Now that he had been on the go without a moment's relaxation since

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO PAN-AFRICAS • 49

arriving in France on August 16, Du Bois headed for Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, the fashionable resort town in the French Alps. Two letters from Nina were awaiting his return to Paris at Madame Chapoteau's. The first had arrived soon after the Paris session ended on September 5. In that letter, dated August 30, Nina acknowledged the letters Du Bois had written on board the Ryndam, wrote of Yolande and preparations for the fall semester at Fisk, and sent greetings from a recent visitor to their new Edgecombe Avenue house. As usual, she hadn't been feeling well, but Nina said she "owe[d] it to you and Yolande not to give out entirely." She had been "going rather slowly now." The second letter waiting for him in Paris was more cheerful. She was "trying not to get too given out," and Yolande was being bustled off to Nashville. Dear Miss Pingree had spent part of the week with them. *Tou will be coming home pretty soon, won't you?" she wondered. He would, but first there was the balm of the Alpine mountain resort.

Du Bois and Fauset are silent after Geneva about their movements as a team. With the official business of the Congress over, they may have been concerned about the propriety of a week of companionship whose obvious motive of mutual enjoyment, if reported to 70 Fifth Avenue, might distress some of the more prudish NAACP board members. That they had been lovers for some time now, there could be little doubt. Typically, he revealed nothing in writing, but Fauset was barely able to screen her feelings of amorous worship from the readers of "Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress," her vivid account in The Crisis of how Dr. Du Bois spent the summer attempting, as she would have it, to overhaul the world order. Her discreet poem about their relationship, which would appear in the July 1922 CrisiSy probably hadn't yet been written, but the emotions informing it must have been given a large boost during this Pan-African summer abroad. Yet if there is a strong probability that he and she were together in Chamonix, proof is now part of the entropy of the past. Fauset's whereabouts are missing, and, as for Du Bois, his stay in the Alps is recorded with great emotional inflation, but with himself as the solitary focus.

Hiking, resting, and writing, and no doubt managing his per diem with considerable care (prices had quadrupled after the war), Du Bois reveled in the outsized beauty of the locale, the play of light and the bracing climate, and gave way to an afflatus whose periodic recurrence had become a personality trait since his Berlin student days. He fancied himself praying to Mont Blanc, "throwing [his] hands in ecstasy, screaming [his] tears," if he were to stay long in Chamonix. He sat, he told his Crisis readers, scribbling, scribbling, and then returning again to admire the great mountain from his window. "The marvel of it, the sheer inhuman perfectness of it all," he rhapsodized, "the almost pain of its beauty and hurt of its joy!" Du Bois's agitated state was the understandable condition of a mind that had conceived, organized, and largely dominated a

50 • W.E.B. DU BOIS

strenuous undertaking whose magnitude of importance he would have beheved at that moment to be incalculable. At the foot of Mont Blanc, he was close to being literally on top of the world. Jessie Fauset's presence would have been a perfect complement to his mood.

DU BOIS SAILED HOME in triumph in late September 1921. A few weeks later, he found himself embroiled in the second great controversy of his life, a confrontation in which not only his ideas and standing as the leading intellectual of his people, but also his very birthright, were to be bitterly assailed by Marcus Garvey, one of the most gifted mobilizers of the mass discontent and ambition of black people during the first quarter of the twentieth century. On Tuesday, April 25,1916, the day Garvey had bounded into the offices at 70 Fifth Avenue, neither man yet thought of the other as a traitorous lunatic or a half-breed, libels Du Bois and Garvey would hurl at each other seven years later. The young Jamaican had been in New York for only about a month, the departure point for a speaking tour of the country that would take him to thirty-eight states. His plan was to raise money to establish a vocational institute in Jamaica based on the Tuskegee model. Booker Washington had replied encouragingly to Garvey's letters, invited him to Tuskegee, and had even indicated that he would appear at certain fundraisers on Garvey's behalf. Washington's death in 1915 deprived Garvey's undertaking of invaluable support, and the new head of Tuskegee, Robert Russa Moton, manifested considerably less enthusiasm. Moton had merely replied by cordial formula to the cryptic letter in which Garvey announced that he had "many large schemes on [his] mind" but could say nothing about them because his numerous enemies were "ever anxious to misrepresent [him]." Du Bois, however, whose influence and renown now exceeded that of the recendy deceased Wizard, had shaken the Jamaican's hand and briefly heard something about his schemes during a visit to the island the previous May. Garvey thought he had good reason to anticipate a sympathetic reception from Du Bois.

Unfortunately, the editor was away from his desk when Garvey visited the association's headquarters. Du Bois returned to find a friendly and rather flattering calling-card message expressing the hope that he, Du Bois, "could be so good as to take the 'chair' at my first public lecture" in the United States. The lecture —"Jamaica" —was to be given at St. Mark's Ghurch on West 138th Street. Du Bois politely declined Garvey's invitation, and so spared himself witnessing what one reliable source described as a fiasco —"one of the most amusing that I have ever seen." Wilfred Adolphus Domingo, a militant black nationalist who was an old friend of Garvey's from Jamaica, was present. Garvey fainted, crashing from the stage amid a crescendo of booing and guffaws. Domingo described this scene some time after he had become as fierce an enemy of Garvey as Du Bois, spicing it with a tasteless description of his former friend's physical features

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO PAN-AFRICAS • 51

that was curiously reminiscent of Monroe Trotter's notorious lampoon of Booker Washington. If the short, round, dark man with flashing eyes and brilliant teeth was hardly the grotesque of Domingo's calumny, it was also true that there was probably no standard of physical attractiveness by which Garvey could ever have been deemed handsome. Had Du Bois joined him on the St. Mark's rostrum, they would have presented a contrast of extremes, the one compact, understat-edly tailored, and precise, the other squat, badly clad, and explosive. But if Du Bois declined to join in the American debut, he did at least cooperate by announcing in the May Crisis that "Mr. Marcus Garvey, founder and president of the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Jamaica, BWI, is now on a visit to America. He will deliver a series of lectures on Jamaica in an effort to raise funds for the establishment of an industrial and educational institution for Negroes in Jamaica."

Du Bois and Garvey's initial interaction in the spring of 1916 appears, therefore, to have been correct, deferential on the latter's part, and entirely free of animus, a far cry from what it would become in a few years. The point is important in light of Garvey's famous version of his first impression of the scene at 70 Fifth Avenue as one that sent him hurrying away in distressed puzzlement, "unable to tell whether he was in a white office or that of the NAAGP." Whatever his true reactions that day to encountering the mix of white and black officers and staff at NAACP headquarters (a sizable proportion of them light-complexioned persons of color), several years were to elapse before Garvey's consternation erupted into print. Until the battle of editorials led to all-out war during 1923, Du Bois proceeded cautiously in his dealings with Garvey. As Garvey himself had not been altogether sure what his long-term plans were, whether to return to Jamaica or attempt to build a racial-uplift organization in the United States, Du Bois, curious and somewhat perplexed, waited and watched. But neither he nor anyone else at the NAACP really paid the visitor from Jamaica much attention.

Left to his own devices and surviving a bout of pneumonia, Garvey had finally managed to save enough money working as a printer in New York to begin traveling and speaking in summer 1916. His cross-country lecture tour opened his eyes as never before to the relative vitality of American Negroes and to the potential for a mass-based race movement. Whereas his own West Indians had been asleep for the last eighty years, "and are still under the spell of Rip Van Winkle," Garvey "unhesitatingly and unreservedly" praised people of color in the United States as the "most progressive and the foremost unit in the expansive chain of scattered Ethiopia." What American Negroes had going for them, Garvey decided, was white racism —what he saw as the "honest prejudices of the [white] South" which forced black people to build their own segregated institutions and to develop a race consciousness that could in time command

52 • W.E.B. DU BOIS

respect from their oppressors. This was to be a frindamental construct of what became Garveyism — the postulate that racial liberation and empowerment were inherent in racial opposition and alienation.

This proud, black-skinned son of an even prouder father had received a solid primary education in the Anglican Church School in St. Ann's Bay, the small seaport town where he was born on August 17,1887. Garvey's cantankerous father, who doggedly impoverished his own family in court battles over grudges and picayune wrongs, was a stonemason and small landowner. Many years later, a claim would be fabricated (probably by the son's second wife) that Garvey pere was descended from the Maroons, the escaped African slaves whose ferocity in the Jamaican highlands had forced the British to grant them a measure of autonomy. Although Garvey's father had little formal schooling, his respect for knowledge became so consuming that he spent hours by himself reading, solitude that Mrs. Garvey and their children learned never to intrude upon. Cap-tivation by books and ideas, as well as a decidedly patriarchal view of women and the world, were legacies from an autocratic and monastic father to a driven and somewhat paranoid son. There was another legacy from St. Ann's Bay— that of a psychic affront astonishingly (even suspiciously) similar to that recounted in The Souls of Black Folk of an adolescent wound inflicted by a callous white female classmate upon a young, innocent Du Bois in Great Barrington. Writing in Current History in September 1923, Garvey would disclose how, at age fourteen, he, also, had been devastated when a white playmate's parents forbade her ever to speak to him again, "for I was a 'nigger.' " It was then that he had understood for the first time, supposedly, "that there was some difference in humanity, and that there were different races, each having its own separate and distinct social life."

Garvey learned the trade of printer in St. Ann's Bay, and later in the larger town of Port Maria, before going to Kingston in 1906 to work as a compositor in a commercial printing establishment. Four years on a fast learning curve in the capital propelled him into politics, unionism, and serious trouble with his employer. First, there was Dr. Robert Love, a septuagenarian of considerable learning and legendary political acumen, one of the first black men elected to the Legislative Council of the colony. Love, a committed Pan-Africanist and admirer of fellow physician and Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams, organized the Pan-African Association of Jamaica in April 1901, not quite a year after the London Pan-African conference at which Du Bois had proclaimed the color line to be the problem of the twentieth century. A Garvey biographer would characterize the physician as, "in a very real sense, a Du Bois-type intellectual." Garvey revered Love and swore by the Jamaica Advocate, Love's newspaper which, asserted the young printer, "one cannot read . . . without getting race consciousness." Finally, there was Garvey's apparentiy peripheral connection to

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Kingston's National Club, organized in 1909 by a mulatto barrister named S.A.G. Cox. Garvey may well have been introduced to Sinn Fein and the struggle for Irish independence at the club.

Serious trouble occurred in November 1908. By that time, Garvey had risen to the position of vice-president of the Jamaican branch of the Typographical Union of America. He either led or, it seems more probable, followed his union out on strike against the island's printing establishments. Blacklisted by the private sector, he was able to secure an appointment as a government printer, a position he held while putting out a periodical during 1910 called Garvey's Watchman. His growing reputation as. an activist almost surely influenced the twenty-three-year-old compositor's decision to take a job on a Costa Rican plantation less than two years later. Garvey soon moved on to Bocas del Toro, Panama, where he saw Jamaican laborers being horribly exploited by the banana and coffee cartels. His protests to the British consulate on behalf of these abused subjects of the empire were unavailing. Then he wrote editorials about their conditions in a Panamanian newspaper called La Prensa. By late 1911, on his way back to Jamaica, Garvey had seen firsthand how Africans and Indians were allowed a bare living in Guatemala and Panama.

Garvey had a burning desire to know what life was like for Africans in Europe, what they thought and hoped for, and how they were treated by supposedly civil and cosmopolitan white people. How he was actually treated while in Great Britain and on the Continent depends on which of his myriad accounts is cited. The leading Garvey expert has insisted that Garvey was generally well received wherever he went, citing the sojourner's own words in evidence. But other words of Garvey's relate dismay and rage, and protest that in Great Britain and on the Continent, as in Jamaica and throughout Central America, he found himself banging his head against the Caucasian ceiling, "found the same stumbling block —Tou are black.' " Sailing home in June 1914 from a two-year stay in England where he had written at least one piece in Duse Muhammad Ali's African Times and Orient Review, probably taken classes at the University of London, made contacts with African and Asian students and merchant seamen, and visited Scotland, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy, this dejected man of destiny claimed to have had a blinding vision. Badly shaken by what a Guyanese passenger, returning from missionary service in Basutoland, told him about "horrible and pitiable" abuse of the Africans there, Garvey had retreated to his cabin:

I asked, "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. . . . My brain was afire. There was a world of thought to conquer. ... All day and the following night I pondered over the subject matter of that conversation.

54 • W.E.B. DU BOIS

and at midnight, lying flat on my back, the vision and thought came to me that I should name the organization the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities (Imperial) League. Such a name I thought would embrace the purpose of all black humanity.

Five days after returning home, on July 20 he had established his new organization in Kingston. But embracing the "purpose of all black humanity" was more than a notion. By late April 1915, when Du Bois visited Jamaica and met Garvey for an instant at the garden party hosted by the royal governor, Sir Sidney Olivier, the young idealist and his Universal Negro Improvement association (UNIA) had made almost no impact. Writing that he "never really knew there was so much color prejudice in Jamaica, in my native home," the dark-skinned Garvey had discovered that the island's mulatto population was generally indifferent if not hostile to his mission. It was then that he had sought the help of Booker Washington and resolved to go the United States.

When he came back to New York exhilarated from his continental speaking tour in summer of 1917, Marcus Mosiah Garvey felt that the years of weary searching and wandering were about over. Thirty years old and world-traveled, he now believed that he had found a place on which to stand and move the earth, a race that he could lead, a chosen people to whom he could be Moses and who would thrill to his gospel of a black Zion. An invitation to address the inaugural meeting of the Liberty League of Colored Americans, a racial-uplift movement founded by Hubert Henry Harrison, gave Garvey his opportunity. Bellhop, telephone operator, evening school prodigy, Virgin Islander Harrison was already a fixture in Harlem. The "speakers' corner" at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue owed much of its reputation for pungent oratory to the dark-skinned agitator with the potato-shaped face framed by horn-rimmed glasses. He had pledged himself to the Socialist party, served as assistant editor of the Masses, and ventured to criticize the Tuskegee Machine, which had cost him a secure position in the Post Office in 1911. Two years later, Harrison had marched with "Big" Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and John Reed in the Paterson, New Jersey, silk workers strike. Self-improved to the point that his broad learning would gain him the monicker "Black Socrates" and a position as staff lecturer with the New York City Board of Education, Harrison's collected wisdom would appear in 1920 as When Africa Awakes: The Inside Story of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro and the Nation, a black nationalist classic. On Tuesday, June 12,1917, Harrison introduced Garvey to some two thousand Harlemites filling Bethel AME Church. There was no pratfall that night. Experienced and confident, he was a hit. From that success Garvey had gone on to hold weekly Sunday afternoon meetings in Lafayette Hall on 131st Street in Harlem. His byline appeared regularly in The Voice, official organ of the Liberty League.

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Those who began showing up at Garvey's increasingly charged Sunday meetings tended to be younger, angrier, poorer, and darker than the typical card-carrying members of the NAACP or the National Urban League. That the majority of them, at least in the early years, were overwhelmingly from the West Indies was a powerful asset that would become, with help from Garvey, a liability exploited by enemies. West Indians poured into the United States between 1911 and 1924, the year in which the new immigration act would severely reduce their influx. Almost thirty thousand would setfle in Harlem during the period roughly corresponding to Garvey's rise and fall. Being a West Indian in Harlem was to belong to a double minority —discriminated against by whites because of the color of their skins and resented by native blacks because of differences perceived under the same skin color. Still, it happened often enough to rankle the native-born Negroes that West Indians were better treated by some white Americans than they were, as when an astonished Claude McKay, his documents missing, was ordered released from vagrancy charges after a smiling judge in Pittsburgh heard his Jamaican lilt. Virgin Islander G. James Fleming, small, smart, and as articulate as a British extra in Hollywood, had been in New York less than twenty-four hours when someone shouted, "Oh, you're a monkey chaser!" Fleming observed the scene at Liberty Hall, fascinated, but never joined the UNIA; instead, he earned degrees in journalism and political science, and, later, even aspired to edit The Crisis. "Some said West Indians were smarter than anybody else," Fleming recalled in his retirement from college teaching — "a double-edged compliment like saying, 'J^^s are smart.' " "There was a great deal of antagonism," George Schuyler confirmed more than fifty years after Garvey had disappeared from Harlem, and he blamed it on organizations such as the UNIA.

Nominally, Garvey remained a soldier in Harrison's militant organization; in reality the older man increasingly deferred to his spellbinding collaborator. Liberty League rallies became UNIA rallies and their popularity so great that they had to be held at the Palace Gasino, one of Harlem's largest entertainment centers. Du Bois stayed away from the Palace Gasino, but he began to pay more attention to the cresting excitement engendered by a man he soon described as "a little difficult to characterize." John Edward Bruce, a famous Aframerican correspondent better known as "Bruce Grit," cast a cynical professional eye on the Palace Casino theatrics in the Home News and called Garvey a "glib phrase maker and a dreamer with a tolerably florid imagination." In a poor imitation of a West Indian accent, Bruce mocked, "you won't do, Mr. Garvey. Too mu-chee talkee" Three years later, however, the veteran journalist would place his pen at Garvey's service until his death in 1923. But while Bruce scoffed for the moment, no less a personage than Mary Church Terrell, an erstwhile Du Bois ally and a Talented Tenth grande damey addressed a meeting in the Palace

56 • W.E.B. DU BOIS

casino in early October 1917. Terrell's appearance was followed by news of a statewide elocution contest sponsored by the UNIA in December. Du Bois may have really been surprised to learn that a justice of the state Supreme Court, another from the Court of Special Session, distinguished divines, and Columbia University's Nicholas Murray Butler, arguably the country's most august university president, presided over the competition. Writing Garvey that the Palace Casino evening inspired him with "a new feeling of pride and satisfaction at what the members of the Association and their friends are accomplishing," President Butler found himself, after another Palace casino appearance, ducking serial invitations to UNIA meetings.

Whatever his long-term plans were, Carvey finally made it unmistakably clear that he intended to pursue them from Manhattan. On July 31, 1918, a certificate of incorporation for the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League was recorded by the commissioner of deeds for the city of New York. To be headed by a "Potentate" "of Negro blood and race," the actual "working head" of the UNIA was invested in the "President-General and Administrator" (later, "Provisional President-General of Africa"), an office reserved by Garvey for Garvey. Article V of the Constitution and Book of Laws stipulated that "he shall be responsible to the Potentate for the entire working and carrying out of all commands." Two years later, Du Bois would be dumbstruck to find himself summoned by Garvey to run for the honorific position of "Supreme Potentate." As the new UNIA took shape over the summer and fall of 1918, it became a magnet for discontented and radical elements now especially alienated by the NAACP's policy on American entry into the war. "Close Ranks," Du Bois's editorial temblor in the July 1918 CrisiSy sundered black leadership into jagged antagonisms. For some, such as Robert Abbot, publisher of the Chicago Defender, and John Hope, president of Morehouse College, the appeal to "forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens and the allied nations" made perfect sense. Deferring goals for full rights of citizenship until the War for Democracy was won, they signed off on a Jim Crow army officer corps and rallied to the flag, if not to the NAACP itself Others, such as Trotter, Archibald Grimke, and Ida Wells-Barnett broke ranks with their Talented Tenth peers and savaged Du Bois as a betrayer, but had little use as yet for the UNIA.

To Caribbean newcomers, as well as to some of the newcomers from the Deep South, Du Bois, Joel Spingarn, James Weldon Johnson, and the rest of the NAACP cadre were outdated racial militants, well-meaning fuddy-duddies at best. Du Bois was astonished to find his Sunday appearance at something called the People's Educational Forum repaid with insolence. The forum's organizer, the young West Indian Socialist Richard B. Moore, challenged the editor's opinion that black labor should keep its distance from both white labor

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO PAN-AFRICAS • 57

and white capital. "As for that young man who waves his hands and froths at the mouth," Du Bois harrumphed (in Moore's account), "I didn't come here to engage in this sort of exchange. I thought you wanted to learn something, but you know everything." They might not know everything, but the young radicals were certain that their elders no longer merited the presumption of wisdom. The roiling controversy over Du Bois's hankering for a captaincy in military intelligence (splitting the association's national headquarters and almost causing the Washington branch to secede) seemed only to prove them right. They applauded when Garvey's new weekly newspaper, The Negro World, castigated "Close Ranks" with the jeremiad, "They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin." A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, having praised the October Revolution in Russia as the defining event of the century, welcomed the UNIA as a companion movement after The Negro World cheered the Bolsheviks. Garvey's friend Domingo, a contributing editor to Randolph's Messenger and editor of The Emancipator, his own periodical, found nothing to laugh about now and much to praise in the President-General and Administrator.

Among the organizations eventually affiliating in some fashion with the UNIA, none would sound more revolutionary than the Hamitic League of the World and its ideological cousin, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), each formed sometime between 1917 and 1919 by a small band of young West Indian intellectuals in Harlem who synthesized black nationalism and communism into a unique doctrine. Two men were the engines of the group: George Wells Parker, founder of the Hamitic League, and his thirty-one-year-old disciple, Cyril Valentine Briggs, a black nationalist so Caucasian in appearance that the New York News once called him an "angry blond Negro." Although the Hamitic league prated its Afrocentric nationalism while the Blood Brotherhood served up a stew of communistic nationalism, the ideological distinctions tended greatly to blur as the two groups increasingly collaborated. The Hamitic League published a remarkable little monthly. The Crusader. The first ten-cent Crusader appeared in September 1918, along with the inaugural Negro World. In mocking tribute to Du Bois, it reproduced Robert Browning's poem "The Lost Leader." "Just for a handful of silver he left us./ Just for a riband to stick in his coat—/ Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,/ Lost all the others she lets us devote." Parker served up the group's Afrocentric cosmology in a Crusczc/er series reminiscent of Du Bois's columns in The Horizon: Parker's "The Children of the Sun" anointed the African race as "the real founder of human civilization"; white people were pale derivatives of a once great black race. Briggs supplied the political economy with its blend of working-class unity across racial lines in America, on the one hand, but nation-building in Africa based on racial exclusivity, on the other. By The Crusaders logic, there was nothing inconsistent

58 • W.E.B. DU BOIS

about backing Randolph's Socialist party candidacy for state comptroller while approving Garvey's race purity and "back to Africa" platform. As the Hamitic League enlarged and its ABB persona became preponderant, apparatchiks of the soon-to-be-established American Communist Party such as Otto Huiswoud, Lov-ett Fort-Whiteman, Grace Campbell, Harry Haywood, and Richard Moore joined it. The ABB persuaded itself that it was a revolutionary conspiracy with paramilitary potential, an Aframerican version of the reorganized Sinn Fein. Briggs had been profoundly impressed by the Irish Easter Rebellion and thought it held valuable lessons for black nationalists. On that score, he and Garvey saw eye to eye.

As far as Du Bois was concerned, reproaches from a few uncredentialed and immigrant intellectuals were minor nuisances. Randolph's prestige would become as impressive as his resonant voice in a few years, but in the editor's estimation Randolph spoke only for a tiny circle of mutual admirers. The irruption of self-proclaimed "New Negro" publications —T/ze Voice, The Messenger, The Emancipator, The Challenge, The Crusader, The Negro World—Du Bois saw as encouraging signs of an emergent complex of diverse American Negro opinions, useful, certainly, but subordinate if not marginal factors in the formulation of racial policy. He would thoughtfully downplay their relevancy in "The Class Struggle," an essay in the June 1921 issue of The Crisis. Still, he couldn't ignore that Garvey's appeal was widening. The editor had risked his reputation appealing to his people to fight in a foreign war on the dubious proposition that they would win their long-denied civil rights when peace came. Garvey had bellowed from the stage of the Palace Casino that Wilson's war was a white man's calamity having nothing to do with black people. The War for Democracy over, Du Bois had commanded America to honor the claims of its African citizens in the defiant Crisis editorial "We Return Fighting." Garvey's Negro World, its circulation already at ten thousand, chronicled the seamless postwar perfidy of the White House, the War Department, and most of white America; and the President-General and Administrator was said to have wept salt tears as he watched the black troops march home to Harlem. Du Bois acclaimed the League of Nations "as absolutely necessary to the salvation of the Negro race." Garvey reserved judgment, but drew inspiration from Briggs's belligerent black nationalism and would soon pronounce the League "null and void as far as the Negro is concerned."

Du Bois would have sensed a definite rise in Garvey's credibility as he monitored the procession of dignitaries in and out of the Casino. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a founder of the NAACP, tenacious civil libertarian, and archetypal feminist, made common cause with the UNIA, as did Reverends George Frazier Miller of Brooklyn and Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., of the powerful Abyssinian Baptist Church, now about to relocate to Harlem. Madame C. J. Walker, the

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immensely wealthy manufacturer of hair and beauty products, helped finance the start-up oiThe Negro World as well as the purchase of the UNIA's permanent meeting hall in 1919. Three weeks after the signing of the armistice on November 11, 1918, the Bureau of Investigation's special agent reported a dramatic Palace Casino meeting whose agenda was the structure of the postwar world. The audience of nearly five thousand roared approval as the President-General nominated Wells-Barnett and Randolph to represent the UNIA at the Versailles Peace Conference. Wells-Barnett, exuding her trademark ebullience, rose to say that she was ready to go to Paris, but she suggested that the UNIA proceed cautiously with its back-to-Africa agenda. Their delegates' specific demands were less fixed than the heated rhetoric in Liberty Hall suggested, but the slogan "Afi-ica for the Africans," was obviously intended to embrace an unprecedented role for American and Antillean blacks in administering Germany's forfeited colonial possessions. Garvey spoke as though he fiilly expected the Allied Powers to transfer the Cameroons and Tanganyika to the UNIA. A twenty-two-year old Haitian named Eliezer Cadet was designated UNIA commissioner to Paris and was to act as interpreter for Randolph and Wells-Barnett. With emotions at fever pitch, Garvey prophesied that the next war would be fought between blacks and whites, unless the former achieved political and social justice —and he boasted that "with the aid of Japan on the side of the Negroes they will be able to win such a war."

Sailing to the Versailles Peace Conference from New York aboard the Orizaba on December 1, with the cream of the press corps, Du Bois would be on the high seas as Garvey, Randolph, Trotter, Wells-Barnett, and the other dissenters held meetings and passed resolutions. Trotter's rival organization, the National Equal Rights League (NERL), had drawn Garvey and 250 prominent Negroes to Washington, D.C., a few days before Du Bois left for France. Too busy with visa red tape and last-minute affairs in New York to be present, Du Bois informed himself, nevertheless, about Trotter's Washington conference. The NERL meeting voted to send eleven representatives (Randolph and Wells-Barnett among them) to the peace conference carrying a Fifteenth Point to add to Wilson's Fourteen —"elimination of civil, political, and judicial, distinctions based on race or color in all nations for the new era of freedom everywhere." By the time the Orizaba docked at Brest, the President-General had accompanied Wells-Barnett, Randolph, Powell, and Miller to a meeting with America's first self-made distaff millionaire. Sarah Breedlove had risen by grit and aptitude from Louisiana Delta poverty to become the fabled Madame C. J. Walker, whose hair and beauty-culture empire was to early twentieth-century Negro Americans what Revlon or Vidal Sassoon became to generations of white Americans after World War II. "I got myself a start by giving myself a start," Madame Walker liked to say of the mail-order business in hot combs and relaxing agents

6o • W.E.B. DU BOIS

she and her second husband had operated in Pittsburgh and Indianapohs. Mr. Walker was now a memory. Devoting herself to good works and racial uplift, Madame held court at Villa Lewaro, her stately Hudson River mansion a stone's throw from robber baron Jay Gould's estate. It was there that she received Garvey and the other guests, ardently embraced their proposal for an International League of Darker Peoples, and agreed to help defray the costs of the delegates to Paris.

While upwards of a hundred thousand Crisis readers followed Du Bois across the battlefields of France into the bivouacs of Negro troops and into the portentous deliberations of the first Pan-African Congress, the visa applications of Garvey's and Trotter's would-be emissaries were summarily rejected, their letters and petitions ignored ("never heard one syllable from the lips of Woodrow Wilson," Garvey complained). Cadet, Garvey's young "High Commissioner" had managed to reach Paris on his Haitian passport before Du Bois headed home in late March 1919. Trotter himself had sailed much later as a cook on the old Canadian ship Yarmouthy perhaps even passing Du Bois's returning ship on the high seas. These were bound to have been fools' errands, as neither Cadet or Trotter possessed even the fiction of importance extended to Du Bois by Clemenceau, Diagne, Colonel House, George Beer, Walter Lippmann, and the international press. Disheveled and friendless, the valiant Trotter was taken in by a compassionate family of color that must have observed with perplexity his fruitless efforts to make contracts with high officials at the conference. Cadet's dispatches to Harlem, alluding to significant meetings and imminent breakthroughs, were mostly fabrications that had the direct consequence of provoking Garvey's first public attack on Du Bois. On March 29, 1919, at Mother Zion AME Church, after Randolph spoke and the regal Amy Ashwood, Garvey's fijture first wife, recited a poem, the President-General called on the capacity audience to show its "complete repudiation of Dr. Du Bois" for interfering with Cadet's "already difficult duties." "The reactionary leader" was denounced in "the most spirited and patriotic manner," reported The Negro World. A substantial offering filled the collection plate to enable Cadet to "combat Dr. Du Bois" and to press the peacemakers to place Germany's African colonies under the stewardship of educated persons of color.

Rumors spread from Harlem to the country at large of the editor's alleged sabotage. Because he alone had been visaed of the score of public figures wishing to bring a message to the peace conference, a certain amount of suspicion about Du Bois's anti-imperialist militancy was hardly surprising. But the UNIA indictment considerably aggravated the credibility problems of a leader whose articles exposing officially sanctioned racism in the military could now be construed as proof of his own previous myopia, if not worse. A few weeks after his return from France, Du Bois was heckled in St. Philip's Episcopal Church,

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO "PAN-AFRICAS" • 6l

Harlem's toniest place of worship. Some demanded to know why only he and Moton had been allowed to sail. Others asked if Du Bois favored the Egyptians and Indians rebelling against their British rulers. There was much booing when he replied no. Whether or not he fully grasped yet what was happening, Du Bois, the NAACP, and the leadership class they represented were about to undergo an unprecedented challenge of authority in comparison to which the Bookerite contest during the first decade of the century would appear to have been a mild misunderstanding. Unlike the previous internecine dispute, which had often been more about the uses and abuses of powerfiil white philanthropists than about mobilizing the hoi polloi, the emergent Du Bois-Garvey struggle would shake the race from bottom to top. "For thousands of years, the Negro has been the outcast of the world," but no longer, the President-General trumpeted from the pages of The Negro World as he announced the convening of a "great convention" for the month of August. Today the Negro was determined to play his part in the "reorganization of world affairs." "All Negroes who are interested in themselves, in their race, and in future generations will wend their way to New York City to form a part of this great convention assembled." As the summer of 1919 closed, the institutional stakes became much clearer and the personal vulnerabilities far greater.

Garvey incorporated the Black Star Line (BSL) in Delaware on July 27, 1919, announcing that the UNIA would operate ships "to trade to all parts of the world. The corporation will offer employment to thousands of our men and women." A week later, he presided over the dedication of the UNIA's permanent assembly place. Liberty Hall, a Baptist church whose congregation had given up on its construction after being able to complete only the basement. Like The Negro World, which took its inspiration from The Irish World, this unfinished structure at 120-140 West 138th Street took its name from Liberty Hall in Dublin, reflections of Garvey's fascination with the struggle for Irish independence. Du Bois, too, praised Irish resistance. Unlike Garvey, however, the editor characteristically reminded readers of the irony that no people had more willingly " 'kill[ed] niggers' from Kingston to Delhi and from Kumasi to Fuji" than the Irish, who had provided the backbone for the AFL's policies excluding Negro workers. "In this world it is the Oppressed who have continually been used to cow and kill... in the interest of the Universal Oppressor," Du Bois sighed. Garvey was not much given to qualified endorsements, and less so now that his popularity took a quantum leap with the acquisition by the Black Star Line of its first ship. Skepticism surrounding the UNIA leader vanished overnight from the streets of Harlem, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, and New Orleans; nor was it any longer quite so fashionable to mock the President-General and Administrator in the parlors of the Talented Tenth. The anchoring of the old Canadian ship Yarmouth at 135th Street pier on September 14, 1919, was

62 • W.E.B. DUBOIS

received by five thousand jostling, cheering Harlemites as one of the greatest events in the modern history of the Negro race.

Du Bois frankly had no idea what to make of it yet. Nearly a full year was to pass before he inquired of the United States Shipping Board about the particulars of age, construction, and ownership of Garvey's ships. Moving cautiously, one of the first things he did was warn Uncle James Burghardt in Great Barrington not to invest any money in the Black Star Line: "The District Attorney of New York County has pronounced its methods as firaudulent." An enquiry of a prominent Jamaican, C. Dodd, brought the much-delayed reply that Garvey's standing in the island was negligible. Du Bois wrote another prospective source for advice about how best to proceed in obtaining information about the Yarmouth's "ownership, liens, etc." The situation called for diplomacy, Du Bois decided, moderation that was in striking contrast to the shrill denunciations of Garvey in the Chicago Defender, black America's leading newspaper. A raucous UNIA meeting at Carnegie Hall in late August 1919 had driven The Defender to declare that the race ought to sever any ties to "a man like Garvey," who was not even an American citizen. The newspaper's aspersion that the Black Star Line was a fraudulent operation resulted in a court verdict in Garvey's favor, which showed that he was as ready to sue detractors as his father had been. Still moving cautiously, however, the September 1920 Crisis acknowledged for the first time, in "The Rise of the West Indian," this "new ally in the fight for black democracy." Rising up against the historic hegemony of Europeans and mulattoes, the peasant masses of the Caribbean were becoming a force throughout the Western Hemisphere, noted the article, and underscored the electric impact of the "new cry of 'Africa for the Africans.' "

The editor's off-the-record comments, however, were far fi-om civil when he was interviewed in late August 1920 by a representative fi:om the National Civic Federation (a coalition of conservative white businessmen). Garvey was not sincere, Du Bois was reported to have said to Charles Mowbray White. He was a demagogue whose movement would collapse "in a short time . . . and his followers are the lowest type of Negroes, mostly fi-om the West Indies." Barring some not readily discernible motive for misrepresentation, White's report (whose authorship was identified by one source as a white lecturer on socialism) captured the editor in a particularly supercilious and reactionary frame of mind. Garvey's followers were allies of Bolsheviks and of the post-Easter Rebellion Sinn Feiners, he charged. These people were not representative "in any sense of the word." But given the "boiling point" hatred that black Americans now felt for white Americans as a result of their war experiences and the upsurge of violence against them, Du Bois speculated that Garvey's movement just might succeed. "I shan't raise a hand to stop it," he declared somewhat imperiously. Four days earlier, Garvey had told White exactly what he thought of the editor

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO "PAN-AFRICAS" • 63

of The Crisis. Du Bois represented the antebellum Negro whose time was fast running out. He had obligated himself to the white folks, Garvey charged, "and is in no sense or way free to break with them now."

Meanwhile, the editor's apprehensions were shared by some of the early collaborators of the UNIA. Briggs and the African Blood Brotherhood were in a much less positive frame of mind by then, not only because of Garvey's decided cooling over socialism but also because of the state of the Black Star Line's finances. When Charles Mowbray White interviewed Randolph and Owen on August 20, 1920, they were as dismissive as Du Bois had been. Owen called Garvey an ignoramus and a "fool or a rogue." The solidarity of the Messenger group with the UNIA had crumbled in recent months, largely due to Garvey's equivocation about socialism. Although Garvey had predicted in his newspaper in late March 1919 that Bolshevism would continue to spread among the oppressed of the world until it produced "a universal rule of the masses," six months later he had expelled his boyhood friend and earliest New York collaborator, Domingo, from his post as The Negro World's first editor. The Red Scare and the Red Summer of 1919 caused Garvey to regret praise for the Russian Revolution and collaboration with its American enthusiasts, especially after incriminating documents written by Domingo turned up in a Lusk Committee raid on the Rand School of Social Science. Domingo was charged with insinuating Bolshevism into the movement and driven out of the UNIA. With Booker Washington, Garvey believed that wealth and the power that came with it were the results of sweat, savings, and risk-taking. With the Palmer raids and their local imitations sweeping the country, to abandon his left-leaning allies cost Garvey littie in the way of conscience and nothing more than the appearance of ideological consistency.

The watchword for Garveyites was now "race first," which meant building the New Jerusalem on the model of the National Negro Business League rather than the New Economic Policy. Barely out of Assistant District Attorney Edwin P. Kilroe's office, where he had been grilled about Wobblies, anarchists, and Reds, Garvey made a hard turn to the political right, telling his followers, "we are not going to waste time over the white man's politics. All the time we have to waste is with pro-Negro politics." Dictatorship over the proletariat was as close as he ever came to an understanding of dialectical materialism. International socialists need no longer apply, said Garvey, who soon wondered why a leader as gifted and determined as Lenin had ever wanted to experiment with communism. That message was communicated in no uncertain terms to a deeply disappointed Claude McKay, the dazzling young Jamaican poet serving as associate editor of The Liberator. The poet had corralled Harrison, Briggs, Grace Campbell, and one or two others for weekly political discussions in Greenwich Village. McKay said he wanted to use nationalism as a bridge to communism

64 • W.E.B. DU BOIS

by winning over the UNIA, "this great army of awakened workers ... to the finer system of Sociahsm." Yale man Wilham Ferris, tiny author of the big book The African Abroad, and Domingo's successor at The Negro World, rebuffed McKay's overtures after attending a meeting or two. A saddened McKay decided that, although his fellow Jamaican possessed a revolutionary spirit, Garvey failed to understand "the significance of modern revolutionary developments. Maybe he chose not to understand," the poet added perceptively.

The growing number of followers certainly understood Garvey's appeal to ethnic pride better than they would have the economics of Marx and Lenin. Many of them — Port of Spain shopkeepers, Panamanian stevedores. New Orleans cooks, and Harlem bellhops —were as conservative in their economic outiook as they were hopefiil of righting ancient racial wrongs. Industrious, fi-u-gal, and commonsensical —petit bourgeois to the core —they were, nonetheless, far fi-om immune to Utopian aspirations. When the President-General spoke to them of past glories and imminent triumphs, as he did to a black American crowd in Norfolk, Virginia, in October 1919, they were electrified. "The Negro gave [the white man] science and art and literature and everything that is dear to him today," they heard him shout, "and the white man has kept them for thousands of years, and he has taken advantage of the world." With greater intellectual tidiness, Du Bois had advanced similar claims in Darkwater and other writings, but Garvey made them come alive for the little people as never before. Ovington saw how he affected them and wrote about the phenomenon some years later with sensitivity: "Garvey was the first Negro in the United States to capture the imagination of the masses. . . . The sweeper in the subway, the elevator boy, eternally carrying fat office men and perky girls up and down a shaft, knew that when night came he might march with the Africa army and bear a wonderfijl banner to be raised some day in a distant, beautifiil land." They wore uniforms and marched under banners, as she said, but they also sent money and bought issue after issue of BSL stock — $200,000 in less than four summer months in 1919. From September 1920 to August 1921, they bought $55,000 worth of stock in the teeth of the economic downturn, and when Garvey launched the Liberian Construction Loan in October 1920 in order to raise $2 million for the UNIA's Liberian beachhead and a sizable loan to the Liberian government, the faithful bought $137,500 worth of bonds virtually overnight.

The drama of the first International Gonvention of the Negro Peoples of the World opened on Sunday, August 1, 1920, under angry Harlem clouds, with rainfall intermittent throughout the day. For one month, from August 1 through September 1, thousands of delegates would file through Harlem and Liberty Hall. The weather on Sunday was in stark contrast to the mood of the elated thousands streaming into Liberty Hall that morning. The hall had been enlarged

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO "PAN-AFRICAS" • 65

for the occasion to seventeen thousand square feet (three times its original dimensions) and to a seating capacity of 12,000. The Red, Black, and Green hung alongside the Stars and Stripes in alternating arrangements, with pride of place given to a gigantic American flag draping a dais seating fully two hundred notables. Two bands rendered spirited versions of the national anthem and "Onward Christian Soldiers." When the curtain rose on Tuesday afternoon, a pageant the likes of which had never been seen before in America unfolded. That Tuesday night, August 3, 1920, 25,000 people of color would pack the old Madison Square Garden between 12th and 14th streets. In the afternoon hours before that legendary event happened, the legions of the UNIA marched 25,000-strong in gorgeous weather through Harlem in a display of civic, commercial, martial, and pan-African prowess.

The parade stepped off promptly at 2 P.M. from UNIA headquarters in 138th Street, headed by four mounted policemen. Behind them came the first vice-president of the Black Star Line, Jeremiah Certain, and the secretary of the Negro P'actories Corporation, Arden "Socrates" Bryan, on horseback. Next came the convertible automobile in which the Honorable Gabriel Johnson, mayor of Monrovia, Liberia, resplendent in his robes of office, sat with Provisional President-General Garvey, his rotund frame in black attire, the feathers of his regal bicornate headress waving. Harlem, at frill turnout, bordered on delirium as hundred-member bands played and choirs sang, followed, in order of march as reported in the Negro World Convention Bulletin, by the men of the African Rifles Corps, immaculate in their black uniforms as they quickstepped down Lenox Avenue, "the Philadelphia contingent with banners showing they represent the 9,500 members of that division . . . ; the Norfolk, Va., Band; the Black Cross nurses of Philadelphia, who with their fellow sisters of the New York division, made a truly inspiring spectacle," clad in white costumes and flowing white caps. There were contingents from Jamaica, Panama, St. Lucia, Bermuda, and Nigeria. Five hundred automobiles brought up the rear, trailed by two mounted policemen. Forty years later, Hugh Mulzac of the Black Star navy and first mate of the Frederick Douglass, recalled that day as "the greatest demonstration of colored solidarity in American history, before or since." .

And the spectacular of the day was yet to come. Twenty-five thousand wildly cheering people rose from every filled seat in Madison Square Garden as Garvey in cape and regalia led the UNIA nobility to the speakers' platform at precisely 8:45 that night. "Onward Christian Soldiers" resounded as the band of the Black Star Line gamely complemented Harlem's regimental band of the fabled Fifteenth Infantry. "The Universal Ethiopian Anthem" had not yet been adopted. Reverend George Alexander McGuire, a regal Episcopal priest from Antigua soon to comport himself as religious patriarch of the UNIA, delivered the invocation. McGuire would feud bitterly with Garvey the following year, only to

66 • W.E.B. DU BOIS

return three years later bringing his African Orthodox Church with its catechism of black divinities to the UNIA faithful. After a stirring musical program, Garvey was introduced by presiding officer Henrietta Vinton Davis, the stylish, vibrant Baltimore elocutionist. At that moment, as the crowd hushed, his boasts that he spoke for tens of millions of people of color no longer seemed a mad conceit "I have in my hand two telegrams," Garvey announced dramatically, one received from a Jew, the other to be sent to an Irishman. Reading the message from Louis Michel, a California Zionist—"there is no justice and no peace in this world until the Jew and the Negro both control side by side Palestine and Africa" —he waited for applause to die down before reading the second message, his own, to President Eamon de Valera: "We believe Ireland should be free even as Africa shall be free for the Negroes of the world. Keep up the fight for a free Ireland."

The young historian Charles Harris Wesley, like Du Bois a product of Fisk and Harvard, may not have been in the Garden on that historic night, but he did hear Garvey speak in public more than once during the early twenties and was impressed. "I hadn't heard anybody dramatize Africa in the way that Garvey had done it," he recalled fifty-five years later. "It would have appealed to Du Bois, if he'd heard it," Wesley thought. There is even a slight probability that Du Bois may have been in the audience that night. Ferris, who had known Du Bois for years, claimed he saw the editor in the Garden, inconspicuous yet unmistakable among the thousands. Du Bois was already gathering information about Garvey, making enquiries in Jamaica, probing his business affairs, seeking data from maritime organizations, even sending Garvey a questionnaire in late July in order, the editor explained, "to present to our readers a critical estimate" of UNIA objectives. When he finally decided to present Garvey and his organization to the NAACP readership in the December-January issue of the magazine, Du Bois wrote about his subject with all the keenness of the investigative journalist. "Garvey is an extraordinary leader of men. Thousands of people believe in him," the editor advised his readers. "He is able to stir them with singular eloquence and the general run of his thoughts is of a high plane." The two-part essay bristled with balance-sheet numbers, contained much material on the inner workings of the UNIA, and presented its subject's personality with a sure touch. The trail of money Du Bois followed into and out of the Garvey's various enterprises —the Black Star Line, the Negro Factories Corporation, the Liberian Loan Fund —plunged, twisted, and detoured as crazily as the path through a circus chamber of horrors.

Of even greater destructive potential than these data-filled observations, however, was Du Bois's highlighting of what he saw as the Garvey movement's alien and invidious elements. The West Indian antagonism between blacks and mulattoes had no place in the United States, Du Bois warned. Pigmentocracy

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO "PAN-AFRICAS" • 67

was "absolutely repudiated by every thinking Negro." The greatest mistake Gar-vey could make was to attempt to perpetrate the politics of color conflict here in America. "American Negroes recognize no color line in or out of the race, and they will in the end punish the man who attempts to establish it," he stated as a simple, fatal fact. The reason Du Bois's threat was likely to be fulfilled, however, was not because Garvey's exploitation of the in-group color line was nothing more than an inflammatory libel but precisely because it violated one of the most sensitive taboos of the native leadership class. The explosive reality was that one of the best-known secrets in the United States was the persisting correspondence between light skins and influence and position in black America. Color reigned even at Tuskegee Institute in the Black Belt, as the farmer wanting to send his son there lamented in Charles S. Johnson's 1934 classic, The Shadow of the Plantation: "I suppose if Fd gone to Tuskegee and had schooling Fd a married a yellow woman too. ... So many colored folks only want to be with white folks. All of them Tuskegee people is like that." Sentiments such as these, usually ignored or humorously discounted, contained less truth than Garveyites claimed, but still more than enough to cause Du Bois and his peers to wince whenever they were insisted upon. There was an almost plaintive dismay in Du Bois's distress over the UNIA leader's insolent ingratitude, his profoundly reckless roiling of the waters of civil rights power relations. "Why then does he sneer at the work of the powerful group of his race in the United States where he finds asylum and sympathy?"

Attempting to make sense of the UNIA's July 1920 financial report (the only one available to the public), indicating neither profit nor loss, Du Bois calculated, now that the first cycle of enthusiastic giving was over, that the UNIA would be able to collect no more than $150,000 annually fi-om some 300,000 devoted UNIA members (Du Bois dismissed the figure of three million) in order to finance its leader's grandiose schemes —more ships, a grocery chain, a restaurant, laundries, real estate investments, a publishing house, an autonomous community in Liberia. By the close of 1920, Du Bois also knew the real story behind the rechristened Yarmouth's implausible voyage to Cuba and the West Indies, the first of three trips to the Caribbean. On a cold, clear October 31, 1919, six thousand members of the UNIA, the red, green, and black official colors streaming above their heads, had marched, bursting with pride, to 135th Street pier for the Yarmouth's rechristening as the S. S. Frederick Douglass. Ignoring Captain Joshua Cockburn's protests of mechanical unreadiness, Garvey had signed a full-liability contract with the Green River Distillery Company to transport liquor on the eve of the January 1920 federal enforcement of the prohibition amendment. Its boilers wheezing and the hull listing dangerously due to the hasty, lopsided loading of the $4.8 million whiskey cargo, the Frederick Douglass had been towed under Coast Guard protection back to port for repairs

68 • W.E.B. DU BOIS

soon after weighing anchor from New York. A portion of the cargo had been thrown overboard in order to steady the ship. Boilers patched and the black star standard flapping from its mast, the Douglass had finally limped into Havana harbor on March 3 with much of the whiskey stolen by gangsters and the crew while in port, the line's paltry eleven-thousand-dollar transportation fee wiped out many times over by the contract's indemnification clause. A gasp might have been heard coming from Talented Tenth parlors across America. Less than two months after the International Convention closed, the Black Star Line had acquired two more boats: the KanawhCy a tired yacht priced at $65,000 ("$55,000 more than she was worth," said Mulzac later); and the Shadyside, a rickety excursion boat sold for an inflated $35,000.

"The great difficulty with him," Du Bois sadly observed of Garvey, "is that he has absolutely no business sense, no flair for real organization and his general objects are so shot through with bombast and exaggeration that it is difficult to pin them down for examination." Briggs's Crusader soon disclosed, however, that, contrary to Garvey's boast, the Yarmouth had yet to be registered as the property of the Black Star Line, that it still belonged to the North American Shipping Corporation, Ltd., and that there was an $83,500 balance due on the aged ship's ludicrous sale price of $168,000. No answer was forthcoming from Garvey about the nearly $200,000 taken in during the four months since the first Black Star Line stock issue in June 1919. Du Bois sensed a racial catastrophe in the making, another knockout blow to group self-confidence comparable in magnitude to the collapse of the Freedmen's Bank in the early 1870s. "He can have all the power and money that he can efficiently and honestly use," Du Bois wrote anxiously, "and if in addition he wants to prance down Broadway in a green shirt, let him —but do not let him overwhelm with bankruptcy and disaster one of the most interesting spiritual movements of the modern Negro world."

Among those who had roared approval of the President-General in Madison Square Garden on the night of August 3, 1920, were two Negroes in the employ of the Bureau of Investigation, special agents P-138 and 800, the first and, for another forty years, the last Hoover would allow to serve under him. Their dutifijl, detailed reports monitored the UNIA's leader's racial boldness, which seemed to increase in proportion to his declining economic radicalism, infuriating the bureau's director and fully convincing him that the Jamaican immigrant was a danger to the republic. According to Agent P-138's report, Garvey had enjoined his followers on the last night of the international convention to be ready to face death in the cause of Negro solidarity. The white races were their "natural foe, irrespective whether they were American, English, French or Germans." There was also the alarming phenomenon of large UNIA affiliates springing up across the country, with the New Orleans branch even surpassing

I

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO "PAN-AFRICAS" • 69

in size those in Philadelphia and Chicago. Not a full year had elapsed since the general counsel of the powerful United Fruit Company had written to warn the secretary of state that, unless actions were taken, Garvey's activities in Latin America "might repeat the French experience in Haiti." In Cuba, the UNIA had become significant enough for that country's president to entertain the officers of the Frederick Douglass. Lord Curzon of Kedleston, secretary of state for the colonies, received a warning from the secretary of the West Indian Protective Society, a New York-based organization, that the Garvey movement was plotting to foment racial discord among whites and coloreds in the British Empire. The 1921 Report of the South African Department of Native Affairs expressed similar concern about the seven UNIA branches that had sprung up across the country, especially the increasingly robust ones in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The Negro World was suppressed throughout British Africa, a policy that would be enforced by the colonial ministries in Paris and Lisbon when the newspaper appeared with French and Spanish-language sections afl:er 1922.

If Lord Curzon and the American secretary of state were mildly dismayed by the phenomenon, the leadership class of American blacks began to feel seriously threatened by the Provisional President-General of Africa and his UNIA. From Boston, Reverend Elmer Thompson, influential pastor of the Massachusetts Avenue Baptist Church, had written in alarm to The Crisis about the "increasing number of our own people" joining that city's new UNIA. "You owe it to the race to give words of warning," Reverend Thompson implored Du Bois. Plainly alarmed about his own organization being tainted by Garveyite excess, Du Bois had drafi:ed and sent a careful disclaimer to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes on the eve of the second Pan-African Congress, explaining that, despite "some public misapprehension," his Congress had "nothing to do with the so called Garvey movement and contemplates neither force nor revolution in its program." But there was also the important, competing consideration of maintaining a common front against white racism. The two organizations were still officially pledged to collaboration, with the UNIA permitting joint membership in the NAACP and supporting passage of the Dyer antilynching bill. After first denouncing the congressional bill to grant Liberia a desperately needed $5 million loan as a plot to control the black republic, Garvey reversed himself and joined Du Bois and the NAACP in supporting its passage. Their personal animosity aside, when he wasn't fiercely attacking Du Bois, Garvey continued to invite the editor's participation in UNIA activities, sending complementary tickets to UNIA events, and even approaching him in early November to contribute a special essay on the "higher development of our Race" for the Christmas issue of The Negro World. Moreover, in their deep concern for the welfare of the continent of Africa, Du Bois and Garvey could even find

yo • W.E.B. DU BOIS

themselves excoriating the same persons and poHcies whose mahce they saw as posing an even more egregious threat than each thought of the other as constituting. Smuts of South Africa was one such threat. "He stands now not only for a white South Africa, but for a white world," Garvey declared. Thomas Jesse Jones was another.

The Welshman Jones had parlayed his Hampton Institute affiliation and self-professed understanding of the Negro Problem into a role with the great foundations as a global expert on race relations. Negro Education, Jones's two-volume study that had caused Du Bois's pen to run red in The Crisis in 1917, was followed in 1922 by Education in Africa, a detailed report funded by the Phelps-Stokes Commission on Africa. Whether or not his Pan-African Congress acquaintance Norman Leys, whose own Fabian socialist writings about African education were markedly advanced for his day, actually revealed to Du Bois what Jones had stated as a fact—that it wasn't "sensible to teach a Negro child what European children are taught" —the editor would already have divined as much about the direction of the Phelps-Stokes study. A Jones-run commission could only mean that the Hampton-Tuskegee model of low-order vocational training would be foisted on black Africa, and South Africa in particular, Du Bois believed. "The English associations got the idea that Mr. Jones represented expert scientific opinion in America," he regretted, "and are placing great faith in his decisions." Garvey was equally alarmed, and as he and Du Bois anxiously monitored the involvement of Moton and the able but somewhat pliable young West African educator J.E.K. Aggrey with the commission, they sounded a simultaneous alarm in October 1921. No member of the race should pay any attention to what Moton says about Africa's needs, Garvey admonished in The Negro World. "Now that the Negro has started to think for himself, the white Christian leaders and philanthropists realize that it will be very hard ... to convince us to accept their 'friendly protection.' "

The real-world consequences of Garvey's heightened emphasis upon racial exclusivism very soon became evident. In a passionately argued, controversial November 1920 essay, "The Social Equality of Whites and Blacks," Du Bois had defended intermarriage of races (but without advocating such unions) as neither "physically criminal or deleterious," unequivocally asserting the "moral, mental and physical fitness to associate with one's fellowmen." Declaring that it was time for The Crisis "to take a public stand on this question," Du Bois and the NAACP were to find this forthright stand on social equality denounced not only by Garvey but also by the president of the United States in an Alabama address that shamelessly pandered to the prejudices of the white South. It seemed that Harding was offering explicit rebuttal of Du Bois's Crisis editorial when he spoke to whooping Birmingham whites a year later. Shouting a rhetorical answer to his own rhetorical question, the president proclaimed, "racial

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO PAN-AFRICAS • 7I

amalgamation there cannot be," and went on to say, after the rebel yells died down, that "men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of Social Equality." Harding's October 1921 Birmingham speech came seventeen years after Teddy Roosevelt's similar endorsement of white supremacy in a swing through Dixie. This time, though, black Americans were a good deal more outraged because of the role the NAACP was perceived to have played in supplying the genial, slow-witted Republican with presidential campaign ammunition about the scandalous occupation of Haiti by U.S. Marines. In return, there had been White House commitments to pull the marines out of Haiti, to form an interracial commission to study domestic race relations, to back the passage of the Dyer antilynching bill, and to assign the Justice Department to investigate the resurgent Ku Klux Klan.

Upon reflection, Du Bois decided. President Harding ought to be thanked for unblocking a public debate over a fifty-year-old evasion by "throwing caution to the winds" in Alabama. It was the arrogant policy not to discriminate between classes of men and women if their skins were dark; it was the fatal power to nullify merit even as the creed of advancement through education, work, and civicism was solemnly promulgated; it was, in a word, the chronic collusion, federal, regional, religious, and bipartisan, with the white South to maintain the real, ulterior agenda of Plessy v. Ferguson that made Harding's October 1921 speech so pernicious. But what the editor espoused as a founding democratic principle, Garvey reviled as racial treason. More than a month before The Crisis chastised Harding, rolling applause and loud amens had filled Liberty Hall as Garvey praised the Birmingham message. Who could dissent from Harding's injunction that the black man should be the best possible black man, rather than the "best possible imitation of the white man," he asked? Garvey speculated, even as the president's speechwriter conceivably may have intended, that the Birmingham speech was a "direct slap or hit at Dr. Du Bois. That is the unkindest cut of all," he added, as Liberty Hall roared with laughter. A signal that the NAACP was about to harden its public antipathy to Garvey came that September with James Weldon Johnson waving a reproving finger at Garvey in the New York Age. "Does Mr. Garvey realize the ftill implications of his statement?" he wondered. Responsible black people never knowingly gave white racists ammunition through public statements validating second-class citizenship. Johnson closed with a ringing affirmation of the NAACP's creed: "The only possible end of the race problem in the United States to which we can now look without despair is one which embraces the fijllest cooperation between white and black in all the phases of national activity."

As 1921 ended, Du Bois and the Talented Tenth leadership found themselves repeatedly ridiculed and denounced. Having managed to reenter the country just in time for a stupendous second international conclave after a

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running battle with U.S. immigration authorities, Garvey began the steady assault upon the editor's reputation and character that would rapidly escalate into unconditional warfare. Missing no occasion now to proclaim that the only authentic value shared by blacks and whites was their determination to remain apart and in parallel and mutually indifferent cultural and political commonwealths, Garvey's real message was an ulterior one aimed at assuaging and propitiating the American white power structure. The African Zion was to be built by "Negro capitalism," the economic system that was not only "necessary to the progress of the world," but had no place in it for labor unions. The black worker, in order to "keep the good will of the white employer and live a little longer under the present scheme of things," ought to be willing to work for less than the white worker, advised Garvey. He adopted with a clear conscience the survival calculus of a messiah willing to play the mountebank if that was the price of his people's deliverance. And if the gambit flattered his innate conservatism and megalomania, it was equally obedient to values forming the vital core of Garvey's racial credo: that all politics was racial and that duplicity in the service of racial solidarity was a virtue. This flawed strategy depended upon guile and cynicism, one in which white enemies were to be bought off by a UNIA, performing the service of undermining those blacks who mounted the most troublesome opposition to the racial status quo in America.

It was for this reason, then, that he now hastened to reassure the United States Government that racial chauvinism was fully compatible with patriotism, proclaiming that "the Negro must be loyal to all flags under which he lives." If Hoover's agents no longer reported hearing threats of race wars in Liberty Hall and postal authorities lightened their scrutiny of BSL stock issues, Garvey counted on being able to buy enough time and space to build an empire powerful enough, eventually, to bargain its way to toleration in the United States while steadily expanding his influence in Africa and the Garibbean. Whether it was the integrationism of the NAAGP, the socialism of the Messenger group, or the communism of the Crusader circle, he indulged his full showmanship powers to broadcast the chasm dividing his own ideology from theirs. In his determination to present a conservative face to mainstream America, Garvey fought with and finally expelled Briggs's Crusader group, one of the most able, articulate supporters of the UNIA, at the close of the 1921 international convention. The timing of these expulsions seems very likely to have been accelerated by the aggressiveness of the Crusader group and the Blood Brotherhood who made a bid for UNIA support of the new Gommunist Worker Party. Briggs, Harrison, and Moore, Gampbell, Huiswood, and Hall, and perhaps a score more had succeeded in winning a place on the program for Rose Pastor Stokes at the second convention. Stokes, playwright, journalist, and wealthy white revolution-

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO PAN-AFRICAS • 73

ary, was a member of the Communist party's central committee who, some amused observers claimed, regularly darted into the Waldorf Astoria to shake her federal surveillance. A gracious Garvey presented Stokes after putting the press on notice that no one should misinterpret the UNIA as "being Soviets. . . . The press I wish to understand us as not being ultra-radical, because we are not radicals," he reiterated. Stokes came to Libert}^ Hall on the night of August 19 with Robert Minor, the gifted cartoonist from Texas who became the party's principal proselytiser among American Negroes, in tow. With members of the Brotherhood cheering from strategic locations in the hall, Stokes gave a stirring speech from the platform, declaiming that "wherever the workers want the land, there they shall have it." A week later, Garvey expelled the African Blood Brotherhood, shouting that these agents of "Sovietism" were the hirelings of "certain destructive white elements which aimed at exploiting Negroes for their own subservient ends."

Yet Garvey must have sensed that he was running out of time. Du Bois was certain of it; consequently, the tone of The Crisis turned sharper, even minatory. "Let the followers of Mr. Garvey insist that he get down to bed-rock business," The Crisis had challenged many months earlier. It was high time for severe economies, published audits, and the gagging of this inspired wild man in order to "preserve his wide powers and influence," the journal pleaded. Salary checks had begun bouncing like tennis balls at the hugely overstaffed UNIA headquarters in 135th Street, an embarrassment serious enough to persuade the entire executive council to vote a unanimous 40 to 50 percent reduction in their own salaries in early January 1921. By the beginning of 1922, the denounced civil rights leaders had become extremely concerned about the domino effect of Garvey's collapse. Whenever Du Bois wrote or spoke of Garvey there was always the unmistakable hint of a tolerant, well-bred preceptor's exasperation when forced to deal with a gifted, unruly, somewhat gauche parvenu — someone woe-ftilly uninstructed in the vicarious and solemn symbolism of responsible black leadership. What possible value could there be in talk of pride of race without responsible, efficient racial conduct, he would have had the Jamaican answer? Garvey's charge was so much nonsense that he, Du Bois, and other American Negro leaders were jealous of his success. They were simply afraid of Garvey's failure, "for his failure would be theirs." No doubt it was the expectation of that failure that explained why "Pan-Africa," a tour d'horizon in the March Crisis, had omitted all mention of the Provisional President-General and his organization.

The exodus of well-known West Indian radicals from the UNIA, their informed and somewhat principled denunciations, and the willingness of Briggs and Domingo to assist the mail-fraud probe of federal examiners, were

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serious blows to Garvey's movement. "Figures Never Lie, But Liars Do Figure," Domingo's coruscating piece on Garvey in the October 1921 Crusader, reproached his former friend's dictatorial methods, detailed the profligate mismanagement of tens of thousands of dollars, and defended the pan-African efforts of Du Bois. Derided by Garvey as a "Negro for convenience" because of his European appearance, Briggs hauled his fellow West Indian into court for libel and won such a crushing settlement that the Yarmouth had to be sold as scrap (for a mere $6,000) at the end of 1921 to satisfy it. One of Garvey's most trusted American associates and a member of the executive council. Reverend J. D. Brooks, had been arrested on charges of grand larceny at the end of November 1921. Months earlier, the crew of the expired Kanawha had been brought home courtesy of the United States Government. The excursion boat. Shady-side, after a few trips up the Hudson in summer 1920, now lay capsized on the beach near 175th Street. On December 20, 1921, special agent 800 reported to Hoover that postal inspectors had questioned UNIA personnel and been seen leaving 135th Street with circulars, correspondence, and copies of The Negro World. In Washington, Hoover fretted as he followed the eleventh-hour maneu-verings of Garvey's attorney, Henry Lincoln Johnson, who apparently hoped to persuade Postmaster General Hays to drop mail-fraud charges for a $20,000 consideration. There was to be no deal. Garvey was arrested on January 12,1922, and released on $2,500 bail. Always choosing the bold stroke over retrenchment and repair, three weeks before his arrest, Garvey had instructed his agents to place a downpayment (but only $10,000 of the expected $25,000) with the U.S. Shipping Board to buy the largest Black Star Line ship yet, the S. S. Orion (to be rechristened the Phyllis Wheatley) for the projected UNIA trade with Africa and Liberian resettlement. On February 15, the sanction that Du Bois had predicted, that Briggs, by providing the authorities with evidence, had gready facilitated, and that Hoover had patiendy supervised, struck the UNIA broadside. Garvey and three officials of the Black Star Line, Elie Garcia, George Tobias, and Orlando Thompson, were indicted on twelve counts of fraudulent use of the mails. Released on bail, their trials were postponed until the government's investigation was completed. The Shipping Board now cancelled the Orion contract and returned the Black Star Line's money. By now, Du Bois knew enough about the shaky finances of Garvey's multiple operations to be certain that the UNIA edifice was bound to collapse in noisy, humiliating failure.

Meanwhile, Du Bois had done a good deal more than continue to accumulate evidence of the unworthiness of the Provisional President-General. He had taken steps to hamper the UNLA's most ambitious undertaking —the Liberian construction and resettiement scheme. Who but he, Du Bois —mind and voice of his race —could have a greater categorical imperative to act with quiet, principled resolve to mitigate the terrible damage wrought by these fiascoes of

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO PAN-AFRICAS • 75

a reckless and fraudulent Moses? It was his vision of Africa as a continent evolving from underdevelopment and exploitation by way of education and civic experience into prosperous self-rule that had animated the pan-African ideology for more than twenty years. His was the synoptic strategy of presenting the progressive forces of Europe and America with a prudent program for the gradual empowerment of the darker world. It was a program that would lead these forces, gradually, then ever more rapidly, to concert their skills, high purposes, and resources to bring an end to imperialism and racism not only because it was the right thing to do, but, in the end, the only sane thing to be done. Garvey threatened the continuity of these efforts with an opera bouffe act that amounted to little more, really, than pageantry and incantation — "Africa for the Africans," a heady slogan in place of a sober program. Du Bois had written and spoken of Africa for the Africans, but he had never meant by this that Africa "should be administered by West Indians or American Negroes," he reiterated, highly annoyed.

DU BOIS WOULD CLAIM that, at first, even he had been genuinely intrigued by Garvey's electrifying vision of ships steaming to Liberia manned by black technicians and teachers from the United States and the Caribbean, of an advance guard of canny organizers cautiously implementing a master plan to accelerate the decolonization of Africa. But "instead of keeping this plan hidden," Du Bois, shaking his head sadly, had watched as Garvey "yelled and shouted and telegraphed it all over the world," leaving the frightened Liberians no other choice than to distance themselves. The dual purpose of Garvey's Liberian Construction Loan, inaugurated in October 1920, had been to raise money for a $2 million loan to the government of Liberia and to buy land for the resettlement of a small number of skilled Negroes. The prospect of UNIA money for Liberia had come at the lowest point in the republic's undistinguished history since the scissoring off by Britain and France of large portions of its territory at the turn of the century. Liberian coffee had been displaced in the world market by Brazilian. Liberian revenues were virtually nonexistent and compound interest on foreign indebtedness amounted to a death sentence for its sovereignty. Unless the United States Government could be persuaded to lend the orphaned republic $5 million, Liberia's disappearance as an independent nation was unavoidable. President C.D.B. King and the ranking officers of his government were already planning an extended sojourn in Washington and New York in order to press their case with the U.S. Senate. Having been constrained to lay on a charade of government reform in order to win the $5 million American loan, the tight-knit, spendthrift Americo-Liberian clans salivated at the promise of an unexpected, alternative source of millions. Given assurances by the secretary of the Black Star Line, the impressive Elie Garcia, that the UNIA stood

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ready to "raise subscriptions all over the world" to help Liberia retire its foreign debt, the Liberian political elite responded with all the enthusiasm consonant with its dignity. The gladhanding mayor of Monrovia, Gabriel Johnson, agreed to serve as the UNIA's munificently compensated Supreme Potentate. The nation's Machiavellian secretary of state, Edwin Barclay, assured the UNIA Executive Council that his government stood ready to "afford the Association every facility legally possible in effectuating in Liberia industry, agriculture, and business prospects."

Three months after launching the Liberian Construction Loan, a delegation of UNIA officials headed by the resident commissioner for Liberia, Cyril Crich-low, sailed for Monrovia with His Highness, Supreme Potentate and Monrovia Mayor Johnson. President King and a considerable entourage departed for the United States to lobby for passage of the loan to Liberia not long after the UNIA delegation had reached Monrovia to begin negotiations for a land concession. Some weeks later, when Crichlow, now unpaid and beleaguered by his fellow commissioners, reported from Monrovia that the UNIA might be able to develop some five thousand square miles in the Grand Cape Mount region near Sierra Leone, President King and his officers were making their antipathy to Garvey's Liberia scheme unequivocally clear to official Washington. France and England were likely to become "anxious with regard to the position of Liberia in connection with this movement," a State Department official reported them to have stated when he paid the visiting dignitaries a courtesy call in early April 1921. In the Liberian capital. Secretary of State Barclay, serving as acting president, struck the perfect note of Americo-Liberian cunning. Despite British and French disquiet about Liberia's dealings with the UNIA, Barclay offered Garvey's representatives assurances that a suitable allocation of territory was forthcoming, provided publicity was kept to a minimum: "But it is not always advisable nor politic to openly expose our secret intentions —our secret thoughts. That is the way we do —or rather don't do —in Liberia. We don't tell them what we think; we only tell them what we like them to hear —what, in fact, they like to hear."

While Garvey's mission languished in Monrovia, Du Bois communicated with President King during early April 1921 to discuss the republic's participation in the forthcoming second Pan-Afi-ican Congress. At some point, they discussed Garvey. The editor was well aware that the UNIA connection had become a source of friction in the inner councils of the True Whig Party, the country's ruling oligarchy, a development made all the more irritating in light of the UNIA's incapacity to provide sufficient funds to lubricate the republic's political machinery. Du Bois thought that this was an opportune moment for Liberia to issue a public statement, offering The Crisis as an ideal vehicle. "Your suggestion

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO PAN-AFRICAS • 77

that a statement be published over my signature setting forth the position of Liberia with respect to Mr. Garvey's movements" was timely, King decided a few days later. The June 1921 issue of The Crisis featured President King's declaration. The declaration stopped short of writing off the UNIA, but guaranteed that "under no circumstances will [Liberia] allow her territory to be made a center of aggression or conspiracy against other sovereign states."

Du Bois would have felt doubly justified in hobbling Garvey's West African initiative when he learned that same June that an exasperated Cyril Crichlow, contraried at every turn by his fellow commissioners, disgusted by endless Lib-erian cabals, and seriously ill, had tendered his resignation and sailed for New York shortly after publication of the King statement. To protect his reputation against charges from Johnson and Marke, Crichlow had handed over to the American ambassador confidential UNIA documents, including a damning appraisal of the country's rulers, which would be published in the December 1922 edition of The African World in London with fatal consequences for Garvey's fiiture Liberian plans. Most of the readers of The Crisis were readily persuaded that Garvey and his movement spelled shame and catastrophe. Still, Ida May Reynolds, a faithful subscriber, posed a large question about group loyalty that Du Bois, in his reply to her, chose to sidestep. It was her impression, as well as that of "quite a large number of the readers," she wrote in early July 1923, that it would have been far better if The Crisis had spent as much time arousing interest among the NAACP membership in the UNIA and in helping it, "as has been given by you and your organization [to] sending Mr. Garvey to jail and trying to wreck" the UNIA.

Du Bois emphatically saw things differently, having decided that the moment was finally right to inform his readers of the danger posed by the Garvey movement. "The Demagog" had run in the April 1922 Crisis. Its prose bore the inflections readers had come to recognize whenever the editor was about to speak, as it were, ex cathedra. The race was reaching a new plateau of maturity, one on which there were dangers of a new kind for a New Negro. "From now on in our new awakening, our self-criticism, or impatience and passion," Du Bois admonished, "we must expect the Demagog among Negroes more and more. He will come to lead, inflame, lie and steal. He will gather large follow-ings and then burst and disappear." For all the half measures and heartbreak of the past, the Negro experience had been characterized by a solidarity bred of "common social oppression and serfdom." Thanks to their long oppression by whites, blacks had survived and struggled in a democracy of deprivation —"a surging group of low intelligence and poverty," wrote Du Bois —where class formation had been retarded and deformed. Racism had saved people of color from internal class conflict by leaving them "with smaller inequalities in wealth

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and education than most groups of twelve millions." But this mixed blessing was ending as, slowly, inevitably, people of color in America became differentiated by education and affluence.

Here was the gravest of dangers —the setting of one class against another. Although Du Bois made no reference to Booker Washington, his readers would have sensed how different, unprecedented, the current controversy was from the one that ensued from Plessy v. Ferguson. The war with the Tuskegee Machine, for all its divisive and enduring legacies, had been fought primarily over ideas and personalities, with only the most muted class dissonances audible. Class had not been irrelevant, certainly. Du Bois spoke for and mobilized those whose socioeconomic profile was mainly northern, urban, college-educated, professional, and light-skinned. Washington spoke for farmers, domestics, and tradespeople located principally in the South, but fairly broadly dispersed geographically; although his real priorities centered on the urban, college-educated, well-connected, and business-engaged wherever he found them. In simplest terms, Washington and Du Bois had competed for and split the allegiances of the same class formation. Since the climax of the Du Bois-Washington controversy, however, the sounds of class conflict had begun to be heard. "The ties between our privileged and our exploited, our educated and ignorant, our rich and poor, our light and dark, are not what they should be," Du Bois acknowledged. The Demagog finds "the cleft between our incipient social classes," and with Garvey unmistakably accused, Du Bois underscored how the Demagog exploits the "kernel of truth" about class in order to destabilize legitimate leadership. "It is here that the New Negro Demagog thrives and yells and steals. They are ashamed of their race'; They are exploiting us'; They are copying the white man's color line' —he shrieks, as he dexterously fills his own pockets and waters the pennies of the poor." Du Bois had warned in the two-part "Marcus Garvey" appearing in December-January 1921 that the native leadership class of Negroes would punish anyone who attempted to play off one group of colored people against another, by which he clearly meant, without saying so explicitly, that any challenge from outsiders to the paramount authority of the Talented Tenth would be fiercely repelled —and ruthlessly repelled if the aggressor were reckless enough to use skin color as a weapon.

If Garvey could claim that mulattoes and Ivy Leaguers were overrepresented in the top tier of civil rights leadership, he and his circle could find themselves at least as vulnerable to being vilified as aliens who understood little about American history, culture, and race relations, and who misunderstood almost everything about black people of achievement in the United States. As Garvey knew from the slurring references in the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, the Messenger, and much of the domestic black press, his being a West Indian subject of the British Empire had become a convenient substitute

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO PAN-AFRICAS • 79

for reasoned criticism of himself and his movement. Du Bois's compHcity in the anti-West Indian counterattack gathering momentum in the spring of 1923 was somewhat masked and ambiguous. When a deeply hurt Domingo, one of Garvey's bitterest critics, asked his view of the xenophobic turn taken by The MessengeTy Du Bois replied that the only issue was the "opinion of the man and not the man himself or his birthplace," adding that American Negroes were under a deep obligation to such West Indian contributions as the Haitian revolution. "I, myself, am of West Indian descent and am proud of the fact." James Weldon Johnson could have made the same lineal claim. In print, Du Bois still maintained an air of pained objectivity. Still, his disclaimer was not entirely accurate. The issue may not have been one of West Indian origins, but it certainly came down increasingly to knocking West Indians who were Garveyites.

In September 1922 and January of the following year. The Crisis carried, respectively, "The Black Star Line" and "The U.N.I.A." The first article, based on a broad canvas of materials, including Briggs's evidence, described a seriocomic financial disaster drawn in Garvey's own words from various trial transcripts. The Crisis piece piled on examples of fantastical bookkeeping (the full purchase price of the Yarmouth was listed as an asset), of quixotic sailing schedules causing paying passengers to be stranded and cargoes abandoned at dock-side, of multiple boiler repairs running into the tens of thousands, of the Kanawha and the Shadyside beached and expiring like an iron and wooden whale, and of Garvey's own surreal disclaimers of responsibility—"what could Jesus do dealing with a dishonest man but to wait to punish him at His judgment?" He was no sailor, "not a navigator; he is not a marine engineer," Garvey was quoted as saying in syllogistic self-defense. "Therefore, the individual who would criticize Marcus Garvey for a ship of the Black Star Line not making a success at sea is a fool." Or as Garvey would later conclude in his darkest hour, "The Negro has no method or system to his dishonesty." The follow-up stroke in January, "The U.N.LA.," reproduced the organization's financial report for 1922, from which Du Bois calculated, on the basis of the UNLA's per capita ten-cent, annual "death tax" (burial insurance), that Garvey could count on a paid UNIA membership of 17,784, rather than the claimed hundreds of thousands. The text of Du Bois's article was uncharacteristically spare, columns of figures unaccompanied by the usual prophecy, jeremiad, exhortation, or indictment— an accountant's audit of a failure.

The New York Times had reported an angry mass rally at Harlem's Douglass Hall in late August of the previous year, the first of the "Marcus Garvey Must Go" protests organized by the Friends of Negro Freedom. With Randolph in the chair, the meeting had taken a sharp nativist turn as two thousand people cheered Bagnall, the normally equable NAAGP field secretary, who skewered the UNIA head and called for his deportation to Jamaica. Had Du Bois not

8o • W.E.B. DU BOIS

stayed away he would surely have overheard scurrilous commonplaces about West Indians that evening—that troublemakers and revolutionaries were bound to be overeducated and out-of-work West Indians; that UNIA stood for "ugliest Negroes in America", "monkey-chasers," and so forth. The editor refrained from unseemly public attacks, but his patience had already thinned to the point that he described Garvey as a scheming "West Indian agitator" in a letter to the Department of State seeking specific information in order to discredit Garvey in the eyes of "the Negro public." On the other hand, it is impossible not to suspect that Du Bois may have known about Bagnall's savage piece written for the March 1923 issue of the Messenger. "The Madness of Marcus Garvey" viciously caricatured its subject's physical attributes and character. Garvey was reviled as a "Jamaican Negro of unmixed stock, squat, stocky, fat and sleek, with protruding jaws, and heavy jowls, small bright pig-like eyes and rather bull-doglike face. Boastful, egotistical, tyrannical, intolerant, cunning, shifty, smooth and suave, avaricious," and on and on in a stream of distemper devoid of intellectual argument.

Machinations with white racists became more and more dismaying as news and rumor spread that Garvey had gone from a Ku Klux Klan rendezvous to meetings with archracist Theodore Bilbo, Mississippi's senior senator, and courtly John Powell, head of the Anglo-Saxon League of America; that he spoke at a rally of racists in North Garolina. Garvey had explained himself, typically, with twisted logic wrapped in hyperbole. "Between the Ku Klux Klan and the Moorfield Storey National Association for the Advancement of 'Gertain' People, give me the Klan for their honesty of purpose toward the Negro," he boomed. He was fed up with integrationist hypocrisy and black dependence on feckless whites and the whole Dyer antilynching campaign of the civil rights establishment. Taking the UNIA out of the civil rights collaboration, he claimed that while on a speaking tour of Missouri he had been unable to get a soda "served even by a dirty Greek who kept his so-called white soda fountain in a Negro section" of Gongressman Dyer's St. Louis district. Speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, in the fall of 1923 Garvey appealed to "the soul of White America" to help him achieve the only feasible solution to the race problem —which was "to provide an outlet for Negro energy, ambition, and passion, away from the attraction of white opportunity and [to] surround the race with opportunities of its own." If it took an understanding with the Klan to help make it possible for black people to survive and thrive separately, equally, and totally apart from white people in the Americas and on the African continent, then Garvey was up to the challenge. The days of "subtle and underhand propaganda fostered by a few men of color in America, the West Indies, and Africa to destroy the pride of the Negro race by building up what is commonly known as a 'blue vein' aristocracy" were finished.

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO "PAN-AFRICAS" • 8l

But it was Garvey himself who was just about finished. The concert with the Klan had the effect of binding his opponents into a sohd, raucous, and unforgiving mass. Hoover's agents reported holding covert interviews with Chandler Owen, Bagnall, Pickens, and others who wanted to see Garvey prosecuted. "Mr. Garvey apparendy does not know," James Weldon Johnson declared solemnly some months later, "that the American Negro considers himself, and is, as much an American as any one." Johnson, Du Bois, and Randolph chose not to sign the fatefijl open letter sent on January 12, 1923, to the U.S. attorney general asking the Justice Department to use "fijll influences completely to disband and extirpate this vicious movement," a signal that Hoover's agents had almost certainly suggested as usefijl to speed up the start of Garvey's trial for mail fraud. But there could be no question that the eight signatories of the open letter represented the spectrum of Talented Tenth leadership —Owen; Abbott, publisher of The Defender; Bagnall and Pickens of the NAACP; John Nail, Harlem's leading realtor and James Weldon Johnson's brother-in-law; Julia P. Coleman, civic leader; George Harris, alderman; and Harry Pace, venturesome businessman and Du Bois protege. On February 16, Carl Murphy, influential and highly respected publisher of the Baltimore Afro-American, followed up with an editorial asking Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty to explain the government's delay.

By the time "Back to Africa," Du Bois's liquidating retrospective of the Garvey Movement, appeared in the February 1923 issue of Century magazine, the Provisional President-General of Africa had wrecked the UNIA hierarchy, expelled most of his closest associates except elocutionist Henrietta Vinton Davis, dissolved the Black Star Line, declared his admiration (as would Winston Churchill, John Foster Dulles, and Bernard Shaw) for Italy's new dictator, Benito Mussolini, and conspired in Eason's assassination to prevent his appearing as a witness in the upcoming fraud trial. Eason, who was scheduled to leave New Orleans the next morning to be deposed by government attorneys in New York, had been fatally shot in the back twice as he left church on the night of January 1. Taking careful, well-rehearsed aim, Du Bois's Century essay centered Garvey in the lethal crosshairs of history, analysis, Du Boisian judgment, and satirical contempt at the most vulnerable, desperate period in the UNIA chiefs public career. The opening sentence —"It was upon the tenth of August, in High Harlem of Manhattan Island, where a hundred thousand Negroes live" — primed the readers (overwhelmingly white) for storytelling at its best about hilarious doings. There in a church basement, "low and unfinished," Du Bois presented Marcus Mosiah Garvey to highbrow America as a character bound to evoke fresh memories of Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones or vaudeville's Bert Williams: "A little, fat black man, ugly, but with intelligent eyes and big head, was seated on a plank platform beside a 'throne,' dressed in a military uniform

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of the gayest mid-Victorian type." Amid the epaulettes, plumage, and swirling capes, and "in the presence of a thousand or more applauding dark spectators," the elite of the UNIA "were duly 'knighted' and raised to the 'peerage' as knight-commanders and dukes of Uganda and the Niger. . . . What did it all mean?"

Du Bois positioned the article's final coffin nail. In Garvey's pandering to the Klan, the author saw another variation of the Great Accommodator's Faust-ian bargain with the white supremacist South. Two grave temptations had challenged the present generation of Negroes. First had come Washington's — "the greater one" —which said, " 'Let politics alone, keep your place, work hard, and do not complain,' " and which meant, insisted Du Bois, "perpetual color caste for colored folk by their own cooperation and consent." The present challenge of the race was to survive Garvey's lesser temptation, which said, "Give up! Surrender! The struggle is useless; go back to Afi-ica and fight the white world." The hope of the fijture lay in disciplined work and unflagging courage, exhorted the editor, in owning property and earning education, in the well-kept homes of families living on 138th Street in Harlem's swank Strivers' Row. This was the fijture in which all members of the Wizard's National Negro Business League would have taken out life memberships in the NAACP—a future in which Garvey would be remembered as no more than an exotic, diverting parenthesis.

The fabled chance meeting of Du Bois and Garvey may well have happened soon after the February Century magazine went on sale. Asked half a century later about some vivid instance that captured these two dissimilar titans, their contemporaries invariably recalled seeing or hearing about the editor and the UNIA president rushing to a public dinner affair and arriving at the same time before an elevator. Compelled to ride up in eerie silence together with a group, Garvey was said to tremble violently while Du Bois's nostrils were observed to flare. Gharles Wesley, George Schuyler, Arthur Davis, and several others claimed that, when asked about the behavior of his nose, Du Bois icily attributed the flaring to odors emanating from the kitchen. But whatever violent urges were suppressed in the Harlem elevator, there was no restraint in the editorial letter published in The Negro World on February 17. Unnerved and seething, Garvey lowered the bar on vilification yet another notch. Du Bois was an "unfortunate mulatto who bewails every day the drop of Negro blood in his veins." Garvey charged that Du Bois arrogated the privilege of condemning and criticizing other people, but held himself up as "the social 'unapproachable' and the great 'I am' of the Negro race." Hating himself and loathing other blacks, the founder of the NAACP preferred the company of white people. "That is why he likes to dance with white people and dine with them and sometimes sleep with them," Garvey lashed out, "because from his way of seeing things all that is black is ugly, and all that is white is beautiful."

Garvey's rage against Du Bois and his kind ("a group that hates the Negro

DU BOIS AND GARVEY: TWO "PAN-AFRICAS" • 83

blood in their veins") became even more scurrilous in the months ahead. His interminable trial, running through four sweltering weeks from May 18 to June 21, he saw as persecution engineered by the NAACP. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge Julian Mack, one of the most incisive minds ever to edit the Harvard Law Review and second only to Louis Brandeis in the American Zionist movement, was widely reputed to be both a cofounder and active member of the NAACP. The jurist's official connection to the association remains somewhat cloudy, although Du Bois, when asked about it later by the Virginia newspaper publisher P. B. Young, replied that Mack was probably a contributor or supporter. In any case, Judge Mack refused to step down, a decision he may have regretted after Garvey, smoldering under his breath about Jews and near-white Negroes, dismissed his first attorney after the second day and assumed his own voluble, hair-splitting defense. "If Garvey conducted his business as he did his trial," opined the Pittsburgh Courier, "there is little wonder it failed." "The result is that he can talk big, but cannot do big," a disillusioned Ferris, observing the trial day after day, wrote Pickens in its final week. The price of failure in Mack's court was a verdict of guilty and a sentence of five years in federal prison and a thousand-dollar fine. A more balefijl consequence of the trial was Garvey's embrace of anti-Semitism. Until then, what he had had to say about Jews, although gauche and misinformed, was usually meant to be complimentary, as when he marveled at their power both to start and end World War I. Behind Mack's NAACP membership and presidency of the American Jewish Congress Garvey divined sinister, clandestine forces bent upon destroying black people's best hope of advancement. From this curious moment onward into the late twentieth century, black Zionism would carry a distinct malodor of ideological anti-Semitism.

For Du Bois, Garvey's conviction was a self-inflicted tragedy. But even with that miscalculation and the mail fraud conviction, Du Bois fiilly expected Garvey to display his finest acting and propaganda skills while his appeal worked its way through the courts. There was still something "attractive and understandable in his personality and his program," Du Bois conceded. The trial and denial of bail, as well as fears of insurgency within the leadership, forced Garvey to cancel the third International Convention scheduled for August-September, but he sacked Ferris, Davis, Marke, and the rest of his inner circle a few days after his trial ended to dispel any misapprehensions about his authority. Confined in the Tombs Prison until September 10, when the court finally approved his petition for bail, he put the time to excellent use by writing a short, self-absolving autobiography blaming his troubles on "very light colored negroes [sic] in America and the West Indies," as well as thieves and incompetents in his organizations. If Du Bois had ever had a second's doubt about his role in toppling Garvey, it must have vanished as he read the autobiographical "The

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Negro's Greatest Enemy" in the New York World for August 5,1923. Reiterating a belief "in the purity of both races," the essay predicted a "terrible clash" and race war in another fifty or one hundred years. Unless —and here it struck at the very core of the established civil rights agenda —black people were encouraged to leave white people's countries and were responsibly discouraged fi^om hoping to participate in political life by holding elective office in America. Washington's exhortation to leave politics alone had been tragedy; coming from Garvey, Du Bois must have deplored the advice as deadly farce.

ON BEING CRAZY AND SOMEWHAT DEVIOUS

On Being Crazy" ran in the July 1923 issue of The Crisis. A short piece of fiction, it was a model satire on the zany, demoralizing state of race relations imposed upon black Americans by white Americans. Du Bois imagined himself a traveler seeking food and entertainment in almost any northern city. Entering a restaurant, his presence evoked astonished protest fi-om a white diner. " 'Are you aware, Sir, that this is social equality?' 'Nothing of the sort. Sir, it is hunger—and I ate,' " was the editor's retort. Later, taking a seat in a concert hall, he noticed that the woman beside him "shrank and squirmed." " 'Do you enjoy being where you are not wanted?' she asked coldly. 'Oh no,' I said. 'Well you are not wanted here.' I was surprised. 'I fear you are mistaken,' I said. 'I certainly want the music and I like to think the music wants me to listen to it.' 'Usher,' said the lady, 'this is social equality.' 'No, ma-dame,' said the usher, 'it is the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.' " The hotel near the end of the traveler's obstacle course features a scowling desk clerk. " 'We don't keep niggers,' he said. 'We don't wan't social equality.' 'Neither do I.' I replied gently, 'I want a bed.' " Tired and disgusted, Du Bois quits the unfamiliar city, intending to purchase a "sleeper" aboard an express train to Texas. No social equality allowed aboard Pullmans heading south, he's told. The allegory ends on a note of demented hilarity, with a screaming white ragamuffin demanding to know why Du Bois doesnt want to marry his daughter.

"On Being Crazy" struck readers' nerve endings. Today, it may seem a cliche, a contrivance whose situational dilemmas have lost much of their sali-ency since the enormous transformation in race relations that began in the sixties. But in 1923, most cultured whites who read The Crisis were either shamed or angered, or both, while Afi-americans, virtually without exception, found themselves vividly reliving a welter of large and small hurts as they

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measured their own bitter experiences against those of Du Bois's sarcastic traveler. The special resonance of "On Being Crazy" came from the fact that it was written against the unique psychic backdrop of the early twenties when hundreds of thousands of men and women of color were still being propped up and recharged by a one-time-only optimism and earnestness. Life in the North was one of rising expectations. One out of every two Negro males in New York had been employed in domestic service in 1910; ten years later the percentage was down to 37.4. More than 20 percent of the city's male manufacturing workforce was now colored, up from 13.9 percent in 1910, 90 percent of it unskilled. Men had made steady, if undramatic, gains in the city's trade and transportation sectors, from 30.3 percent to 35.1 in a decade. Advancement was steeply uphill, yet enough men made it into the professions between 1910 and 1920 to augment their percentages from 4.7 to 5.9. Because colored men's wages rose during this period, the much higher number of colored women than white seeking work outside the home declined somewhat. Numbers varied, whether in Philadelphia, Chicago, or Pittsburgh, but overall the picture was one of upward movement in wages for the Negro workingman, notwithstanding his near total exclusion from skilled labor by Samuel Gompers's American Federation of Labor (AFL). More of a flux than a rising tide, perhaps, but the better jobs in the North for the masses of Negroes decidedly buoyed the professional opportunities of their better-educated cousins, the graduates of Atlanta, Fisk, Howard, and a select number of mainstream universities. Dentists, physicians, and morticians, preachers, lawyers, and pharmacists serviced the Great Migration in increasing numbers, with a sizable percentage of them enrolling as active members of the Talented Tenth.

As a "record of the darker races," The Crisis kept track of the things that were crazy, and becoming even crazier. "A University Course in Lynching," in the issue for June 1923, reported the fate of James T. Scott, a janitor at the University of Missouri accused of raping a white teenager. Thus far, no American university had actually offered a comprehensive course in lynching, the editor wrote, discounting a nighttime hanging near the campus of the University of Georgia because female students "did not have a fair chance to see it." Lynching 101 was perfected at Missouri, however, with a demonstration in broad daylight, ample notice given, and a "comparatively orderly" audience of five hundred men and boys along with some fifty women students. "We are very much in favor of this method of teaching 100 per cent Americanism," Du Bois observed sarcastically. So long as mob execution was a nationally approved institution, university students should have firsthand instruction so as to understand "exactly what lynching is." But far more realistic than the danger of college credits for lynching was the reshaping of the national memory through film. The Birth of a Nation^ in the judgment of more than one historian of the period.

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was uniquely responsible for encoding the white South's version of Reconstruction on the DNA of several generations of Americans. Rerelease of the 1915 film in the spring of 1923 inspired an eloquent editorial denouncing its inflammatory power and "perversion of historic truths." Once again, in full support of the NAACP's petition to suppress the film under New York's motion picture censorship law, Du Bois unhesitatingly chose a restrictive reading of the First Amendment in the interests of racial justice as he perceived them.

In May and August, The Crisis reminded Americans just how everlastingly unpredictable racial justice for Negro Americans was. After well over fifty thousand NAACP dollars in legal costs, roller-coaster appeals in state and federal courts, and heroic feats of lawyering by attorney Scipio Jones, six of the twelve men sentenced to death in the 1919 Elaine, Arkansas, conspiracy trials were freed after their case, Moore v. Dempsey, was remanded for rehearing before the high court of the state. With a scrupulosity both tardy and rare in such cases, the Supreme Court of the United States accepted the argument of Moorfield Storey (strategically replacing attorney Jones) that the mere formality of a trial was an insufficient guarantee of due process The Crisis predicted that the remaining six would soon be released, a prediction that was to be realized six years after their conveyor-belt trials by a kangaroo court of white landowners had convicted them of the capital crime of organizing a farmers' cooperative in the Arkansas Black Belt. The May 1923 issue reported that Representative Dyer had agreed to barnstorm the Midwest to breathe new life into his federal anti-lynching bill, his expenses underwritten by the NAACP. The filibustered death of the Dyer bill in the Senate had come — not unexpectedly but no less mor-tifyingly—despite petitions and telegrams from a broad array of religious and civic groups, NAACP-sponsored parades and public addresses in major cities, tireless lobbying in the Capitol by Johnson and White, full-throttle editorials by Du Bois, and hard-won passage in the House. Putting a brave face on defeat in the immediate aftermath of Senate "lynching," the editor issued standby orders to the association's faithful and praised the potential power Negroes had demonstrated, now that they had mastered "the mere rudiments of using it." "What a trumpet blast, what a call to hope and courage, are your editorials!" Joel Spingarn fairly shouted.

In issues published just before and immediately after "On Being Crazy" appeared. The Crisis had disclosed three appalling institutional developments of major consequence to educated colored people: racial discrimination at Harvard; southern white control of the new Veterans Administration Hospital at Tuskegee; and the denial of scholarship assistance by the Fontainebleau School of the Fine Arts to colored American artists. Individually, each amounted to a brutal uppercut; taken together, they seemed to deliver an immobilizing body blow to the aspirations of the Talented Tenth. First came the news of Harvard's

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decision in the fall of 1921 to bar men of color from the freshmen dormitories. Opening his orientation and registration packet, William J. Knox of New Bedford, Massachusetts, class of 1925, had been nonplussed to find his room assignment in Standish Hall canceled. He was instructed to report to Weld Hall along with five other entering colored students, each of whom was the son of an affluent, professionally accomplished family, and two, Edward Wilson and Ros-coe Conkling Bruce, Jr., who were second-generation Harvard. Bruce, Jr.'s father had graduated in the class of 1902, and his grandfather, Blanche K. Bruce, had represented Mississippi in the United States as its second senator during Reconstruction. Pritchett Klugh was the son of a distinguished Boston clergyman. Bertram Bland's family was old New England. Cecil Blue's father was a prosperous Washington, D.C., physician. When the new residence halls, Standish, Smith, and Gore, were built along the Charles River in 1912-13, much had been made of them as molders of "class identity." These halls were conceived as performance venues in which the distinguishing qualities of manner and mind that made Harvard men special would be preliminarily learned, rehearsed, and commonly reinforced. If the few Negroes admitted each year insisted on residing on campus. Weld Hall in the Yard, with its mix of graduate students and presumably already molded upperclassmen, was deemed appropriate by the administration.

A science major who would earn a doctorate in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Knox was to cap his career as a member of the exclusive band of scientists working on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. In September 1921, however. Bill Knox, whose racial identity the admissions office had only recently discovered, was a depressed young man whose privileged New England background left him poorly equipped to deal with the stigma of ostracism. Harvard admission was prized by select Talented Tenth families as though it were the Holy Grail. But it was equally true, even for the many thousands of ambitious families whose children had almost no prospects for an Ivy League education, that "Fair Harvard" was upheld as a precious symbol of what was finest in New England values —a color-blind meritocracy in a democracy corrupted by racial subordination. A distraught Knox had turned to his fi-iend and hometown mentor, Edwin Jour-dain, and decided on Harvard partly due to Jourdain's urging. Handsome, self-confident Jourdain, class of 1921, holder at that moment of the world's broad jump record, had stayed on for a year of graduate studies in the business school. Stunned by his friend's news, he did what was expected of a son whose father had joined Du Bois at Niagara: Jourdain confronted the patrician President Abbott Lawrence Lowell at his home and politely demanded an explanation. Offering the sophistry that the policy amounted to segregation without denigration, Lowell implored him to understand Harvard's dilemma

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as more southerners enrolled yearly. He understood the position, Jourdain was supposed to have said, respectfully accepting the president's insistent handclasp. "It's just that I don't respect it."

By late summer 1922, the sweeping cultural agenda driving President Lowell and his supporters had become clear, as he worried in the Literary Digest about the recent slippage of the Harvard persona. Lowell wished the nation to understand that Harvard's "flavor can be imparted successfully to men of any race or religion," but the flavor was "most easily imparted to men of the old New England stock." Writing to a distinguished Negro alumnus, Lowell explained (in a letter published in the New YorkTribune) that, while the university owed the colored man and white man the same educational opportunities, "we do not owe it to him to force him and the white into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial." But it was Jewish students for whom the imparting of special flavors was deemed most problematic. While men of color were to be made to feel out of place by a residence hall bar, the more urgent matter was to curtail the much larger influx of Jews. In this context, Harvard's discrimination against Negroes was merely a sidebar, a sop to sons and daughters of southern whites whose attendance it and other elite schools wished to encourage in order to serve as WASP counterweights to the new ethnics pressing at the gates. But, ultimately and most significantly, discrimination against Negroes was the logical as well as symbolic requirement in a broad policy of strategic "whitening" of the hubs of culture and power.

Believing themselves called to action in a fateful time of crisis, then, Lowell and a majority of the Harvard board of overseers committed the nation's oldest university to the hallowed task of preserving what remained of the genteel in gentile America.

The New Republic served up Lowell's rationale in delicious satire: "Five Jews to the hundred will necessarily undergo prompt assimilation. Ten Jews to the hundred might assimilate. But twenty or thirty—no . . . What they got out of Harvard might be worth their time and effort, but it would not be the priceless Harvard flavor. . . . Better one true Jewish Harvard man than ten mere Jewish scholars." As one of the leading students of the subject, Leonard Dinnerstein, wrote of this dark and shameful period, "throughout the United States there was near universal concern about Jews infiltrating cherished organizations and abodes." Lewis Gannett, a Nation journalist who was intensely engaged in the Harvard crisis, supplied Villard with hard statistics (undoubtedly passed along to Du Bois) concerning the elite universities' response to what was being called the Jewish "saturation point." In one year, Columbia had reduced its enrollment of Jewish students from 40 percent to 10; New York University from 80 to 16 percent; Princeton reportedly kept the entering number fixed at forty students.

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Spearheaded by large, increasingly vocal numbers of Anglo-Saxon Protestants who were distressed by pullulating slums where no English was spoken, who grew fearful of violence supposedly spawned by alien political ideas, felt threatened by high birthrates among people whose complexions, religions, and diets were different, and who saw corrupt, big-city machines fueled by white immigrants and Negro migrants, old-stock Americans demanded federal action in order to preserve "Nordic" civilization. The immigration act of 1917 (passed over Wilson's veto) had barely made a dent, despite its imposition of a literacy test. Throughout 1920 and 1921, the national press reported that millions more Slavs, Italians, and Russian Jews intended to book passage for Ellis Island now that the war was over. When it became clear that the AFL found its best economic interests served by ending the flow of cheap labor from Europe, the 1921 and 1924 restriction acts became inevitable. Du Bois had deplored the collusion of nativists and labor unionists in the January 1920 Crisis as a "despicable and indefensible drive against all foreigners [to shut] the gates of opportunity to the outcasts and victims of Europe." He would have no truck with those Negro leaders who cynically applauded immigration restriction as a boon to black labor.

Du Bois had been so shocked by the dormitory exclusion that he had agreed with Harvard men Storey and Villard to work quietiy with other alumni to reverse the policy, even though his old rival. Trotter, had blasted it immediately in the Guardian. The Crisis maintained discreet, uncharacteristic silence until August of the following year, when it had become clear that Lowell was adamant about maintaining the ban. When Du Bois finally broke silence, he unleashed a double-barreled charge in the August 1922 Crisis with "Americanization" and "Fair (!) Harvard." He knew that there was a certain ambivalence not only among the authors of the dormitory protest petition, but even within the NAACP hierarchy and its membership, about combining the issues of residence hall exclusion of Aframericans and admittance quotas for Jews. As Gannett wrote to Storey, after assuming responsibility for circulating the petition, the question of discriminating against a class of students "after their admission seems to have a much more certain answer than the question of limitation of enrollment." Talented Tenth objections to Lowell's policies were inclined to reflect a bias stressing class and breeding —an aristocratic exceptionalism that found discrimination painful because it failed to be sufficiently discriminating, because it was arbitrary rather than selective, as novelist Charles Chesnutt and educator Roscoe Bruce, Sr., saw the injustice. "No half dozen men picked at random among the Harvard freshman class could present any better family history or training," Harvard man Raymond Pace Alexander would note in Opportunityy the Urban League's new magazine. Such was the reasoning animating the circulating petition authored by seven alumni, including Storey (1866) and novelist Robert Benchley (1912). Nor was the attitude of prominent Jews free of ambiguity about linking quotas

to residence rights, as the batthng newspaperman, Ernest Gruening, a Harvard graduate and now a driving force at The Nation, clearly sensed when he expressed the hope to Villard that "some of our prominent Jews" would see the wisdom of weighing in against anti-Negro discrimination. In fact, the forces opposing the Aframerican segregation and Jewish exclusion would persevere on two parallel tracks, almost never converging except for Du Bois's editorial on the subject.

"Americanization" put the Harvard controversy in the larger political and cultural context of, as Du Bois wrote, the latest "renewal of the Anglo-Saxon cult; the worship of the Nordic totem, the disfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander—the world rule of Nordic white through brute force." By that time, the dire cultural and political implications of the new policy had driven Du Bois into a rage that few other Negro public figures seemed to share. A growing majority of his countrymen envisaged Americanization as a democratic challenge of breathtaking scope and unprecedented idealism, he declared. It meant an America striving to become "one great homogeneous whole" out of ite teeming disparateness. But there were those other Americans, quavering and resentful, for whom Americanization meant dominion of the past over the present—narrow forces in Brahmin New England and the Bourbon South who were mobilizing against modern America and its ethnics. It was this "dry rot of aristocracy. . . entering New England and Harvard that has ruined in other days the aristocracies of the world." Even if it were true that "neither side in this vast developing controversy loves Jew or Negro or Irishman as such," Du Bois predicted in a surcharge of optimism that political logic was bound to bring advantaged and disadvantaged Americans together to oppose Anglo-Saxon privilege. The forces that wanted to proscribe Negroes and Jews were the same forces "south and east that are fighting democracy in the United States." Readers would never have suspected that Du Bois knew that neither Storey nor Julian Mack was optimistic about the Harvard outcome. Gannett and Greuning had told Villard that both jurists believed they had "nobody on the board of overseers." The attitude was much changed since the war. Mack sighed.

While the overseers awaited the report of the faculty committee appointed to review Lowell's dual policies, expected in early spring of 1923, the editor championed another cause of equal symbolism and even greater political significance: the racial composition of the staff at Tuskegee's Veterans Administration Hospital. "The last place on God's green earth to put a segregated Negro hospital was in the lynching belt," The Crisis roared after Principal Moton had been given two days' advance notice that the new federal facility would be run by a white director and all-white medical and nursing staff. The U.S. Government's premier medical center for Negro veterans, the hospital was to be located

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at Tuskegee, Alabama, only after Veterans Administration authorities had been rebuffed by prominent white citizens in one southern community after another. But once the huge, T-shaped structure on landscaped grounds adjacent to the Tuskegee Institute campus was ready, southern white politicians orchestrated a takeover. Conflict had been virtually assured from the beginning when the Treasury Department, responsible for the hospital's construction, had promised Tus-kegee's white citizens control of the facility and the major portion of its $65,000 payroll, while the Veterans Administration had promised the timorous Moton that Negroes would eventually staff the hospital under a northern white director. Instead, Colonel Robert Stanley, a churlish Alabamian, and his staff of white medical officers had arrived in early February 1923. A grim. New England-born nurse accompanied them at the head of a cadre of white women of remarkably sour mien. To comply with state law governing racial separation, as well as to avoid "contamination" from the patients, each white nurse would command a Negro "nurse-maid."

Fearing himself in danger of irrevocable compromise, Moton appealed to Washington and resisted demands from scores of "eminent white citizens" that he state publicly that Negro physicians were too inexperienced to serve in the hospital. At the same time, however, he declined to back publicly the demands of the colored National Medical Association for total control by Negroes of the facility. Principal Moton's office figuratively sat just below the mouth of a smouldering volcano, with each rumble sending him ducking for cover beneath his imposing oak desk. Although he once described the principal as the most distinguished living graduate of Hampton Institute, Du Bois now smirked that Moton was "a much simpler and more straightforward type" than Booker Washington. Negro America, as Du Bois well knew, had never forgotten the incident in which Mrs. Moton had been ejected from a Pullman car in Alabama. A white trustee of Tuskegee who volunteered to handle the humiliating situation had spoken in Moton's name to say that Moton firmly disapproved of Negroes riding Pullman cars. For the sake of his own position and that of the larger cause of peacefiil accommodation in the Plessy v. Ferguson South, Moton had kept silent, as he had wished to do in the hospital controversy. But the stakes were such that now he no longer could risk not taking a public position. Du Bois declared his sympathy for the educator "in his undoubted danger and humiliation," although he still rapped Moton's knuckles for his compliant past. "Here was a great government duty to take care of the black soldiers wounded in soul and body," Du Bois asserted. But Moton's earlier collusion had made it possible for the Veterans Administration to duck caring for them "without discrimination in the same hospitals and under the same circumstances as white soldiers."

After a February Oval Office conference with Moton, President Harding had instructed the Civil Service Commission to find qualified Negroes to staff

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the hospital, although the authority of Colonel Stanley remained unchallenged. The NAACP leadership, backed by the influential National Medical Association and the National Negro Press Association, had made it clear to the White House that it regarded the staffing issue of sufficient importance to influence the Negro vote in the upcoming three-way presidential contest among the Republican, Democratic, and La Follette Farmer-Labor parties. "We had understood that Southern white people simply could not be asked to nurse and heal black folk," the editor wrote in "The Fear of Efficiency." Yet here were Deep South congressmen and the Alabama governor salivating to grab physicians' and nurses' salaries reserved for Negroes. "Nothing more astonishing has happened in this astonishing generation." On a Tuesday night in July, Moton's "undoubted danger" seemed real enough. With a debauched sense of occasion, some seven hundred Klansmen paraded through the town of Tuskegee and across the hospital grounds on the night before the Fourth of July. The parade took on an even more macabre aspect when a reliable informant wrote Du Bois that the head nurse had supplied the Ku Klux Klan with new sheets from the hospital storeroom. Tuskegee was "no place for such a hospital," Du Bois snapped; furthermore, despite Moton's nervously correct response, it had been evident from the beginning that Tuskegee had been induced to accept the facility as part of a deal that had been struck by federal officials sympathetic to the white South. The editor growled throughout the summer of 1923 over the foot-dragging by the Civil Service Commission. What galled him more than the blatant intimidation at Tuskegee was the white South's convincing propaganda campaign in the North. Despite a nine-point refiatation of misinformation about the hospital in the July CrisiSy he knew that the gently skeptical letter his "Tuskegee Hospital" evoked from Mrs. John K. Howe reflected a bias broadly shared among many well-meaning whites. A subscriber who gave her copy each month to the apartment house janitor, Mrs. Howe wondered if sometimes "something that excites you" mightn't have a less ulterior cause. Reminding the editor that white people "suffer just as much when unjustly accused as colored people do," she enclosed a clipping from the current Outlook informing its well-bred readers that the Veterans Hospital was originally intended to be run and staffed by whites, that the government had been unable to find a large enough pool of available Negro physicians; that the NAACP and other militant organizations had demanded that the Civil Service Commission adjust standards in favor of unqualified applicants; finally, that the racial friction in Tuskegee was due to agitation by the NAACP.

If he betrayed an almost harsh impatience in replying to Mrs. Howe and the Outlook's willful disregard for the facts, it was partly due to the fact that Du Bois had become bitterly distraught after the failure of the Justice Department to intervene. At first, he'd been cautiously encouraged by White's report to the

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board of his breakthrough meeting with Justice Department officials, claiming that the Bureau of Investigation was entering the case. Dashing to the sweltering capital on June 6, the NAACP secretary had eventually reached Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., who enabled him to meet with the assistant chief of the Bureau of Investigation, apparently about the only Justice Department official in town at the time. "Cordially received" by this official he identified as "Mr. John E. Hoover," White had insisted that the Klan was plotting to intimidate the local Negro community, only to have the assistant chief explain that he lacked authority to act without specific instructions from the attorney general. Ascertaining the name of the official empowered to speak for the absent attorney general. White promptly telephoned firom Hoover's office and not only received assurance from Attorney General Harry Daugherty's deputy, "a Mr. Crim," of the Harding administration's concern, but listened over the telephone extension while the deputy dictated instructions to Hoover to investigate "any situation where Government property or government interests were involved." The July outrage of the Klan parade at Tuskegee, the refiisal by the town's white merchants to sell to black customers, the expulsion of the only black doctor, and the summary dismissal of black nursemaids from the hospital had followed hard on the heels of White's Justice Department discussions. Yet Washington had done nothing prior to Harding's sudden death at the beginning of August—not even the removal of Colonel Stanley. Before the matter came to Calvin Coo-lidge's attention, the white South was very likely to have settled it on the ground while the Civil Service Commission vacillated. "Human hatred, meanness and cupidity gone stark mad!" Du Bois expostulated.

Du Bois saw yet more evidence of madness in the treatment meted out to Augusta Savage during spring 1923 by the directors of the Fontainebleau School of the Fine Arts, a recently established, American-sponsored academy outside Paris. Ernestine Rose, the white head librarian of the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library who hovered over her patrons like a mother hen, had written the chairman of the school's sculpture department for an explanation; could there have been a mistake, she wondered? Miss Savage had done outstanding work in sculpture at Cooper Union. From a poor Florida family, thirty-one and patchily educated in the public schools of the state, Savage had been in New York less than three years, yet her talent had already won enthusiastic support among a small circle that would eventually see its faith in her outstandingly rewarded. Savage's commissioned sculpture. The Harp, would be the central attraction in the Contemporary Arts Building at the 1939 New York World's Fair. That she was destined for an exceptional future was already evident ft-om the evaluation of her work sent to the Fontainebleau School by the Cooper Union: "excellent and her conduct irreproachable." But she was never going to be white, and "to be perfectly firank ... we did learn that Miss Savage was of

the colored race," Miss Rose was told by Ernest Peixotto, director of painting and sculpture at Fontainebleau and a distinguished American painter. Back at his desk after a month's speaking tour in the West, Du Bois fired off his own inquiry to each of the school's eight prominent American directors as soon as the Rose correspondence reached him. "In the next issue of The CrisiSy we hope to have their answers and to comment on them," he announced in his June catalogue of horrors, "The Fear of Efficiency."

WHEN THE EXPATRIATE writcr Malcolm Cowlcy recalled in his Exile's Return, many years after the Harlem Renaissance had become a gorgeous memory, that "one heard it said that the Negroes had retained a direct virility that the whites had lost through being overeducated," he could have very appropriately cited The Gift of Black Folk as his source. Du Bois had begun writing this influential book, whose contributions to the aesthetic, literary, and dramatic conceptions of his people were to be permanent, sometime during 1922. The Negro was "primarily an artist," the author pronounced canonically, and possessed of a special sense of beauty—"particularly for sound and color, which characterizes the race." Probing further, Du Bois exposed the racial essence as being "a certain spiritual joyousness; a sensuous, tropical love of life, in vivid contrast to the cool and cautious New England reason." "Finally the Negro has played a peculiar spiritual role in America," Du Bois's foreword trumpeted, a "living, breathing test of our ideals and an example of the faith, hope and tolerance of our religion." In one sense, however, Du Bois's stipulations that black people had contributed "a sense of meekness and humility which America never has recognized and perhaps never will," or that they possessed "a slow and dreamftil conception of the universe; a drawling and slurring of speech, an intense sensitiveness to spiritual values," could as easily have been stigmatized by hostile racialists as esteemed by admiring racialists. The Gift of Black Folk was an outstanding example of the complexity of unintended consequences, a work whose copious evidence and emphatic thesis cut both ways across the plane of racial typologies, an argument that could be construed to have exactly opposite meanings.

The book was commissioned by the Knights of Columbus Historical Commission just as the alliance of the northeastern Protestant establishment. Middle America, the Klan-ridden South, and much of organized skilled labor was heading for victory in a frenzied campaign to revise the nation's immigration laws. The redoubtable Dr. Edward McSweeney, the Historical Commission's chair and former deputy immigration commissioner at Ellis Island, hoped that a thoughtfril book by the foremost intellectual of color might help to blunt the runaway momentum of Anglo-Saxon racism and religious bigotry. The Historical Commission's series on the making of America underwrote two other

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studies dealing with distinctive populations —T/ze Germans in the Making of America and The Jews in the Making of America. McSweeney's "Introduction" to Gift fully complemented Du Bois's perspicacity in the Harvard dormitory controversy about the preeminent national values at stake in the nativistic irruption of the twenties. "To attempt, in this country, to set up a 'caste' control based on the accident of birth, wealth, or privilege, is a travesty of Democracy," McSweeney protested. Yesterday, the bigoted slogan was "No Irish need apply," he recalled. Today, the cry was to turn back the Jews and the Italians, slogans with strong appeal to the pocketbooks of white working men and women (and, he might well have added, to those of most black Americans). What McSweeney and Du Bois gamely tried to do was to oppose conservative Gentile elites, Ku Klux Klan loyalists, hardshell Baptists, gentrified eugenicists, and Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent readership with the counterweight vision of an American pluralism or multiculturalism that had only just begun to be conceptualized at the beginning of the century. Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce and Du Bois's approximate Harvard contemporaries Horace Kallen and Hutchins Hapgood, along with Greenwich Village's Randolph Bourne and Waldo Frank, offered a vision of a democracy that celebrated differences rather than reviled and suppressed them, a vision, said Du Bois, that might never have materialized but for the unique role the Negro American had been forced to play in the nation's history. After all, the so-called democracy of the Founding Fathers was never a "democracy of the masses of men," but an Athenian democracy in which slavery along with class and gender hegemony formed the natural order of things.