Chapter 12: GARVEY AND THE BLACK RADICALS
The UNIA's 1921 Convention finalized Garvey's irrevocable split with the radicals. Garvey's purge of his opponents, repression of dissent, dissimulations concerning the Black Star Line, concentration of power in his own hands, and marked rightward lurch infuriated the Afro-American Socialists. Towards the convention's end, the UNIA expelled four delegates from Cyril Briggs's African Blood Brotherhood who had made a final effort to convert the UNIA into a movement for class justice as well as racial betterment. Briggs and the other African-American leftists then launched a no-holds-barred "Garvey Must Go" campaign. The tragic hurling of charges and countercharges between the bitterly opposed factions starkly revealed the insoluble dilemmas faced by Afro-Americans in the 1920s.
Before the 1921 convention, Briggs generally supported Garvey and the UNIA. As we have seen, Briggs shared most of Garvey's major ideas: "race first" and race pride, a strong Negro state in Africa, racial internationalism, self-sufficient Negro economic and cultural development in the United States, and militant self-defense against white terrorism. Even UNIA and ABB ideas on class were initially similar. The early Negro World spoke in terms of class as well as race, especially under the editorships of Domingo and Harrison. Garvey himself, while denouncing the racism of American unions and radicals, vigorously supported unions and strikes in black-majority nations, acknowledged radical European support for the UNIA, and praised Lenin, Trotsky, and the Soviet Union. Briggs wavered in his own views on the comparative relevance of race and class, and sometimes questioned the feasibility of allying with white radicals. Until August 1921, Briggs's criticisms of the UNIA centered upon its election of the world leader of Africans at the 1920 Convention, and the management of the Black Star Line (BSL).
Briggs welcomed Garvey's announcement that the 1920 UNIA Convention would elect a world leader of the African race, even if such an election offended the self-proclaimed and white-appointed "leaders" who lacked all mandate from the people themselves.
This announcement of an election of a paramount chief is the most important that has emanated from any Negro source since the glory that was Egypt's and the grandeur that was Ethiopia's and the passing of the great medieval Negro States of the Sudan and West Africa.[1]
The elected leader "should be accepted as such by the entire race," presently so divided that no leader could speak with authority. In order that the elected leader truly represent the Negro people, however, the "International Convention of Negroes" must include "all purely Negro bodies," not merely the UNIA. The election of a world leader would so "greatly affect the Negro race" that it must be "open to all Negro organizations and to the Negro press."[2]
Garvey praised Briggs's editorial and invited the ABB to the convention. Briggs, however, replied that Garvey had missed his most important point: all Negro organizations, not just the ABB, must receive invitations. Unless the leader truly represented a consensus among blacks, the election would "end in failure of the most farcical kind and in all probability will engender enmity and division in place of the unity that Mr. Garvey, along will all other Negro patriots, desire[s]." Briggs warned that blacks would no more tolerate a leader appointed by the UNIA than one selected by whites. Garvey responded by belatedly inviting all Negro organizations and allowing them to select the leader of American blacks; but he reserved selection of "His Highness, the Potentate," to UNIA members alone. The convention, Briggs concluded, was thus reduced to "a gigantic farce."[3]
Long an advocate of Negro business, Briggs originally thought the Black Star Line "a good business proposition." Asserting that Garvey had already remedied some initial managerial errors, the Crusader warned that "because of his splendid work in the past, and the greater promise of the future," any diminution of Garvey's influence would harm the race; but it advised that Garvey "take the race and his associates more into his confidence as befits a democratic era. His mind has been too imperialistic and arbitrary in the past."[4] In December 1919 the Crusader again guardedly endorsed the Black Star Line, but warned that it required its own source of financing (black-owned banks) because whites would boycott a Negro corporation. The Crusader could not vouch for the honesty of the BSL's promoters, but averred that "when men are willing to die for a cause they are not likely to be dishonest to that cause. Mr. Garvey has suffered enough persecution in his fight for the race to earn himself the status of a martyr and a full-grown niche in Ethiopia's hall of fame."[5]
In early 1921, however, Briggs became an editor of the Emancipator, a weekly newspaper that was highly critical of the BSL. The Crusader also criticized Garvey. It began by calling the UNIA "the biggest thing in modern Negro organizations" which had "ramifications in every part of the globe. (On a genuine cooperative basis it could be made a wonderful factor for Negro improvement.) Collapse of the movement or failure of any of its important enterprises would be nothing less than a racial calamity."[6]
Yet such collapse already threatened the BSL, the Crusader contended, and would occur unless UNIA members and BSL investors "take a larger personal interest in the control of the organization." Briggs alleged that the two ships supposedly owned by the BSL in fact belonged to white corporations; he also denounced Garvey's reticence about BSL finances and his ad hominem abuse of critics. As late as April 1921, however, Briggs urged that blacks join both the ABB and the UNIA, which he had earlier called two distinct parts of "the movement to free Africa and raise the status of the Negro everywhere."[7]
In the spring of 1921, however, Briggs joined the Workers (Communist) party, for which he envisioned the ABB as a recruiting center. The ABB, which had four delegates at the 1921 UNIA convention, published a weekly "Negro Congress Bulletin and News Service" (NCB). Although clearly identified as an ABB publication, its seemingly neutral and even flattering tone apparently convinced many blacks that it was an official UNIA publication. (The UNIA had published an official convention bulletin in 1920. In addition, some blacks confused the ABB and the UNIA.) The NCB for August 6 praised the Soviet Union as having "aggressively championed the cause of all the oppressed" and the Third International for demanding as a condition of affiliation that all member parties "whole-heartedly and actively support the fight" for colonial liberation. The second UNIA Convention delegates, it thundered, would be "cowardly and servile" if they shrank from endorsing the Comintern. Although a "spirit of racial and national assertion and pride" was necessary for Africa's liberation, blacks should not alienate white forces that sought the destruction of European colonialism. The NCB for August 24 proclaimed the necessity of a united front with Indian, Irish, and Turkish nationalists "and with all other forces now or in the future menacing the British Empire in particular and the capitalist-imperialist system in general.... Since it is under the capitalist-imperialist system [that] we Negroes suffer, we must boldly seek the destruction of that system and to that end seek cooperation with such other forces" such as "Socialism [and] Bolshevism." The NCB also demanded the creation of labor organizations in Africa and a secret Pan-African Army, modeled on the Irish Republican Army, which would "drive respect and terror into the hearts of the White Capitalist planters."[8]
A federation of diverse organizations united by a centralized leadership, Briggs believed, would enlist more Negroes than a single, amorphous organization representing all blacks. In the middle of the August 1921 convention, Briggs wrote Garvey advocating mutual cooperation between the ABB and the UNIA. The two groups cherished "the same aims and ideals" but "are yet approaching our object by somewhat different, though always parallel, roads." The ABB was "essentially a secret organization, though at present engaged in open recruiting" in the northern United States. It aimed at "immediate protection" and "eventual revolutionary liberation in Africa and other countries where Negroes constitute a majority of the population." The widespread belief that the ABB fomented the Tulsa resistance, "while not literally true can still give you an idea of the nature of our organization."[9]
Briggs secured permission for his friend Rose Pastor Stokes to address the convention. Stokes, a white Communist of working-class origins who had attained national fame by her marriage to a millionaire Socialist, was in some ways an odd choice on Briggs's part, emphasizing as she did the overwhelmingly white composition of the Communist movement. Perhaps, as secret police agents reported, Stokes helped finance the ABB. Perhaps Briggs could not find a prominent black Communist whom Garvey would allow to speak. (Garvey, however, traditionally invited black leaders, including outspoken opponents, to UNIA conventions). Briggs himself was nearly white in appearance, and handicapped by a severe stutter. Briggs's main consideration probably involved international Communist politics: Stokes was a Workers party expert on black affairs, and would write the final draft of the Comintern's "Negro Resolution," promulgated at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922.[10]
Garvey was acutely aware of the extensive governmental surveillance of UNIA activities. He distanced the UNIA from white radical organizations from motives of caution, organizational autonomy, and his own ideological predilections. In introducing Stokes he subtly differentiated her advocacy of freedom for the Soviet Union (which he characterized as white) from the UNIA's demand for black rights and African independence. He introduced Stokes as one who was "endeavoring to free struggling white humanity." She and her husband had been persecuted "for the cause they represent. She desires to say a few words to us in convention, in her own way." Distancing himself and the UNIA from Stokes and the Communists, Garvey emphasized that "Liberty Hall welcomes all friends of liberty. We welcome the Irish, we welcome the Jews, the Egyptians, the Hindus, and all peoples struggling for liberty, because we are in sympathy with suffering humanity everywhere. But that does not mean to say that we support every program, every method that is being used.... Her cause, I believe, is dear to her, even as our cause is dear to us.[11]
The UNIA, Garvey continued, "adopts no one form of government" and did not endorse the Soviet Union or Bolshevism. He hoped that the press would not misinterpret the UNIA as pro-Soviet or radical, but recognize it as "an organized body of people struggling towards freedom... [who] are not going to stop at anything to get freedom." The UNIA welcomed "this friend of Soviet Russia to tell us a little of what her people are doing to get liberty, and if we can find any good in what she says we shall certainly be quick to seize upon it and adopt it for our own benefit."[12]
In a rhetorical style greatly resembling Garvey's, Stokes emphasized that the evils of capitalism--starvation amid plenty, unemployment amid idle machinery--afflicted members of every race. The working masses have "but one historic task before them," which was the overthrow of capitalism and the return of the land and the factories to the people. "Whenever men are oppressed we say there is neither color, nor creed, nor nation. We stand together against all oppressors." She acknowledged the existence of racial prejudice "chiefly among the ignorant masses" who did not realize that if they would be free, "they must free all workers together. We can have no liberty except in the liberty of all the people of all the world." Stokes claimed that
In Soviet Russia they have decided that Persia shall be free; that India shall be free; that Africa shall be free. And it is not merely words; it is not sentiment that they express; they have given of their gold; they have given of their wealth, which represents the labor power of the Russian workers and the peasants; and they have given not only of these things; they have given of their very all for the liberation of the darker races of the world. Go East and you will find the red armies of Russia are marching shoulder to shoulder with the black men; they march with the darker races. We say we will give you not only our wealth and our labor, but we will give you our lives when necessary.[13]
Stokes identified capitalist imperialism as the main threat to Africa. The class conflict "overshadows every other element in the conflict of peoples and races and humanity. We must stand together as workers." In every colonized nation "you will find the strong and the mighty who live upon the blood and the tears of the common people. You will find them hand in glove with European imperialism; they work with them and enslave their own people." Blacks must cooperate with the white revolutionaries "just as we are willing and eager to go with you in the struggle of liberty."[14]
Stokes's speech was received with great enthusiasm. At its conclusion, however, Garvey subtly undermined its main point. Thanking Stokes for her "splendid address," Garvey said that Liberty Hall was "a great university" to which the UNIA invited "professors from the four corners of the world" and of every point of view. After hearing all sides, the UNIA would determine its policy. He gave Stokes "the best wishes of the representatives of the Negro peoples of the world to the struggling workers in Russia and elsewhere. They are seeking, I understand from you, freedom from their capitalist oppressors. We are seeking freedom in Africa. Later on, if the Soviets can help us to free Africa, we will do all we can to help free them."[15] The convention did not endorse Bolshevism or the Soviet Union, or make any overtures to the revolutionary working class.
Toward the end of the convention Briggs and the ABB published a short pamphlet, "To New Negroes Who Really Seek Liberation," which they distributed not only at the convention but also nationally. In an implicit slap at Garvey, it said, "WOE TO THOSE WHO SHAMELESSLY FOR THEIR OWN PERSONAL AGGRANDIZEMENT AND GLORY SHALL TREAT LIGHTLY THE WELFARE AND HONOR OF THE RACE." The ABB repeated that Negroes must "foster the divisions in the camp of the enemy and make alliances that strengthen those that are with us." Blacks in Africa and the Americas suffered more than anyone "from the tyranny and degradation of Imperialism.... Africa is partitioned among the big white Powers, all of whom keep up a well-equipped and strong army in their respective 'colonies' to keep our people in subjection and to exploit them mercilessly. On the American continent the same thing is developing. One after the other the free Negro republics are being subjugated by American marines who establish a rule of terror, brutalizing and torturing our people." Revolt "while Capitalism is still in power in the big white countries" equalled suicide. Nor would "moving from one 'colony' to another" help, because "the same oppressor awaits us everywhere." Even the few countries still free would be subjugated whenever capitalists profited from doing so.[16]
Vastly misrepresenting the Soviet Union, Briggs hailed it as the "one great exception which stands out as a beacon of hope to all the oppressed." In Soviet Russia "the oppressed took charge of the government" and were "conducting an aggressive struggle in behalf of the oppressed in all lands" as demonstrated by its "treaties of brotherly protection" with Persia, Afghanistan, China, and Turkey, and its granting of independence to some of its own former subject nationalities, such as Latvia, Georgia, and Armenia. "Soviet Russia is to-day the greatest menace to Imperialism. Her doctrine of freedom and equality for all peoples is diametrically opposed to the doctrine of exploitation, oppression and degradation [practiced by] England, France and the United States." Therefore, all imperialist nations slandered the Soviet Union. The day that European workers revolt against the "capitalist exploiters of black and white toilers will be the day of your opportunity to conquer power and seize control of the continent of Africa... The cause of the white workers will be the cause of the black workers, the cause of a free Africa the cause of a Europe freed from capitalist control." White capitalists trembled because "the revolution of the oppressed and exploited of their own race threatens to shake into dust their power. The only certain way, and therefore the best way, of reducing the enemy is to besiege and destroy him in his own land. Only then could colonized peoples "successfully rise and free themselves from their aggressors." Fighting alone, "without allying ourselves with all those forces that are seeking [our enemy's] destruction," was futile.[17]
The ABB demanded that the Convention "organize and prepare our people so that they shall be ready when needed to defend themselves, that they may be ready after the downfall of Capitalism to establish their own governments." In the meantime it must protect the Negro's standard of living, stop lynching and peonage, and forge a federation of all Negro organizations, "molding all Negro factions into one mighty and irresistible factor.... Unless these things are accomplished.... this Congress will have been in vain and every delegate disgraced!" The pamphlet ended by promising that the Crusader would publish "a full and impartial report of the convention" and listing the four ABB delegates.[18]
Despite the ABB's exhortations, however, the convention achieved little of substance, especially compared to the epochal 1920 gathering. It did, however, purge those whom Garvey blamed for the catastrophes of the Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation, and greatly centralized power in Garvey's hands. As the convention neared its end, the ABB's "Negro Congress Bulletin" protested the convention's inaction, whereupon a delegate demanded that the ABB explain what UNIA loyalists regarded as "fantastic misrepresentation" and scurrilous abuse. According to the UNIA's account, no one responded when the names of the ABB delegates were called. When an examination of the delegates' credentials was called for, "a man was seen to rise hastily and scurry across the hall, plunge through the doorway, beating his way in precipitate flight towards Seventh avenue. The erstwhile indignant House rocked with laughter." Garvey then attacked the ABB as an "advocate of Sovietism, Bolshevism and Radicalism, the paid servant of certain destructive white elements which aimed at exploiting Negroes for their own subservient ends. Finding that the Universal Negro Improvement Association held nothing in common [with it], it had set itself to discredit the work of this organization." The convention unanimously revoked the credentials of the four ABB delegates.[19]
Briggs responded with a leaflet, "Mr. Garvey and the ABB," that complained that the ABB had issued its program for the convention only after twenty-five days of inaction. Two hours later Garvey denounced the ABB and expelled its delegation. Briggs then denounced Garvey's profession of loyalty to imperialist and white supremacist governments:
What does Mr. Garvey mean by pledging Negro loyalty to the United States Government and giving that Government a blanket endorsement for all its Future Wars, whether those wars be against friendly Soviet Russia, racial Japan, China or Haiti; and whether the U.S. Government take steps to protect Negroes in their Constitutional Rights or Refuse, as in the Past, to take such Steps? What does he mean by advising Negroes to "be loyal to all flags under which they live"? How can Negroes liberate Africa if they remain loyal to Great Britain, France, Belgium and other European plunderers? Has Mr. Garvey a "yellow streak" [in] that he has not denounced the continued presence and savage acts of the United States Marines in Haiti? And lynchings and race riots in the United States? Why has not Mr. Garvey given support to the idea proposed by the ABB of organizing Negroes for self-defense and protection?.... Why has he tried to make the Congress believe that it was to legislate for a government in existence, rather than to formulate a program for the liberation of an enslaved and oppressed people?.... Why has he ignored the Mohammedan and Ethiopian Movements in Africa--the two greatest factors working for liberation in that continent?[20]
Garvey in turn blasted Briggs as a white man who posed as a "Negro for convenience." Garvey charged that Briggs was "operating under the auspices of the Communist Party" and wanted Negroes "to destroy everything we come into contact with; to smash up governments and destroy capital." This, Garvey claimed, would cause political anarchy and economic collapse. Garvey denounced the radicals as "agents of other governments.... Socialistic parasites who are receiving money from the Soviets and Communism to destroy governments everywhere and bring about universal chaos and destruction." Taunted for his increasingly accommodationist tone--but acutely aware of the government's intensive surveillance of all black radicals--Garvey did demand that blacks remain loyal to whatever flag they lived under. He also rejected Briggs's proposed alliance between the UNIA and the ABB. The UNIA, he said, "can form no alliance with any organization of Negroes working secretly to attain and enjoy rights and privileges which ought to be won in a manly open fight.... It does not intend to be trapped by the white man who invented the ABB this year nor next year."[21] William Ferris, literary editor of the Negro World, challenged Briggs to repeat his demand that Negroes refuse to fight for the United States against any nation of color, saying that Briggs would "then discover how long the American government would tolerate disloyalty."[22] At the same time Garvey attacked Du Bois, began his campaign against social equality and miscegenation, and upbraided blacks for having achieved nothing on their own for hundreds of years.
Briggs indignantly replied that the ABB delegates had merely presented a concrete program for the consideration of UNIA delegates and had suffered expulsion for their pains. He denied operating under the auspices of the Communist party and stated that the ABB demanded the destruction not of capital and of government, but of capitalism and of imperialist governments. Destruction of such governments was "the surest means whereby the liberation of Africa can be achieved." Negroes owed no loyalty to racist or imperialist governments. Briggs ironically noted that while Garvey denounced him as a Bolshevik, Du Bois made the same accusation against Garvey. "Marcus says we are Bolshevists. If by that he means that we are determined to free Africa and liberate the Negro people of the world by all and every means, why, then, we are Bolshevists! Bolshevists or anything else for the Liberation of Africa!"[23]
The Crusader also accepted Ferris's challenge and repeated, in capital letters, its demand that Negroes accept imprisonment or death rather than fight for the United States against Japan or Mexico. Briggs asserted that "the Negro owes no loyalty to a government that is disloyal (by acquiescence in his oppression, etc.) to the Negro." Loyalty began on the part of the government, not the citizen, and "until a government proves loyal to the Negro the editor of the Crusader sees no reason for preaching loyalty of the Negro to that government, and the vision of prison cells, etc., has no power to make him emulate Marcus Garvey and Major Moton in preaching such servile loyalty."[24] Briggs denounced Garvey for having
given a blanket endorsement to the Government of the United States for all its future wars--regardless of whether that government recognizes our legal claims upon it for protection of our rights as citizens of the United States or continues in its stolid refusal to recognize such claims; regardless of whether that government goes to war with Black Haiti, Yellow Japan or some other colored nation or with friendly Soviet Russia, whose actions in behalf of the Liberation Struggle of the darker races speak louder than.... [the words of hypocritical nations, and] regardless of whether the United States government goes to war in self-defense or to uphold the principle of White Supremacy so dear to the hearts of "100 per cent" white Americans.[25]
Briggs next accused Garvey of "servile fear" and "despicable cowardice," proclaimed that any race leader must accept the possibility of "imprisonment, deportation or exclusion," and denounced Garvey's new stance as "a radical departure" from "the revolutionary preachments and forcible liberation doctrines by which the fearless and earnest membership of the UNIA was attracted to the leadership of Marcus Garvey!"[26]
Ridiculing Garvey's accusations about ABB secrecy, Briggs cited U.S. labor unions and Sinn Fein as groups that had organized secretly when open functioning was impossible; similarly, the ABB's secrecy aided its effective operation in colonized areas whose governments had throttled the UNIA and banned the Negro World. "We do not care a straw for mock heroics," he said. "We seek results, and we use the methods best fitted to attain results!... Marcus Garvey is alone in his beliefs that it is good tactics to blow one's mouth off threatening one's enemies with dire things to come."[27] Briggs claimed that revolutionaries had only three options: open, militant operation resulting in persecution; open, cravenly compromising organization that would avoid repression; or secret, underground, fearless, and successful operation. The UNIA, he implied, had tried the first approach and, encountering repression, had opted for the second; the ABB championed the first where feasible, and the third where it was not.[28]
Briggs (perhaps forgetting that the Crusader had editorialized against miscegenation and that he had professed shame at his light skin) also denounced Garvey's demand for racial purity and his repudiation of social equality as capitulations to white supremacy and the KKK. Briggs indignantly charged that "His Imperial Travesty" excommunicated from the Negro race "the vast majority of the inhabitants of Africa who have grievously sinned by coming into this world in such outlawed shades as dark brown, light brown, red, yellow.... Things are so mixed up that hardly any family can show a consistency of shade in its members. Mothers will be separated from their children. Wives from husbands. Dark brother from brown brother...."[29] Briggs also attacked Garvey's assertions--made in the white press--that blacks had achieved nothing for centuries.
The "Africa for the Africans" agitation had originated with him, Briggs claimed. He demanded
an Africa really and completely free. Not an Africa whose white capitalist-imperialist bonds have been exchanged for the capitalist or feudalist bonds of a Negro Potentate, with a piratical court and an antiquated system of knights, lords and other potential parasites upon the Negro workers. The editor of the Crusader visualizes an Africa in which the workers shall control, and shall produce wealth for themselves and not for parasites.... An Africa such as there was before the misfortune of the white man's presence. An Africa such as still exists in certain inland territories where white rule is only nominal. An Africa in which the native system of Communism would reign supreme with such necessary additions to progress as the Machine Civilization of the Western World.[30]
Implying that Garvey demanded all blacks return to Africa, Briggs asserted (in words actually resembling Garvey's) that a "free and strong Africa" would automatically elevate the Negro's status everywhere in the world.[31]
Ignoring his own earlier support for the BSL, Briggs lambasted Garvey for "mixing the necessarily unfriendly (to certain whites) propaganda of the Liberation Struggle with affairs of business enterprises that, at least in the beginning, would have to depend for support upon whites."[32] He also accused Garvey of fraudulent misappropriation of funds and of lying about UNIA finances. Despite this, Briggs said that the UNIA and ABB shared the same ultimate aims and should closely cooperate. Briggs envisioned a federation of all Negro organizations and castigated Garvey's refusal even to discuss entering such a united front.
Briggs also sued Garvey for criminal libel for Garvey's assertion that Briggs was white. Garvey, convinced that the white courts would not find such an accusation libelous, nevertheless retaliated by showing the District Attorney Briggs's letter of August 15, which, Garvey claimed, revealed that Briggs sought "the overthrow of white governments."[33] Briggs countered by strongly implying that Garvey had left his wife, lived with a woman other than his wife, and had earlier fled from England after "having raped a little white girl in a friend's office."[34] Garvey in turn sued Briggs for criminal libel. This mudslinging in the white man's courts eventually resulted in both men retracting their libels.
Briggs and Garvey fought each other in the streets as well as in the press and the courts. In December 1921 some of Garvey's henchmen broke up a public ABB meeting featuring three disgruntled ex-officials of the UNIA. UNIA press releases crowed that "Garvey wins hands down the first round in his Battle Royal against the enemies of the Universal Negro Improvement Association" and boasted that the ABB's speakers were "denied a hearing" by the irate audience and had to sneak out of the hall in confusion. "The Police remained on the spot and watched the proceedings utterly powerless to stem the tide of opposition which swept the audience like a tidal wave.... [The ABB speakers were] hissed and hooted and jeered at by the gathering who were evidently determined to put a quietus on the African Blood Brotherhood movement," whose sole purpose was "a campaign of relentless warfare against the Universal Negro Improvement Association."[35]
An ABB press release headlined "Garveyites Break Up ABB Meeting--Desecrate Church" soon denounced Garvey's "Great Terror" and demanded that "the public should be protected in their right to hear whom they please." An ABB leaflet screamed in huge headlines "Of What Are They Afraid.... Be Pro-Race and Help Us Save the LIBERATION MOVEMENT...." Secret police agent 800 commented that such incidents "give Garvey more confidence, and rightfully so as they only give him a tighter hold on the masses.... Garvey is laughing up his sleeve at Briggs and he is bigger in the eyes of his members than ever." Agent 800 marveled--and complained--that "some of these same people that broke up [the ABB] meeting are the largest stockholders in Garvey's corporations" and "still have confidence in him" despite their knowledge that "Garvey has spent their money (and most of them know foolishly)." Temporarily demoralized, Briggs had the Crusader publish a devastating report on the UNIA's Liberian venture by Cyril Crichlow, former UNIA resident secretary in Liberia. Although Garvey ordered Negro World editor William Ferris to ignore the Crusader, feeling that direct response would only garner it additional publicity and subscribers, secret police agents made sure that all important UNIA officials were informed of this exposé.[36]
The Crusader positively gloated when Garvey was arrested and indicted for mail fraud. "Time and time again," it exulted, "we protested against the inconceivable stupidity of basing the Liberation movement upon the chances of the success or failure of commercial enterprises.... By constructive criticism we tried to force reforms in the management of certain of these schemes." However "fanatical allegiance to the individual above the Cause" undermined reform efforts. The Crusader also charged unnamed Negro World editors with encouraging the assassination of Garvey's opponents. It also published a devastating series of articles by Crichlow (documents hitherto suppressed by Garvey) revealing the wild impracticality of Garvey's Liberian plans and concluding that Liberia was "a fine place" to avoid. The Crusader hoped that "those Negroes who have been connected with the Liberation struggle, through the Garvey organization, will not desert the flag."[37]
In a grand finale, Briggs published the Workers party's resolution on the race problem. The Communists denounced "the brutal terror of persecution, rape and murder" inflicted upon Afro-Americans and "secret murder societies such as the Ku Klux Klan." They pledged a fight against "the anti-Negro policies of organized labor" and support for blacks "in their fight for economic, political and social equality." Implicitly criticizing "purely racial organizations which seek purely racial aims," the Communists vowed "to destroy altogether the barrier of race prejudice" that divided the workers and to "weld them into a solid union of revolutionary forces for the overthrow of their common enemy." Briggs praised the Communists as "a party which embodies the very essence of the Negro Liberation Struggle in its program." He also touted the party's eleven daily newspapers and its 50,000 members, "among them the pick of the white workers."[38] With this encomium, the Crusader, always a shoe-string operation, fell silent, probably because of bad checks from distributors, but possibly because of U.S. government intimidation.[39]
Briggs had already launched The Crusader News Service, which, he claimed, provided one hundred Afro-American publications twice a week with news about organized labor (especially whatever scant evidence he could muster demonstrating the increased racial enlightenment of white labor), and "news of general race-interest interpreted from the working class point of view."[40] He attempted to metamorphose the ABB into a UNIA without Garvey, with a sick and death benefit fund, cooperative stores, and a plan for the liberation of Africa. However, few blacks listened. Weaning Afro-Americans from the UNIA had been a raison d'étre for the ABB; once that proved impossible, it lacked a clearly-defined mission. In 1923 Briggs and the ABB transiently forged (at least on paper) their long-sought United Negro Front. A "concordat" hammered out on March 23-24 by representatives of the ABB, the NAACP, the NERL, the FNF, and two other organizations stated that "we are all striving for one great common goal" and emphatically repudiated the idea "that loyalty to any one of these organizations necessitates antagonism toward any of the others, or that membership in one in any way precludes membership and active interest in the other." This agreement, however, had scant practical effect.[41]
The ABB straggled along for some additional years; as late as 1925 George S. Schuyler of the Messenger ridiculed its pretensions, its subordination to Moscow, and its "six members who formerly assembled in weekly conclave in some friendly telephone booth or barber shop and hurled dire threats at the capitalist system"; he also satirized the ABB's Comintern-inspired rightist policy of jettisoning revolutionary slogans, adopting the trappings of American patriotism, and working within the AFL. "Rightward the course of revolution takes its way!" Schuyler wryly commented.[42] The secret police easily infiltrated the ABB, and placed its agents on the Supreme Council. Harrison, meanwhile, once again fearing white control, adamantly opposed Comintern funding, proffered by Rose Pastor Stokes, and kept his distance from the ABB. In 1925 the ABB folded into the American Negro Labor Congress (strongly denounced by Randolph), a Communist front as ineffectual as the ABB. Not until the Great Depression would the CPUSA make significant inroads among Afro-Americans.[43]
The demise of the Crusader did not mean that the radicals were finished with Garvey, however. Indeed, their campaign had just begun. The Messenger took up the cudgels when the Crusader folded. Although Randolph had implicitly criticized Garvey's African colonization plans, he had not mentioned Garvey or the UNIA by name. Until October 1920, in fact, the Messenger virtually ignored the UNIA, and concentrated its fire on the NAACP and other mainstream Afro-American institutions. Only Randolph's affiliation with the Emancipator had publicized his views about Garvey. In an unpublished interview during the 1920 UNIA convention, Owen and Randolph lambasted Garvey as "either a fool or a rogue. He is of course an uneducated man--an ignoramus, and is appealing to the Negroes through their emotional nature." If successful, Garvey would set back by ten years "the Socialist movement we are leading among blacks." The BSL was a fraud that diverted precious money from civil rights organizations. Garvey misrepresented the extent of UNIA membership and support. The two asserted that
Our Socialist movement among the Negroes of America is for equality in all things with the whites, even intermarriage. We believe the Negro the equal of the white socially, and with education he will be the equal of the white from every standpoint. Therefore we do not think it will be necessary for the Negro alone to fight this war for his freedom. If he joins with the Socialists of the world he will share equally with the white in all things when Socialism becomes the order of the day.
We don't believe the cry of the Garvey gang--"Africa for the Africans"--[any] more than we accept the cry of America for the Americans. We are not nationalists but internationalists. And when the world is Socialized the Negro and white will be equal in all countries under the sun.... We scientific-minded and higher minded Negroes do not want a Negro nation. It would forever kill our dream of world equality.[44]
The Messenger steered clear of such statements, however, until October 1920, when it published "The Garvey Movement: A Promise or a Menace," promising a detailed analysis of Garvey's ideas. The first article in this series, in December 1920, focused on the Liberty party. the Messenger then fell silent on Garvey until September 1921, after the fiasco of the UNIA's convention and Garvey's rightward lurch. Even then Randolph admitted that Garveyism could legitimately boast splendid achievements. It had taught "the need and value of organization" and "demonstrated the ability of Negroes to come together in large masses under Negro leadership." It had effectively criticized the traditional Negro leaders. It had "stimulated the pride of Negroes in Negro history and traditions, thereby helping to break down the slave psychology which throttles and strangles Negro initiative," and had "stiffened the Negroes' backbone to resist the encroachments and insults of white people. Again, it has emphasized the international character of the Negro problem."[45] Yet from this time on Randolph bitterly assailed Garvey's "back to Africa" and "race first" campaigns, his opposition to social equality and miscegenation (and consequent denigration of mulattoes), his Black Star Line, his use of violence against political opponents, and his rapprochement with the KKK.
Randolph attacked Garvey's "back to Africa" campaign as a wild, visionary scheme that "smacks of the romantic and infantile excursions of Don Quixote." Randolph recognized that blacks were unorganized, unarmed, and divided (in and out of Africa) into countless groups with differing histories, customs, traditions, and habits. They could not possibly overcome the combined opposition of the white imperialist powers. "Conquering Africa is not any less difficult than conquering Europe.... Garvey has begun Empire building too late." Even Germany was crushed by rivals "who were not interested in having any more competitors in the empire business." Garvey would also have to subjugate the native inhabitants of Africa, which "is a continent, not a nation," composed of peoples of many races, languages, and religions. Even if, per impossible, Garvey conquered Africa, he would only replace one exploiting elite with another; the histories of Haiti, Abyssinia, Russia, Japan, and other nations conclusively proved that class, not race, was the font of exploitation and oppression, and that the capitalists of all races would ruthlessly exploit the workers of their own race. "Black despotism is as objectionable as white despotism," and would as surely generate revolution.[46]
Nor would a strong and independent Africa ensure decent treatment for American blacks, as Garvey claimed; the Japanese were mistreated in the United States despite Japan's power. Randolph charged that "the white mobocratic South could not wish for a better ally than Garveyism.... To divert the Negroes' mind away from these fundamental problems [lynching, peonage, etc.] is to weaken them and strengthen the Bourbon forces of the Negro-hating South and the exploiting capitalists of America." Garvey, he said, had no domestic program, but placed all his hopes in a distant land "invested with the halo of mysticism."[47]
Africa could achieve freedom only through alliance with liberation movements of "all races, creeds, and colors," Randolph warned blacks. "Imperialism is at the bottom of African bondage. Only the abolition of imperialism can free Africa. First, the black workers in America and the West Indies must change their own social systems. They must raise the workers to power. The workers have no interest in holding colonies in subjection; for they reap no profits." Echoing Bolshevik calls for proletarian revolution as an indispensable support for revolution in the underdeveloped world, Randolph said that blacks must join with "the radical international labor and socialist forces of the world. For with the present stages of African economic, political, and social development, only a world-wide proletarian revolution can achieve her liberation." Garveyism would hinder Negro revolution "by cutting the Negro workers away from the proletarian liberation movement... by setting them against instead of joining them with the white workers' struggle for freedom." This fomenting of racial divisions constituted "the chief menace of Garveyism."[48]
Randolph next attacked the Black Star Line as an absurd and fraudulent scheme. Randolph pointed out that a small, black-owned company could not compete with international conglomerates, that the shipping business was suffering from a severe depression, and that even the U.S. government subsidized its own merchant marine. Building a black shipping line was as absurd as building a black railroad parallel to the Pennsylvania line. The Black Star Line "would have no effect on the Negro problem if successfully established, because the Negro problem is not one of transportation."[49] Randolph accused Garvey of running a bunko scheme that defrauded poor blacks of their savings.
Randolph further claimed Garvey's "race first" doctrine emulated and validated white racism. Garvey's assertion that all whites were enemies of all blacks "is both dangerous and false. It is dangerous because it pits whites against blacks; it engenders and fosters a virulent race prejudice, the very menace we are trying to eradicate, and gives birth to such destructive and violent race riots as E. St. Louis, which was a conflict between black and white workers." If blacks preached "race first," the more numerous, wealthy, educated, and powerful whites could justly do the same, and drive blacks from civic life. Randolph asserted that "it is false to assume that all white men are agreed upon a program of opposition to Negroes" or that blacks of all classes had a common interest.[50]
Randolph also castigated Garvey's opposition to social equality and intermarriage--a corollary of Garvey's black separatism. Garvey condemned blacks who imitated or associated with whites as committing race treason, despising their color, and wishing that they were white. For this "preaching of Negro inferiority to the white and Negro peoples of the world," Randolph said, Garvey "qualifies splendidly as an ally of the Ku Klux Klan."[51] Randolph asserted that "without social equality, the Negro will ever remain a political and economic serf." Garvey's attacks on light-skinned blacks would "wreck every Negro home, setting brother against sister and husband against wife." When Garvey parleyed with a high official of the Klan and sought white racist support for "back to Africa" schemes, Randolph thundered that "there is no place in America for a black race baiter, one time reviling all white men; and a 'good nigger' race traitor, at another time selling out the rights of all Negroes."[52]
In New Orleans in the summer of 1922 Garvey proclaimed
This is a white man's country. He found it, he conquered it, and we can't blame him if he wants to keep it. I am not vexed with the white man of the South for Jim Crowing me because I am black.
I never built any street cars or railroads. The white man built them for his own convenience. And if I don't want to ride where he's willing to let me ride than I'd better walk.[53]
In reply, Randolph accused Garvey of scheming "not to redeem but to enslave Africa and the Negro everywhere." He contrasted Garvey's statement with that of a white Harvard historian who said that blacks, having "largely built our railroads and great industries," fully deserved just treatment. "Of course Garvey never built any railroads or street cars," Randolph said. "He just got to America from Jamaica less than five years ago.... Garvey wasn't here when American Negroes were making this country."[54]
The Messenger launched its anti-Garvey campaign in the fall of 1921; but only after Garvey's infamous statement in New Orleans did Randolph say that "the Messenger is firing the opening gun in a campaign to drive Garvey and Garveyism in all its sinister viciousness from the American soil." Randolph called Garvey "the infernal black blizzard of the presumptuous Ku Klux wizard"; "a buffoon" whose "fool antics and clown tactics" disgraced blacks everywhere; "the Black Kluxer"; and "the greatest vaudeville comedian in Christendom." He falsely charged that the UNIA "is chiefly a British West Indian association" and (in a remark he would more appropriately apply to the Communist party), said that "no movement whose program is essentially foreign will ever command the interest and support of the American Negro." The Messenger alleged numerous instances of Garveyite violence against political opponents, their breaking up of outdoor and even indoor meetings, and charged that Garvey headed a "deliberately criminal organization." When Randolph received a threat accompanied by a severed human hand in the mail, he blamed the Garveyites. He condemned Garvey as "an anarchist in the truest sense of the word" whose deportation was legally justified. The Garvey movement, he said, was "a social-racial disease germ to the Negro which must be destroyed." Randolph called for Garvey's imprisonment and exile, the arrest and deportation of his foreign followers, and finally for the destruction of the UNIA itself. "If Garvey is a menace, his spirit is a menace, hence the UNIA should be destroyed."[55]
Randolph and other African-American leaders collaborated with the capitalist, white supremacist U.S. government, and with European colonial administrations, in their campaigns against Garvey. In a move that Du Bois's biographer says was "almost certainly" prompted by the FBI, eight prominent Afro-American leaders wrote (January 15, 1923) a hysterical letter to the U.S. Attorney General, accusing Garvey and the UNIA of fomenting hatred of the white race, murdering their opponents, and defrauding innocent blacks. Shortly thereafter, the United States brought Garvey to trial for mail fraud, for which he had been indicted a year earlier. After Garvey was convicted, the U.S. imprisoned him (1925-1927). Garvey was deported immediately after President Coolidge commuted his sentence to time served.[56]
Many of Randolph's criticisms of Garvey were justified. Garvey's later praise for Hitler and Mussolini, like his colorism and his rapprochement with the KKK, validated Randolph's worst fears about the consequences of Garvey's "race first" doctrine. Garvey's "back to Africa" scheme substituted bogus psychological consolations for realistic action. It also involved misleading and manipulative designs on the (admittedly corrupt, racist, and exploitative) Liberian government. Ironically, Garvey's hope that racist whites would subsidize black emigration foundered on the shoals of class interest: the whites who owned the South and the rest of the United States would not part with the cheap black labor that worked the land and undercut white unions. For the capitalists, class trumped race, as the white South's hostile response to black northward migration during the Great War indicated.
The Black Star line was, at the very least, grossly and corruptly mismanaged in a manner that deprived thousands of trusting blacks of their savings. Moreover, it was by no means an autonomous African-American institution. Booker Washington, however extensively controlled by whites, built a black-run institution with white money; Garvey bought ships constructed, maintained, and sometimes officered by whites with the money of masses of blacks. Garvey wanted a separate black economy because he correctly believed that he could not depend on white fairness. He was, however, deluded by the fetish of ownership. The whites from whom Garvey bought the UNIA's vessels grossly overcharged him, while some of the skilled whites upon whom he depended apparently sabotaged the UNIA's ships. Finally, Garveyites frequently Red-baited and intimidated African-American opponents within the UNIA and outside of it; they were not above inciting the authorities against their racial brethren. Garvey frequently pressed charges of criminal libel against his black opponents and, confronted with a competing black-owned steamship line, encouraged the prosecution of his rival for fraud.
In his attacks on Garvey, however, Randolph sometimes descended into vituperation. The BSL fiasco was not all Garvey's fault. The shipping industry as a whole virtually collapsed after the BSL was launched, and many larger, better financed, and more competently managed firms went bankrupt. The Messenger sometimes flirted with nativism in its attacks on the UNIA as composed mostly of ignorant West Indians. This was ludicrously unfair; had it been true, Randolph would not have bothered with Garvey's organization. His incessant harping on this theme led to a break with Domingo in 1923. Randolph went further, publishing a racist screed by Robert Bagnall, a black NAACP official, that described Garvey as "a Jamaican Negro of unmixed stock, squat, fat and sleek, with protruding jaws, and heavy jowls, small bright pig-like eyes and [a] rather bull-dog-like face."[57] Could the Klan have said it better? Randolph apparently exiled Floyd Calvin from the Messenger merely for asserting that the UNIA as an organization should not be blamed for Garvey's sins.[58] Historian Theodore Kornweibel has stated that Randolph's alliance with the white supremacist and capitalist U.S. government (which had persecuted Randolph in the past) was as reprehensible as Garvey's alliance with the KKK.[59] Randolph, however, had ample cause for alarm. Garvey defrauded poor blacks of their life savings, incited violence against black opponents, and, after his rightward lurch, grossly misrepresented the aspirations and beliefs of the African-American community.
Garvey's countercharges against his Socialist and Communist opponents were, however hysterical and overwrought, not without merit. His repeated assertions that rival blacks instigated U.S. surveillance and prosecution of him were exaggerated; various agencies of the secret police had monitored Garvey, sown dissension among his followers, and disrupted the UNIA long before the NAACP, the ABB, and the FNF allied against Garvey. Nevertheless, Garvey's African-American enemies did demand that the United States prosecute him for mail fraud, and provided key evidence and testimony.
Garvey's bitter accusation against white radicals--that they recruited blacks only so that blacks would not take jobs during white strikes--was, however exaggerated, also based on some reality. Domingo, Randolph, and Briggs had appealed to white workers precisely on the grounds that unorganized black workers constituted a reservoir of scabs who undermined white unions and wages. Although some white radicals (especially Wobblies) were genuine egalitarians, Du Bois, McKay, Harrison, and others encountered racism aplenty in the SP. Garvey was undoubtedly correct when he warned Afro-Americans that "the capitalists who can employ you will have no sympathy or mercy for you" if blacks embraced socialism or even joined unions in large numbers.[60] Racist capitalists hired Negroes only because they were regarded as cheaper and more docile than whites; given the choice between unionized blacks and whites, most capitalists would prefer whites. Garvey also charged that racist whites financed his radical opponents in the hopes that black militants and agitators, converted to Bolshevism, would be deported or otherwise disposed of by the government. This charge smacked of paranoia in its ascription of evil motives to his opponents, but it was based on the solid reality that the U.S. did imprison, deport, and condone the murder of class-conscious radicals during and after World War I. Militant blacks faced enough dangers without embracing revolutionary radicalism.
Similarly, Garvey characterized some opponents as a "revolutionary gang of alien races" who would "further exploit us to serve their own ends in starting revolutions in different white countries, and then to throw us off as usual as an inferior race."[61] This charge, however inappropriate as regards the IWW and the SP, proved all-too-prescient when applied to the Communist party. Briggs, in particular, was dishonest in denying his Bolshevik affiliations; to this day, the extent, nature, and timing of his, and the ABB's, connections to the Communists remains unclear.[62]
Garvey's assertions that his enemies vowed to destroy the UNIA when they proved unable to control it had merit. Many radicals did work within the UNIA, seeking to convince its membership of the validity of their own class-based program, and turned against it with a vengeance only when they were rebuffed. When Garvey denounced the NAACP, the Messenger, and the ABB as white dominated and controlled, he merely threw back in their faces accusations that they themselves had leveled against opponents. The NAACP, the SP, the CP, and the FNF, Garvey said, were "fighting a purely Negro organization, a Negro organization from top to bottom, a Negro organization kept up for five years with Negroes' money. Who must know better what the Negro wants at this time? The man who kept the Negro a slave for three hundred years, or the Negro himself?"[63] Garvey called Socialism "only another form of white control" fostered by "the very same men who have been devouring us for three hundred years." He concluded that "Before you can accept socialism as a cure, you have to change the white man's soul; and that, the Negro socialists have not done yet."[64]
Garvey's particular example here was deliberately inaccurate; he claimed that when Claude McKay danced with Crystal Eastman at a Liberator ball, the Socialists "smashed up the dance hall... because [McKay] attempted to dance with a white Socialist woman."[65] Garvey well knew, however, that the police, not the radicals, rioted when McKay danced with Crystal Eastman; the Negro World covered this story in considerable detail.[66] McKay and Crystal Eastman remained lifelong friends. Yet Garvey's overall point retained validity: racism did infect the Socialist and Communist movements, as McKay himself vocally complained.
Garvey's reprise to those who accused the UNIA of lack of achievement was that "they have been talking for the last ten years, and you have had to pay for their talk." The NAACP, the FNF, the ABB, the NERL, and other black organizations had indeed achieved little by 1924. Finally, Garvey's response to the accusation that he was an alien should have resonated in internationalist hearts. "I am called an alien," he said in response to white racist slurs. "We are not aliens. We were taken away from Africa in chains against our will, and scattered around the world in slavery. We are now searching for one another."[67] Responding to Afro-American critics, he said
Great principles, great issues, great movements know no nationality. I know no nationality; I know no national boundary where the Negro is concerned. Wherever Negroes are enslaved politically, industrially, socially or educationally there is my home for the time being. Until they become politically emancipated, whether it is in America or the West Indies or Africa, I have work to perform, and I can do it anywhere with as much pleasure as I am doing it here now. Soil does not matter one bit except that soil is Africa.[68]
Many of Garvey's beliefs stemmed from inescapable dilemmas that bedeviled Randolph as well. While Randolph often accused Garvey of opposing political action and unionism, Garvey actually favored both electioneering and working-class organization both before and after his sojourn in the United States. He praised Socialists and Communists abroad while castigating exploitative black capitalists. His disparagement of politics and of unionism in the United States stemmed from the very dilemmas of which Randolph himself was fully aware, and that equally ensnared him.[69]
The Messenger agreed with Garvey on numerous issues: the need for African-American cooperative enterprises and for self-defense against white violence, and upon the primacy of economics (however differently they interpreted this idea). Above all, both recognized that African Americans, as a terrorized, impoverished, and ill-educated minority, could neither win on the basis of their own strength, nor depend upon white decency. Randolph, Garvey, Harrison, and Briggs all sought mutually beneficial alliances, based on common interests rather than moral vision, with other groups. Randolph favored the American and international working class of all races; Garvey wooed Africans in the diaspora and in Africa; Briggs allied with the Communist International. Harrison initially embraced the Socialists and then switched to a "race first" program while still retaining a class analysis.
Except for Du Bois (who soon enough repented his error), all major black radical intellectuals emphasized power over moral suasion. Garvey said that in fifty years, when the NAACP would still be petitioning for an anti-lynching bill, the UNIA "will be coming up the Hudson Bay with a flotilla of battleships, dreadnoughts and cruisers to land our first ambassador, and whilst [the NAACP] will be introducing bills in Congress, we will be entertained in the White House as being the first ambassadors from the great African republic. And let me tell you, they will hear us then."[70] This fantasy, however surreal, was in 1923 no more utopian than Randolph's proposed alliance of white and black workers or Briggs's hopes that the Comintern would genuinely promote African liberation. Du Bois's appeal to the conscience of whites was as ludicrous as anything Garvey ever propounded, while his subsequent agitation within a racist society and reliance on two capitalist and white supremacist parties was almost as chimerical. In the 1920s, no strategy could have extricated African Americans from their oppressed condition or even ameliorated it. They were vastly outnumbered and without significant domestic or international allies. The epochal and worldwide changes of subsequent decades--the CIO's interracial and industrial unionism, anti-colonial movements in Africa, and a powerfully competitive international Communist movement--all added their mite to the black liberation struggle. These changes were far in the future during the heyday of the Messenger, the UNIA, and the ABB.
In the 1920s, neither assimilation nor separatism were viable strategies. Pressured by Garvey's success, Randolph reluctantly admitted the necessity of African-American racial pride. But building racial self-esteem without essentializing race (thus capitulating to the hegemonic discourse of the enemy) and legitimizing white racism was indeed a precarious enterprise. It ended almost inexorably in assertions of black superiority and a consequent attack on mixed-bloods, the vast majority of the Afro-American population. Pride in one's own culture leads almost inexorably to assertions of superiority over other peoples and their ways of life. Cultural nationalism is insupportable without political nationalism, and was hence impracticable within the United States for blacks. Garvey recognized that in the United States, integration would mean virtual extinction for the black minority because the survival of a distinctive black culture required residential, educational, and social separation. If mainstream society treated blacks as individuals rather than as members of an alien people, their sense of group cohesion would dissipate and ultimately disappear as blacks moved out of racial enclaves into the white world. Individual advancement would detract from group consciousness, especially when social mobility was predicated on conformity to white norms. A black consciousness based upon a mythical racial purity would exclude most Afro-Americans, who were of mixed blood; a consciousness based on culture must confront the fact that cultures change and are subject to contradictory interpretations and definitions. A cultural definition of blackness would establish an ideological criterion for inclusion in the black "race" and exclude many persons who are racially "black" by U.S. standards. (The 1924 UNIA Convention unanimously excommunicated Du Bois from the black community.)[71]
Miscegenation would have contradictory effects. The U.S. characterization of mixed-marriage offspring as black meant that intermarriage would increase the proportion of people socially defined as blacks; yet mulattoes would have every incentive to acculturate to white norms and, after their black hue was bleached out over generations of intermarriage with the light majority, "pass" for white. Garvey was correct, by his lights, in seeing extinction of both races through integration, social equality, and intermarriage. The Messenger almost admitted as much in 1927 when it ran a symposium based on a series of questions addressed to prominent Afro-American intellectuals. Randolph's magazine asked whether the attainment of equality would "result in the disappearance of the Negro population through amalgamation?" If so, "do you consider the present efforts to inculcate and develop a race consciousness to be futile and confusing?" If full equality meant extinction, "Do you desire to see the Aframerican group maintain its identity and the trend toward amalgamation cease?" Finally, "Can a minority group like the Aframerican maintain separate identity and group consciousness, obtain industrial and social equality with the citizens of the majority group, and mingle freely with them?"[72]
Garvey's criticism of the mulatto elite was, however, based more on hurtful experience than on theories of racial purity. In Jamaica, Liberia, and the United States, light-skinned blacks often considered themselves superior to dark-skinned ones. Although discussion of this incendiary topic within the Afro-American community was strongly discouraged, and the very existence of colorism denied (especially by its chief practitioners), Garvey had suffered from racist treatment and slurs from his racial compatriots both in Jamaica and in the United States. Despite his rhetoric, Garvey's criterion for blackness was ideological and cultural, not biological; mulattoes held high posts in the UNIA. At the very time Garvey was attacking Briggs as a white "Negro for convenience," he warmly welcomed blacks of all hues into the UNIA. When Garvey criticized the light-skinned, assimilationist blacks--"they believe that, in time, through miscegenation, the American race will be of their type"--he voiced an anger felt by many dark-hued African Americans, even as he provided fuel for KKK fires.
Randolph's assimilationist position encountered its own difficulties. Integration and assimilation were impossible goals for most blacks in an era of virulent and often homicidal white racism. Most whites shunned association with blacks on a basis of equality, and ridiculed blacks who sought such association as hating their own color and wishing that they were white--a charge that Garvey reiterated. Assimilation is much more difficult when demanded than when voluntary. Forced assimilation is seen as capitulation, not choice, degrading rather than self-affirming; it coerces an individual into an unwanted identity rather than allowing an individual to cultivate her own personality and values. As McKay's experience would demonstrate, no black, however educated, could move in even the most enlightened white circles without suddenly and unexpectedly encountering lacerating humiliation and abuse. Although Randolph was well received at public meetings of white radicals and certain white unions, and accorded equality at the ILGWU's vacation retreat, his education, ideology, and social position were very unusual for a black (or a white). And how many of the whites who applauded Randolph at public gatherings would have welcomed him into their homes? Owen's brother Toussaint paid for his life for his faith in white radical egalitarianism. Closing his successful tailor shop in the South, he moved North only to die destitute when the SP-led garment unions denied him membership.[73]
Randolph's Eurocentric universalism was as problematic as Garvey's race consciousness. Messenger writers often used words such as "black" and "dark" as synonyms for evil, and "white" as connoting good. Their characterization of a prominent white official as "white outside, but black inside"[74] was meant as a severe criticism. Randolph was acutely aware of the horrors of "Western Civilization" and the class, gender, and racial exploitation that constituted the very foundations of its economic, cultural, political, and social structures. Despite this awareness, he accepted many of Western Civilization's essential claims and considered a privileged set of white, Western ideals--science, technology, progress, representative democracy, and Enlightenment universalism--as unquestioned, eternal verities to which all peoples must conform.
Randolph was the antithesis of a multiculturalist. He never seriously considered the possibility that non-white, non-industrialized peoples could meaningfully contribute to world civilization. The Messenger implied that "Africans of the Congo and the Fiji Islanders" were savages, spoke of the "dark, wild jungles of Africa," and slanderously equated "the wild men from Borneo or the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands" with lynch-law white terrorists. Randolph believed that Africa was backward and incapable, for the moment, of self-government. He claimed that "to separate the Negro peoples from modern, scientific Western Civilization and culture would wreak irreparable injury upon their progress, in fact, they would relapse into barbarism and savagery." Though contact with the West resulted in oppression, "it is only out of this exploitation of the weak by the strong, a sort of struggle between the classes, that the weak will ever prepare itself for achieving its own emancipation."[75] Garvey believed that this apprenticeship had passed, its mission fulfilled; Randolph had his doubts.
Du Bois shared Randolph's sentiment, and even Garvey believed that emigrants from the New World would industrialize, develop, and modernize Africa. Garvey based his own redemptive message on other Western concepts such as race and nationality. (The very concept of "Africa" was largely a white, Western invention.) Even J.A. Rogers and George Wells Parker claimed not that contemporary Africa offered a valid alternative to Western values, but that it had played a large and unacknowledged role in fostering Western civilization and philosophy. Rogers and Parker argued that these accomplishments from the distant past demonstrated the capacities of black peoples and promised renewed black world leadership in the future; they admitted that Africans had long fallen behind the white world, although through no fault of their own. Garvey never convincingly explained how African peoples could adopt Western technology (which strongly implied Western forms of economic organization, and their corresponding psychological and moral sensibilities) while retaining their distinctive native cultures. Indeed, reconciling this contradiction was scarcely an issue with one who spoke of dreadnoughts and overweening power. Garvey, as firmly as Randolph, usually rejected the traditional black nationalist "Ethiopeanism" (at times enunciated by Du Bois) that posited a distinct and superior black sensibility based on the Christian virtues. Garvey demanded that blacks compete with whites on their own terms, and with their own weapons.
Garvey's appeal, however, stemmed precisely from the UNIA's most fantastic and bizarre aspects, such as its Black Star Line, its "back to Africa" movement, and its orders of Knights, Barons, and Dukes. Few of Garvey's followers hoped to "return" to an Africa they had never seen; few could realistically expect even to board a Black Star Line steamer.[76] Garvey appealed to emotion rather than intellect, to a poor and despised population who (like their white counterparts) reveled in mystical, escapist fantasies of prestige and power, fostered by parades, uniforms, insignia, and rituals. "Africa," Randolph said, "is sufficiently far and distant and invested with the halo of mysticism as to ensnare the unsuspecting."[77] While Randolph hectored blacks in the tradition of white anarchists and socialists upbraiding their followers (and of ministers scolding their congregations), one historian has correctly observed that "practically every aspect of the [UNIA] was designed to bolster the black man's self-esteem and to foster pride in self." Another scholar has commented on the essential conservatism of Garveyism, which comprised "a mixture of the conventional American worldview (in its economic, political, and social vision) and a radical concept that Blacks could compete with whites as equals. This mix did not require grassroots Blacks to alter radically their conception of the world, except for their own place in it, which would of course be radically improved."[78] Moreover, Garvey claimed that blacks could save themselves without the cooperation of whites. The allure of this belief is obvious.
Randolph preached an icy, rational creed that demanded a total transformation in black self-identity and the cooperation of a hateful and hating white race; Garvey gave African Americans the comforting news that if they only recognized their magnificence, they could succeed on their own. Randolph's message of class solidarity contradicted the experiences of African-American workers and formed an impossible basis for action in the face of unrelenting hostility. Garvey, on the contrary, appealed to blacks on the basis of their own traditions, culture, values, and experience. As George Frederickson observed, the UNIA adapted itself "to the needs and opinions of local black communities in ways that more intellectually self-conscious and ideologically precise organizations would have been unable to do. The eclectic and ambitious quality of populist ideologies is a source of strength when it comes to organizing relatively inarticulate people who know that something is terribly wrong but resist abstract and rationalized interpretations of what it is." Frederickson noted the possible retrogressive ideological pitfalls into which such populism may fall; Judith Stein has argued that the UNIA's loose, adaptable structure generated organizational impotence and division as well.[79] But Randolph's FNF, Garvey's UNIA, Du Bois's NAACP, Briggs's ABB, and Trotter's NERL all had both weaknesses and strengths; in the climate of class and racial oppression of the 1920s, only their weaknesses mattered.
Notes:
[1] "A Paramount Chief for the Negro Race," TCR, March 1920.
[2] ibid.
[3] "A Letter from Marcus Garvey," TCR, April 1920; "The UNIA Convention," TCR, June 1920.
[4] "Marcus Garvey," TCR, August 1919.
[5] "The Black Star Line," TCR, December 1919.
[6] "The Universal Negro Improvement Association," TCR, May 1920.
[7] ibid; "Editor's Note," TCR, December 1919.
[8] Negro Congress Bulletin, August 6, 1921, and August 24, 1921, FSAA, Reels 1, 7. Robert Hill (Racial and Radical, lxii-lxiii) quotes white Communist Joseph Kornfeder as testifying many years later that "we created a bulletin which was dressed up as a news bulletin in such a way as if it was coming from Garvey's organization.... The Negro papers, of which there were several hundred weeklies, thought it was coming from the convention." This may well be true; but Kornfeder's memory clearly misled him on other issues. For example, he claimed that UNIA conventions were biennial rather than annual and that the Workers party "sent a large delegation" to the 1922 convention, whereas in fact the delegation had only four members.
[9] "Garvey Turns Informer," TCR, November 1921; CB to MG, August 15, 1921, MGP III, 667-668.
[10] Citing McKay's autobiography, Hill ("Racial and Radical: Cyril V. Briggs, THE CRUSADER Magazine, and the African Blood Brotherhood," his introduction to the reprinted Crusader, xl), claims that Stokes represented the legal, aboveground Party, and that Robert Minor advocated an illegal, underground organization. However, McKay, LWFH 159-162, ridicules Stokes at some length for her conspiratorial mannerisms and advocacy of an illegal party.
[11] MG, introducing Rose Pastor Stokes, August 19, 1921, MGP III, 675-6.
[12] ibid.
[13] Convention Speech by Rose Pastor Stokes, August 19, 1921, MGP III 676-681.
[14] ibid.
[15] MG, closing remarks after speech of Rose Pastor Stokes, August 19, 1921, MGP III, 681.
[16] "To New Negroes Who Really Seek Liberation," FSAA, Reel 21.
[17] ibid.
[18] ibid.
[19] UNIA paraphrase of MG speech under heading "Bolshevism in Flight," August 26, 1921, MGP III, 691-2; "Garvey Shows His Hand," TCR, October 1921.
[20] "Mr. Garvey and the ABB," FSAA, Reel 1.
[21] MG Speech, September 4, 1921, MGP IV, 23-28; "Will Not Cooperate, Says Garvey," TCR, November 1921.
[22] "More Wobbling Leadership," TCR, October 1921.
[23] "Briggs Says Garvey Lies," TCR, October 1921; Snippet in TCR, October 1921.
[24] "More Wobbling Leadership," TCR, October 1921.
[25] "Is This Not Treason," TCR, October 1921.
[26] "More Wobbling Leadership," TCR, October 1921; "Is This Not Treason?," TCR, October 1922.
[27] "Will Not Cooperate, Says Garvey," TCR, November 1921.
[28] "Lessons in Tactics," TCR, November 1921.
[29] "How Can We Separate Them?," TCR, November 1921.
[30] "A Free Africa," TCR, October 1921.
[31] "Garvey Shows His Hand," TCR, October 1921; "A Free Africa," TCR, October 1921.
[32] "Stupid Tactical Blunders," TCR, October 1921.
[33] "Garvey Turns Informer," TCR, November 1921.
[34] "As to Morality," TCR, November 1921.
[35] UNIA press release, December 19, 1921, in FSAA, Reel 1.
[36] ABB press release, December 19, 1921, FSAA, Reel 1; Report of Agent "800," December 19, 1921, in FSAA, Reel 1.
[37] "On With the Liberation Struggle," TCR, January-February 1922; "The Inevitable," TCR, January-February 1922; "Garvey Arrested," TCR, January-February 1922; Crichlow, "What I Know About Liberia," TCR, December 1921, January-February 1922.
[38] "The Workers Party, Marcus Garvey, and the Negro," TCR, January-February, 1921.
[39] Agent "800" reported on April 12, 1922 that Briggs suspended The Crusader because of bad checks returned by news agents and that ABB revenue had fallen off sharply because 90% of its members were unemployed because of the recession. However, another agent, Andrew Battle, stated on October 2, 1922, that Mrs. Briggs said that CB suspended his publication because of U.S. government opposition.
[40] Joseph Tucker, Special Report, August 18, 1923.
[41] Joseph Tucker, Special Report, December 1, 1923, FSAA Reel 1; GSS and TL, "Shafts and Darts, a Page of Calumny and Satire," TM, June 1925.
[42] Joseph Tucker, Special Report, December 1, 1923, FSAA Reel 1; GSS and TL, "Shafts and Darts, a Page of Calumny and Satire," TM, June 1925, 231, 238.
[43] Herbert Aptheker reprints an ABB statement from 1923 and "A Call to Action," the founding manifesto of the American Negro Labor Congress, in Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People of the United States (Secaucus: 1973), III, 413-420, 488-493. Philip S. Foner and James S. Allen reprint a 1922 Program of The African Blood Brotherhood (with some of their own commentary) in American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, (Philadelphia, 1987), I, 15-23. This Program largely restated ABB ideas discussed above, including some strident criticism of Garvey and the UNIA. In advocating a united Negro Front, however, it was influenced by the CP practice of having both a legal, above-ground party, and a secret, underground organization. "Such a movement could be carried on openly in the North, but would have to be built up secretly in the South in order to protect those members living in the South and to safeguard the organization from premature attack. Within this Federation a secret protective organization should be developed--the real Power--to the membership of which should be admitted only the best and most courageous of the race. The Protective organization would have to function under strict military discipline, ready to act a moment's notice whenever defense and protection are necessary."
The ABB also proclaimed that "It is the Negroes resident in America--whether native or foreign born--who are destined to assume the leadership of our people in a powerful world movement for Negro liberation. The American Negro by virtue of being part of the population of a great empire, has acquired certain knowledge in the waging of modern warfare, the operation of industries, etc. This country is the base for easy contact with the whole world, and the United States is destined, until the Negro race is liberated, to become the centre of the Negro World Movement. It is in this country, especially, that the Negro must be strong. It is from here than most of the leaders and pioneers who will carry the message across the world will go forth."
For more information on the ABB see Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 (Blomington, 1998), especially pp. 132-154. For information on the American Negro Labor Congress see Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans (Jackson, 1998). For an account of Harlem radicalism during the depression see Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Great Depression (Urbana, 1983).
[44] Interview with CO and APR by C. Mowbray White for the National Civic Federation, August 1920, MGP II, 609-612. White said that Owen did most of the talking, but Randolph concurred. He said that Owen "spoke substantially as follows," meaning that the quotes are probably not exact. I have corrected grammatical errors and capitalized "Negro," which White did not.
[45] APR, "Garveyism," TM, September 1921. In April 1922 ("Garvey Unfairly Attacked"), Randolph reiterated that Garvey "has done much good work in putting into many Negroes a backbone where for years they have had only a wishbone. He has stimulated race pride.... He has inspired an interest in Negro traditions, Negro history, Negro literature, Negro art and culture."
[46] "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, January 1923; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, November 1920; "Garveyism," TM, September 1921.
[47] "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, January 1923; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, November 1920; "Garveyism," TM September 1921.
[48] APR, "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922.
[49] "Garvey Unfairly Attacked," TM, April 1922.
[50] "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, December 1922; "Garveyism," TM, September 1921.
[51] "Garvey's Social Equality Cables," TM, October 1921.
[52] "Garveyism," TM, September 1921; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, February 1923; "Should Marcus Garvey Be Deported," TM, September 1922.
[53] "Marcus Garvey! The Black Imperial Wizard Becomes Messenger Boy of the White Ku Klux Kleagle," TM, July 1922.
[54] "Marcus Garvey!" TM, July 1922; "Find the Liar," TM, February 1923.
[55] "Marcus Garvey!," TM, July 1922; "Should Marcus Garvey Be Deported?," TM, September 1922; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, February 1923; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, December 1922; "Garveyism and Anarchism," TM, October 1922; "The UNIA," TM, August 1923. U.S. law provided for the deportation of immigrant anarchists. Randolph apparently forgot the declamation of the Messenger's poet, Walter Everett Hawkins, made in the that magazine's important "The Negro and the New Social Order" (TM, March 1919): "I am an Iconoclast... I am an Anarchist... I am an Agnostic."
[56] The phrase is from Lewis, Du Bois... 1919-1963, 81. Lewis dates the letter January 12; the version in MGP, V, is dated January 15.
[57] Bagnall, "The Madness of Marcus Garvey," TM, March 1923.
[58] Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, 1976), 331, citing the Amsterdam News. Both of these sources are hostile to Randolph.
[59] Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917-1928 (Westport, 1975), 132-175, discusses the "Garvey Must Go" campaign. Although he judiciously sorts the evidence and criticizes all participants, he concludes (142) that "to invite the Department of Justice to prosecute one's black opponent was nearly as despicable as inviting the Klan to do so." In "Seeing Red," xiii, he refuses to condemn even Afro-American secret police agents on the grounds that "the African American population was then, as it is now, large and diverse, with a multiplicity of political viewpoints."
[60] MG speech, December 18, 1921, MGP IV, 288
[61] MG Statement, December 31, 1922, MGP IV, 316-317; MG Speech, August 20, 1922, MGP IV, 928.
[62] Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (Vintage: New York, 1986), 315-357, discusses the evolution of the CP's stance on the problems of Afro-Americans. Draper corresponded at some length with Briggs, and consulted those few issues of the Crusader which were available when he first published his book in 1960. For a more recent discussion of this issue see Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (Verso: London, 1998), 160-163, 177-178. James convincingly argues that Briggs was simply wrong in some of his key assertions to Draper. Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1996), 266, n.5, finds that Briggs was wrong about another key assertion he made to Draper. Robert Hill, "Race and Radicalism," finds numerous egregious errors in Briggs's later accounts of his activities.
[63] MG Statement, December 31, 1922, MGP IV, 316-317; MG Speech, August 20, 1922, MGP IV, 928.
[64] MG Speech, August 13, 1922, MGP IV, 850.
[65] MG speech, August 13, 1922, MGP IV, 850. Curiously, Garvey seriously misspelled Claude McKay's name. Garvey conceivably did this deliberately, as McKay was popular among militant Afro-Americans and West Indians. Garvey seldom if ever quoted McKay's famous "If We Must Die," preferring instead slaveholder Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death," which he cited on numerous occasions.
[66] NW, May 6, 1922, reprinted a New York World article which correctly described the police riot. It also ran its own article, "Claude McKay, Negro 'Constab' Editor, Cause of a Disturbance." Although this article accurately described the riot, and even said that the organizers of the dance were consulting an attorney (presumably for possible action against the police), it was subtitled "Whites Object to [McKay's] Dancing with White Woman at a Ball--Advocate of Social Equality." It also claimed that "happenings of this kind tend to show the impossibility of Negroes ever gaining social recognition among the whites." The Negro World falsely implied that it was the white radicals, rather than the police, who objected to interracial dancing. Garvey misled his auditors about this incident in a speech on August 13, 1922 (MGP IV, 850).
[67] MG Speech, August 13, 1922, MGP IV, 849; MG speech, July 14, 1921, MGP IV, 849.
[68] MG Editorial, July 16, 1922, MGP IV, 728.
[69] For an incendiary example of Garvey's praise for radicals abroad see his eulogy for Lenin, January 27, 1924 in MGP V.
[70] MG, NW, February 24, 1923, quoted in Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, 1976), 62. Garvey's reference to Hudson Bay reveals a casualness about details of geography and other matters that subjected him to much ridicule.
[71] For a diverse range of opinions on the issue of black identity see Gerald Early, ed., Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation (New York, 1993).
[72] "Group Tactics and Ideals," TM, January 1927 and succeeding months. Other questions were also asked.
[73] Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York, 1973), 142-143; Kornweibel, No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917-1928 (Westport, 1975), 57, 191-192.
[74] "Who's Who, Justice White," TM, July 1921.
[75] "Self-Government," TM, December 1920; William Pickens, "These 'Colored' United States," TM, January 1923; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, November 1920.
[76] In the words of distinguished historian George Fredrickson, "Disillusionment with the United States and the prospects it offered for the equality and dignity of black people, rather than a strong attraction to Africa, was the common threat running through the entire history of African-American separatism." George Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995), 287.
[77] "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, December 1922.
[78] Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York, 1999), 94.
[79] Fredrickson, Black Liberation; 173; Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rogue, 1986), passim.
Before the 1921 convention, Briggs generally supported Garvey and the UNIA. As we have seen, Briggs shared most of Garvey's major ideas: "race first" and race pride, a strong Negro state in Africa, racial internationalism, self-sufficient Negro economic and cultural development in the United States, and militant self-defense against white terrorism. Even UNIA and ABB ideas on class were initially similar. The early Negro World spoke in terms of class as well as race, especially under the editorships of Domingo and Harrison. Garvey himself, while denouncing the racism of American unions and radicals, vigorously supported unions and strikes in black-majority nations, acknowledged radical European support for the UNIA, and praised Lenin, Trotsky, and the Soviet Union. Briggs wavered in his own views on the comparative relevance of race and class, and sometimes questioned the feasibility of allying with white radicals. Until August 1921, Briggs's criticisms of the UNIA centered upon its election of the world leader of Africans at the 1920 Convention, and the management of the Black Star Line (BSL).
Briggs welcomed Garvey's announcement that the 1920 UNIA Convention would elect a world leader of the African race, even if such an election offended the self-proclaimed and white-appointed "leaders" who lacked all mandate from the people themselves.
This announcement of an election of a paramount chief is the most important that has emanated from any Negro source since the glory that was Egypt's and the grandeur that was Ethiopia's and the passing of the great medieval Negro States of the Sudan and West Africa.[1]
The elected leader "should be accepted as such by the entire race," presently so divided that no leader could speak with authority. In order that the elected leader truly represent the Negro people, however, the "International Convention of Negroes" must include "all purely Negro bodies," not merely the UNIA. The election of a world leader would so "greatly affect the Negro race" that it must be "open to all Negro organizations and to the Negro press."[2]
Garvey praised Briggs's editorial and invited the ABB to the convention. Briggs, however, replied that Garvey had missed his most important point: all Negro organizations, not just the ABB, must receive invitations. Unless the leader truly represented a consensus among blacks, the election would "end in failure of the most farcical kind and in all probability will engender enmity and division in place of the unity that Mr. Garvey, along will all other Negro patriots, desire[s]." Briggs warned that blacks would no more tolerate a leader appointed by the UNIA than one selected by whites. Garvey responded by belatedly inviting all Negro organizations and allowing them to select the leader of American blacks; but he reserved selection of "His Highness, the Potentate," to UNIA members alone. The convention, Briggs concluded, was thus reduced to "a gigantic farce."[3]
Long an advocate of Negro business, Briggs originally thought the Black Star Line "a good business proposition." Asserting that Garvey had already remedied some initial managerial errors, the Crusader warned that "because of his splendid work in the past, and the greater promise of the future," any diminution of Garvey's influence would harm the race; but it advised that Garvey "take the race and his associates more into his confidence as befits a democratic era. His mind has been too imperialistic and arbitrary in the past."[4] In December 1919 the Crusader again guardedly endorsed the Black Star Line, but warned that it required its own source of financing (black-owned banks) because whites would boycott a Negro corporation. The Crusader could not vouch for the honesty of the BSL's promoters, but averred that "when men are willing to die for a cause they are not likely to be dishonest to that cause. Mr. Garvey has suffered enough persecution in his fight for the race to earn himself the status of a martyr and a full-grown niche in Ethiopia's hall of fame."[5]
In early 1921, however, Briggs became an editor of the Emancipator, a weekly newspaper that was highly critical of the BSL. The Crusader also criticized Garvey. It began by calling the UNIA "the biggest thing in modern Negro organizations" which had "ramifications in every part of the globe. (On a genuine cooperative basis it could be made a wonderful factor for Negro improvement.) Collapse of the movement or failure of any of its important enterprises would be nothing less than a racial calamity."[6]
Yet such collapse already threatened the BSL, the Crusader contended, and would occur unless UNIA members and BSL investors "take a larger personal interest in the control of the organization." Briggs alleged that the two ships supposedly owned by the BSL in fact belonged to white corporations; he also denounced Garvey's reticence about BSL finances and his ad hominem abuse of critics. As late as April 1921, however, Briggs urged that blacks join both the ABB and the UNIA, which he had earlier called two distinct parts of "the movement to free Africa and raise the status of the Negro everywhere."[7]
In the spring of 1921, however, Briggs joined the Workers (Communist) party, for which he envisioned the ABB as a recruiting center. The ABB, which had four delegates at the 1921 UNIA convention, published a weekly "Negro Congress Bulletin and News Service" (NCB). Although clearly identified as an ABB publication, its seemingly neutral and even flattering tone apparently convinced many blacks that it was an official UNIA publication. (The UNIA had published an official convention bulletin in 1920. In addition, some blacks confused the ABB and the UNIA.) The NCB for August 6 praised the Soviet Union as having "aggressively championed the cause of all the oppressed" and the Third International for demanding as a condition of affiliation that all member parties "whole-heartedly and actively support the fight" for colonial liberation. The second UNIA Convention delegates, it thundered, would be "cowardly and servile" if they shrank from endorsing the Comintern. Although a "spirit of racial and national assertion and pride" was necessary for Africa's liberation, blacks should not alienate white forces that sought the destruction of European colonialism. The NCB for August 24 proclaimed the necessity of a united front with Indian, Irish, and Turkish nationalists "and with all other forces now or in the future menacing the British Empire in particular and the capitalist-imperialist system in general.... Since it is under the capitalist-imperialist system [that] we Negroes suffer, we must boldly seek the destruction of that system and to that end seek cooperation with such other forces" such as "Socialism [and] Bolshevism." The NCB also demanded the creation of labor organizations in Africa and a secret Pan-African Army, modeled on the Irish Republican Army, which would "drive respect and terror into the hearts of the White Capitalist planters."[8]
A federation of diverse organizations united by a centralized leadership, Briggs believed, would enlist more Negroes than a single, amorphous organization representing all blacks. In the middle of the August 1921 convention, Briggs wrote Garvey advocating mutual cooperation between the ABB and the UNIA. The two groups cherished "the same aims and ideals" but "are yet approaching our object by somewhat different, though always parallel, roads." The ABB was "essentially a secret organization, though at present engaged in open recruiting" in the northern United States. It aimed at "immediate protection" and "eventual revolutionary liberation in Africa and other countries where Negroes constitute a majority of the population." The widespread belief that the ABB fomented the Tulsa resistance, "while not literally true can still give you an idea of the nature of our organization."[9]
Briggs secured permission for his friend Rose Pastor Stokes to address the convention. Stokes, a white Communist of working-class origins who had attained national fame by her marriage to a millionaire Socialist, was in some ways an odd choice on Briggs's part, emphasizing as she did the overwhelmingly white composition of the Communist movement. Perhaps, as secret police agents reported, Stokes helped finance the ABB. Perhaps Briggs could not find a prominent black Communist whom Garvey would allow to speak. (Garvey, however, traditionally invited black leaders, including outspoken opponents, to UNIA conventions). Briggs himself was nearly white in appearance, and handicapped by a severe stutter. Briggs's main consideration probably involved international Communist politics: Stokes was a Workers party expert on black affairs, and would write the final draft of the Comintern's "Negro Resolution," promulgated at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922.[10]
Garvey was acutely aware of the extensive governmental surveillance of UNIA activities. He distanced the UNIA from white radical organizations from motives of caution, organizational autonomy, and his own ideological predilections. In introducing Stokes he subtly differentiated her advocacy of freedom for the Soviet Union (which he characterized as white) from the UNIA's demand for black rights and African independence. He introduced Stokes as one who was "endeavoring to free struggling white humanity." She and her husband had been persecuted "for the cause they represent. She desires to say a few words to us in convention, in her own way." Distancing himself and the UNIA from Stokes and the Communists, Garvey emphasized that "Liberty Hall welcomes all friends of liberty. We welcome the Irish, we welcome the Jews, the Egyptians, the Hindus, and all peoples struggling for liberty, because we are in sympathy with suffering humanity everywhere. But that does not mean to say that we support every program, every method that is being used.... Her cause, I believe, is dear to her, even as our cause is dear to us.[11]
The UNIA, Garvey continued, "adopts no one form of government" and did not endorse the Soviet Union or Bolshevism. He hoped that the press would not misinterpret the UNIA as pro-Soviet or radical, but recognize it as "an organized body of people struggling towards freedom... [who] are not going to stop at anything to get freedom." The UNIA welcomed "this friend of Soviet Russia to tell us a little of what her people are doing to get liberty, and if we can find any good in what she says we shall certainly be quick to seize upon it and adopt it for our own benefit."[12]
In a rhetorical style greatly resembling Garvey's, Stokes emphasized that the evils of capitalism--starvation amid plenty, unemployment amid idle machinery--afflicted members of every race. The working masses have "but one historic task before them," which was the overthrow of capitalism and the return of the land and the factories to the people. "Whenever men are oppressed we say there is neither color, nor creed, nor nation. We stand together against all oppressors." She acknowledged the existence of racial prejudice "chiefly among the ignorant masses" who did not realize that if they would be free, "they must free all workers together. We can have no liberty except in the liberty of all the people of all the world." Stokes claimed that
In Soviet Russia they have decided that Persia shall be free; that India shall be free; that Africa shall be free. And it is not merely words; it is not sentiment that they express; they have given of their gold; they have given of their wealth, which represents the labor power of the Russian workers and the peasants; and they have given not only of these things; they have given of their very all for the liberation of the darker races of the world. Go East and you will find the red armies of Russia are marching shoulder to shoulder with the black men; they march with the darker races. We say we will give you not only our wealth and our labor, but we will give you our lives when necessary.[13]
Stokes identified capitalist imperialism as the main threat to Africa. The class conflict "overshadows every other element in the conflict of peoples and races and humanity. We must stand together as workers." In every colonized nation "you will find the strong and the mighty who live upon the blood and the tears of the common people. You will find them hand in glove with European imperialism; they work with them and enslave their own people." Blacks must cooperate with the white revolutionaries "just as we are willing and eager to go with you in the struggle of liberty."[14]
Stokes's speech was received with great enthusiasm. At its conclusion, however, Garvey subtly undermined its main point. Thanking Stokes for her "splendid address," Garvey said that Liberty Hall was "a great university" to which the UNIA invited "professors from the four corners of the world" and of every point of view. After hearing all sides, the UNIA would determine its policy. He gave Stokes "the best wishes of the representatives of the Negro peoples of the world to the struggling workers in Russia and elsewhere. They are seeking, I understand from you, freedom from their capitalist oppressors. We are seeking freedom in Africa. Later on, if the Soviets can help us to free Africa, we will do all we can to help free them."[15] The convention did not endorse Bolshevism or the Soviet Union, or make any overtures to the revolutionary working class.
Toward the end of the convention Briggs and the ABB published a short pamphlet, "To New Negroes Who Really Seek Liberation," which they distributed not only at the convention but also nationally. In an implicit slap at Garvey, it said, "WOE TO THOSE WHO SHAMELESSLY FOR THEIR OWN PERSONAL AGGRANDIZEMENT AND GLORY SHALL TREAT LIGHTLY THE WELFARE AND HONOR OF THE RACE." The ABB repeated that Negroes must "foster the divisions in the camp of the enemy and make alliances that strengthen those that are with us." Blacks in Africa and the Americas suffered more than anyone "from the tyranny and degradation of Imperialism.... Africa is partitioned among the big white Powers, all of whom keep up a well-equipped and strong army in their respective 'colonies' to keep our people in subjection and to exploit them mercilessly. On the American continent the same thing is developing. One after the other the free Negro republics are being subjugated by American marines who establish a rule of terror, brutalizing and torturing our people." Revolt "while Capitalism is still in power in the big white countries" equalled suicide. Nor would "moving from one 'colony' to another" help, because "the same oppressor awaits us everywhere." Even the few countries still free would be subjugated whenever capitalists profited from doing so.[16]
Vastly misrepresenting the Soviet Union, Briggs hailed it as the "one great exception which stands out as a beacon of hope to all the oppressed." In Soviet Russia "the oppressed took charge of the government" and were "conducting an aggressive struggle in behalf of the oppressed in all lands" as demonstrated by its "treaties of brotherly protection" with Persia, Afghanistan, China, and Turkey, and its granting of independence to some of its own former subject nationalities, such as Latvia, Georgia, and Armenia. "Soviet Russia is to-day the greatest menace to Imperialism. Her doctrine of freedom and equality for all peoples is diametrically opposed to the doctrine of exploitation, oppression and degradation [practiced by] England, France and the United States." Therefore, all imperialist nations slandered the Soviet Union. The day that European workers revolt against the "capitalist exploiters of black and white toilers will be the day of your opportunity to conquer power and seize control of the continent of Africa... The cause of the white workers will be the cause of the black workers, the cause of a free Africa the cause of a Europe freed from capitalist control." White capitalists trembled because "the revolution of the oppressed and exploited of their own race threatens to shake into dust their power. The only certain way, and therefore the best way, of reducing the enemy is to besiege and destroy him in his own land. Only then could colonized peoples "successfully rise and free themselves from their aggressors." Fighting alone, "without allying ourselves with all those forces that are seeking [our enemy's] destruction," was futile.[17]
The ABB demanded that the Convention "organize and prepare our people so that they shall be ready when needed to defend themselves, that they may be ready after the downfall of Capitalism to establish their own governments." In the meantime it must protect the Negro's standard of living, stop lynching and peonage, and forge a federation of all Negro organizations, "molding all Negro factions into one mighty and irresistible factor.... Unless these things are accomplished.... this Congress will have been in vain and every delegate disgraced!" The pamphlet ended by promising that the Crusader would publish "a full and impartial report of the convention" and listing the four ABB delegates.[18]
Despite the ABB's exhortations, however, the convention achieved little of substance, especially compared to the epochal 1920 gathering. It did, however, purge those whom Garvey blamed for the catastrophes of the Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation, and greatly centralized power in Garvey's hands. As the convention neared its end, the ABB's "Negro Congress Bulletin" protested the convention's inaction, whereupon a delegate demanded that the ABB explain what UNIA loyalists regarded as "fantastic misrepresentation" and scurrilous abuse. According to the UNIA's account, no one responded when the names of the ABB delegates were called. When an examination of the delegates' credentials was called for, "a man was seen to rise hastily and scurry across the hall, plunge through the doorway, beating his way in precipitate flight towards Seventh avenue. The erstwhile indignant House rocked with laughter." Garvey then attacked the ABB as an "advocate of Sovietism, Bolshevism and Radicalism, the paid servant of certain destructive white elements which aimed at exploiting Negroes for their own subservient ends. Finding that the Universal Negro Improvement Association held nothing in common [with it], it had set itself to discredit the work of this organization." The convention unanimously revoked the credentials of the four ABB delegates.[19]
Briggs responded with a leaflet, "Mr. Garvey and the ABB," that complained that the ABB had issued its program for the convention only after twenty-five days of inaction. Two hours later Garvey denounced the ABB and expelled its delegation. Briggs then denounced Garvey's profession of loyalty to imperialist and white supremacist governments:
What does Mr. Garvey mean by pledging Negro loyalty to the United States Government and giving that Government a blanket endorsement for all its Future Wars, whether those wars be against friendly Soviet Russia, racial Japan, China or Haiti; and whether the U.S. Government take steps to protect Negroes in their Constitutional Rights or Refuse, as in the Past, to take such Steps? What does he mean by advising Negroes to "be loyal to all flags under which they live"? How can Negroes liberate Africa if they remain loyal to Great Britain, France, Belgium and other European plunderers? Has Mr. Garvey a "yellow streak" [in] that he has not denounced the continued presence and savage acts of the United States Marines in Haiti? And lynchings and race riots in the United States? Why has not Mr. Garvey given support to the idea proposed by the ABB of organizing Negroes for self-defense and protection?.... Why has he tried to make the Congress believe that it was to legislate for a government in existence, rather than to formulate a program for the liberation of an enslaved and oppressed people?.... Why has he ignored the Mohammedan and Ethiopian Movements in Africa--the two greatest factors working for liberation in that continent?[20]
Garvey in turn blasted Briggs as a white man who posed as a "Negro for convenience." Garvey charged that Briggs was "operating under the auspices of the Communist Party" and wanted Negroes "to destroy everything we come into contact with; to smash up governments and destroy capital." This, Garvey claimed, would cause political anarchy and economic collapse. Garvey denounced the radicals as "agents of other governments.... Socialistic parasites who are receiving money from the Soviets and Communism to destroy governments everywhere and bring about universal chaos and destruction." Taunted for his increasingly accommodationist tone--but acutely aware of the government's intensive surveillance of all black radicals--Garvey did demand that blacks remain loyal to whatever flag they lived under. He also rejected Briggs's proposed alliance between the UNIA and the ABB. The UNIA, he said, "can form no alliance with any organization of Negroes working secretly to attain and enjoy rights and privileges which ought to be won in a manly open fight.... It does not intend to be trapped by the white man who invented the ABB this year nor next year."[21] William Ferris, literary editor of the Negro World, challenged Briggs to repeat his demand that Negroes refuse to fight for the United States against any nation of color, saying that Briggs would "then discover how long the American government would tolerate disloyalty."[22] At the same time Garvey attacked Du Bois, began his campaign against social equality and miscegenation, and upbraided blacks for having achieved nothing on their own for hundreds of years.
Briggs indignantly replied that the ABB delegates had merely presented a concrete program for the consideration of UNIA delegates and had suffered expulsion for their pains. He denied operating under the auspices of the Communist party and stated that the ABB demanded the destruction not of capital and of government, but of capitalism and of imperialist governments. Destruction of such governments was "the surest means whereby the liberation of Africa can be achieved." Negroes owed no loyalty to racist or imperialist governments. Briggs ironically noted that while Garvey denounced him as a Bolshevik, Du Bois made the same accusation against Garvey. "Marcus says we are Bolshevists. If by that he means that we are determined to free Africa and liberate the Negro people of the world by all and every means, why, then, we are Bolshevists! Bolshevists or anything else for the Liberation of Africa!"[23]
The Crusader also accepted Ferris's challenge and repeated, in capital letters, its demand that Negroes accept imprisonment or death rather than fight for the United States against Japan or Mexico. Briggs asserted that "the Negro owes no loyalty to a government that is disloyal (by acquiescence in his oppression, etc.) to the Negro." Loyalty began on the part of the government, not the citizen, and "until a government proves loyal to the Negro the editor of the Crusader sees no reason for preaching loyalty of the Negro to that government, and the vision of prison cells, etc., has no power to make him emulate Marcus Garvey and Major Moton in preaching such servile loyalty."[24] Briggs denounced Garvey for having
given a blanket endorsement to the Government of the United States for all its future wars--regardless of whether that government recognizes our legal claims upon it for protection of our rights as citizens of the United States or continues in its stolid refusal to recognize such claims; regardless of whether that government goes to war with Black Haiti, Yellow Japan or some other colored nation or with friendly Soviet Russia, whose actions in behalf of the Liberation Struggle of the darker races speak louder than.... [the words of hypocritical nations, and] regardless of whether the United States government goes to war in self-defense or to uphold the principle of White Supremacy so dear to the hearts of "100 per cent" white Americans.[25]
Briggs next accused Garvey of "servile fear" and "despicable cowardice," proclaimed that any race leader must accept the possibility of "imprisonment, deportation or exclusion," and denounced Garvey's new stance as "a radical departure" from "the revolutionary preachments and forcible liberation doctrines by which the fearless and earnest membership of the UNIA was attracted to the leadership of Marcus Garvey!"[26]
Ridiculing Garvey's accusations about ABB secrecy, Briggs cited U.S. labor unions and Sinn Fein as groups that had organized secretly when open functioning was impossible; similarly, the ABB's secrecy aided its effective operation in colonized areas whose governments had throttled the UNIA and banned the Negro World. "We do not care a straw for mock heroics," he said. "We seek results, and we use the methods best fitted to attain results!... Marcus Garvey is alone in his beliefs that it is good tactics to blow one's mouth off threatening one's enemies with dire things to come."[27] Briggs claimed that revolutionaries had only three options: open, militant operation resulting in persecution; open, cravenly compromising organization that would avoid repression; or secret, underground, fearless, and successful operation. The UNIA, he implied, had tried the first approach and, encountering repression, had opted for the second; the ABB championed the first where feasible, and the third where it was not.[28]
Briggs (perhaps forgetting that the Crusader had editorialized against miscegenation and that he had professed shame at his light skin) also denounced Garvey's demand for racial purity and his repudiation of social equality as capitulations to white supremacy and the KKK. Briggs indignantly charged that "His Imperial Travesty" excommunicated from the Negro race "the vast majority of the inhabitants of Africa who have grievously sinned by coming into this world in such outlawed shades as dark brown, light brown, red, yellow.... Things are so mixed up that hardly any family can show a consistency of shade in its members. Mothers will be separated from their children. Wives from husbands. Dark brother from brown brother...."[29] Briggs also attacked Garvey's assertions--made in the white press--that blacks had achieved nothing for centuries.
The "Africa for the Africans" agitation had originated with him, Briggs claimed. He demanded
an Africa really and completely free. Not an Africa whose white capitalist-imperialist bonds have been exchanged for the capitalist or feudalist bonds of a Negro Potentate, with a piratical court and an antiquated system of knights, lords and other potential parasites upon the Negro workers. The editor of the Crusader visualizes an Africa in which the workers shall control, and shall produce wealth for themselves and not for parasites.... An Africa such as there was before the misfortune of the white man's presence. An Africa such as still exists in certain inland territories where white rule is only nominal. An Africa in which the native system of Communism would reign supreme with such necessary additions to progress as the Machine Civilization of the Western World.[30]
Implying that Garvey demanded all blacks return to Africa, Briggs asserted (in words actually resembling Garvey's) that a "free and strong Africa" would automatically elevate the Negro's status everywhere in the world.[31]
Ignoring his own earlier support for the BSL, Briggs lambasted Garvey for "mixing the necessarily unfriendly (to certain whites) propaganda of the Liberation Struggle with affairs of business enterprises that, at least in the beginning, would have to depend for support upon whites."[32] He also accused Garvey of fraudulent misappropriation of funds and of lying about UNIA finances. Despite this, Briggs said that the UNIA and ABB shared the same ultimate aims and should closely cooperate. Briggs envisioned a federation of all Negro organizations and castigated Garvey's refusal even to discuss entering such a united front.
Briggs also sued Garvey for criminal libel for Garvey's assertion that Briggs was white. Garvey, convinced that the white courts would not find such an accusation libelous, nevertheless retaliated by showing the District Attorney Briggs's letter of August 15, which, Garvey claimed, revealed that Briggs sought "the overthrow of white governments."[33] Briggs countered by strongly implying that Garvey had left his wife, lived with a woman other than his wife, and had earlier fled from England after "having raped a little white girl in a friend's office."[34] Garvey in turn sued Briggs for criminal libel. This mudslinging in the white man's courts eventually resulted in both men retracting their libels.
Briggs and Garvey fought each other in the streets as well as in the press and the courts. In December 1921 some of Garvey's henchmen broke up a public ABB meeting featuring three disgruntled ex-officials of the UNIA. UNIA press releases crowed that "Garvey wins hands down the first round in his Battle Royal against the enemies of the Universal Negro Improvement Association" and boasted that the ABB's speakers were "denied a hearing" by the irate audience and had to sneak out of the hall in confusion. "The Police remained on the spot and watched the proceedings utterly powerless to stem the tide of opposition which swept the audience like a tidal wave.... [The ABB speakers were] hissed and hooted and jeered at by the gathering who were evidently determined to put a quietus on the African Blood Brotherhood movement," whose sole purpose was "a campaign of relentless warfare against the Universal Negro Improvement Association."[35]
An ABB press release headlined "Garveyites Break Up ABB Meeting--Desecrate Church" soon denounced Garvey's "Great Terror" and demanded that "the public should be protected in their right to hear whom they please." An ABB leaflet screamed in huge headlines "Of What Are They Afraid.... Be Pro-Race and Help Us Save the LIBERATION MOVEMENT...." Secret police agent 800 commented that such incidents "give Garvey more confidence, and rightfully so as they only give him a tighter hold on the masses.... Garvey is laughing up his sleeve at Briggs and he is bigger in the eyes of his members than ever." Agent 800 marveled--and complained--that "some of these same people that broke up [the ABB] meeting are the largest stockholders in Garvey's corporations" and "still have confidence in him" despite their knowledge that "Garvey has spent their money (and most of them know foolishly)." Temporarily demoralized, Briggs had the Crusader publish a devastating report on the UNIA's Liberian venture by Cyril Crichlow, former UNIA resident secretary in Liberia. Although Garvey ordered Negro World editor William Ferris to ignore the Crusader, feeling that direct response would only garner it additional publicity and subscribers, secret police agents made sure that all important UNIA officials were informed of this exposé.[36]
The Crusader positively gloated when Garvey was arrested and indicted for mail fraud. "Time and time again," it exulted, "we protested against the inconceivable stupidity of basing the Liberation movement upon the chances of the success or failure of commercial enterprises.... By constructive criticism we tried to force reforms in the management of certain of these schemes." However "fanatical allegiance to the individual above the Cause" undermined reform efforts. The Crusader also charged unnamed Negro World editors with encouraging the assassination of Garvey's opponents. It also published a devastating series of articles by Crichlow (documents hitherto suppressed by Garvey) revealing the wild impracticality of Garvey's Liberian plans and concluding that Liberia was "a fine place" to avoid. The Crusader hoped that "those Negroes who have been connected with the Liberation struggle, through the Garvey organization, will not desert the flag."[37]
In a grand finale, Briggs published the Workers party's resolution on the race problem. The Communists denounced "the brutal terror of persecution, rape and murder" inflicted upon Afro-Americans and "secret murder societies such as the Ku Klux Klan." They pledged a fight against "the anti-Negro policies of organized labor" and support for blacks "in their fight for economic, political and social equality." Implicitly criticizing "purely racial organizations which seek purely racial aims," the Communists vowed "to destroy altogether the barrier of race prejudice" that divided the workers and to "weld them into a solid union of revolutionary forces for the overthrow of their common enemy." Briggs praised the Communists as "a party which embodies the very essence of the Negro Liberation Struggle in its program." He also touted the party's eleven daily newspapers and its 50,000 members, "among them the pick of the white workers."[38] With this encomium, the Crusader, always a shoe-string operation, fell silent, probably because of bad checks from distributors, but possibly because of U.S. government intimidation.[39]
Briggs had already launched The Crusader News Service, which, he claimed, provided one hundred Afro-American publications twice a week with news about organized labor (especially whatever scant evidence he could muster demonstrating the increased racial enlightenment of white labor), and "news of general race-interest interpreted from the working class point of view."[40] He attempted to metamorphose the ABB into a UNIA without Garvey, with a sick and death benefit fund, cooperative stores, and a plan for the liberation of Africa. However, few blacks listened. Weaning Afro-Americans from the UNIA had been a raison d'étre for the ABB; once that proved impossible, it lacked a clearly-defined mission. In 1923 Briggs and the ABB transiently forged (at least on paper) their long-sought United Negro Front. A "concordat" hammered out on March 23-24 by representatives of the ABB, the NAACP, the NERL, the FNF, and two other organizations stated that "we are all striving for one great common goal" and emphatically repudiated the idea "that loyalty to any one of these organizations necessitates antagonism toward any of the others, or that membership in one in any way precludes membership and active interest in the other." This agreement, however, had scant practical effect.[41]
The ABB straggled along for some additional years; as late as 1925 George S. Schuyler of the Messenger ridiculed its pretensions, its subordination to Moscow, and its "six members who formerly assembled in weekly conclave in some friendly telephone booth or barber shop and hurled dire threats at the capitalist system"; he also satirized the ABB's Comintern-inspired rightist policy of jettisoning revolutionary slogans, adopting the trappings of American patriotism, and working within the AFL. "Rightward the course of revolution takes its way!" Schuyler wryly commented.[42] The secret police easily infiltrated the ABB, and placed its agents on the Supreme Council. Harrison, meanwhile, once again fearing white control, adamantly opposed Comintern funding, proffered by Rose Pastor Stokes, and kept his distance from the ABB. In 1925 the ABB folded into the American Negro Labor Congress (strongly denounced by Randolph), a Communist front as ineffectual as the ABB. Not until the Great Depression would the CPUSA make significant inroads among Afro-Americans.[43]
The demise of the Crusader did not mean that the radicals were finished with Garvey, however. Indeed, their campaign had just begun. The Messenger took up the cudgels when the Crusader folded. Although Randolph had implicitly criticized Garvey's African colonization plans, he had not mentioned Garvey or the UNIA by name. Until October 1920, in fact, the Messenger virtually ignored the UNIA, and concentrated its fire on the NAACP and other mainstream Afro-American institutions. Only Randolph's affiliation with the Emancipator had publicized his views about Garvey. In an unpublished interview during the 1920 UNIA convention, Owen and Randolph lambasted Garvey as "either a fool or a rogue. He is of course an uneducated man--an ignoramus, and is appealing to the Negroes through their emotional nature." If successful, Garvey would set back by ten years "the Socialist movement we are leading among blacks." The BSL was a fraud that diverted precious money from civil rights organizations. Garvey misrepresented the extent of UNIA membership and support. The two asserted that
Our Socialist movement among the Negroes of America is for equality in all things with the whites, even intermarriage. We believe the Negro the equal of the white socially, and with education he will be the equal of the white from every standpoint. Therefore we do not think it will be necessary for the Negro alone to fight this war for his freedom. If he joins with the Socialists of the world he will share equally with the white in all things when Socialism becomes the order of the day.
We don't believe the cry of the Garvey gang--"Africa for the Africans"--[any] more than we accept the cry of America for the Americans. We are not nationalists but internationalists. And when the world is Socialized the Negro and white will be equal in all countries under the sun.... We scientific-minded and higher minded Negroes do not want a Negro nation. It would forever kill our dream of world equality.[44]
The Messenger steered clear of such statements, however, until October 1920, when it published "The Garvey Movement: A Promise or a Menace," promising a detailed analysis of Garvey's ideas. The first article in this series, in December 1920, focused on the Liberty party. the Messenger then fell silent on Garvey until September 1921, after the fiasco of the UNIA's convention and Garvey's rightward lurch. Even then Randolph admitted that Garveyism could legitimately boast splendid achievements. It had taught "the need and value of organization" and "demonstrated the ability of Negroes to come together in large masses under Negro leadership." It had effectively criticized the traditional Negro leaders. It had "stimulated the pride of Negroes in Negro history and traditions, thereby helping to break down the slave psychology which throttles and strangles Negro initiative," and had "stiffened the Negroes' backbone to resist the encroachments and insults of white people. Again, it has emphasized the international character of the Negro problem."[45] Yet from this time on Randolph bitterly assailed Garvey's "back to Africa" and "race first" campaigns, his opposition to social equality and miscegenation (and consequent denigration of mulattoes), his Black Star Line, his use of violence against political opponents, and his rapprochement with the KKK.
Randolph attacked Garvey's "back to Africa" campaign as a wild, visionary scheme that "smacks of the romantic and infantile excursions of Don Quixote." Randolph recognized that blacks were unorganized, unarmed, and divided (in and out of Africa) into countless groups with differing histories, customs, traditions, and habits. They could not possibly overcome the combined opposition of the white imperialist powers. "Conquering Africa is not any less difficult than conquering Europe.... Garvey has begun Empire building too late." Even Germany was crushed by rivals "who were not interested in having any more competitors in the empire business." Garvey would also have to subjugate the native inhabitants of Africa, which "is a continent, not a nation," composed of peoples of many races, languages, and religions. Even if, per impossible, Garvey conquered Africa, he would only replace one exploiting elite with another; the histories of Haiti, Abyssinia, Russia, Japan, and other nations conclusively proved that class, not race, was the font of exploitation and oppression, and that the capitalists of all races would ruthlessly exploit the workers of their own race. "Black despotism is as objectionable as white despotism," and would as surely generate revolution.[46]
Nor would a strong and independent Africa ensure decent treatment for American blacks, as Garvey claimed; the Japanese were mistreated in the United States despite Japan's power. Randolph charged that "the white mobocratic South could not wish for a better ally than Garveyism.... To divert the Negroes' mind away from these fundamental problems [lynching, peonage, etc.] is to weaken them and strengthen the Bourbon forces of the Negro-hating South and the exploiting capitalists of America." Garvey, he said, had no domestic program, but placed all his hopes in a distant land "invested with the halo of mysticism."[47]
Africa could achieve freedom only through alliance with liberation movements of "all races, creeds, and colors," Randolph warned blacks. "Imperialism is at the bottom of African bondage. Only the abolition of imperialism can free Africa. First, the black workers in America and the West Indies must change their own social systems. They must raise the workers to power. The workers have no interest in holding colonies in subjection; for they reap no profits." Echoing Bolshevik calls for proletarian revolution as an indispensable support for revolution in the underdeveloped world, Randolph said that blacks must join with "the radical international labor and socialist forces of the world. For with the present stages of African economic, political, and social development, only a world-wide proletarian revolution can achieve her liberation." Garveyism would hinder Negro revolution "by cutting the Negro workers away from the proletarian liberation movement... by setting them against instead of joining them with the white workers' struggle for freedom." This fomenting of racial divisions constituted "the chief menace of Garveyism."[48]
Randolph next attacked the Black Star Line as an absurd and fraudulent scheme. Randolph pointed out that a small, black-owned company could not compete with international conglomerates, that the shipping business was suffering from a severe depression, and that even the U.S. government subsidized its own merchant marine. Building a black shipping line was as absurd as building a black railroad parallel to the Pennsylvania line. The Black Star Line "would have no effect on the Negro problem if successfully established, because the Negro problem is not one of transportation."[49] Randolph accused Garvey of running a bunko scheme that defrauded poor blacks of their savings.
Randolph further claimed Garvey's "race first" doctrine emulated and validated white racism. Garvey's assertion that all whites were enemies of all blacks "is both dangerous and false. It is dangerous because it pits whites against blacks; it engenders and fosters a virulent race prejudice, the very menace we are trying to eradicate, and gives birth to such destructive and violent race riots as E. St. Louis, which was a conflict between black and white workers." If blacks preached "race first," the more numerous, wealthy, educated, and powerful whites could justly do the same, and drive blacks from civic life. Randolph asserted that "it is false to assume that all white men are agreed upon a program of opposition to Negroes" or that blacks of all classes had a common interest.[50]
Randolph also castigated Garvey's opposition to social equality and intermarriage--a corollary of Garvey's black separatism. Garvey condemned blacks who imitated or associated with whites as committing race treason, despising their color, and wishing that they were white. For this "preaching of Negro inferiority to the white and Negro peoples of the world," Randolph said, Garvey "qualifies splendidly as an ally of the Ku Klux Klan."[51] Randolph asserted that "without social equality, the Negro will ever remain a political and economic serf." Garvey's attacks on light-skinned blacks would "wreck every Negro home, setting brother against sister and husband against wife." When Garvey parleyed with a high official of the Klan and sought white racist support for "back to Africa" schemes, Randolph thundered that "there is no place in America for a black race baiter, one time reviling all white men; and a 'good nigger' race traitor, at another time selling out the rights of all Negroes."[52]
In New Orleans in the summer of 1922 Garvey proclaimed
This is a white man's country. He found it, he conquered it, and we can't blame him if he wants to keep it. I am not vexed with the white man of the South for Jim Crowing me because I am black.
I never built any street cars or railroads. The white man built them for his own convenience. And if I don't want to ride where he's willing to let me ride than I'd better walk.[53]
In reply, Randolph accused Garvey of scheming "not to redeem but to enslave Africa and the Negro everywhere." He contrasted Garvey's statement with that of a white Harvard historian who said that blacks, having "largely built our railroads and great industries," fully deserved just treatment. "Of course Garvey never built any railroads or street cars," Randolph said. "He just got to America from Jamaica less than five years ago.... Garvey wasn't here when American Negroes were making this country."[54]
The Messenger launched its anti-Garvey campaign in the fall of 1921; but only after Garvey's infamous statement in New Orleans did Randolph say that "the Messenger is firing the opening gun in a campaign to drive Garvey and Garveyism in all its sinister viciousness from the American soil." Randolph called Garvey "the infernal black blizzard of the presumptuous Ku Klux wizard"; "a buffoon" whose "fool antics and clown tactics" disgraced blacks everywhere; "the Black Kluxer"; and "the greatest vaudeville comedian in Christendom." He falsely charged that the UNIA "is chiefly a British West Indian association" and (in a remark he would more appropriately apply to the Communist party), said that "no movement whose program is essentially foreign will ever command the interest and support of the American Negro." The Messenger alleged numerous instances of Garveyite violence against political opponents, their breaking up of outdoor and even indoor meetings, and charged that Garvey headed a "deliberately criminal organization." When Randolph received a threat accompanied by a severed human hand in the mail, he blamed the Garveyites. He condemned Garvey as "an anarchist in the truest sense of the word" whose deportation was legally justified. The Garvey movement, he said, was "a social-racial disease germ to the Negro which must be destroyed." Randolph called for Garvey's imprisonment and exile, the arrest and deportation of his foreign followers, and finally for the destruction of the UNIA itself. "If Garvey is a menace, his spirit is a menace, hence the UNIA should be destroyed."[55]
Randolph and other African-American leaders collaborated with the capitalist, white supremacist U.S. government, and with European colonial administrations, in their campaigns against Garvey. In a move that Du Bois's biographer says was "almost certainly" prompted by the FBI, eight prominent Afro-American leaders wrote (January 15, 1923) a hysterical letter to the U.S. Attorney General, accusing Garvey and the UNIA of fomenting hatred of the white race, murdering their opponents, and defrauding innocent blacks. Shortly thereafter, the United States brought Garvey to trial for mail fraud, for which he had been indicted a year earlier. After Garvey was convicted, the U.S. imprisoned him (1925-1927). Garvey was deported immediately after President Coolidge commuted his sentence to time served.[56]
Many of Randolph's criticisms of Garvey were justified. Garvey's later praise for Hitler and Mussolini, like his colorism and his rapprochement with the KKK, validated Randolph's worst fears about the consequences of Garvey's "race first" doctrine. Garvey's "back to Africa" scheme substituted bogus psychological consolations for realistic action. It also involved misleading and manipulative designs on the (admittedly corrupt, racist, and exploitative) Liberian government. Ironically, Garvey's hope that racist whites would subsidize black emigration foundered on the shoals of class interest: the whites who owned the South and the rest of the United States would not part with the cheap black labor that worked the land and undercut white unions. For the capitalists, class trumped race, as the white South's hostile response to black northward migration during the Great War indicated.
The Black Star line was, at the very least, grossly and corruptly mismanaged in a manner that deprived thousands of trusting blacks of their savings. Moreover, it was by no means an autonomous African-American institution. Booker Washington, however extensively controlled by whites, built a black-run institution with white money; Garvey bought ships constructed, maintained, and sometimes officered by whites with the money of masses of blacks. Garvey wanted a separate black economy because he correctly believed that he could not depend on white fairness. He was, however, deluded by the fetish of ownership. The whites from whom Garvey bought the UNIA's vessels grossly overcharged him, while some of the skilled whites upon whom he depended apparently sabotaged the UNIA's ships. Finally, Garveyites frequently Red-baited and intimidated African-American opponents within the UNIA and outside of it; they were not above inciting the authorities against their racial brethren. Garvey frequently pressed charges of criminal libel against his black opponents and, confronted with a competing black-owned steamship line, encouraged the prosecution of his rival for fraud.
In his attacks on Garvey, however, Randolph sometimes descended into vituperation. The BSL fiasco was not all Garvey's fault. The shipping industry as a whole virtually collapsed after the BSL was launched, and many larger, better financed, and more competently managed firms went bankrupt. The Messenger sometimes flirted with nativism in its attacks on the UNIA as composed mostly of ignorant West Indians. This was ludicrously unfair; had it been true, Randolph would not have bothered with Garvey's organization. His incessant harping on this theme led to a break with Domingo in 1923. Randolph went further, publishing a racist screed by Robert Bagnall, a black NAACP official, that described Garvey as "a Jamaican Negro of unmixed stock, squat, fat and sleek, with protruding jaws, and heavy jowls, small bright pig-like eyes and [a] rather bull-dog-like face."[57] Could the Klan have said it better? Randolph apparently exiled Floyd Calvin from the Messenger merely for asserting that the UNIA as an organization should not be blamed for Garvey's sins.[58] Historian Theodore Kornweibel has stated that Randolph's alliance with the white supremacist and capitalist U.S. government (which had persecuted Randolph in the past) was as reprehensible as Garvey's alliance with the KKK.[59] Randolph, however, had ample cause for alarm. Garvey defrauded poor blacks of their life savings, incited violence against black opponents, and, after his rightward lurch, grossly misrepresented the aspirations and beliefs of the African-American community.
Garvey's countercharges against his Socialist and Communist opponents were, however hysterical and overwrought, not without merit. His repeated assertions that rival blacks instigated U.S. surveillance and prosecution of him were exaggerated; various agencies of the secret police had monitored Garvey, sown dissension among his followers, and disrupted the UNIA long before the NAACP, the ABB, and the FNF allied against Garvey. Nevertheless, Garvey's African-American enemies did demand that the United States prosecute him for mail fraud, and provided key evidence and testimony.
Garvey's bitter accusation against white radicals--that they recruited blacks only so that blacks would not take jobs during white strikes--was, however exaggerated, also based on some reality. Domingo, Randolph, and Briggs had appealed to white workers precisely on the grounds that unorganized black workers constituted a reservoir of scabs who undermined white unions and wages. Although some white radicals (especially Wobblies) were genuine egalitarians, Du Bois, McKay, Harrison, and others encountered racism aplenty in the SP. Garvey was undoubtedly correct when he warned Afro-Americans that "the capitalists who can employ you will have no sympathy or mercy for you" if blacks embraced socialism or even joined unions in large numbers.[60] Racist capitalists hired Negroes only because they were regarded as cheaper and more docile than whites; given the choice between unionized blacks and whites, most capitalists would prefer whites. Garvey also charged that racist whites financed his radical opponents in the hopes that black militants and agitators, converted to Bolshevism, would be deported or otherwise disposed of by the government. This charge smacked of paranoia in its ascription of evil motives to his opponents, but it was based on the solid reality that the U.S. did imprison, deport, and condone the murder of class-conscious radicals during and after World War I. Militant blacks faced enough dangers without embracing revolutionary radicalism.
Similarly, Garvey characterized some opponents as a "revolutionary gang of alien races" who would "further exploit us to serve their own ends in starting revolutions in different white countries, and then to throw us off as usual as an inferior race."[61] This charge, however inappropriate as regards the IWW and the SP, proved all-too-prescient when applied to the Communist party. Briggs, in particular, was dishonest in denying his Bolshevik affiliations; to this day, the extent, nature, and timing of his, and the ABB's, connections to the Communists remains unclear.[62]
Garvey's assertions that his enemies vowed to destroy the UNIA when they proved unable to control it had merit. Many radicals did work within the UNIA, seeking to convince its membership of the validity of their own class-based program, and turned against it with a vengeance only when they were rebuffed. When Garvey denounced the NAACP, the Messenger, and the ABB as white dominated and controlled, he merely threw back in their faces accusations that they themselves had leveled against opponents. The NAACP, the SP, the CP, and the FNF, Garvey said, were "fighting a purely Negro organization, a Negro organization from top to bottom, a Negro organization kept up for five years with Negroes' money. Who must know better what the Negro wants at this time? The man who kept the Negro a slave for three hundred years, or the Negro himself?"[63] Garvey called Socialism "only another form of white control" fostered by "the very same men who have been devouring us for three hundred years." He concluded that "Before you can accept socialism as a cure, you have to change the white man's soul; and that, the Negro socialists have not done yet."[64]
Garvey's particular example here was deliberately inaccurate; he claimed that when Claude McKay danced with Crystal Eastman at a Liberator ball, the Socialists "smashed up the dance hall... because [McKay] attempted to dance with a white Socialist woman."[65] Garvey well knew, however, that the police, not the radicals, rioted when McKay danced with Crystal Eastman; the Negro World covered this story in considerable detail.[66] McKay and Crystal Eastman remained lifelong friends. Yet Garvey's overall point retained validity: racism did infect the Socialist and Communist movements, as McKay himself vocally complained.
Garvey's reprise to those who accused the UNIA of lack of achievement was that "they have been talking for the last ten years, and you have had to pay for their talk." The NAACP, the FNF, the ABB, the NERL, and other black organizations had indeed achieved little by 1924. Finally, Garvey's response to the accusation that he was an alien should have resonated in internationalist hearts. "I am called an alien," he said in response to white racist slurs. "We are not aliens. We were taken away from Africa in chains against our will, and scattered around the world in slavery. We are now searching for one another."[67] Responding to Afro-American critics, he said
Great principles, great issues, great movements know no nationality. I know no nationality; I know no national boundary where the Negro is concerned. Wherever Negroes are enslaved politically, industrially, socially or educationally there is my home for the time being. Until they become politically emancipated, whether it is in America or the West Indies or Africa, I have work to perform, and I can do it anywhere with as much pleasure as I am doing it here now. Soil does not matter one bit except that soil is Africa.[68]
Many of Garvey's beliefs stemmed from inescapable dilemmas that bedeviled Randolph as well. While Randolph often accused Garvey of opposing political action and unionism, Garvey actually favored both electioneering and working-class organization both before and after his sojourn in the United States. He praised Socialists and Communists abroad while castigating exploitative black capitalists. His disparagement of politics and of unionism in the United States stemmed from the very dilemmas of which Randolph himself was fully aware, and that equally ensnared him.[69]
The Messenger agreed with Garvey on numerous issues: the need for African-American cooperative enterprises and for self-defense against white violence, and upon the primacy of economics (however differently they interpreted this idea). Above all, both recognized that African Americans, as a terrorized, impoverished, and ill-educated minority, could neither win on the basis of their own strength, nor depend upon white decency. Randolph, Garvey, Harrison, and Briggs all sought mutually beneficial alliances, based on common interests rather than moral vision, with other groups. Randolph favored the American and international working class of all races; Garvey wooed Africans in the diaspora and in Africa; Briggs allied with the Communist International. Harrison initially embraced the Socialists and then switched to a "race first" program while still retaining a class analysis.
Except for Du Bois (who soon enough repented his error), all major black radical intellectuals emphasized power over moral suasion. Garvey said that in fifty years, when the NAACP would still be petitioning for an anti-lynching bill, the UNIA "will be coming up the Hudson Bay with a flotilla of battleships, dreadnoughts and cruisers to land our first ambassador, and whilst [the NAACP] will be introducing bills in Congress, we will be entertained in the White House as being the first ambassadors from the great African republic. And let me tell you, they will hear us then."[70] This fantasy, however surreal, was in 1923 no more utopian than Randolph's proposed alliance of white and black workers or Briggs's hopes that the Comintern would genuinely promote African liberation. Du Bois's appeal to the conscience of whites was as ludicrous as anything Garvey ever propounded, while his subsequent agitation within a racist society and reliance on two capitalist and white supremacist parties was almost as chimerical. In the 1920s, no strategy could have extricated African Americans from their oppressed condition or even ameliorated it. They were vastly outnumbered and without significant domestic or international allies. The epochal and worldwide changes of subsequent decades--the CIO's interracial and industrial unionism, anti-colonial movements in Africa, and a powerfully competitive international Communist movement--all added their mite to the black liberation struggle. These changes were far in the future during the heyday of the Messenger, the UNIA, and the ABB.
In the 1920s, neither assimilation nor separatism were viable strategies. Pressured by Garvey's success, Randolph reluctantly admitted the necessity of African-American racial pride. But building racial self-esteem without essentializing race (thus capitulating to the hegemonic discourse of the enemy) and legitimizing white racism was indeed a precarious enterprise. It ended almost inexorably in assertions of black superiority and a consequent attack on mixed-bloods, the vast majority of the Afro-American population. Pride in one's own culture leads almost inexorably to assertions of superiority over other peoples and their ways of life. Cultural nationalism is insupportable without political nationalism, and was hence impracticable within the United States for blacks. Garvey recognized that in the United States, integration would mean virtual extinction for the black minority because the survival of a distinctive black culture required residential, educational, and social separation. If mainstream society treated blacks as individuals rather than as members of an alien people, their sense of group cohesion would dissipate and ultimately disappear as blacks moved out of racial enclaves into the white world. Individual advancement would detract from group consciousness, especially when social mobility was predicated on conformity to white norms. A black consciousness based upon a mythical racial purity would exclude most Afro-Americans, who were of mixed blood; a consciousness based on culture must confront the fact that cultures change and are subject to contradictory interpretations and definitions. A cultural definition of blackness would establish an ideological criterion for inclusion in the black "race" and exclude many persons who are racially "black" by U.S. standards. (The 1924 UNIA Convention unanimously excommunicated Du Bois from the black community.)[71]
Miscegenation would have contradictory effects. The U.S. characterization of mixed-marriage offspring as black meant that intermarriage would increase the proportion of people socially defined as blacks; yet mulattoes would have every incentive to acculturate to white norms and, after their black hue was bleached out over generations of intermarriage with the light majority, "pass" for white. Garvey was correct, by his lights, in seeing extinction of both races through integration, social equality, and intermarriage. The Messenger almost admitted as much in 1927 when it ran a symposium based on a series of questions addressed to prominent Afro-American intellectuals. Randolph's magazine asked whether the attainment of equality would "result in the disappearance of the Negro population through amalgamation?" If so, "do you consider the present efforts to inculcate and develop a race consciousness to be futile and confusing?" If full equality meant extinction, "Do you desire to see the Aframerican group maintain its identity and the trend toward amalgamation cease?" Finally, "Can a minority group like the Aframerican maintain separate identity and group consciousness, obtain industrial and social equality with the citizens of the majority group, and mingle freely with them?"[72]
Garvey's criticism of the mulatto elite was, however, based more on hurtful experience than on theories of racial purity. In Jamaica, Liberia, and the United States, light-skinned blacks often considered themselves superior to dark-skinned ones. Although discussion of this incendiary topic within the Afro-American community was strongly discouraged, and the very existence of colorism denied (especially by its chief practitioners), Garvey had suffered from racist treatment and slurs from his racial compatriots both in Jamaica and in the United States. Despite his rhetoric, Garvey's criterion for blackness was ideological and cultural, not biological; mulattoes held high posts in the UNIA. At the very time Garvey was attacking Briggs as a white "Negro for convenience," he warmly welcomed blacks of all hues into the UNIA. When Garvey criticized the light-skinned, assimilationist blacks--"they believe that, in time, through miscegenation, the American race will be of their type"--he voiced an anger felt by many dark-hued African Americans, even as he provided fuel for KKK fires.
Randolph's assimilationist position encountered its own difficulties. Integration and assimilation were impossible goals for most blacks in an era of virulent and often homicidal white racism. Most whites shunned association with blacks on a basis of equality, and ridiculed blacks who sought such association as hating their own color and wishing that they were white--a charge that Garvey reiterated. Assimilation is much more difficult when demanded than when voluntary. Forced assimilation is seen as capitulation, not choice, degrading rather than self-affirming; it coerces an individual into an unwanted identity rather than allowing an individual to cultivate her own personality and values. As McKay's experience would demonstrate, no black, however educated, could move in even the most enlightened white circles without suddenly and unexpectedly encountering lacerating humiliation and abuse. Although Randolph was well received at public meetings of white radicals and certain white unions, and accorded equality at the ILGWU's vacation retreat, his education, ideology, and social position were very unusual for a black (or a white). And how many of the whites who applauded Randolph at public gatherings would have welcomed him into their homes? Owen's brother Toussaint paid for his life for his faith in white radical egalitarianism. Closing his successful tailor shop in the South, he moved North only to die destitute when the SP-led garment unions denied him membership.[73]
Randolph's Eurocentric universalism was as problematic as Garvey's race consciousness. Messenger writers often used words such as "black" and "dark" as synonyms for evil, and "white" as connoting good. Their characterization of a prominent white official as "white outside, but black inside"[74] was meant as a severe criticism. Randolph was acutely aware of the horrors of "Western Civilization" and the class, gender, and racial exploitation that constituted the very foundations of its economic, cultural, political, and social structures. Despite this awareness, he accepted many of Western Civilization's essential claims and considered a privileged set of white, Western ideals--science, technology, progress, representative democracy, and Enlightenment universalism--as unquestioned, eternal verities to which all peoples must conform.
Randolph was the antithesis of a multiculturalist. He never seriously considered the possibility that non-white, non-industrialized peoples could meaningfully contribute to world civilization. The Messenger implied that "Africans of the Congo and the Fiji Islanders" were savages, spoke of the "dark, wild jungles of Africa," and slanderously equated "the wild men from Borneo or the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands" with lynch-law white terrorists. Randolph believed that Africa was backward and incapable, for the moment, of self-government. He claimed that "to separate the Negro peoples from modern, scientific Western Civilization and culture would wreak irreparable injury upon their progress, in fact, they would relapse into barbarism and savagery." Though contact with the West resulted in oppression, "it is only out of this exploitation of the weak by the strong, a sort of struggle between the classes, that the weak will ever prepare itself for achieving its own emancipation."[75] Garvey believed that this apprenticeship had passed, its mission fulfilled; Randolph had his doubts.
Du Bois shared Randolph's sentiment, and even Garvey believed that emigrants from the New World would industrialize, develop, and modernize Africa. Garvey based his own redemptive message on other Western concepts such as race and nationality. (The very concept of "Africa" was largely a white, Western invention.) Even J.A. Rogers and George Wells Parker claimed not that contemporary Africa offered a valid alternative to Western values, but that it had played a large and unacknowledged role in fostering Western civilization and philosophy. Rogers and Parker argued that these accomplishments from the distant past demonstrated the capacities of black peoples and promised renewed black world leadership in the future; they admitted that Africans had long fallen behind the white world, although through no fault of their own. Garvey never convincingly explained how African peoples could adopt Western technology (which strongly implied Western forms of economic organization, and their corresponding psychological and moral sensibilities) while retaining their distinctive native cultures. Indeed, reconciling this contradiction was scarcely an issue with one who spoke of dreadnoughts and overweening power. Garvey, as firmly as Randolph, usually rejected the traditional black nationalist "Ethiopeanism" (at times enunciated by Du Bois) that posited a distinct and superior black sensibility based on the Christian virtues. Garvey demanded that blacks compete with whites on their own terms, and with their own weapons.
Garvey's appeal, however, stemmed precisely from the UNIA's most fantastic and bizarre aspects, such as its Black Star Line, its "back to Africa" movement, and its orders of Knights, Barons, and Dukes. Few of Garvey's followers hoped to "return" to an Africa they had never seen; few could realistically expect even to board a Black Star Line steamer.[76] Garvey appealed to emotion rather than intellect, to a poor and despised population who (like their white counterparts) reveled in mystical, escapist fantasies of prestige and power, fostered by parades, uniforms, insignia, and rituals. "Africa," Randolph said, "is sufficiently far and distant and invested with the halo of mysticism as to ensnare the unsuspecting."[77] While Randolph hectored blacks in the tradition of white anarchists and socialists upbraiding their followers (and of ministers scolding their congregations), one historian has correctly observed that "practically every aspect of the [UNIA] was designed to bolster the black man's self-esteem and to foster pride in self." Another scholar has commented on the essential conservatism of Garveyism, which comprised "a mixture of the conventional American worldview (in its economic, political, and social vision) and a radical concept that Blacks could compete with whites as equals. This mix did not require grassroots Blacks to alter radically their conception of the world, except for their own place in it, which would of course be radically improved."[78] Moreover, Garvey claimed that blacks could save themselves without the cooperation of whites. The allure of this belief is obvious.
Randolph preached an icy, rational creed that demanded a total transformation in black self-identity and the cooperation of a hateful and hating white race; Garvey gave African Americans the comforting news that if they only recognized their magnificence, they could succeed on their own. Randolph's message of class solidarity contradicted the experiences of African-American workers and formed an impossible basis for action in the face of unrelenting hostility. Garvey, on the contrary, appealed to blacks on the basis of their own traditions, culture, values, and experience. As George Frederickson observed, the UNIA adapted itself "to the needs and opinions of local black communities in ways that more intellectually self-conscious and ideologically precise organizations would have been unable to do. The eclectic and ambitious quality of populist ideologies is a source of strength when it comes to organizing relatively inarticulate people who know that something is terribly wrong but resist abstract and rationalized interpretations of what it is." Frederickson noted the possible retrogressive ideological pitfalls into which such populism may fall; Judith Stein has argued that the UNIA's loose, adaptable structure generated organizational impotence and division as well.[79] But Randolph's FNF, Garvey's UNIA, Du Bois's NAACP, Briggs's ABB, and Trotter's NERL all had both weaknesses and strengths; in the climate of class and racial oppression of the 1920s, only their weaknesses mattered.
Notes:
[1] "A Paramount Chief for the Negro Race," TCR, March 1920.
[2] ibid.
[3] "A Letter from Marcus Garvey," TCR, April 1920; "The UNIA Convention," TCR, June 1920.
[4] "Marcus Garvey," TCR, August 1919.
[5] "The Black Star Line," TCR, December 1919.
[6] "The Universal Negro Improvement Association," TCR, May 1920.
[7] ibid; "Editor's Note," TCR, December 1919.
[8] Negro Congress Bulletin, August 6, 1921, and August 24, 1921, FSAA, Reels 1, 7. Robert Hill (Racial and Radical, lxii-lxiii) quotes white Communist Joseph Kornfeder as testifying many years later that "we created a bulletin which was dressed up as a news bulletin in such a way as if it was coming from Garvey's organization.... The Negro papers, of which there were several hundred weeklies, thought it was coming from the convention." This may well be true; but Kornfeder's memory clearly misled him on other issues. For example, he claimed that UNIA conventions were biennial rather than annual and that the Workers party "sent a large delegation" to the 1922 convention, whereas in fact the delegation had only four members.
[9] "Garvey Turns Informer," TCR, November 1921; CB to MG, August 15, 1921, MGP III, 667-668.
[10] Citing McKay's autobiography, Hill ("Racial and Radical: Cyril V. Briggs, THE CRUSADER Magazine, and the African Blood Brotherhood," his introduction to the reprinted Crusader, xl), claims that Stokes represented the legal, aboveground Party, and that Robert Minor advocated an illegal, underground organization. However, McKay, LWFH 159-162, ridicules Stokes at some length for her conspiratorial mannerisms and advocacy of an illegal party.
[11] MG, introducing Rose Pastor Stokes, August 19, 1921, MGP III, 675-6.
[12] ibid.
[13] Convention Speech by Rose Pastor Stokes, August 19, 1921, MGP III 676-681.
[14] ibid.
[15] MG, closing remarks after speech of Rose Pastor Stokes, August 19, 1921, MGP III, 681.
[16] "To New Negroes Who Really Seek Liberation," FSAA, Reel 21.
[17] ibid.
[18] ibid.
[19] UNIA paraphrase of MG speech under heading "Bolshevism in Flight," August 26, 1921, MGP III, 691-2; "Garvey Shows His Hand," TCR, October 1921.
[20] "Mr. Garvey and the ABB," FSAA, Reel 1.
[21] MG Speech, September 4, 1921, MGP IV, 23-28; "Will Not Cooperate, Says Garvey," TCR, November 1921.
[22] "More Wobbling Leadership," TCR, October 1921.
[23] "Briggs Says Garvey Lies," TCR, October 1921; Snippet in TCR, October 1921.
[24] "More Wobbling Leadership," TCR, October 1921.
[25] "Is This Not Treason," TCR, October 1921.
[26] "More Wobbling Leadership," TCR, October 1921; "Is This Not Treason?," TCR, October 1922.
[27] "Will Not Cooperate, Says Garvey," TCR, November 1921.
[28] "Lessons in Tactics," TCR, November 1921.
[29] "How Can We Separate Them?," TCR, November 1921.
[30] "A Free Africa," TCR, October 1921.
[31] "Garvey Shows His Hand," TCR, October 1921; "A Free Africa," TCR, October 1921.
[32] "Stupid Tactical Blunders," TCR, October 1921.
[33] "Garvey Turns Informer," TCR, November 1921.
[34] "As to Morality," TCR, November 1921.
[35] UNIA press release, December 19, 1921, in FSAA, Reel 1.
[36] ABB press release, December 19, 1921, FSAA, Reel 1; Report of Agent "800," December 19, 1921, in FSAA, Reel 1.
[37] "On With the Liberation Struggle," TCR, January-February 1922; "The Inevitable," TCR, January-February 1922; "Garvey Arrested," TCR, January-February 1922; Crichlow, "What I Know About Liberia," TCR, December 1921, January-February 1922.
[38] "The Workers Party, Marcus Garvey, and the Negro," TCR, January-February, 1921.
[39] Agent "800" reported on April 12, 1922 that Briggs suspended The Crusader because of bad checks returned by news agents and that ABB revenue had fallen off sharply because 90% of its members were unemployed because of the recession. However, another agent, Andrew Battle, stated on October 2, 1922, that Mrs. Briggs said that CB suspended his publication because of U.S. government opposition.
[40] Joseph Tucker, Special Report, August 18, 1923.
[41] Joseph Tucker, Special Report, December 1, 1923, FSAA Reel 1; GSS and TL, "Shafts and Darts, a Page of Calumny and Satire," TM, June 1925.
[42] Joseph Tucker, Special Report, December 1, 1923, FSAA Reel 1; GSS and TL, "Shafts and Darts, a Page of Calumny and Satire," TM, June 1925, 231, 238.
[43] Herbert Aptheker reprints an ABB statement from 1923 and "A Call to Action," the founding manifesto of the American Negro Labor Congress, in Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People of the United States (Secaucus: 1973), III, 413-420, 488-493. Philip S. Foner and James S. Allen reprint a 1922 Program of The African Blood Brotherhood (with some of their own commentary) in American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, (Philadelphia, 1987), I, 15-23. This Program largely restated ABB ideas discussed above, including some strident criticism of Garvey and the UNIA. In advocating a united Negro Front, however, it was influenced by the CP practice of having both a legal, above-ground party, and a secret, underground organization. "Such a movement could be carried on openly in the North, but would have to be built up secretly in the South in order to protect those members living in the South and to safeguard the organization from premature attack. Within this Federation a secret protective organization should be developed--the real Power--to the membership of which should be admitted only the best and most courageous of the race. The Protective organization would have to function under strict military discipline, ready to act a moment's notice whenever defense and protection are necessary."
The ABB also proclaimed that "It is the Negroes resident in America--whether native or foreign born--who are destined to assume the leadership of our people in a powerful world movement for Negro liberation. The American Negro by virtue of being part of the population of a great empire, has acquired certain knowledge in the waging of modern warfare, the operation of industries, etc. This country is the base for easy contact with the whole world, and the United States is destined, until the Negro race is liberated, to become the centre of the Negro World Movement. It is in this country, especially, that the Negro must be strong. It is from here than most of the leaders and pioneers who will carry the message across the world will go forth."
For more information on the ABB see Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 (Blomington, 1998), especially pp. 132-154. For information on the American Negro Labor Congress see Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans (Jackson, 1998). For an account of Harlem radicalism during the depression see Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Great Depression (Urbana, 1983).
[44] Interview with CO and APR by C. Mowbray White for the National Civic Federation, August 1920, MGP II, 609-612. White said that Owen did most of the talking, but Randolph concurred. He said that Owen "spoke substantially as follows," meaning that the quotes are probably not exact. I have corrected grammatical errors and capitalized "Negro," which White did not.
[45] APR, "Garveyism," TM, September 1921. In April 1922 ("Garvey Unfairly Attacked"), Randolph reiterated that Garvey "has done much good work in putting into many Negroes a backbone where for years they have had only a wishbone. He has stimulated race pride.... He has inspired an interest in Negro traditions, Negro history, Negro literature, Negro art and culture."
[46] "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, January 1923; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, November 1920; "Garveyism," TM, September 1921.
[47] "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, January 1923; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, November 1920; "Garveyism," TM September 1921.
[48] APR, "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922.
[49] "Garvey Unfairly Attacked," TM, April 1922.
[50] "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, December 1922; "Garveyism," TM, September 1921.
[51] "Garvey's Social Equality Cables," TM, October 1921.
[52] "Garveyism," TM, September 1921; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, February 1923; "Should Marcus Garvey Be Deported," TM, September 1922.
[53] "Marcus Garvey! The Black Imperial Wizard Becomes Messenger Boy of the White Ku Klux Kleagle," TM, July 1922.
[54] "Marcus Garvey!" TM, July 1922; "Find the Liar," TM, February 1923.
[55] "Marcus Garvey!," TM, July 1922; "Should Marcus Garvey Be Deported?," TM, September 1922; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, February 1923; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, December 1922; "Garveyism and Anarchism," TM, October 1922; "The UNIA," TM, August 1923. U.S. law provided for the deportation of immigrant anarchists. Randolph apparently forgot the declamation of the Messenger's poet, Walter Everett Hawkins, made in the that magazine's important "The Negro and the New Social Order" (TM, March 1919): "I am an Iconoclast... I am an Anarchist... I am an Agnostic."
[56] The phrase is from Lewis, Du Bois... 1919-1963, 81. Lewis dates the letter January 12; the version in MGP, V, is dated January 15.
[57] Bagnall, "The Madness of Marcus Garvey," TM, March 1923.
[58] Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, 1976), 331, citing the Amsterdam News. Both of these sources are hostile to Randolph.
[59] Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917-1928 (Westport, 1975), 132-175, discusses the "Garvey Must Go" campaign. Although he judiciously sorts the evidence and criticizes all participants, he concludes (142) that "to invite the Department of Justice to prosecute one's black opponent was nearly as despicable as inviting the Klan to do so." In "Seeing Red," xiii, he refuses to condemn even Afro-American secret police agents on the grounds that "the African American population was then, as it is now, large and diverse, with a multiplicity of political viewpoints."
[60] MG speech, December 18, 1921, MGP IV, 288
[61] MG Statement, December 31, 1922, MGP IV, 316-317; MG Speech, August 20, 1922, MGP IV, 928.
[62] Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (Vintage: New York, 1986), 315-357, discusses the evolution of the CP's stance on the problems of Afro-Americans. Draper corresponded at some length with Briggs, and consulted those few issues of the Crusader which were available when he first published his book in 1960. For a more recent discussion of this issue see Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (Verso: London, 1998), 160-163, 177-178. James convincingly argues that Briggs was simply wrong in some of his key assertions to Draper. Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1996), 266, n.5, finds that Briggs was wrong about another key assertion he made to Draper. Robert Hill, "Race and Radicalism," finds numerous egregious errors in Briggs's later accounts of his activities.
[63] MG Statement, December 31, 1922, MGP IV, 316-317; MG Speech, August 20, 1922, MGP IV, 928.
[64] MG Speech, August 13, 1922, MGP IV, 850.
[65] MG speech, August 13, 1922, MGP IV, 850. Curiously, Garvey seriously misspelled Claude McKay's name. Garvey conceivably did this deliberately, as McKay was popular among militant Afro-Americans and West Indians. Garvey seldom if ever quoted McKay's famous "If We Must Die," preferring instead slaveholder Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death," which he cited on numerous occasions.
[66] NW, May 6, 1922, reprinted a New York World article which correctly described the police riot. It also ran its own article, "Claude McKay, Negro 'Constab' Editor, Cause of a Disturbance." Although this article accurately described the riot, and even said that the organizers of the dance were consulting an attorney (presumably for possible action against the police), it was subtitled "Whites Object to [McKay's] Dancing with White Woman at a Ball--Advocate of Social Equality." It also claimed that "happenings of this kind tend to show the impossibility of Negroes ever gaining social recognition among the whites." The Negro World falsely implied that it was the white radicals, rather than the police, who objected to interracial dancing. Garvey misled his auditors about this incident in a speech on August 13, 1922 (MGP IV, 850).
[67] MG Speech, August 13, 1922, MGP IV, 849; MG speech, July 14, 1921, MGP IV, 849.
[68] MG Editorial, July 16, 1922, MGP IV, 728.
[69] For an incendiary example of Garvey's praise for radicals abroad see his eulogy for Lenin, January 27, 1924 in MGP V.
[70] MG, NW, February 24, 1923, quoted in Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, 1976), 62. Garvey's reference to Hudson Bay reveals a casualness about details of geography and other matters that subjected him to much ridicule.
[71] For a diverse range of opinions on the issue of black identity see Gerald Early, ed., Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation (New York, 1993).
[72] "Group Tactics and Ideals," TM, January 1927 and succeeding months. Other questions were also asked.
[73] Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York, 1973), 142-143; Kornweibel, No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917-1928 (Westport, 1975), 57, 191-192.
[74] "Who's Who, Justice White," TM, July 1921.
[75] "Self-Government," TM, December 1920; William Pickens, "These 'Colored' United States," TM, January 1923; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, November 1920.
[76] In the words of distinguished historian George Fredrickson, "Disillusionment with the United States and the prospects it offered for the equality and dignity of black people, rather than a strong attraction to Africa, was the common threat running through the entire history of African-American separatism." George Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995), 287.
[77] "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, December 1922.
[78] Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York, 1999), 94.
[79] Fredrickson, Black Liberation; 173; Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rogue, 1986), passim.