Chapter 10: GARVEY'S RIGHTWARD LURCH
After his break with Harrison, Garvey, nudged by official persecution, swerved sharply rightward. In 1921, he stridently condemned social equality and intermarriage, increasingly blamed Afro-Americans rather than white racism for the problems faced by blacks, and proposed a rapprochement between the UNIA and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Although all of these beliefs had antecedents in Garvey's earlier writings, together they comprised a new and highly toxic mix that united many prominent Afro-Americans against him.
In early 1921 Garvey embarked upon an organization-building and fund-raising trip through the West Indies and Panama. White colonial governments harassed him, and for three months the United States denied him permission to return. With dissension and chaos engulfing the UNIA headquarters in New York and the 1921 Convention rapidly approaching, Garvey pleaded and negotiated for re-entry. He apparently secured it by bribing a U.S. official (using a highly-placed black Republican official as his conduit) and forswearing militance. After Garvey's return, secret police agent Herbert S. Boulin, a West Indian businessman known as P-138, reported that "for some unknown reason all the officials of the Black Star Line and Garvey's other organizations seem to have undergone a change of mind. They are very patriotic in their speeches and have eliminated all the anti-white talks and in its place [are] preaching loyalty to the U.S.A." Boulin said that Garvey praised Secretary of State Hughes for allowing his return, blamed prominent Afro-Americans for his troubles, and pledged undying loyalty to the United States. Garvey "is preaching nothing but loyalty to the flag. His recent experience must have taught him to take another, saner course. However, I shall see how long he will keep it up...."[1]
Garvey was a master of dissimulation and Aesopian language. On many previous occasions he had promised fealty to the United States and a more moderate tone. Notably, he had cashiered W.A. Domingo as editor of the Negro World in August 1919 at least partly in response to government pressure. Garvey himself later claimed that the conciliatory preamble to the 1920 Declaration of Rights was a ruse "written particularly for the purpose of winning the sympathy of alien races where the other objects of the association were being threatened with hostility"; he urged that beleaguered members quote this preamble when the UNIA's enemies "assail it before a Court of Law or before Governmental Authorities."[2] In the months before the 1921 convention Garvey had increasingly noted that he was under intense surveillance, and had warned his followers that the threat of repression altered the tone of his public utterances.
During his foreign tour, Garvey said that he "told [the whites] a part of my mind" and warned his auditors that he spoke differently depending on circumstances. Shortly after making these statements Garvey, under pressure from British colonial authorities, proclaimed his loyalty, claimed that his enemies misquoted him, and disavowed radical sentiments expressed in the Negro World--which, he assured his interrogators, he had not seen for months on end during his tour. Immediately after his return, however, he assured a Liberty Hall audience that he "waited longingly for every copy of the Negro World" and (amidst profusions of loyalty to white governments) assured his followers that "there are certain things that I cannot say and you may better understand them not said." He also complained (or perhaps boasted) that "I cannot move an inch without everyone knowing that I am in town." According to a United States secret police agent, Garvey "has evidently been impressed by many cross examinations during his trip" and had learned "that his organization is looked upon as an unpatriotic movement which is based upon a programme of forcible overthrow of the white race. This has resulted in his having issued, On July 18th, the first pro-American speech he has ever been known to utter."[3]
Garvey's increasingly frequent use of Aesopian language continued after the 1921 convention. In September 1921 Garvey admitted that "sometimes you have to camouflage.... Tell them you don't want a thing when you want it, so that [whites and their governments] will think that you are not looking for it." According to a secret police report, Garvey told Du Bois "that he was somewhat afraid to give voice to his radical beliefs for fear that the Federal Authorities would call him to task about it."[4]
For a constellation of reasons (of which government surveillance and repression were only two) the UNIA's 1921 convention sharply contrasted to the upbeat, militant 1920 gathering that had passed the Declaration of Rights. Its main business consisted of Garvey's purge of the leadership and the further concentration of power in his hands. During and after the Convention, Garvey significantly shifted the tone and emphasis of his pronouncements. He strongly denounced social equality and miscegenation, harshly blamed African Americans for their own predicament, and sought rapprochement with the KKK and other white racists.
We may only speculate about the reasons for these changes. First, the BSL and other financial enterprises, the mainstays of the UNIA, verged on collapse. With a major UNIA raison d'être in shambles, Garvey required scapegoats (which he found in alleged traitors and incompetents within the BSL and UNIA) and new issues that would distract his followers. Second, facing intensified governmental surveillance and harassment, Garvey repeatedly proclaimed that camouflage, dissimulation, and Aesopian language would fool and mollify the authorities. (These tactics, predictably, did not succeed, partly because they were publicly proclaimed, and Garvey was indicted on charges of mail fraud in January 1922.) Third, a virulent new outburst of separatist white supremacy--symbolized by President Warren Harding's Birmingham address, the Mississippi's senate's advocacy of "repatriation" of Afro-Americans to Africa, and the explosion in KKK membership--further convinced Garvey of white America's intractable racism, and indicated the viability of an alliance with whites based on the mutually acceptable basis of separate racial development. Garvey may have presented himself as the author of a new racial compromise, as Robert Hill has suggested.[5] Fourth, the open breach with Cyril Briggs and the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) at the 1921 convention severed Garvey's last ties with radical or even mainstream African-American organizations. Radicals who had previously worked within the UNIA, educating its massive following in socialist philosophy, now confronted the final failure of that doomed enterprise, and felt unconstrained in their criticisms by any hopes of reconciliation. Garvey, fully aware of the incessant and semi-secret maneuvering against him (which included smear, slander, and denunciation to governmental authorities as well as legitimate criticism) also abandoned any hopes of peace with his rivals. He could, therefore, freely and unabashedly proclaim some of the more extreme and unpalatable aspects of his long-held views. This new departure precipitated an all-out war with almost all other Afro-American leaders, culminating in a grand alliance of radicals and moderates in a "Garvey Must Go" campaign aiming at the imprisonment and deportation of Garvey and the destruction of the UNIA. Finally, because governmental terrorism and violence had virtually destroyed the white Left, alliance with it was less feasible than ever.[6]
When Garvey returned to the United States, he faced renewed opposition not only from Briggs and the ABB, but from Harrison's newly-revived Liberty League. According to secret police reports, Harrison believed the Tulsa pogrom, widespread unemployment among black workers, and Garvey's extended absence (Harrison apparently felt that the United States would not allow Garvey's return) would revivify his moribund organization. Although previous secret police reports had emphasized Harrison's effectiveness with educated, respectable audiences, in 1921 alarmed agents reported that his militant calls for self-defense against white terrorism fascinated even Garveyites irked by his attacks on their leader. Secret agent P-138 said that Harrison
asked for brave men to come forward and form the Liberty League as he did not want cowards who would be found hiding under a bed if they were in East St. Louis or Tulsa when a race riot started; men who are not afraid to die; men with red blood; strong young men as he needs their services and the race needs them also.
However, the spy reported that "only about four came forward and gave their names out of a crowd of about six hundred."[7]
Another secret police agent reported that Harrison predicted more race riots and advised preparation for self-defense. Harrison ominously said that "the State Government has removed some of its restrictions upon owning firearms"; that "one form of life insurance for your wives and children might be the possession of some of these handy implements"; and that "it is absolutely necessary for your protection to join the Liberty League which is carrying on a wide campaign for the interest of our race."[8] Secret police agents complained that Harrison was a master of Aesopian language who counseled violence "in such subtle words and phrases that his audiences understand him" while he stayed within the letter of the law. The secret police also alleged that prominent white Communist Rose Pastor Stokes had offered the Liberty League "Russian gold" if Harrison would use his organization for Communist agitation among blacks. Harrison, ratifying his earlier refusal of white aid for his revived Voice, refused Stokes's offer, although some agents (and historians) alleged that Briggs accepted it.[9]
Harrison's enterprises floundered, however, even as Garvey's new departure generated intense controversy. Garvey's right turn in August 1921 reemphasized old beliefs. Garvey had long extolled racial purity, a stance implicit in his "race first" doctrine. In a remarkable 1916 letter to Robert Moton, Washington's successor at Tuskegee, Garvey had bitterly claimed that the lack of race consciousness in Jamaica generated white hegemony, miscegenation, and the rule of a mulatto elite:
The black man lives directly under the white man's institutions and the influence over him is so great that he is only a play-thing in the molder's hand.... Whenever the blackman gets money and education he thinks himself white and coloured, and he wants a white and coloured wife, and he will spend his all to get this; much to his eternal misery.... Our black girls are taught by observation to despise blackmen as they are naturally poor/and of social discount/; hence you will find a black girl willing to give herself up to any immoral suggestion of white or coloured men, and positively refusing the good attentions of a /blackman at/ the outset.... Our morality is destroyed in this way. Ninety per cent of the coloured people are off-springs of immorality, yet they rule next to the whites over the blacks....[10]
Garvey, therefore, claimed that Jamaican blacks of both sexes avoided marrying mates of their own race if possible; by this reading, mixed-race offspring resulted from black choices rather than white rape. Harrison (embodying the very colorism he criticized) similarly denounced the mulatto elite in the pages of the Negro World and elsewhere. The first UNIA Constitution (July 1918) stated that the UNIA Potentate "shall marry only a lady of Negro blood and parentage."[11] In response, critics repeatedly disparaged the UNIA as a primarily West Indian organization. (Most West Indians were much darker than the average African American).
Garvey first publicly extolled racial purity at the UNIA's August 1921 Convention. Garvey had invited Du Bois to the convention, but Du Bois had carefully excluded Garvey from his competing Pan-African Congress (PAC), held in Europe. Denouncing the PAC as a front for white imperialists, Garvey said that Du Bois and his black allies were "making an issue of social equality with the white race for their own selfish purposes.... [the PAC] is more for the purpose of aggravating the question of social equality to their own personal satisfaction, than for the benefit of the Negro race." Garvey alleged that Du Bois wanted prestige-enhancing companionship with whites rather than Negro freedom and advancement. Garvey repudiated the PAC "because we sincerely feel that the white race, like the black and yellow races, should maintain the purity of self and that the congress is nothing more than an effort to encourage race suicide by the admixture of two opposite races.... The Negro feels socially satisfied with himself, and means to maintain the dignity and purity of his race, and therefore denounces any attempt on the part of dissatisfied individuals who by accident are members of the said Negro race in their attempts to foster a campaign of miscegenation to the destruction of the race's purity."[12]
The following month Garvey continued his attack, charging that "Du Bois wants a black and white admixture which will ultimately produce new types which are neither black nor white," and had duped well-meaning people of both races into adopting his idea. Negroes, however, should "develop on their own lines. We are too mixed up already; we have been mixing up for the last 350 years. Look at this audience in here now and you have about 200 different types here. You have chocolate colors; you have Buster Brown; you have tantalizing browns and mesmerizing browns--all the colors of the rainbow can be found in Liberty Hall tonight, because we have been so badly mixed for 350 years. It is a time we call a halt...."[13] Garvey charged that "Du Bois seeks to produce a new race type by amalgamation of black and white," an enterprise "destructive to the designs of nature."[14]
James Weldon Johnson, prominent author and high-ranking NAACP official, complained that such statements pandered to white racists such as Southern politicians Vardaman and Blease, placed Negroes outside the pale of humanity, and implied that mixed-bloods such as Booker Washington and Frederick Douglass were unnatural monstrosities and "crimes against nature." (Indeed, Garvey's strictures implicitly denigrated the very mixed-hued audiences he addressed.) Social equality, Johnson said, meant nothing more than the right of free association, and was essential for black progress.[15] Garvey vigorously assailed Johnson's views, declaring "I am concerned with the destiny of the Negro" rather than placating white racists. If disgusting whites said things interpretable as resembling Garvey's views, "Johnson is welcome to the comparison." Garvey, for his part, championed social justice, not social equality:
If Negroes will stop making all this noise about social equality, giving white people the idea that we are hankering after their company, and get down to business and build up a strong race, industrially, commercially, educationally and politically, everything social will come afterwards....It is human to be prejudiced, it has been so since creation and will be so until Gabriel blows his horn.[16]
No slaveowning race, Garvey said, would admit their ex-slaves to equality until the freedmen proved themselves by rising "up to the standard of the race of slave masters." Garvey did not denigrate Washington or Douglass but said that "these men were brought into the world under unfortunate circumstances; they were brought into the world through bastardy, the rape of one race upon the other, and the abuse and advantage of the mothers of one race by the men of the other." Interracial sex often stemmed from white rape of black women--a practice that blacks must prevent.[17] Johnson, Garvey charged,
believes that the only society for the Negro is that of the white man's. We believe to the contrary. We think that the black man's society is as good as that of any other race, and we are determined to build up a Negro society even superior to that of the whites.... We are demonstrating to the white race that we do not give a row of pins about social equality with them, because we believe in our own good company.... I am not going to waste time with Mr. Johnson and his associates waiting for white people to recognize me. I am going to put in all my time with my race and help to bring them to a standard where they will demand things and get them, and not beg and be refused.[18]
Garvey, however, also implied that social equality would be achieved when blacks built up "a race independently" and then demanded "justice through the strength of the race."[19]
Simultaneously, however, Garvey claimed that social equality was impossible as well as baneful. In a somewhat contradictory pronouncement--which asserted that white racism was eternal but also implied that black self-advancement and the destruction of the profits of racism might overcome it--Garvey declared that the American white would not "assimilate the Negro, because in so doing he feels that he will be committing racial suicide." Race mixing did occur after dark, but upon a basis of inequality rather than justice, and whites disdained the offspring of their own lust. "To the white man the question of racial differences is eternal; nothing will change his attitude in regard to it. So long as the Negro occupies an inferior position among the races and nations of the world, just so long will they be prejudiced against him, for it will be profitable for them to keep up their system of superiority...."[20]
Garvey, therefore, praised President Harding's infamous Birmingham address, execrated in the radical and mainstream black press. While defending civil rights, Harding had alleged "a fundamental, eternal and inescapable difference" between the races, emphatically repudiated social equality, and advocated separate development. Harding said that "the black man should be encouraged to be the best possible black man, and not the best possible imitation of the white man." Finding such sentiments fully compatible with UNIA doctrine, Garvey claimed credit for inspiring Harding's speech and saw the possibility of an alliance with some whites. He urged that UNIA members "follow the leadership of President Harding."[21]
In a similar spirit, Garvey praised the McCallum bill, passed by the Mississippi state senate. This bill urged that the United States (using war debts owed by the Allies) acquire land in Africa on which American blacks could establish their own government. Garvey again warned that intensified economic and political competition between the races, and increasing black self-assertion, would inevitably generate a race war resulting in the extermination of the blacks. The history of the world, and of the United States in particular, he said, conclusively demonstrated that no race of slaveowners would acquiesce in the equality of their former slaves. A race of slaves could prosper only if they removed themselves "to other habitats (probably their own native habitats), and there apart from those who once enslaved them, developed a power of their own." Garvey, therefore, committed the UNIA unreservedly to the McCallum bill. "What a Southern Senator would not concede to the Negro in the United States he is willing to give the Negroes in Africa.... The sooner we can get this national idea into the minds of white folks and black folks in America, the better it will be for us as a people.... [Many whites] wish us well; but they are not going to wish us well if we remain here and compete with them."[22]
McCallum's proposal, Garvey asserted, demonstrated that "the question of African nationality is not a far fetched one, but is as reasonable and feasible as was the idea of American nationality." McCallum's methods differed slightly from those of the UNIA, but "the same object will be achieved."[23] As in his response to Harding's Birmingham address, Garvey saw a possible social base among the vast hordes of racist whites--a group that far outnumbered the handful of egalitarians upon whom Du Bois relied, or the equally tiny group of class-conscious workers courted by Randolph. Ironically, however, Garvey's scheme foundered upon the inexorable class realities that he adamantly denied. That black northward migration during World War I evoked such virulent Southern white hostility should have warned him that in the South as well as the North, class trumped race. Southern Bourbons would not acquiesce in the loss of the cheap black labor upon which they battened, and with which they both bribed and bludgeoned white southern labor into submission.
Garvey's rapprochement with racist whites reached its apogee in what his opponents termed an "alliance" with the Ku Klux Klan. In late June 1922 in Atlanta, Garvey had a frank and friendly two-hour chat with Edward Clarke, a major Klan leader. Garvey reported that Clarke "denied any hostility toward the Negro as a race. He expresses sympathy for [the] aims and objects of [the] UNIA. He believes America to be a white man's country, and also states that the Negro should have a country of his own in Africa." Garvey invited Clarke to speak at the upcoming UNIA Convention; he also repeatedly (and falsely) promised that the Negro World would print the entire text of the interview.[24]
Garvey's parley with the Klan ignited a firestorm of protest among African Americans of all opinions. He responded that the NAACP leaders were idle dreamers, "as far from understanding the Negro problem of America and the western world as [is] a monkey in understanding how far Mars is from Jupiter." Whites had always hated blacks and always would. Seeming acts of white benevolence stemmed from purely selfish motives. "Emancipation was not a voluntary act on the part of the white man in America or the West Indies. In America it was a war measure; in the West Indies it was an economic necessity." Blacks should finally reject the tutelage and sympathy of the race that had enslaved them. "There is no disputing the fact that America is a white man's country. It has become so by conquest, in that the white man conquered the Indian, exterminated him and took possession of his property." Africans required a country of their own. "Africa awaits us.... The fight [of] the American and Western Negro is not with the Ku Klux Klan of America, or with the other white people of America; the fight with the Negro is with himself to bring about a united sentiment, a united race, with a common object in view."[25]
Garvey stated that the Klan made absolutely no apology for its program of white supremacy and asserted that "the Ku Klux Klan represents the spirit, the feeling, the attitude of every white man in the United States of America." The question was "what should be the Negro's attitude toward such an organization?" Operating from a position of weakness, blacks must not remain ignorant or inflame hostility, but should inform themselves. "Aggravating the Ku Klux Klan or aggravating any organization in the world organized for the specific purpose of white supremacy is not going to help the race in America, placed at a disadvantage as it is.... The Ku Klux Klan is really the invisible government of the United States of America." It had grown vastly since the exposé in the New York World, which "was solely a skillful method of advertising the activities of the Klan at very little cost to the Klan."[26] The KKK, Garvey alleged with only slight exaggeration, was stronger in the North than in the South.
Garvey admitted that the KKK favored whites, but claimed that it did not hate blacks. "You cannot blame any group of men, whether they are Chinese, Japanese, Anglo-Saxons or Frenchmen, for standing up for their interests or for organizing in their interest... The attitude of the Ku Klux Klan is that America is to be a white man's country at all hazards, at all costs. The attitude of the Universal Negro Improvement Association is in a way similar to [that of] the Ku Klux Klan. Whilst the Ku Klux Klan desires to make America absolutely a white man's country, the Universal Negro Improvement Association wants to make Africa absolutely a black man's country. Whether you wish it or not, that is not the point, because your wish does not amount to anything." In the United States, whites overwhelmingly outnumbered blacks. "The white people of this country are not going to allow Negroes--ambitious and educated Negroes--to have their wish, and the wish of the educated, ambitious Negro of America is that the Negro has as much right to be President of the United States as President Harding has," and equal right to any other office or position. "You have the wish, but the odds are against you."[27]
My suit is mine, but if a bully comes along and tears it off me it is mine but it is his now. All of us know that America is as much the Negro's as the white man's, but the white man says, "I am going to make this a white man's country." The only thing for you to do is get hold of him, beat him and take it away. But can you do that? You cannot do that.... We are not going to have any fight as an organization with the Ku Klux Klan because it is not going to help.... There are hundreds of other organizations that feel as the Ku Klux Klan feels. There are millions of individuals in America who feel as the Ku Klux Klan feels, but those individuals, those organizations are not honest enough to make the confession that the Ku Klux Klan makes.... No law can put down the prejudice of a race. You may legislate between now and eternity. If I hate you, no law in the world can make me love you. If I am prejudiced against you for reasons, no law, no constitution in the world can make me change my attitude toward you.[28]
Garvey's qualifier "for reasons" underscored his increasing belief that blacks were in large measure responsible for their own plight.
In Garvey's view, the practical question posed by the Klan concerned the proper Afro-American response. Northern Negroes talked big, Garvey charged, but would not venture South and say what they so easily mouthed from the security of Harlem. "The largest number of Negroes in the United States of America live below the Mason and Dixon line where the Ku Klux Klan rules" at every level from sheriff to governor. The Negro in the South--"the poor unfortunate fellow who lives next door to the Klan and comes into contact with him every day"--would pay the price for the vapid mouthings of Northern militants. When Clarke told Garvey that no African-American could become President or Governor "so long as there is one white man living in the United States of America," Garvey said that Clarke spoke for the white race.
I was speaking to a man who was brutally a white man, and I was speaking to him as a man who was brutally a Negro. He had his interests to protect and I had mine to protect. His one idea, his one greatest hope is to see the great white race the masters of civilization. My one dream, my one hope is to see the great black race the masters of civilization. Now I am not going to waste time fighting with the Ku Klux Klan; I am going to use my time fighting for the ideals which we have.[29]
According to Garvey, Clarke alleged that the KKK did not oppose advancement of Negroes or countenance violence against them. Instead, it wanted a black organization with which it could negotiate, and advised that Negroes form a racial organization resembling the Klan. The Acting Imperial Wizard opposed white men raping Negro women and advised that the UNIA protect Negro women as the KKK protected white women. Garvey extolled a Klan judge who praised Negro men for flogging white men who slept with Negro women in a Negro neighborhood. "So you realize that the UNIA is carrying out just what the Ku Klux Klan is carrying out--the purity of the white race down South--and we are going to carry out the purity of the black race not only down South, but all through the world." Garvey warned blacks that "You must realize your position in this country. It is hopeless. You cannot, therefore, adopt an attitude of offense and aggression, because in the retaliation a large number of us are going to suffer." Diplomacy, not bluster, was the best strategy. Rather than telling a lion you mean to kill it, blacks must "study the strategy that will... get around the lion and take away its life."[30]
Garvey's pro-KKK stance, however inflammatory, is explicable in light of his long-held positions. He had previously praised white racists for engendering black racial consciousness. In 1920 he had said that some Africa Americans were so thick-headed that "it takes the Ku Klux Klan to rouse them and this UNIA [is] a sort of Ku Klux Klan" for blacks. When the New York World exposed the KKK in a widely syndicated series of articles in September 1921, Garvey initially denounced the Klan.[31] The vast increase in Klan membership following the exposé, however, only reinforced his belief in ubiquitous and invincible white racism. Garvey considered the UNIA an actual government in exile, and, like most heads of state, willingly allied with the most virulent of enemies if such cooperation would benefit his people. Churchill, defending his alliance with Stalin, frankly told Parliament that he would praise the devil himself if Satan, for whatever selfish purpose, opposed Hitler; while some leaders of the future state of Israel contemplated an alliance of convenience with Hitler on the grounds that both Zionists and Nazis hated the British Empire and wanted the Jews out of Europe. Garvey frequently proclaimed his willingness to ally himself with all people who would help liberate Africa, regardless of their particular motives.
Garvey's third major shift in emphasis, after his strident advocacy of racial purity and segregation, and his alliance with racist whites, consisted of his increasingly strident criticism of West Indian and American blacks as the causes of their own problems. This stance partly stemmed from Garvey's philosophical idealism--his insistence that blacks could surmount the structural obstacles posed by white racism and attain their goals on their own by a sheer act of the will. If Garvey's program of black self-help was realistic, it followed that blacks could liberate themselves by individual and collective effort in the here-and-now; if they had not done so, whose fault was it? In a proclamation that encapsulates both the strengths and weaknesses of his philosophy, Garvey complained that some blacks, because of the hostile white environment in which they existed, lost hope and believed that "we are unable to accomplish anything." Garvey, however, exhorted his followers that the human will is
the thing that rules men; the will is the thing that rules the world. The human will is that force, is that power that the white races have used to make themselves the giants that they are in this world today; and because we fail to use that human will, that accounts for our being pygmies as a race. The time has come when the New Negro has made up in his mind that he will use and exercise his will to the limit, and we say that from our human will whatsoever the other races of the world have achieved, we are going to achieve it also.... We want you to go out and do. We want you to go out and achieve, even as other men of other races have achieved. There is a great world yet to be conquered; and if you men are to live as men, you have to play your part as men.[32]
Garvey compared a successful white who "has added fresh laurels" to his country and race with a black, born at the same time with the same opportunities as the white, who "is found on the street corners blacking some one's shoes, brush[ing] some one's coat; a porter for some one." Ignoring the huge apparatus of white supremacy and terrorism that crippled, oppressed, exploited, and poisoned black life at every turn, Garvey ascribed the different conditions of the races to the fact that "the one man was born to the full consciousness--of himself, of his possibilities. The other fellow had no consciousness of self and naturally he remained always at the foot of the great human ladder."[33]
Garvey's strictures resembled those of many white radicals who bluntly condemned their audiences. Emma Goldman, who held similar idealistic beliefs, savaged the working class, women, and many other oppressed groups as responsible for their own afflictions. Even IWW and SP soap-boxers, in the manner of stern preachers upbraiding the sins of their congregations, hectored their audiences as contemptible slaves who required only intelligence, information, and will for self-emancipation. Garvey, however, had a further motivation: he recognized that many prominent Afro-Americans were secretly denouncing him to the Post Office, the Bureau of Investigation, and other arms of the white supremacist government. Partly for strategic reasons--avoiding a direct collision with powerful white authorities--but partly out of real experience, Garvey claimed that black leaders, rather than whites, instigated the government's surveillance and harassment of him and of the UNIA. "We love all humanity," he said; "we hate only traitors, and we hate black traitors to the black race more than all others."[34]
In the manner of a prophet scorned, Garvey had long criticized blacks for their lack of achievements. Of all groups, he complained, only blacks had gained nothing from the Great War. Shortly before his trip abroad in 1921, Garvey thundered that "Again I must say, as I have often said, that Negroes are the most lazy, the most careless and indifferent people in the world, and it simply sickens one sometimes to feel that he is identified with a people who cannot see while the whole world is seeing and realizing its own interests." In his native Jamaica, he excoriated his audiences: "You lazy, good-for-nothing Jamaicans, wake up!... Jamaica is the most backward country in the Western hemisphere."[35]
But after the 1921 Convention, Garvey's strictures multiplied and became even more vehement. He even implicitly repudiated his belief in eternal and unwavering white racism and claimed that black achievement would modify white attitudes. In an ambivalent and hedging statement that wavered between a description of what whites believed and his own validation of those beliefs, Garvey proclaimed that
The white man believes that he has built up this civilization exclusively by himself. His railroads, his steamships, his subways, his elevated railways--all brought into existence through his own energy, and he feels that the black man is impertinent and audacious to want to share equally the comforts of those things with him that he has sacrificed for, and in some cases, died for and which the Negro has never made any effort to help him bring about. This is the white man's attitude, and it is one you cannot blame him for, because I would do it myself.[36]
Whites were prejudiced "not so much because you are black, but because we have achieved nothing in comparison with what they have achieved. The white man views the universe... and he sees no civilization standing to the credit of the black man that he could reciprocate with.... If he goes to Africa he sees the naked African and he has to walk his way through the jungles; if he goes to the West Indies he sees the bare-footed Negro; if he goes to the South he sees the happy-go-lucky coon, and he comes to the conclusion, after all, 'why should I accept social equality with a race like this that has done nothing?'"[37]
Whites, therefore, would harp upon black inferiority "until we get out and build, build our cities, build our nations, build our empires, build our navies, build our armies to protect them, and when he knows you have these things and you can give him a hard battle and whip him he will come to terms, as he has come to terms with Japan. The prejudice of the world is not so much against skin--it is not so much against color--it is against what you have not done."[38]
In an even more incendiary restatement of this idea, Garvey recounted the heroic sacrifices and sufferings of the white pioneers who had carved a civilization from the desolate wilderness and asked:
Can I lay claim to that ancestry? Unfortunately, no! The men and women who laid the foundation of American nationality and American progress and American civilization were not my forbears. They were the ancestors of another race; yes, the white race. Do you wonder, therefore, that the white man boasts that America is a white man's country? Do you wonder that he takes pride in the development of his own nation? Do you wonder that he Jim-crows, segregates, murders, burns and lynches the black man when the black man shows a disposition to rival him in industry, in politics, in social life in the country that he, the white man, has suffered for, has died for, has built for his own convenience?[39]
Garvey admitted that his ancestors "worked as slaves to build up alongside of the white man the great American nation," but claimed that "the white man owes no obligation to the Negro" because the Negro had done only manual labor and had been paid for it. Once again conflating white beliefs with his own, Garvey said that although some blacks denied that the slaves had been paid, "the white man believes that the slave has been well paid for whatsoever service he gave" because the white man has given the Negro civilization and Christianity; "the white man claims he rescued the Negro from the jungles of Africa, otherwise he would still have been a barbarian, a savage, a cannibal." Whites also claimed that they had granted blacks equal opportunity in the decades since slavery.[40]
These outrageous racist canards went unchallenged by Garvey, who affirmed that the white man "is not going to yield up to the black man that which he has worked for, suffered for, and died for.... This great white man is going to make a death struggle to maintain the civilization that he has founded for his own convenience.... The white man is not thinking about the Negro or any other race but himself, and no sensible human being will blame him in an age so material, in an age so human as this twentieth century."[41] Instead he urged that blacks build their own civilization:
If the Negro wants the comforts of modern civilization, if he wants the happiness of city life, if he wants the privilege of government control, then he must create these things for himself. If he wants to ride in Pullman cars from New Orleans to New York, from New York to San Francisco; if he wants to occupy the orchestra seat in the Metropolitan Opera House; if he wants to sit in the front seats of the trolley car... he will not expect these things in the United States of America. He shall go out and create for himself the United States of Africa.... There is no use aggravating this great white man, because he is not going to [accord equality to blacks], simply because it is unreasonable--it is not human.[42]
Blacks need not blindly imitate Western civilization; rather, emulating the Japanese, they should graft Western technologies unto the institutions and values of native African genius.[43]
Garvey's inflammatory statements predictably enraged Afro-Americans outside the UNIA. When black Socialists bitterly retorted that Afro-Americans had built America, Garvey replied that blacks had contributed "absolutely nothing. Nothing more than our labor. That is all. Labor under the leadership, under the guidance of someone else.... And yet we wonder why we are not appreciated." Revealing his own capitalist assumptions, Garvey rebuked George Harris, a New York alderman and editor of the New York News, who touted the presence of Negroes on the expeditions of Columbus, Balboa, and Peary. In remarks equally applicable to Randolph's similar claims for Negro accomplishment, Garvey laughed at Harris's assertion that Afro-Americans participated in the California gold rush. "Where," Garvey sarcastically asked, "is the Negro's portion of the gold that was discovered?" Harris "fails to prove to us where the Negro established his claim co-equal with the other fellow" whom he accompanied. Harris "cannot see the difference between a man being with another man as a servant--as a lackey--as auxiliary of war or whatnot, and the individual by whose initiative the conquest is made or the expedition carried out." The Negroes who accompanied Columbus, Balboa, and Peary were paid "as an employee or laborer" but had no hand in planning, financing, or achieving the goals of the expeditions. "I am not saying these things of my own opinion; I am saying these things because they are facts, and the white man looks at facts and nothing else." The Negro at Bunker Hill did not cause the revolutionary war, nor was he a factor in it. Harris and other celebrants of black achievement flattered their readers. However, "flattery has taken us nowhere; flattery has not abolished the Jim Crow car; flattery has not abolished segregation; flattery has not abolished lynching. Writing these beautiful things about the past as far as we are concerned is not going to give us the consideration that we want now."[44]
These inaccurate and cantankerous statements contradicted many ideas which Garvey had long propounded. As late as 1922 he reiterated his frequent contention that blacks had substantially undergirded white prosperity, but had been violently deprived of their product. He correctly asserted that "The great English race, the great American race, we made them great... In the production of [their products] the Negro plays the chief part, but [blacks] do not control the output."[45] Garvey denounced the white injustices that stymied black achievement and recognized that successful blacks evoked savage retaliation, especially in the South. He recognized that African-American diligence, thrift, and work, more than laziness and carelessness, offended, threatened, and enraged whites. But whatever the contradictions in the details, Garvey's conclusions remained the same: blacks must forge new personalities, create a new race and people, and found a nation and civilization of their own in Africa.
Notes:
[1] P-138 Report, July 30, 1921, MGP III, 558. For information about Boulin's activities, see Kornweibel, Seeing Red. Cyril Briggs early noticed the correlation between Garvey's difficulties re-entering the United States and his swerve rightward. See his "The Decline of the Garvey Movement," The Communist, June 1931, in John Henrik Clarke, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York, 1974), 174-179.
[2] MGP III, 713-714. Garvey made this statement in 1937.
[3] MG Speech in Panama, May 3, 1921, MGP III, 385; MG Speech, reported in The Gleander, March 24, 1921, MGP III, 275; MG Speech, July 20, 1921, MGP III, 543, 541; MG Speech, July 14, 1921, MGP III, 529; MG Editorial Letter, NW, September 8, 1921, MGP IV, 47-48; J.C. Tucker, Special Report, Negro Activities, August 27, 1921, FSAA Reel 7.
[4] MG Speech, September 11, 1921, MGP IV, 54; Bureau Report by Agent H. J. Lenon, September 17, 1921, MGP IV, 60-61.
[5] Robert Hill, MGP I, lxxxii-lxxxiii and IV, xxxiii.
[6] William Z. Foster later noticed the correlation between Garvey's right turn and the decline of radicalism in American and abroad. "Garvey was gradually shedding his earlier radicalism," Foster said, "and taking on a conservatism which amounted to a surrender of the Negro people into the hands of their worst enemies on a national and international scale." This shift "was directly related to the subsiding of the great postwar struggle of the workers in this country and also to the temporary lull in the profound revolutionary movement which shook Europe in the early years after World War I." Foster, "The Garvey Movement: A Marxist View," Political Affairs, February 1954, in Clarke, ed. Garvey, 236-241.
[7] Report of P-138, June 8, 1921, in FSAA Reel 7.
[8] Report of Tucker, June 11, 1921, in FSAA Reel 7.
[9] Report of P-138, June 8, 1921; Tucker report, June 11, 1921, FSAA Reel 7; P-138, July 11, 1921, FSAA Reel 7; P-138, July 13, 1921, FSAA Reel 7; P-138, July 15, 1922, FSAA Reel 7; P-138, August 22, 1921, FSAA Reel 7; P-138, August 30, 1921, in FSAA Reel 7.
[10] MG to Robert Moton, February 29, 1916, MGP, I, 180-181. In the MGP, slash marks contain additional material or corrections made by the author.
[11] "Constitution and Book of Laws," Article V, "Potentate and Supreme Commander," July 1918, MGP I, 259. This rule, of course, assumed that the Potentate would be male. Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996), 242, quotes Harrison as saying that full-blooded blacks such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Phyllis Wheatley, and Paul Dunbar afforded blacks "a hope nobler than the hope of amalgamation, whereby in order to become men, we must lose our racial identity."
[12] MG speech, August 1, 1921, MGP III, 583-584. Garvey concluded with the remarkably conservative statement that the Negro desired only "a fair chance to work for his livelihood, and if he is given that chance the entire race problem will be solved."
[13] MG speech, September 7, 1920, MGP, IV, 41.
[14] MG, quoted in the New York Evening Post, September 7, 1921, MGP IV, 46.
[15] JWJ, New York Age, September 24, 1921, MGP IV, 79-81.
[16] MG Editorial, October 1, 1921, MGP IV, 94-95.
[17] ibid.
[18] ibid.
[19] ibid.
[20] MG Editorial, April 5, 1922, MGP IV, 593.
[21] MG speech October 30, 1921, MGP IV, 141-151. The last quote ends in question mark but Garvey's answer is clearly positive.
[22] MG speech, February 13, 1922, MGP IV, 496-504.
[23] MG Editorial, April 18, 1922, MGP IV, 610-611.
[24] Cable by Marcus Garvey to Chairman, Liberty Hall, June 25, 1922, MGP IV, 679-680.
[25] MG Editorial, June 27, 1922, MGP IV, 682-686.
[26] MG speech, July 9, 1922, MGP IV, 707-715.
[27] ibid.
[28] ibid.
[29] ibid.
[30] ibid.
[31] MG speech, November 7, 1920, MGP III, 81; MG, quoted in New York World, September 7, 1921, MGP IV, 1088.
[32] MG speech, March 13, 1920, MGP II, 252-253.
[33] ibid.
[34] MG Editorial, January 17, 1922, MGP IV, 380.
[35] MG Editorial, February 13, 1921, MGP III, 195; MG in the Gleaner, March 26, 1921, MGP III, 281.
[36] MG speech, September 7, 1921, MGP IV, 38-40.
[37] ibid.
[38] ibid.
[39] MG Editorial, June 5, 1922, MGP IV, 660-662.
[40] ibid.
[41] ibid.
[42] ibid.
[43] ibid.
[44] MG Speech, November 20, 1921, MGP IV, 213; MG speech, July 16, 1922, MGP IV, 721-728.
[45] UNIA paraphrase of MG speech, August 14, 1922, MGP IV, 859.
In early 1921 Garvey embarked upon an organization-building and fund-raising trip through the West Indies and Panama. White colonial governments harassed him, and for three months the United States denied him permission to return. With dissension and chaos engulfing the UNIA headquarters in New York and the 1921 Convention rapidly approaching, Garvey pleaded and negotiated for re-entry. He apparently secured it by bribing a U.S. official (using a highly-placed black Republican official as his conduit) and forswearing militance. After Garvey's return, secret police agent Herbert S. Boulin, a West Indian businessman known as P-138, reported that "for some unknown reason all the officials of the Black Star Line and Garvey's other organizations seem to have undergone a change of mind. They are very patriotic in their speeches and have eliminated all the anti-white talks and in its place [are] preaching loyalty to the U.S.A." Boulin said that Garvey praised Secretary of State Hughes for allowing his return, blamed prominent Afro-Americans for his troubles, and pledged undying loyalty to the United States. Garvey "is preaching nothing but loyalty to the flag. His recent experience must have taught him to take another, saner course. However, I shall see how long he will keep it up...."[1]
Garvey was a master of dissimulation and Aesopian language. On many previous occasions he had promised fealty to the United States and a more moderate tone. Notably, he had cashiered W.A. Domingo as editor of the Negro World in August 1919 at least partly in response to government pressure. Garvey himself later claimed that the conciliatory preamble to the 1920 Declaration of Rights was a ruse "written particularly for the purpose of winning the sympathy of alien races where the other objects of the association were being threatened with hostility"; he urged that beleaguered members quote this preamble when the UNIA's enemies "assail it before a Court of Law or before Governmental Authorities."[2] In the months before the 1921 convention Garvey had increasingly noted that he was under intense surveillance, and had warned his followers that the threat of repression altered the tone of his public utterances.
During his foreign tour, Garvey said that he "told [the whites] a part of my mind" and warned his auditors that he spoke differently depending on circumstances. Shortly after making these statements Garvey, under pressure from British colonial authorities, proclaimed his loyalty, claimed that his enemies misquoted him, and disavowed radical sentiments expressed in the Negro World--which, he assured his interrogators, he had not seen for months on end during his tour. Immediately after his return, however, he assured a Liberty Hall audience that he "waited longingly for every copy of the Negro World" and (amidst profusions of loyalty to white governments) assured his followers that "there are certain things that I cannot say and you may better understand them not said." He also complained (or perhaps boasted) that "I cannot move an inch without everyone knowing that I am in town." According to a United States secret police agent, Garvey "has evidently been impressed by many cross examinations during his trip" and had learned "that his organization is looked upon as an unpatriotic movement which is based upon a programme of forcible overthrow of the white race. This has resulted in his having issued, On July 18th, the first pro-American speech he has ever been known to utter."[3]
Garvey's increasingly frequent use of Aesopian language continued after the 1921 convention. In September 1921 Garvey admitted that "sometimes you have to camouflage.... Tell them you don't want a thing when you want it, so that [whites and their governments] will think that you are not looking for it." According to a secret police report, Garvey told Du Bois "that he was somewhat afraid to give voice to his radical beliefs for fear that the Federal Authorities would call him to task about it."[4]
For a constellation of reasons (of which government surveillance and repression were only two) the UNIA's 1921 convention sharply contrasted to the upbeat, militant 1920 gathering that had passed the Declaration of Rights. Its main business consisted of Garvey's purge of the leadership and the further concentration of power in his hands. During and after the Convention, Garvey significantly shifted the tone and emphasis of his pronouncements. He strongly denounced social equality and miscegenation, harshly blamed African Americans for their own predicament, and sought rapprochement with the KKK and other white racists.
We may only speculate about the reasons for these changes. First, the BSL and other financial enterprises, the mainstays of the UNIA, verged on collapse. With a major UNIA raison d'être in shambles, Garvey required scapegoats (which he found in alleged traitors and incompetents within the BSL and UNIA) and new issues that would distract his followers. Second, facing intensified governmental surveillance and harassment, Garvey repeatedly proclaimed that camouflage, dissimulation, and Aesopian language would fool and mollify the authorities. (These tactics, predictably, did not succeed, partly because they were publicly proclaimed, and Garvey was indicted on charges of mail fraud in January 1922.) Third, a virulent new outburst of separatist white supremacy--symbolized by President Warren Harding's Birmingham address, the Mississippi's senate's advocacy of "repatriation" of Afro-Americans to Africa, and the explosion in KKK membership--further convinced Garvey of white America's intractable racism, and indicated the viability of an alliance with whites based on the mutually acceptable basis of separate racial development. Garvey may have presented himself as the author of a new racial compromise, as Robert Hill has suggested.[5] Fourth, the open breach with Cyril Briggs and the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) at the 1921 convention severed Garvey's last ties with radical or even mainstream African-American organizations. Radicals who had previously worked within the UNIA, educating its massive following in socialist philosophy, now confronted the final failure of that doomed enterprise, and felt unconstrained in their criticisms by any hopes of reconciliation. Garvey, fully aware of the incessant and semi-secret maneuvering against him (which included smear, slander, and denunciation to governmental authorities as well as legitimate criticism) also abandoned any hopes of peace with his rivals. He could, therefore, freely and unabashedly proclaim some of the more extreme and unpalatable aspects of his long-held views. This new departure precipitated an all-out war with almost all other Afro-American leaders, culminating in a grand alliance of radicals and moderates in a "Garvey Must Go" campaign aiming at the imprisonment and deportation of Garvey and the destruction of the UNIA. Finally, because governmental terrorism and violence had virtually destroyed the white Left, alliance with it was less feasible than ever.[6]
When Garvey returned to the United States, he faced renewed opposition not only from Briggs and the ABB, but from Harrison's newly-revived Liberty League. According to secret police reports, Harrison believed the Tulsa pogrom, widespread unemployment among black workers, and Garvey's extended absence (Harrison apparently felt that the United States would not allow Garvey's return) would revivify his moribund organization. Although previous secret police reports had emphasized Harrison's effectiveness with educated, respectable audiences, in 1921 alarmed agents reported that his militant calls for self-defense against white terrorism fascinated even Garveyites irked by his attacks on their leader. Secret agent P-138 said that Harrison
asked for brave men to come forward and form the Liberty League as he did not want cowards who would be found hiding under a bed if they were in East St. Louis or Tulsa when a race riot started; men who are not afraid to die; men with red blood; strong young men as he needs their services and the race needs them also.
However, the spy reported that "only about four came forward and gave their names out of a crowd of about six hundred."[7]
Another secret police agent reported that Harrison predicted more race riots and advised preparation for self-defense. Harrison ominously said that "the State Government has removed some of its restrictions upon owning firearms"; that "one form of life insurance for your wives and children might be the possession of some of these handy implements"; and that "it is absolutely necessary for your protection to join the Liberty League which is carrying on a wide campaign for the interest of our race."[8] Secret police agents complained that Harrison was a master of Aesopian language who counseled violence "in such subtle words and phrases that his audiences understand him" while he stayed within the letter of the law. The secret police also alleged that prominent white Communist Rose Pastor Stokes had offered the Liberty League "Russian gold" if Harrison would use his organization for Communist agitation among blacks. Harrison, ratifying his earlier refusal of white aid for his revived Voice, refused Stokes's offer, although some agents (and historians) alleged that Briggs accepted it.[9]
Harrison's enterprises floundered, however, even as Garvey's new departure generated intense controversy. Garvey's right turn in August 1921 reemphasized old beliefs. Garvey had long extolled racial purity, a stance implicit in his "race first" doctrine. In a remarkable 1916 letter to Robert Moton, Washington's successor at Tuskegee, Garvey had bitterly claimed that the lack of race consciousness in Jamaica generated white hegemony, miscegenation, and the rule of a mulatto elite:
The black man lives directly under the white man's institutions and the influence over him is so great that he is only a play-thing in the molder's hand.... Whenever the blackman gets money and education he thinks himself white and coloured, and he wants a white and coloured wife, and he will spend his all to get this; much to his eternal misery.... Our black girls are taught by observation to despise blackmen as they are naturally poor/and of social discount/; hence you will find a black girl willing to give herself up to any immoral suggestion of white or coloured men, and positively refusing the good attentions of a /blackman at/ the outset.... Our morality is destroyed in this way. Ninety per cent of the coloured people are off-springs of immorality, yet they rule next to the whites over the blacks....[10]
Garvey, therefore, claimed that Jamaican blacks of both sexes avoided marrying mates of their own race if possible; by this reading, mixed-race offspring resulted from black choices rather than white rape. Harrison (embodying the very colorism he criticized) similarly denounced the mulatto elite in the pages of the Negro World and elsewhere. The first UNIA Constitution (July 1918) stated that the UNIA Potentate "shall marry only a lady of Negro blood and parentage."[11] In response, critics repeatedly disparaged the UNIA as a primarily West Indian organization. (Most West Indians were much darker than the average African American).
Garvey first publicly extolled racial purity at the UNIA's August 1921 Convention. Garvey had invited Du Bois to the convention, but Du Bois had carefully excluded Garvey from his competing Pan-African Congress (PAC), held in Europe. Denouncing the PAC as a front for white imperialists, Garvey said that Du Bois and his black allies were "making an issue of social equality with the white race for their own selfish purposes.... [the PAC] is more for the purpose of aggravating the question of social equality to their own personal satisfaction, than for the benefit of the Negro race." Garvey alleged that Du Bois wanted prestige-enhancing companionship with whites rather than Negro freedom and advancement. Garvey repudiated the PAC "because we sincerely feel that the white race, like the black and yellow races, should maintain the purity of self and that the congress is nothing more than an effort to encourage race suicide by the admixture of two opposite races.... The Negro feels socially satisfied with himself, and means to maintain the dignity and purity of his race, and therefore denounces any attempt on the part of dissatisfied individuals who by accident are members of the said Negro race in their attempts to foster a campaign of miscegenation to the destruction of the race's purity."[12]
The following month Garvey continued his attack, charging that "Du Bois wants a black and white admixture which will ultimately produce new types which are neither black nor white," and had duped well-meaning people of both races into adopting his idea. Negroes, however, should "develop on their own lines. We are too mixed up already; we have been mixing up for the last 350 years. Look at this audience in here now and you have about 200 different types here. You have chocolate colors; you have Buster Brown; you have tantalizing browns and mesmerizing browns--all the colors of the rainbow can be found in Liberty Hall tonight, because we have been so badly mixed for 350 years. It is a time we call a halt...."[13] Garvey charged that "Du Bois seeks to produce a new race type by amalgamation of black and white," an enterprise "destructive to the designs of nature."[14]
James Weldon Johnson, prominent author and high-ranking NAACP official, complained that such statements pandered to white racists such as Southern politicians Vardaman and Blease, placed Negroes outside the pale of humanity, and implied that mixed-bloods such as Booker Washington and Frederick Douglass were unnatural monstrosities and "crimes against nature." (Indeed, Garvey's strictures implicitly denigrated the very mixed-hued audiences he addressed.) Social equality, Johnson said, meant nothing more than the right of free association, and was essential for black progress.[15] Garvey vigorously assailed Johnson's views, declaring "I am concerned with the destiny of the Negro" rather than placating white racists. If disgusting whites said things interpretable as resembling Garvey's views, "Johnson is welcome to the comparison." Garvey, for his part, championed social justice, not social equality:
If Negroes will stop making all this noise about social equality, giving white people the idea that we are hankering after their company, and get down to business and build up a strong race, industrially, commercially, educationally and politically, everything social will come afterwards....It is human to be prejudiced, it has been so since creation and will be so until Gabriel blows his horn.[16]
No slaveowning race, Garvey said, would admit their ex-slaves to equality until the freedmen proved themselves by rising "up to the standard of the race of slave masters." Garvey did not denigrate Washington or Douglass but said that "these men were brought into the world under unfortunate circumstances; they were brought into the world through bastardy, the rape of one race upon the other, and the abuse and advantage of the mothers of one race by the men of the other." Interracial sex often stemmed from white rape of black women--a practice that blacks must prevent.[17] Johnson, Garvey charged,
believes that the only society for the Negro is that of the white man's. We believe to the contrary. We think that the black man's society is as good as that of any other race, and we are determined to build up a Negro society even superior to that of the whites.... We are demonstrating to the white race that we do not give a row of pins about social equality with them, because we believe in our own good company.... I am not going to waste time with Mr. Johnson and his associates waiting for white people to recognize me. I am going to put in all my time with my race and help to bring them to a standard where they will demand things and get them, and not beg and be refused.[18]
Garvey, however, also implied that social equality would be achieved when blacks built up "a race independently" and then demanded "justice through the strength of the race."[19]
Simultaneously, however, Garvey claimed that social equality was impossible as well as baneful. In a somewhat contradictory pronouncement--which asserted that white racism was eternal but also implied that black self-advancement and the destruction of the profits of racism might overcome it--Garvey declared that the American white would not "assimilate the Negro, because in so doing he feels that he will be committing racial suicide." Race mixing did occur after dark, but upon a basis of inequality rather than justice, and whites disdained the offspring of their own lust. "To the white man the question of racial differences is eternal; nothing will change his attitude in regard to it. So long as the Negro occupies an inferior position among the races and nations of the world, just so long will they be prejudiced against him, for it will be profitable for them to keep up their system of superiority...."[20]
Garvey, therefore, praised President Harding's infamous Birmingham address, execrated in the radical and mainstream black press. While defending civil rights, Harding had alleged "a fundamental, eternal and inescapable difference" between the races, emphatically repudiated social equality, and advocated separate development. Harding said that "the black man should be encouraged to be the best possible black man, and not the best possible imitation of the white man." Finding such sentiments fully compatible with UNIA doctrine, Garvey claimed credit for inspiring Harding's speech and saw the possibility of an alliance with some whites. He urged that UNIA members "follow the leadership of President Harding."[21]
In a similar spirit, Garvey praised the McCallum bill, passed by the Mississippi state senate. This bill urged that the United States (using war debts owed by the Allies) acquire land in Africa on which American blacks could establish their own government. Garvey again warned that intensified economic and political competition between the races, and increasing black self-assertion, would inevitably generate a race war resulting in the extermination of the blacks. The history of the world, and of the United States in particular, he said, conclusively demonstrated that no race of slaveowners would acquiesce in the equality of their former slaves. A race of slaves could prosper only if they removed themselves "to other habitats (probably their own native habitats), and there apart from those who once enslaved them, developed a power of their own." Garvey, therefore, committed the UNIA unreservedly to the McCallum bill. "What a Southern Senator would not concede to the Negro in the United States he is willing to give the Negroes in Africa.... The sooner we can get this national idea into the minds of white folks and black folks in America, the better it will be for us as a people.... [Many whites] wish us well; but they are not going to wish us well if we remain here and compete with them."[22]
McCallum's proposal, Garvey asserted, demonstrated that "the question of African nationality is not a far fetched one, but is as reasonable and feasible as was the idea of American nationality." McCallum's methods differed slightly from those of the UNIA, but "the same object will be achieved."[23] As in his response to Harding's Birmingham address, Garvey saw a possible social base among the vast hordes of racist whites--a group that far outnumbered the handful of egalitarians upon whom Du Bois relied, or the equally tiny group of class-conscious workers courted by Randolph. Ironically, however, Garvey's scheme foundered upon the inexorable class realities that he adamantly denied. That black northward migration during World War I evoked such virulent Southern white hostility should have warned him that in the South as well as the North, class trumped race. Southern Bourbons would not acquiesce in the loss of the cheap black labor upon which they battened, and with which they both bribed and bludgeoned white southern labor into submission.
Garvey's rapprochement with racist whites reached its apogee in what his opponents termed an "alliance" with the Ku Klux Klan. In late June 1922 in Atlanta, Garvey had a frank and friendly two-hour chat with Edward Clarke, a major Klan leader. Garvey reported that Clarke "denied any hostility toward the Negro as a race. He expresses sympathy for [the] aims and objects of [the] UNIA. He believes America to be a white man's country, and also states that the Negro should have a country of his own in Africa." Garvey invited Clarke to speak at the upcoming UNIA Convention; he also repeatedly (and falsely) promised that the Negro World would print the entire text of the interview.[24]
Garvey's parley with the Klan ignited a firestorm of protest among African Americans of all opinions. He responded that the NAACP leaders were idle dreamers, "as far from understanding the Negro problem of America and the western world as [is] a monkey in understanding how far Mars is from Jupiter." Whites had always hated blacks and always would. Seeming acts of white benevolence stemmed from purely selfish motives. "Emancipation was not a voluntary act on the part of the white man in America or the West Indies. In America it was a war measure; in the West Indies it was an economic necessity." Blacks should finally reject the tutelage and sympathy of the race that had enslaved them. "There is no disputing the fact that America is a white man's country. It has become so by conquest, in that the white man conquered the Indian, exterminated him and took possession of his property." Africans required a country of their own. "Africa awaits us.... The fight [of] the American and Western Negro is not with the Ku Klux Klan of America, or with the other white people of America; the fight with the Negro is with himself to bring about a united sentiment, a united race, with a common object in view."[25]
Garvey stated that the Klan made absolutely no apology for its program of white supremacy and asserted that "the Ku Klux Klan represents the spirit, the feeling, the attitude of every white man in the United States of America." The question was "what should be the Negro's attitude toward such an organization?" Operating from a position of weakness, blacks must not remain ignorant or inflame hostility, but should inform themselves. "Aggravating the Ku Klux Klan or aggravating any organization in the world organized for the specific purpose of white supremacy is not going to help the race in America, placed at a disadvantage as it is.... The Ku Klux Klan is really the invisible government of the United States of America." It had grown vastly since the exposé in the New York World, which "was solely a skillful method of advertising the activities of the Klan at very little cost to the Klan."[26] The KKK, Garvey alleged with only slight exaggeration, was stronger in the North than in the South.
Garvey admitted that the KKK favored whites, but claimed that it did not hate blacks. "You cannot blame any group of men, whether they are Chinese, Japanese, Anglo-Saxons or Frenchmen, for standing up for their interests or for organizing in their interest... The attitude of the Ku Klux Klan is that America is to be a white man's country at all hazards, at all costs. The attitude of the Universal Negro Improvement Association is in a way similar to [that of] the Ku Klux Klan. Whilst the Ku Klux Klan desires to make America absolutely a white man's country, the Universal Negro Improvement Association wants to make Africa absolutely a black man's country. Whether you wish it or not, that is not the point, because your wish does not amount to anything." In the United States, whites overwhelmingly outnumbered blacks. "The white people of this country are not going to allow Negroes--ambitious and educated Negroes--to have their wish, and the wish of the educated, ambitious Negro of America is that the Negro has as much right to be President of the United States as President Harding has," and equal right to any other office or position. "You have the wish, but the odds are against you."[27]
My suit is mine, but if a bully comes along and tears it off me it is mine but it is his now. All of us know that America is as much the Negro's as the white man's, but the white man says, "I am going to make this a white man's country." The only thing for you to do is get hold of him, beat him and take it away. But can you do that? You cannot do that.... We are not going to have any fight as an organization with the Ku Klux Klan because it is not going to help.... There are hundreds of other organizations that feel as the Ku Klux Klan feels. There are millions of individuals in America who feel as the Ku Klux Klan feels, but those individuals, those organizations are not honest enough to make the confession that the Ku Klux Klan makes.... No law can put down the prejudice of a race. You may legislate between now and eternity. If I hate you, no law in the world can make me love you. If I am prejudiced against you for reasons, no law, no constitution in the world can make me change my attitude toward you.[28]
Garvey's qualifier "for reasons" underscored his increasing belief that blacks were in large measure responsible for their own plight.
In Garvey's view, the practical question posed by the Klan concerned the proper Afro-American response. Northern Negroes talked big, Garvey charged, but would not venture South and say what they so easily mouthed from the security of Harlem. "The largest number of Negroes in the United States of America live below the Mason and Dixon line where the Ku Klux Klan rules" at every level from sheriff to governor. The Negro in the South--"the poor unfortunate fellow who lives next door to the Klan and comes into contact with him every day"--would pay the price for the vapid mouthings of Northern militants. When Clarke told Garvey that no African-American could become President or Governor "so long as there is one white man living in the United States of America," Garvey said that Clarke spoke for the white race.
I was speaking to a man who was brutally a white man, and I was speaking to him as a man who was brutally a Negro. He had his interests to protect and I had mine to protect. His one idea, his one greatest hope is to see the great white race the masters of civilization. My one dream, my one hope is to see the great black race the masters of civilization. Now I am not going to waste time fighting with the Ku Klux Klan; I am going to use my time fighting for the ideals which we have.[29]
According to Garvey, Clarke alleged that the KKK did not oppose advancement of Negroes or countenance violence against them. Instead, it wanted a black organization with which it could negotiate, and advised that Negroes form a racial organization resembling the Klan. The Acting Imperial Wizard opposed white men raping Negro women and advised that the UNIA protect Negro women as the KKK protected white women. Garvey extolled a Klan judge who praised Negro men for flogging white men who slept with Negro women in a Negro neighborhood. "So you realize that the UNIA is carrying out just what the Ku Klux Klan is carrying out--the purity of the white race down South--and we are going to carry out the purity of the black race not only down South, but all through the world." Garvey warned blacks that "You must realize your position in this country. It is hopeless. You cannot, therefore, adopt an attitude of offense and aggression, because in the retaliation a large number of us are going to suffer." Diplomacy, not bluster, was the best strategy. Rather than telling a lion you mean to kill it, blacks must "study the strategy that will... get around the lion and take away its life."[30]
Garvey's pro-KKK stance, however inflammatory, is explicable in light of his long-held positions. He had previously praised white racists for engendering black racial consciousness. In 1920 he had said that some Africa Americans were so thick-headed that "it takes the Ku Klux Klan to rouse them and this UNIA [is] a sort of Ku Klux Klan" for blacks. When the New York World exposed the KKK in a widely syndicated series of articles in September 1921, Garvey initially denounced the Klan.[31] The vast increase in Klan membership following the exposé, however, only reinforced his belief in ubiquitous and invincible white racism. Garvey considered the UNIA an actual government in exile, and, like most heads of state, willingly allied with the most virulent of enemies if such cooperation would benefit his people. Churchill, defending his alliance with Stalin, frankly told Parliament that he would praise the devil himself if Satan, for whatever selfish purpose, opposed Hitler; while some leaders of the future state of Israel contemplated an alliance of convenience with Hitler on the grounds that both Zionists and Nazis hated the British Empire and wanted the Jews out of Europe. Garvey frequently proclaimed his willingness to ally himself with all people who would help liberate Africa, regardless of their particular motives.
Garvey's third major shift in emphasis, after his strident advocacy of racial purity and segregation, and his alliance with racist whites, consisted of his increasingly strident criticism of West Indian and American blacks as the causes of their own problems. This stance partly stemmed from Garvey's philosophical idealism--his insistence that blacks could surmount the structural obstacles posed by white racism and attain their goals on their own by a sheer act of the will. If Garvey's program of black self-help was realistic, it followed that blacks could liberate themselves by individual and collective effort in the here-and-now; if they had not done so, whose fault was it? In a proclamation that encapsulates both the strengths and weaknesses of his philosophy, Garvey complained that some blacks, because of the hostile white environment in which they existed, lost hope and believed that "we are unable to accomplish anything." Garvey, however, exhorted his followers that the human will is
the thing that rules men; the will is the thing that rules the world. The human will is that force, is that power that the white races have used to make themselves the giants that they are in this world today; and because we fail to use that human will, that accounts for our being pygmies as a race. The time has come when the New Negro has made up in his mind that he will use and exercise his will to the limit, and we say that from our human will whatsoever the other races of the world have achieved, we are going to achieve it also.... We want you to go out and do. We want you to go out and achieve, even as other men of other races have achieved. There is a great world yet to be conquered; and if you men are to live as men, you have to play your part as men.[32]
Garvey compared a successful white who "has added fresh laurels" to his country and race with a black, born at the same time with the same opportunities as the white, who "is found on the street corners blacking some one's shoes, brush[ing] some one's coat; a porter for some one." Ignoring the huge apparatus of white supremacy and terrorism that crippled, oppressed, exploited, and poisoned black life at every turn, Garvey ascribed the different conditions of the races to the fact that "the one man was born to the full consciousness--of himself, of his possibilities. The other fellow had no consciousness of self and naturally he remained always at the foot of the great human ladder."[33]
Garvey's strictures resembled those of many white radicals who bluntly condemned their audiences. Emma Goldman, who held similar idealistic beliefs, savaged the working class, women, and many other oppressed groups as responsible for their own afflictions. Even IWW and SP soap-boxers, in the manner of stern preachers upbraiding the sins of their congregations, hectored their audiences as contemptible slaves who required only intelligence, information, and will for self-emancipation. Garvey, however, had a further motivation: he recognized that many prominent Afro-Americans were secretly denouncing him to the Post Office, the Bureau of Investigation, and other arms of the white supremacist government. Partly for strategic reasons--avoiding a direct collision with powerful white authorities--but partly out of real experience, Garvey claimed that black leaders, rather than whites, instigated the government's surveillance and harassment of him and of the UNIA. "We love all humanity," he said; "we hate only traitors, and we hate black traitors to the black race more than all others."[34]
In the manner of a prophet scorned, Garvey had long criticized blacks for their lack of achievements. Of all groups, he complained, only blacks had gained nothing from the Great War. Shortly before his trip abroad in 1921, Garvey thundered that "Again I must say, as I have often said, that Negroes are the most lazy, the most careless and indifferent people in the world, and it simply sickens one sometimes to feel that he is identified with a people who cannot see while the whole world is seeing and realizing its own interests." In his native Jamaica, he excoriated his audiences: "You lazy, good-for-nothing Jamaicans, wake up!... Jamaica is the most backward country in the Western hemisphere."[35]
But after the 1921 Convention, Garvey's strictures multiplied and became even more vehement. He even implicitly repudiated his belief in eternal and unwavering white racism and claimed that black achievement would modify white attitudes. In an ambivalent and hedging statement that wavered between a description of what whites believed and his own validation of those beliefs, Garvey proclaimed that
The white man believes that he has built up this civilization exclusively by himself. His railroads, his steamships, his subways, his elevated railways--all brought into existence through his own energy, and he feels that the black man is impertinent and audacious to want to share equally the comforts of those things with him that he has sacrificed for, and in some cases, died for and which the Negro has never made any effort to help him bring about. This is the white man's attitude, and it is one you cannot blame him for, because I would do it myself.[36]
Whites were prejudiced "not so much because you are black, but because we have achieved nothing in comparison with what they have achieved. The white man views the universe... and he sees no civilization standing to the credit of the black man that he could reciprocate with.... If he goes to Africa he sees the naked African and he has to walk his way through the jungles; if he goes to the West Indies he sees the bare-footed Negro; if he goes to the South he sees the happy-go-lucky coon, and he comes to the conclusion, after all, 'why should I accept social equality with a race like this that has done nothing?'"[37]
Whites, therefore, would harp upon black inferiority "until we get out and build, build our cities, build our nations, build our empires, build our navies, build our armies to protect them, and when he knows you have these things and you can give him a hard battle and whip him he will come to terms, as he has come to terms with Japan. The prejudice of the world is not so much against skin--it is not so much against color--it is against what you have not done."[38]
In an even more incendiary restatement of this idea, Garvey recounted the heroic sacrifices and sufferings of the white pioneers who had carved a civilization from the desolate wilderness and asked:
Can I lay claim to that ancestry? Unfortunately, no! The men and women who laid the foundation of American nationality and American progress and American civilization were not my forbears. They were the ancestors of another race; yes, the white race. Do you wonder, therefore, that the white man boasts that America is a white man's country? Do you wonder that he takes pride in the development of his own nation? Do you wonder that he Jim-crows, segregates, murders, burns and lynches the black man when the black man shows a disposition to rival him in industry, in politics, in social life in the country that he, the white man, has suffered for, has died for, has built for his own convenience?[39]
Garvey admitted that his ancestors "worked as slaves to build up alongside of the white man the great American nation," but claimed that "the white man owes no obligation to the Negro" because the Negro had done only manual labor and had been paid for it. Once again conflating white beliefs with his own, Garvey said that although some blacks denied that the slaves had been paid, "the white man believes that the slave has been well paid for whatsoever service he gave" because the white man has given the Negro civilization and Christianity; "the white man claims he rescued the Negro from the jungles of Africa, otherwise he would still have been a barbarian, a savage, a cannibal." Whites also claimed that they had granted blacks equal opportunity in the decades since slavery.[40]
These outrageous racist canards went unchallenged by Garvey, who affirmed that the white man "is not going to yield up to the black man that which he has worked for, suffered for, and died for.... This great white man is going to make a death struggle to maintain the civilization that he has founded for his own convenience.... The white man is not thinking about the Negro or any other race but himself, and no sensible human being will blame him in an age so material, in an age so human as this twentieth century."[41] Instead he urged that blacks build their own civilization:
If the Negro wants the comforts of modern civilization, if he wants the happiness of city life, if he wants the privilege of government control, then he must create these things for himself. If he wants to ride in Pullman cars from New Orleans to New York, from New York to San Francisco; if he wants to occupy the orchestra seat in the Metropolitan Opera House; if he wants to sit in the front seats of the trolley car... he will not expect these things in the United States of America. He shall go out and create for himself the United States of Africa.... There is no use aggravating this great white man, because he is not going to [accord equality to blacks], simply because it is unreasonable--it is not human.[42]
Blacks need not blindly imitate Western civilization; rather, emulating the Japanese, they should graft Western technologies unto the institutions and values of native African genius.[43]
Garvey's inflammatory statements predictably enraged Afro-Americans outside the UNIA. When black Socialists bitterly retorted that Afro-Americans had built America, Garvey replied that blacks had contributed "absolutely nothing. Nothing more than our labor. That is all. Labor under the leadership, under the guidance of someone else.... And yet we wonder why we are not appreciated." Revealing his own capitalist assumptions, Garvey rebuked George Harris, a New York alderman and editor of the New York News, who touted the presence of Negroes on the expeditions of Columbus, Balboa, and Peary. In remarks equally applicable to Randolph's similar claims for Negro accomplishment, Garvey laughed at Harris's assertion that Afro-Americans participated in the California gold rush. "Where," Garvey sarcastically asked, "is the Negro's portion of the gold that was discovered?" Harris "fails to prove to us where the Negro established his claim co-equal with the other fellow" whom he accompanied. Harris "cannot see the difference between a man being with another man as a servant--as a lackey--as auxiliary of war or whatnot, and the individual by whose initiative the conquest is made or the expedition carried out." The Negroes who accompanied Columbus, Balboa, and Peary were paid "as an employee or laborer" but had no hand in planning, financing, or achieving the goals of the expeditions. "I am not saying these things of my own opinion; I am saying these things because they are facts, and the white man looks at facts and nothing else." The Negro at Bunker Hill did not cause the revolutionary war, nor was he a factor in it. Harris and other celebrants of black achievement flattered their readers. However, "flattery has taken us nowhere; flattery has not abolished the Jim Crow car; flattery has not abolished segregation; flattery has not abolished lynching. Writing these beautiful things about the past as far as we are concerned is not going to give us the consideration that we want now."[44]
These inaccurate and cantankerous statements contradicted many ideas which Garvey had long propounded. As late as 1922 he reiterated his frequent contention that blacks had substantially undergirded white prosperity, but had been violently deprived of their product. He correctly asserted that "The great English race, the great American race, we made them great... In the production of [their products] the Negro plays the chief part, but [blacks] do not control the output."[45] Garvey denounced the white injustices that stymied black achievement and recognized that successful blacks evoked savage retaliation, especially in the South. He recognized that African-American diligence, thrift, and work, more than laziness and carelessness, offended, threatened, and enraged whites. But whatever the contradictions in the details, Garvey's conclusions remained the same: blacks must forge new personalities, create a new race and people, and found a nation and civilization of their own in Africa.
Notes:
[1] P-138 Report, July 30, 1921, MGP III, 558. For information about Boulin's activities, see Kornweibel, Seeing Red. Cyril Briggs early noticed the correlation between Garvey's difficulties re-entering the United States and his swerve rightward. See his "The Decline of the Garvey Movement," The Communist, June 1931, in John Henrik Clarke, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York, 1974), 174-179.
[2] MGP III, 713-714. Garvey made this statement in 1937.
[3] MG Speech in Panama, May 3, 1921, MGP III, 385; MG Speech, reported in The Gleander, March 24, 1921, MGP III, 275; MG Speech, July 20, 1921, MGP III, 543, 541; MG Speech, July 14, 1921, MGP III, 529; MG Editorial Letter, NW, September 8, 1921, MGP IV, 47-48; J.C. Tucker, Special Report, Negro Activities, August 27, 1921, FSAA Reel 7.
[4] MG Speech, September 11, 1921, MGP IV, 54; Bureau Report by Agent H. J. Lenon, September 17, 1921, MGP IV, 60-61.
[5] Robert Hill, MGP I, lxxxii-lxxxiii and IV, xxxiii.
[6] William Z. Foster later noticed the correlation between Garvey's right turn and the decline of radicalism in American and abroad. "Garvey was gradually shedding his earlier radicalism," Foster said, "and taking on a conservatism which amounted to a surrender of the Negro people into the hands of their worst enemies on a national and international scale." This shift "was directly related to the subsiding of the great postwar struggle of the workers in this country and also to the temporary lull in the profound revolutionary movement which shook Europe in the early years after World War I." Foster, "The Garvey Movement: A Marxist View," Political Affairs, February 1954, in Clarke, ed. Garvey, 236-241.
[7] Report of P-138, June 8, 1921, in FSAA Reel 7.
[8] Report of Tucker, June 11, 1921, in FSAA Reel 7.
[9] Report of P-138, June 8, 1921; Tucker report, June 11, 1921, FSAA Reel 7; P-138, July 11, 1921, FSAA Reel 7; P-138, July 13, 1921, FSAA Reel 7; P-138, July 15, 1922, FSAA Reel 7; P-138, August 22, 1921, FSAA Reel 7; P-138, August 30, 1921, in FSAA Reel 7.
[10] MG to Robert Moton, February 29, 1916, MGP, I, 180-181. In the MGP, slash marks contain additional material or corrections made by the author.
[11] "Constitution and Book of Laws," Article V, "Potentate and Supreme Commander," July 1918, MGP I, 259. This rule, of course, assumed that the Potentate would be male. Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996), 242, quotes Harrison as saying that full-blooded blacks such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Phyllis Wheatley, and Paul Dunbar afforded blacks "a hope nobler than the hope of amalgamation, whereby in order to become men, we must lose our racial identity."
[12] MG speech, August 1, 1921, MGP III, 583-584. Garvey concluded with the remarkably conservative statement that the Negro desired only "a fair chance to work for his livelihood, and if he is given that chance the entire race problem will be solved."
[13] MG speech, September 7, 1920, MGP, IV, 41.
[14] MG, quoted in the New York Evening Post, September 7, 1921, MGP IV, 46.
[15] JWJ, New York Age, September 24, 1921, MGP IV, 79-81.
[16] MG Editorial, October 1, 1921, MGP IV, 94-95.
[17] ibid.
[18] ibid.
[19] ibid.
[20] MG Editorial, April 5, 1922, MGP IV, 593.
[21] MG speech October 30, 1921, MGP IV, 141-151. The last quote ends in question mark but Garvey's answer is clearly positive.
[22] MG speech, February 13, 1922, MGP IV, 496-504.
[23] MG Editorial, April 18, 1922, MGP IV, 610-611.
[24] Cable by Marcus Garvey to Chairman, Liberty Hall, June 25, 1922, MGP IV, 679-680.
[25] MG Editorial, June 27, 1922, MGP IV, 682-686.
[26] MG speech, July 9, 1922, MGP IV, 707-715.
[27] ibid.
[28] ibid.
[29] ibid.
[30] ibid.
[31] MG speech, November 7, 1920, MGP III, 81; MG, quoted in New York World, September 7, 1921, MGP IV, 1088.
[32] MG speech, March 13, 1920, MGP II, 252-253.
[33] ibid.
[34] MG Editorial, January 17, 1922, MGP IV, 380.
[35] MG Editorial, February 13, 1921, MGP III, 195; MG in the Gleaner, March 26, 1921, MGP III, 281.
[36] MG speech, September 7, 1921, MGP IV, 38-40.
[37] ibid.
[38] ibid.
[39] MG Editorial, June 5, 1922, MGP IV, 660-662.
[40] ibid.
[41] ibid.
[42] ibid.
[43] ibid.
[44] MG Speech, November 20, 1921, MGP IV, 213; MG speech, July 16, 1922, MGP IV, 721-728.
[45] UNIA paraphrase of MG speech, August 14, 1922, MGP IV, 859.