of isolationist values that permeated mainstream U.S. culture than on racism,170 given the history of black Americans, it is easy to see why many found the soapbox orators’ claims of U.S. complicity to be completely plausible. Describing the rise of these sentiments in the black community, one historian writes:

New York’s rabid race patriots concluded that U.S. government opposition to the volunteer movement was calculated to serve the interests of Italian imperialism rather than those of American neutrality. . . . Many Harlemites tended to agree with the reported observation of Robert L. Ephraim, president of the Negro World Alliance of Chicago, that Washington’s stand against the volunteer effort and its refusal to act against Mussolini could only be taken as an indication that the white races of the world were lining up against the black.171

Black Americans were frustrated with the entire structure of the global race system. And Italian Americans living and working in and around the black community became the focal point of their rage.

The most important aspect of the deteriorating relations between black and Italian Americans was its effect on economic relationships between the two groups. That many Italian American (and other white-owned) businesses flourished in the black sections of New York prior to the war had always been a sore point for black Americans because they were denied equal access to the white-owned lending institutions that made small business ownership possible. As the war progressed, racial entrepreneurs such as Daniels and Hamid mobilized black New Yorkers around this traditional grievance, encouraging boycotts and vandalism of Italian American businesses.172 In the end, the boycott movement was the most successful aspect of the wave of activism that swept over black communities in response to the Italian-Ethiopian War. The number of white-owned businesses in Harlem declined, and those that remained were forced to adopt much more cordial relationships with their black customers than they had maintained before the war.

But the mass movements in support of Ethiopia had no effect on the outcome of the conflict. On May 2, 1936, just five months after Mussolini’s warplanes first buzzed Adowa, the Ethiopian imperial army was in full retreat and Emperor Selassie was forced to flee to London. Although the mainstream civil rights groups continued to extend moral support to Emperor Selassie as he sought redress from the League of Nations, U.S. black communities, deeply distraught by the outcome of the war, for the most part returned to the challenge of trying to overcome the closed opportunity structures that they faced at home.173 Ten years later, as the nation emerged from World War II, black Americans would again find that the status of Africa (and U.S. policies on the continent) was intertwined with their core ideas about navigating these structures on the home front.

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In this chapter, I present a strong challenge to the notion that the tensions between Garvey and the black elite boiled down to a clash of personalities. Instead, opposition to the Garvey movement among the black elite was a function of their representational imperative derived from a sense of linked fate with downtrodden blacks; in short, the black elite judged Garvey’s program to be a threat to the interests of the black masses.

The black elite saw Garvey’s improprieties and managerial incompetence as a threat to downtrodden blacks. In other words, the black elite feared that Garvey was, as A. Philip Randolph charged, “a crook and a liar” more than a black leader. In addition, Garvey’s emphasis on repatriation to Africa revived the specter of the late-nineteenth-century emigration movements. The black elite also feared that Garvey’s support for segregation (like Booker T. Washington’s politics of accommodation) provided legitimacy to the white supremacist cause in the South.

Even though the UNIA collapsed under Garvey, the best of his ideals continued to reverberate throughout black communities into the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, it is clear that Garvey’s central message—that the diaspora needed to mobilize to gain a stake in Africa—was partly responsible for the outpouring of affection that blacks demonstrated toward Ethiopia during the second Italian-Ethiopian conflict.

Moreover, as I discuss in the next chapter, even mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP became divided about whether they should try to mobilize rank-and-file blacks against European colonialism as Garvey had attempted to do or should remain committed to their more legalistic strategies. Ironically, W. E. B. Du Bois, Garvey’s principal opponent in the black intelligentsia, would lead the call for change in the 1940s and 1950s.