Chapter six

The Rise of Marcus Garvey

The end of the First World War was accompanied by a wave of strikes across the United States. Though the strikes were most commonly for wage increases and shorter working days, several important ones, including the Seattle general strike and the Boston police and steel strikes, threatened to transform this postwar strike wave into a generalized challenge to the employers and the state. The ruling class certainly viewed the strikes as a threat, and launched an anti-Communist crusade. Immigrant workers were singled out as “foreign agitators.” In late April 1919, newspapers around the country warned, as one headline writer phrased it, of “Reds Planning to Overthrow U.S. on May Day.”1 May Day marches were either broken up, with numerous marchers arrested, or simply prevented from taking place. Judges issued injunctions to break strikes, and commonly impose severe limits on the number of pickets. A Toledo, Ohio, judge had the distinction of limiting the number of picketers—and adding that they had to be native-born.2 Deportation became a favorite government tool, since laws provided for the deportation of immigrant “undesirables.” Government officials were appalled at the release of two-thirds of arrested Wobblies (members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World), and thus simply passed an act making membership in a radical organization a deportable offense. The government-sponsored red scare was a signal to employers to do whatever it took to break strikes.

1919 was also marked by brutal and bloody racial violence, which came to be known as the “Red Summer of 1919.” From May to September of that year, major race riots broke out in Charleston, Knoxville, Omaha, Washington, Chicago, Longview, Texas, and Phillips County, Arkansas. All told, twenty-five riots took place.3 The riots were primarily the result of violent, and often murderous, attacks on Blacks by white racists. Such attacks and lynchings were not new, but the rash of riots in 1919 was seen as different in a crucial respect: Blacks fought back. Black poet Claude McKay penned a battle cry:

If we must die, let it be not like hogs

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!4

The new Black militancy was the result of changes brought by the First World War. Labor shortages brought hundreds of thousands of Southern Blacks North during the war. A constant labor supply had traditionally been provided by successive waves of immigration, but the war had drastically curtailed immigration. The demand for labor became acute. Between 1910 and 1920, the number of Black industrial workers grew by nearly two-thirds from 550,000 to 900,000.5

During the war, an additional four hundred thousand Blacks entered the armed forces.6 Both Black workers and veterans gained new confidence. As one newspaper editorial observed, “Out of this war the Negro expects—he demands—justice, and cannot and will not be content with less.”7 The gap between expectation and reality led to growing resentment and militancy among Blacks. Acute housing shortages, wartime inflation, and discrimination on the job were compounded by unemployment in 1919. Postwar demobilization resulted in mass layoffs and increased competition for jobs with white workers. The unwillingness of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to organize Black workers played into the hands of employers, who consciously used racism to further divide Black and white workers. In several riots, job competition was the underlying cause. The bloody 1919 race riot in Chicago stemmed, in part, from Black and white job competition in the city’s stockyards.8

The UNIA: A Mass Organization

It was in these conditions that Marcus Garvey built the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) into a mass organization—the largest Black nationalist organization to date at that time. Assessments of Garvey vary considerably. For Black nationalists, Garvey’s success is evidence of the viability of nationalism. They see Garvey as the link between nineteenth-century nationalists such as Martin Delany and the nationalist revival of the 1960s. This assessment is shared by left-wing nationalists who are critical of many of Garvey’s ideas, but stress his importance in establishing independent Black organization. The West Indian historian and critic C. L. R. James expressed this view in the 1980s, reversing his earlier hostility to Garvey: “Garvey was a remarkable man. Before Garvey there was no Black movement anywhere. Since Garvey there has been a continuous Black movement.... All of us stand on the shoulders of Marcus Garvey. There is plenty to say against Garvey, but nothing you can say against Garvey can ever weaken the things, the positive things, that Garvey did.”9

It is worth emphasizing, however, that this assessment of Garvey was not shared by many of his contemporaries, including Black members of the Socialist Party and W. E. B. Du Bois, then the leader of the NAACP. Du Bois believed that “Garvey is financially more or less a fraud.” He was suspicious of and hostile to Garvey whom he believed was under the influence of communists. In August 1920, Du Bois described Garvey as “a demagogue” in an unpublished interview and referred to Garvey’s supporters as “the lowest type of Negroes.... They are allied with the Bolsheviks and the Sinn Feiners in their world revolution.”10 Du Bois’ opinion of Garvey only hardened as time went on. “Marcus Garvey is, without doubt, the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world,” Du Bois wrote. “He is either a lunatic or a traitor,” he went on. “The American Negroes have endured this wretch all too long with fine restraint and every effort at cooperation and understanding. But the end has come. Every man who apologizes for or defends Marcus Garvey from this day forth writes himself down as unworthy of the countenance of decent Americans.”11

It would have been hard to predict that Garvey would generate such raw feelings when he arrived in the United States in 1916. Here he hoped to build his recently formed and floundering organization, the UNIA. Born in Jamaica in 1887, Garvey entered politics inadvertently. A printer by trade, he became a foreman in one of Kingston’s largest printing companies. When workers at the company voted for strike action in 1909, Garvey joined the walkout. The strike was defeated, and Garvey was fired for his role in the strike. During the next three years, he traveled across the West Indies and Latin America. He then moved to London, where he spent the next two years. Garvey’s political ideas began to cohere during this period. Influenced by Egyptian nationalist Duse Mohammed Ali, Garvey learned of conditions in colonial Africa and began to relate them to those of Blacks internationally.

I asked myself “Where is the Black man’s Government? Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his president, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?” I could not find them, and I declared “I will help to make them.”... I saw before me then...a nation of sturdy men making their impress upon the human race. I could not remain in London any more.12

Five days after his return to Jamaica in July 1914, Garvey founded the UNIA. Under the slogan “One god! One aim! One destiny!” he defined the UNIA’s tasks as “uniting all the Negro peoples of the world into one great body to establish a country and Government absolutely their own.”13 The aims and objectives of the UNIA were:

To establish a Universal Confraternity among the race; to promote the spirit of pride and love; to reclaim the fallen; to administer to and assist the needy; to assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa; to assist in the development of Independent Negro nations and communities; to establish a central nation for the race, where they will be given the opportunity to develop themselves; to establish Commissaries and Agencies in the principal countries and cities of the world for the representation of all Negroes; to promote a conscientious Spiritual worship among the native tribes of Africa; to establish Universities, Colleges and Academies and Schools for racial education and culture of the people; to improve the general conditions of Negroes everywhere.14

Garvey’s nationalism did not lead him to oppose the major imperialist powers. Instead he praised them for helping to “civilize” Blacks. Garvey believed the UNIA could continue the colonial project, leading to the establishment of Black nations ruled by Blacks. “To do this,” he argued, “we must get the co-operation and sympathy of our white brothers.”15 Garvey looked for support from several sources, including Britain. In a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in September 1914, Garvey wrote, “We sincerely pray for the success of British arms on the battle fields of Europe and Africa, and at Sea, in crushing the ‘Common Foe,’ the enemy of peace and further civilization. We rejoice in British Victories and the suppression of foreign foes. Thrice we hail, ‘God save the King! Long live the King and Empire.’”16

Garvey’s efforts to build the UNIA met with little success. In 1916, he could claim only one hundred members. A supporter of Booker T. Washington’s ideas, Garvey arrived in New York in March 1916 intending to raise funds for an industrial farm and trade school in Jamaica modeled after Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. But Washington died shortly before Garvey arrived in the United States, forcing him to change his plans. He established a branch of the UNIA in Harlem, and set out to build the organization. At first it looked as though he would have as little success in Harlem as he did in Jamaica. Nervous and under pressure from hecklers, his first public speech ended with him fleeing the speakers’ platform.

Garvey’s fortunes soon changed dramatically, however. By 1920, Marcus Garvey was the most prominent Black figure in the United States, and in the early years of the decade, the organization claimed to have more than seven hundred branches in the United States, with 35,000 dues-paying members in New York City alone. The UNIA also claimed to have established branches in forty-two countries, and its newspaper Negro World was a widely read Black publication in the United States.17 During this period, Garvey identified himself as a leader of Black resistance in the United States. In 1919, he urged Black supporters to “have a white man lynched for every Negro who was lynched.”18 In 1920, he claimed that the colors of the UNIA flag “showed their sympathy with the ‘Reds’ of the world, and the Green their sympathy for the Irish in their fight for freedom.”19 But the depths of Garvey’s radicalism and identification with the left were quite shallow. The idea that “during the period 1918–1921 Garvey was profoundly sympathetic with the international left and with mass workers’ movements against capital,” as Manning Marable writes, is to overstate the case.20 Judith Stein rightly stressed that Garvey adopted militant rhetoric in 1919 because he understood that it was necessary to attract members to the UNIA.21 And while Garvey praised the Bolshevik Revolution for doing in Russia what he envisioned for Blacks, he quickly added: “We are not very much concerned as partakers in these revolutions.”22 In other words, Garvey tried to identify with the possibility of social change that the Bolshevik Revolution represented, without endorsing the socialist aims of the revolution.

Race Consciousness and the “Back to Africa” Movement

Modern-day commentators who exaggerate Garvey’s sympathy with the left during this period also attempt to gloss over his subsequent development, without acknowledging the fundamental continuity in his ideas. This is not to say that Garvey’s ideas did not change at all from 1916 to 1920. Influenced by events around him, Garvey moved away from the conciliatory and assimilationist approach of Booker T. Washington, and began to stress the importance of racial pride and racial purity. Garvey also began to argue more clearly for racial separation. He attacked other Blacks who believed that Black equality could be achieved in a white America:

The professional Negro leader and the class who are agitating for social equality feel that it is too much work for them to settle down and build up a civilization of their own. They feel it is easier to seize on the civilization of the white man and under the guise of constitutional rights fight for those things that the white man has created. Natural reason suggests that the white man will not yield them, hence such leaders are but fools for their pains. Teach the Negro to do for himself, help him the best way possible in that direction.23

Garvey’s increased race consciousness was not accompanied by a rejection of the other ideas he shared with Booker T. Washington, though. Black capitalism and self-help were now combined with the slogan “Back to Africa.” Toward that end, the UNIA promoted racial consciousness and established a number of business ventures. The most important of these was the Black Star Line endeavor, which Garvey set up in 1919. The Black Star Line drew the savings of thousands of Blacks into a plan to form a fleet of Black-owned cruise ships for transoceanic travel, especially transit to Africa. Many of Garvey’s critics accused Garvey of trying to embezzle the thousands of poor Blacks who invested money in this venture. Similar charges would become the excuse for government prosecution of the UNIA in 1921. In 1919, however, the government was more concerned with the threat posed by the wave of strikes sweeping the country and socialist agitation in support of the Russian Revolution. A Justice Department investigation at the time concluded that Garvey was the “foremost pro-negro agitator in New York. It is apparent, however, that his pro-negroism is secondary to his scheme for the solicitation of subscriptions for stock in the Black Star Line.”24

UNIA supporters greeted the Black Star Line with considerable enthusiasm, especially after the purchase of its first ship, the SS Frederick Douglass. The ship was docked on the Hudson River for a few weeks, and evoked a massive response described in the following terms by Claude McKay: “There was a wild invasion of Harlem by Negroes from every Black quarter in America. Hordes of disciples came with more dollars to buy more shares. The boat was moored at the pier with its all-Negro crew. And the common people gladly paid half a dollar to go aboard and look over the miracle. Loudly talking and gesturing, they inspected the ship, singing the praises of Marcus Garvey.”25

Garvey had successfully tapped the aspirations of many Blacks, and the UNIA expressed their alienation from a society that oppressed them. He provided a vision of a different society, if only in embryonic form, through the UNIA, its businesses, its adoption of a flag and anthem, and its establishment of a government in exile (with Garvey as president). In an argument with C. L. R. James and others of his followers in the United States, the exiled Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky stressed that Garvey’s following was an expression of the aspiration for Black self-determination:

The Black woman who said to the white woman, “Wait until Marcus is in power. We will know how to treat you then,” was simply expressing her desire for her own state. The American Negroes gathered under the banner of the “Back to Africa” movement because it seemed a possible fulfillment of their wish for their own home. They did not want to actually go to Africa. It was the expression of a mystic desire for a home in which they would be free of the domination of the whites, in which they themselves could control their own fate.26

But the problem for Garvey was that while he could build on such aspirations, he could not satisfy them. This explains the meteoric rise and fall of the UNIA. As the postwar radicalization dissipated, the UNIA lost its mass base. The positive elements in Garvey’s ideas in 1920—encouraging race pride and resistance—soon gave way to the most reactionary elements. Soon nothing was left but the emphasis on racial purity. Denouncing any sexual relations between the races, Garvey declared: “Miscegenation will lead to the moral destruction of both races, and the promotion of a hybrid caste that will have no social standing or moral background in a critical moral judgment of the life and affairs of the human race.”27

For Garvey, political ideas and programs were irrelevant when it came to race. The UNIA, he announced, “has absolutely no association with any political party.... Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists are the same to us—they are all white men to us and all of them join together and lynch and burn Negroes.”28

Garvey and Separatism

But despite this condemnation of whites, Garvey did not treat all whites in the same way. He began to identify white supremacists as the only true friends of Blacks because they understood the need for racial purity. On a trip south in 1922, he thanked whites for having “lynched race pride into the Negroes.”29 He met with the Ku Klux Klan’s second in command in Atlanta, Georgia. According to Garvey’s worldview, the Klan and other white supremacists shared common aims with the UNIA. “I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.”30

If some whites were better friends, others were more dangerous—above all socialists and Communists.

It seems strange and a paradox, but the only convenient friend the Negro worker or laborer has, in America, at the present time, is the white capitalist....

I am of the opinion that the group of whites from whom Communists are made, in America, as well as trade unionists and members of the Workers’ party, is more dangerous to the Negro’s welfare than any other group at present.31

He added, “The danger of Communism to the Negro in countries where he forms the minority of the population, is seen in the selfish and vicious attempts of that party or group to use the Negro’s vote and physical numbers in helping to smash and over-throw by revolution, a system that is injurious to them as the white underdogs, the success of which would put their majority group or race still in power, not only as [C]ommunists but as white men.”32

Garvey’s hostility to socialists reflected his long-held admiration for capitalism: “Capitalism is necessary to the progress of the world, and those who unreasonably and wantonly oppose or fight against it are enemies of human advancement.”33 Garvey would draw even more reactionary conclusions a few years later. In 1937, Garvey gave an interview in London in which he claimed: “We were the first fascists...when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our fascism.”34 Later the same year, he declared that the “UNIA was before Mussolini and Hitler ever were heard of. Mussolini and Hitler copied the program of the UNIA—aggressive nationalism for the Black man in Africa.”35

By the time he expressed his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, few Black Americans paid much attention to what Garvey had to say. The U.S. government deported him in 1927, and the UNIA spiralled downward to collapse. Although Garvey and the UNIA espoused quite reactionary positions as the organization declined, the Garvey movement left behind thousands of Blacks who became activists in subsequent community, labor, and political struggles. Many of them or their children would emerge as key leaders in the struggles of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.