ACOLD FEBRUARY TURNED INTO A March that started out even worse. In the Northeast, snowfalls made highways and railroad lines impassable, and eighty-mile-an-hour winds knocked down trees and the poles that suspended electrical wires; as they fell, they blocked the frozen streets, stranding thousands at home in Maine and Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. Pedestrians in New York were blown off balance as they walked, even though the canyon walls of skyscrapers should have protected them. As far south as Washington, D.C., temperatures sank to levels that most people had never felt before.
But springtime finally made its appearance in 1920, earlier in New Orleans than in New England, of course, and that was when the crowds started getting bigger again at the clubs where Louis Armstrong led his band by playing a beat-up old five-dollar cornet he had bought in a pawnshop. He did not make much money yet. He did not live on the right side of town yet. He did not even live in the right town. But he was closing in on all of those goals.
“We were all poor,” he later wrote of those days. “The privies [the toilets] were out in a big yard, one side for the men and one side for the women.” His neighbors were “churchpeople, thieves, prostitutes, and lots of children. There were bars, honky-tonks, and saloons.” And there was one night in particular, young Louis recalled, when “a woman hollered out into the yard to her daughter. She said (real loud), ‘You, Marandy, you’d better come into this house, you laying out there with nothing on top of you but that thin nigger.’ Marandy said, ‘Yassum.’”
The blues had to be born in a place like New Orleans. “Chastized as the devil’s music” by the pure of heart but weak of knowledge, it was, in fact, just the opposite. “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation” asked an article in the Ladies’ Home Journal, then proceeded to answer in the righteous, but erroneous, affirmative.
In his definitive The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia relates that jazz did not begin in New Orleans’s red-light district, the infamous Storyville, but in the city’s Baptist churches. Says banjoist Johnny St. Cyr, “Those Baptist rhythms were similar to the jazz rhythms, and the singing was very much on the blues side.” And trombonist Kid Ory, who would later figure importantly in Armstrong’s life, believes that “[Buddy] Bolden [believed by some to have been America’s first real jazz instrumentalist], got most of his tunes from the Holy Roller Church, the Baptist church on Jackson and Franklin. I know that he used to go to that church, but not for religion, he went there to get ideas on music.”
But like children leaving home to see the wider world, in the early twentieth century jazz became a passenger riding the rails, the music too undertaking a journey, finding its way to bigger cities where African-Americans were living the lowdown life, and to the occasional small town where poverty was so plentiful, it might as well have been a crop. For instance, cotton, the picking of which was sufficiently onerous that only blacks would do it, and for pennies a day and still end up owing the boss for food and other supplies; the picking of which would soon find itself with not nearly enough hands.
As for Louis, he had his eyes on Chicago, where the real tunes were being played these days. The best musicians were heading there, including many from New Orleans. In baseball terms, the Crescent City was the minor leagues—Triple-A ball, the top of the rung, but still the minors.
Chicago was the majors. It was bigger, more diverse, a more expansive environment for the new music than its birthplace, in large part because blacks were freer in the North than in the South and their music could not help but reflect the lack of restrictions. Jazzmen were pouring in not only from New Orleans, but from the Mississippi Delta, the cotton fields of Alabama—from points all over the South. Anyone could sit in with anyone else at any club at any time—the more the merrier, yes; but of greater importance, the more who played the music, the better for both its evolution and its spread. As Southern musicians settled near Lake Michigan and joined in the party, jazz started to become a new kind of music, separating from its roots in the blues with something distinct and previously unknown resulting from the process, something purely American but a product created purely by American outsiders, by Americans whose dreams hadn’t come true and never would, not unless they told the tale of their sorrows and joys with just the right notes, just the right beat, just the right feeling. And even then there were no guarantees.
Louis Armstrong, though, had some magic in him. He was only eighteen at the time in 1920 but was the year’s boy wonder, already becoming a jazz master, even without musicians of Chicago caliber sitting in to influence him, urge him on. Always a prodigy, Armstrong was remodeling jazz into something that he could play like no one else. The influences on him could not have been more varied than just a neighborhood Baptist church. As Lucy Moore points out, they included the rhythms and melodies that were in the very air of New Orleans: “the mournful energy of the freed slaves’ blues; the calypso rhythms of the West Indies; the syncopated beat of plantation banjo music, known as ragtime; the mysticism of Negro spirituals, the lyricism and sophistication of the Creole tradition; and the local love of marching brass bands—fused on the streets into an entirely new type of music.”
But Armstrong’s was the newest of all. Biographer Laurence Bergreen writes that his subject was his own inspiration, his own source of encouragement. “Satchmo,” short for “Satchel Mouth,” a tribute to the size of his opening,
“entered just a fraction behind the melody,” as he told [his second wife] Lil, and then caught up to the other musicians and finally got out in front of them. … Sure, it was “wrong” by the standards of classical music, but in jazz, with its relaxed tempos and polyphony, the technique added tension to the music, as the ear waited for the soloist to enter. In Louis’s hands, this was more than just a gimmick; he used it to imply notes that carried as much musical meaning as the actual notes. His horn engaged the ear and the mind, making the listener hear things that were only suggested, never stated. Eventually, he learned to alternate between the melody and his variations on it, until the melody gradually disappeared behind the notes suggesting it, and the ear supplied what his horn left out. His method was rebellious, yet it conformed to a ruthless inner logic. He embroidered and invented tunes within the tune, rhythms within the rhythm.
The result was that he “transformed whatever piece he happened to be playing into an extension of his psyche,” and, as it turned out, his psyche would soon become the national rage.
But when?
Patience, he told himself; patience. He might have been but a teenager in the spring of 1920, but already the cats knew about him in Chicago; some had heard him in his hometown, and their amazement quickly turned to the more solid foundation of respect. They not only spread the word about him up North, but belted out their own versions of Louis’s licks.
It would just be a matter of time until he got the right offer and joined them. He knew it. What he did not know was that two more years of waiting were ahead, although he would later say he had not minded. He already was New Orleans, in most of the ways that mattered, was already leading the way in Chicago—and that wasn’t bad for someone his age.
When Kid Ory headed North from the bayou in 1920, his departure opened up the Southern throne for Louis. But before the Kid left, in a rite of passage, he gave his successor some advice. The Kid told Satchmo to “‘put a new piece together. Words and music. Even put in a little dance.’ The song,” Bergreen continues, “was an unashamedly filthy thing called, variously, ‘Keep Off Katie’s Head’ or ‘Take Your Finger Outta Katie’s Ass.’ When Louis sang this to a packed house at Pete Lala’s one night, ‘Man it was like a sporting event. All the guys crowded around and they like to carry me up on their shoulders.’”
The cornetist Joe Oliver was nicknamed “King,” and that was precisely his rank in the Chicago blues scene. It was he who had summoned Ory to join him, and in 1922 he would call for Louis, waiting those extra two years, perhaps, because he wanted more time at the top. Once Louis came to Chicago, the city would eventually be his every bit as much as New Orleans was now, and the King knew it. It would be a momentous event, a transfer of power. The King was in no hurry.
But like Ory, Oliver would be gracious. It was the music that mattered, after all, the music more than the man, and both Oliver and Ory could see that the music was about to belong almost solely to Satchmo. An entire generation and more would grow up trying to copy his sound. To a man, they would fail. No one can copy a legend. From Terry Teachout, another Armstrong biographer:
He really did perform with everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Johnny Cash. He really did end his shows (some of them, anyway) by playing 250 or more high Cs capped with a high F. He wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies—without a collaborator. The ranks of his admirers included Kingsley Amis, Tallulah Bankhead, Jackson Pollock, Jean Renoir, and Le Corbusier (“He is mathematics, equilibrium on a tightrope. He is Shakespearean!”). Virgil Thomson called him “a master of musical art.” Stuart Davis, whose abstract paintings were full of jazz-inspired images, cited him as a “model of greatness.” Is it any wonder, then, that so many musicians longed to play the way he played and sing the way he sang? It was no accident that they usually referred to Armstrong not as “Satchmo,” his own favorite nickname, but as “Pops.” He was the father figure of jazz, and what his children wanted was to be him, or at least come as close as they possibly could.
But Armstrong was not merely different, an exception among exceptions. Most other men and women of his race lived a different life, a life that remained the same from cradle to grave—and such a short, hard period of time it seemed. It was the blues that they lived, never able to play it. It was the blues that they lived; they would never make it to jazz. For Armstrong and a fortunate few others, it was the music to which they would devote their lives in willing servitude—not the white massah, no more of the white massah standing in cotton fields with a whip in one hand and a cooling drink in the other. But he was about to become a rarity, just like old-fashioned church music once the jazzmen got hold of it.
ACCORDING TO GOVERNMENT FIGURES, 111,888 men and women of African descent in the United States made their way northward in 1920. But they were just the latest in a much larger number of internal immigrants. As James R. Green tells us, “The black population in Northern cities grew by 35 percent between 1910 and 1920 and topped 100,000 in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. In other industrial cities, this population multiplied dramatically, by over 600 percent in Detroit and over 300 percent in Cleveland. The number of blacks working in manufacturing increased by 40 percent in the same decade, while black employment in agriculture dropped by 25 percent.”
African-Americans were escaping from conditions they found intolerable, assuming that their lives could only be better at the top of the country than they had been at the bottom. In the South, everything from public toilets to hospitals, from parks to schools, was segregated, and those who dared step across the lines of racial separation faced reprisals from the law and, worse, from the Ku Klux Klan, which was in places a law unto itself. It has been claimed that the Klan gained more than a million members during the twenties, a number that is probably much too high. Nonetheless, it is true that as African-Americans departed from the legally sanctioned racism of the South for hopes of welcome in the North, the Klan was close behind, making a migration of its own, determined not to let the black man escape its own particular brand of justice.
BLACKS WERE ALMOST TEN PERCENT of the population at the time, yet less than five percent of the military. And of the military men, only one in five saw action in the Great War, clearly the result of prejudice, a prejudice that U.S. officials not only encouraged, but taught. “The French allied forces, for example,” writes James Oliver Horton, “were instructed to see that the French civilian population respected American racial etiquette. To treat black soldiers as equals or to show them respect would, they were told, offend white American soldiers. This was especially true when French women socialized with black men.”
Many more African-Americans were waiting their turns in uniform as the war ended. If they had been called upon earlier, perhaps the fighting would have ended before it did. The little-known, but nonetheless legendary, “Battle of Henry Johnson” suggests the possibility.
Johnson and Needham Roberts were on sentry duty in Germany on the night of May 15, 1918, when a noise caught their attention.
About 2 A.M. [Johnson] heard the Germans cutting the wire that protected his post, so he sent Roberts, in an adjoining sentry post, to alert their troops. Johnson lobbed a grenade and the “surprised Dutchmen” began firing, so he recalled Roberts. Roberts was soon incapacitated by a German grenade. Two Germans tried to take Roberts prisoner but Johnson beat them off. Roberts could not stand but he sat upright and passed grenades to Johnson.
With grenades exhausted, Johnson grabbed his rifle. He inserted an American clip in his French rifle but it jammed. At that point, a German platoon rushed him and the fighting became hand-to-hand. He then “banged them on the dome and the side and everywhere I could land until the butt of my rifle busted.” Next he resorted to his bolo knife. “[I] slashed in a million directions,” he said. “Each slash meant something, believe me.” He admitted that the Germans “knocked me around considerable and whanged me on the head, but I always managed to get back on my feet.” One German was “bothering” him more than the others, so he eventually threw him over his head and stabbed him in his ribs. “I stuck one guy in the stomach,” Johnson continued, “and then he yelled in good New York talk: ‘That black _______ got me.’” Johnson was still “banging them” when his friends arrived and repulsed the Germans. Johnson then fainted. The fight had lasted about an hour.
Johnson and Roberts were taken to a French hospital. Johnson had a total of 21 wounds to his left arm, back, feet, and face, most of them from knives and bayonets.
The Battle of Henry Johnson, as far as I know the Great War’s only eponymous struggle, resulted in all manner of accolades for its African-American hero. At the one extreme was the awarding to Johnson of the highest of all French military honors, the Croix de Guerre with a gold palm. Roberts received a Croix de Guerre sans gold palm. They were the first two American soldiers, out of tens of thousands who fought in France, to have been so recognized.
There were no honors awaiting either of them in the United States.
At the other extreme was the story called “Young Black Joe,” written by Irvin S. Cobb, one of the most famous journalists of the time, and published in the Saturday Evening Post on August 24, 1918. Cobb presented his encomium to Johnson awkwardly, both in phrasing and feeling: “I am of the opinion personally, and I make the assertion with all the better grace, I think, seeing that I am a Southerner with all the Southerner’s inherited and acquired prejudices touching on the race question—that as a result of what our black soldiers are going to do in this war, a word that has been uttered billions of times in our country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in hate, sometimes in all kindliness—but which I am sure never fell on black ears but it left behind a sting for the heart—is going to have a new meaning for all of us, South and North too, and that hereafter n-i-g-g-e-r will merely be another way of spelling the word American.”
More than anyone else, Cobb, in his own distinctive manner, had created a hero. As much as anyone else, Henry Johnson deserved to be one.
AND SO WHEN JOHNSON AND other African-Americans returned to the United States, many of them joining their families who were now living in the North, they expected hearty shows of gratitude at the most, a “welcome back” or a slap on the shoulder at the least. They expected freedom from segregation, or at least a lessening of its impact. They expected better career opportunities than had existed upon their departure, if nothing so grand as a position in the executive offices. They did not believe in the sudden appearance of gold streets in the ghetto, nor even streets in which the ruts had been filled, maybe even paved over—not in the black neighborhoods. They were, however, counting on paper, green paper, more of it than they had been able to earn in their old lives. Simple, dignified, fairly compensated employment. Nineteen twenty, they hoped, as most soldiers had finally been mustered out of service by then, would be the start of new lives for them.
It did not happen, almost none of it. For the most part, African-Americans were faced with the same demeaning jobs and insulting wages they had left behind to take up arms against the Hun. In the South, they had earned their daily crumbs by cleaning toilets in public buildings or sweeping the streets in front of them, streets which, because of horse droppings, often smelled more like the toilets than the great outdoors. They tended horses, shined shoes, toiled at the most repetitious and mindless jobs in factories, and carried bags through hotel lobbies or along train platforms to seats in the “Whites Only” cars. They kowtowed to the white man and woman in both their language and their demeanor.
But for the returning black serviceman, as for the black families who had departed from their tenant farms, things were no better in the North; there was no dignity to be found in the Chicago area workplace either. The jobs they secured were horrifyingly similar, and sometimes even identical, to those they had left behind. And, on occasion, no employment awaited them at all. As Meyer Weinberg reported,
In Chicago, “International Harvester, the packinghouses, and steel mills all carefully monitored quotas on the number of blacks that could be hired.” With respect to anti-black prejudices of European immigrants, “employers … took pleasure in fueling the flames of this discord, doing whatever they could to incite the prejudices and fears of native workers.”
Beginning in 1924, the management of U.S. Steel established quotas for black employees. The new policy was part of a broad racial program for the Gary [Indiana] community: “In the 1920s … Gary saw the growth of ‘jim crow’ housing, public accommodations, recreation, and education [begun] by United States Steel corporation executives running both City Hall and the decisive community organizations to an extent unknown prior to … [World War I].”
Nor did there seem to be any likelihood of change—not yet, at least. There was no nationwide campaign to improve living conditions for blacks; no such phrase, or even notion, as “civil rights.” The country’s best-known black leader, despite being a man of unusual accomplishment, inspired derision at least as much as he raised alarms. His is an extraordinary story for its time. If only it could have ended differently.
MARCUS MOSIAH GARVEY WAS ONE of the rare blacks who had made a wide-ranging success of himself in 1920, perhaps the widest: entrepreneur, journalist, poet, publisher, and lecturer. Born in Saint Anne’s Bay, a small town on the north coast of British Jamaica, Garvey had been a playful, sometimes rambunctious boy—once jailed for being part of a gang that threw stones at the windows of a local church, breaking every one. He was, afterward, ashamed of himself; he vowed it would be his last act of vandalism, and it was.
Always intelligent, always curious, Garvey took elocution lessons and entered public-speaking competitions at a young age. He read constantly in his father’s library, where, according to historian Jules Archer, he “learned about the colonization and partition of Africa by European powers. He became aware of a worldwide pattern of oppression of those with black skin by those with white skin.”
Moving with his family to the United States, to Harlem, New York’s largest black neighborhood, which was actually a series of neighborhoods shoved up against each other, and a part of town that would, in 1920, change the very meaning of American culture, Garvey began to dream. “But,” as biographer Colin Grant tells us, “when Marcus Garvey closed his eyes in the middle of the year [1919], he did not imagine the saccharine luxury of a Sugar Hill [Harlem’s priciest neighborhood] penthouse with a chauffeured Cadillac parked outside and a Scandinavian maid to open the front door. No, what he saw were ships, not one or two but a whole line of Negro-owned steamships sailing across the Atlantic. It was an impossible idea. There had been no hint of anything like it in recent history.”
By 1920, Garvey had founded a group for the advancement of African-Americans in the United States; and when he lectured, he spoke frequently about both the group and the exalted position he had given himself as its head. “I am President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” he would say at the beginning of his presentations, by way of justifying the fees he collected from those whom he addressed. “There is always a charge for admission, in that I feel that if the public is thoughtful it will be benefited by the things I say. I do not speak carelessly or recklessly but with a definite object of helping the people, especially those of my race, to know, to understand, to realise themselves.”
In addition to collecting money for the UNIA, Garvey also edited a weekly newspaper called Negro World, one of the rare journals of the time that advocated women’s rights as well as those of African-Americans. Every issue, which cost a nickel, included a full page titled “Our Women and What They Think.” Also included were poetry by Garvey, and reviews of theatre, music, and literature. The paper would play a major role in the Harlem Renaissance, that dramatic change in American culture that is the subject of a later chapter.
It was during the Renaissance, as another Garvey biographer relates, that the paper “eventually claimed a circulation of one hundred thousand, making it the most widely read black weekly of that day. Following Marcus’s policy of glorifying blackness, it refused ads for hair straighteners, skin bleaches, or any product that promised to make the user look whiter. It was the only black publication to reject such ads.”
Black is beautiful, Garvey believed, well ahead of his time. Further, he insisted that his people could most improve themselves by departing from the hostility and indignities that beset them in the United States and establishing a nation of their own in Liberia, a nation in West Africa and one of only two countries on the continent that had no history of European colonization. Liberians, as it happened, were not in favor of Garvey’s idea; he would clean up details like that later.
The first step was to bring into being the Black Star Steamship Line, the fleet he saw when he closed his eyes. So determined was Garvey to make the dream come true that he sought money from those Americans who, in his opinion, would be most likely to support the venture. Not all of them were black. And not all of them were friendly.
One day in 1920, Marcus Garvey, without any advance notice, “did what no black person in America had ever contemplated.” So we learn from biographer Grant. Garvey had made an appointment with someone who was stunned to hear from him but, once learning the reason, was willing to meet. After their time together, Garvey explained what he had done and why he had done it. Opinion was divided. A number of UNIA members and other African-Americans came to regard him as a death-defying genius, while others now thought of him as a fool, perhaps even a traitor to the causes of black America, striking secret bargains of some sort with the devil.
Have this day interviewed Edward Young Clarke, acting Imperial Wizard Knight of the Ku Klux Klan. In conference of two hours he outlined the aims and objects of the Klan. He denied any hostility towards the Negro Improvement Association. He believes America to be a white man’s country and also states that the Negro should have a country of his own in Africa. He denied that his organization, since its reorganization, ever officially attacked the Negro. He has been invited to speak at forthcoming convention to further assure the race of the stand of the Klan.
And that was it. Garvey said no more, having answered some of the questions raised by his visit to the Klan, but having ignored others and raised a few more. He did, however, allow a spokeswoman to tell reporters that “Garvey intends to reorganise the Black Star Line shortly, and it is possible [Imperial Wizard] Clarke may buy stock in the new company.”
Possible, yes—but not certain. And to this day no one seems to know for certain whether or not the Ku Klux Klan became a stockholder of the Black Star Steamship Line. It remains, though, intriguing to contemplate; the possibility of Klan money helping to ship Africans back to their homeland is as stunning as it is … well, sensible.
GARVEY’S ATTIRE WHEN HE VISITED the Klan made him look pompous, even laughable. It was, in fact, the same outfit he wore at all the formal occasions he attended, all the speeches he gave, and it could not have been more different from Mrs. Martin’s bedsheets and pillowcases. If the Klansmen looked like a child’s notion of a ghost, Garvey looked like a small nation’s potentate or a large parade’s grand marshal.
His silliest adornment was his hat, a Napoleonic bicorn with fluttering plumage; beneath it he wore white gloves and a dark blue uniform with gold epaulets and tassels and brass buttons bright enough to make a passerby blink. A belt crossed his chest at a forty-five-degree angle. A sword hung in a sheath from his waist, a sword he had never used, in part because he had no idea how to wield it. It slapped against his leg as he walked.
But just as the Ku Klux Klan was to be taken seriously for its violence, Garvey and the UNIA were to be taken seriously for both their persistence and their ability to raise money. Whether the Klan contributed or not, Garvey gave speech after speech in support of the Black Star Line, collecting thousands of dollars from African-American families who could barely afford contributions of any denomination but were determined to show their support. And, if possible, to sail back to Africa, their native land, once the steamship line became a reality.
Garvey also sought money for his Negro Factories Corporation, “to encourage black economic independence.”
Slowly but surely his ideas began to catch on. The end of segregation, the beginning of self-rule—it sounded better and better to African-Americans weary of their mistreatment. Self-reliance was, in fact, the theme of one of Garvey’s best-known poems, “Have Faith in Self.”
Today I made myself in life anew,
By going to the royal fount of truth,
And searching for the secret of the few
Whose goal in life and aim is joy forsooth.
I found at last the friend and counselor
That taught me all that in life I should know;
It is the soul, the sovereign chancellor,
The guide and keeper of the good you sow.
I am advised—“Go ye, have faith in self,
And seek once more the guide that lives in you. …”
IN NEW YORK, A UNIA rally attracted 25,000 men and women eager to learn of Garvey’s plans to weigh anchor. It was a large turnout, larger than expected, and J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like it. Already behaving as if he were the head of the BOI, which he would be before long, he had several times in the past sent agents to listen to Garvey and observe those in attendance. Although he could not publicly admit it, Hoover, along with the Klan, favored the whitest America possible, and he probably would have invested in the Black Star Line himself if he could. He was certainly in favor of the idea behind it.
Still, he was troubled by Garvey, saw him as a rabble-rouser, and feared him for his ability to attract large crowds of black people. J. Edgar Hoover did not like large crowds of people with dark skin, especially when they were listening to a lecturer who whipped up their passions and raised the energy level as they slapped hands with one another in brotherhood and shouted out “Amens!” They might be peaceful now, and they were just that on their night in New York—but who knew what would happen in the future, what those crowds might do if they were all worked up, agitated and inflamed, for some other reason? As Hoover was well aware, they had reasons aplenty for dissatisfaction.
“Garvey is a West Indian Negro,” he jotted down in a memo,
who [has] been particularly active among the radical elements in New York City agitating the Negro movement. Unfortunately, however, he has not as yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an undesirable alien, from the view of deportation. It occurs to me, however … that there might be some proceeding against him for fraud in connection with his Black Star Line propaganda.
As it turned out, there was. Or so ruled the judge and jury that heard the case Hoover brought against Garvey. The defendant was indicted on charges of mail fraud for selling stock in the Black Star Line after it had gone bankrupt. It might have been true; then again, the conviction might have been the result of Hoover’s bigotry as much as Garvey’s illegal behavior. Historians debate the charge even to the present.
Nonetheless, Garvey was sentenced to five years in prison, and he did not take the verdict with equanimity.
“Mr. Garvey immediately burst into a storm of rage,” reported the Kansas City Call. “An undignified tirade of foul abuse and low language followed,” according to [socialist] Hubert Harrison, in which “both judge and district attorney [were described] as ‘damned dirty Jews.’” And the Call painted a final pitiful picture of the convicted UNIA leader “escorted to the elevator … by eighteen marshals through a crowd of sobbing sympathizers.”
Eventually it was decided that Garvey’s sentence would be reduced to three years, but only if he could provide $15,000 for bail. It was money he did not have, had never had—but Amy Jacques would not be dissuaded. Perhaps the most supportive of Garvey’s supporters, she hectored some of her friends and associates, pleaded with others, threatened still more, and within a few weeks had raised the entire amount in either cash or promissory notes.
The money was handed over to authorities and Garvey was free. But not happy. He began a speaking tour of the country on which he spoke more venomously than ever about the treatment of blacks in the United States. Among those who cheered him on were men and women whom he had rescued from poverty by providing them jobs with the UNIA. Among those who didn’t were the tyrannical Hoover and members of the almost comically corrupt Harding administration. For them, it was all too much. Garvey had to be silenced.
In fact, he was deported. Speaking out as angrily as he had when first sentenced, Garvey continued to insist on his innocence, to fume at such treatment for a President-General. But his words would soon be heard no more.
Garvey’s voyage back to his homeland of Jamaica, according to biographer Grant, was a sad occasion for more than just the deportee. Its implications were much greater.
Garvey’s and the Black Star Line’s failure was every aspiring black American’s failure. Months, sometimes years later, it produced a dull referred pain, whose source was not always immediately obvious, but was reminiscent of so many aches that had gone before. James Saunders Redding recalled how the collapse of the Brown and Stevens Bank—“the richest and safest Negro bank in the world”—in which the Black Star Line had some deposits brought his father to the verge of tears “not because he lost money in that disastrous collapse—he didn’t—but because that failure cast dark shadows over the prospects of a self-sustaining Negro culture.”
Garvey stayed in Jamaica for a few years, then took up residence in London, where he died in 1940. He suffered two strokes, at least one of which came, supposedly, after reading an obituary of himself that was, in addition to being slightly premature, full of mistakes and highly critical of his life’s work. His body was taken back to Jamaica for burial and enshrinement.
In the United States, it was not an especially sad occasion for the “black intelligentsia,” which, according to historian Page Smith, had always been embarrassed by Garvey’s “spectacular antics—words big with bombast, colorful robes, Anglo-Saxon titles of nobility to his staff (Sir William Ferris, K.C.O.N., for instance, was his editor, and Lady Henrietta Vinton Davis, his international organizer); his steam-roller-like mass meetings and parades and lamentable business ventures.”
His work, however, would be more appreciated, and his excesses overlooked, as time went on. Schools in a number of countries, including the United States, have been named after him, as have numerous streets and public parks. In 1965, Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited his shrine in Jamaica, with Dr. King, who would be compared to Garvey as an orator, later receiving the first Marcus Garvey Prize for Human Rights.
In 2011, the Obama administration was petitioned to pardon Garvey for his mail-fraud conviction. The decision was announced at a press conference. The administration had refused, on the grounds that, as a matter of policy, it did not offer pardons posthumously. Obama was not asked for an opinion of Garvey’s life and times, nor did he volunteer one. The next reporter to ask a question changed the subject.
DESPITE THEIR BEING CLOSE FRIENDS, Carter G. Woodson was as different from Marcus Garvey as it was possible for one person to be from another. He did not hatch unrealistically appealing plans like the Black Star Line. He did not dress outrageously or speak with overly practiced elocution; in fact, on those rare occasions when he addressed public forums, his voice was so soft that it was hard to hear at times. Despite his color, and the influence that would eventually be his among learned African-Americans, he never seemed a danger to the white establishment, was never the subject of a memo by J. Edgar Hoover; Woodson was too earnest and scholarly to attract large groups of followers. But his imprint, if not his name, has long outlived him, and after all these years his legacy remains a surprisingly important part of the black experience in the United States today. If only anyone knew.
Woodson, born in Virginia in 1875, is the first American of slave parentage to have earned a Ph.D. in the United States. He may, in fact, be the only one. Neither of his parents could read or write, but they managed to influence their boy’s academic yearnings nonetheless—all the more, probably, for they could not bear the thought of their son suffering through their own deficiencies and being fated to similar employment. His father, Woodson would one day relate, insisted that “learning to accept insult, to compromise on principle, to mislead your fellow man, or to betray your people, is to lose your soul.”
Woodson studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and afterward received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from Harvard. By that time, he was well on his way to a conclusion that would influence his entire career: that history “was not the mere gathering of facts. The object of historical study is to arrive at a reasonable interpretation of the facts. History is more than political and military records of peoples and nations. It must include some description of the social conditions of the period being studied.”
The social conditions of 1920 were difficult, painful, even de-humanizing for African-Americans. Yet Woodson, with his training in the great sweep of history, its emphasis on the dispassionate overview rather than the heat of the moment, was able to look at those conditions with an almost detached equanimity. It was not, in many cases, what his fellow blacks were hoping for from him. As far as they were concerned, Woodson contemplated the period with a certain passivity, and much too forgivingly. Even as a young man, he had concluded that racial prejudice “is merely the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind.” It was hardly the talk of a firebrand.
But if Woodson had truly been a passive man, he would not have been able to change that perception. Change it, though, he did—not entirely, but more, it seemed, than any one man possibly could.
Finished with his formal schooling, Woodson began his life’s work by forming the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (although the organization still exists, the “Negro” has since been changed to “African American,” without a hyphen). After a few years, the Association started to publish an immediately influential magazine called The Journal of Negro History, which concentrated not on polemics but profiles, bringing to life notable black figures of the past and calling attention to their contributions to men and women of both races. In addition, Woodson founded the Associated Publishers, the first African-American publishing company in the United States. Headquartered in a row house in Washington, D.C., the first two stories served as office space and printing facilities. The third floor was where Woodson lived. It was all he could afford at the time, but he did not mind. His life and work were one; there was no reason for them not to share the same abode.
In addition to publishing the magazine, he was able to continue working “on two scholarly projects he had begun the year before: the research on free blacks in the antebellum period and a study of blacks during Reconstruction.” It is no wonder that despite his relative youth, Woodson was by 1920, at the age of forty-five, known as “the Father of Black History.” By those who know his work, he continues to be so regarded today.
It sounds like achievement enough for one man. But there was more. Woodson was also an author, and black self-esteem was a principal theme of his two texts, The History of the Negro Church and The Mis-Education of the Negro, books that continue to be widely read in academic circles. The latter, in fact, is a particular favorite of Garvey’s UNIA, which still exists, and to this day urges African-Americans to study the Woodson volume, finding it “a key to our freedom as a people.” Another of his books, The Negro in Our History, had sold 90,000 copies by 1966, by which time it had been published in eleven editions.
Woodson worked closely with schools—those schools that would have him, at least—in emphasizing the historical importance of the black man and woman to our nation’s founding and growth. He felt certain that, if he could only carve out a place for the achievements of African-Americans in the curricula of a few institutions, more would surely follow. He could not have imagined the extent of that following. Today, Black Studies, or African-American Studies, is a recognized major in almost every college and university in the United States. No man is more responsible than Carter G. Woodson.
Further, and perhaps of equal importance, Woodson was also the guiding force behind “Negro History Week,” the second week in February, which he chose because within those seven days both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass had been born. According to a brief publication of the NAACP, of which he was a member, “Dr. Woodson often said that he hoped the time would come when Negro History Week would be unnecessary; when all Americans would willingly recognize the contributions of Black Americans as a legitimate and integral part of the history of this country.”
That time has not yet come. But one cannot help concluding that Woodson would have taken some degree of pleasure in knowing that, beginning in 1976, America’s bicentennial year, all of February became Black History Month—and not only in the United States, but in the United Kingdom and Canada as well.
Nineteen twenty was Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s year, the peak of his influence, but he would remain there for the rest of his life. The enduring strength of his achievements and the anonymity of the achiever would have been exactly what he desired.