Back home in Chicago, I was soon working again as a waiter on the Michigan Central Railroad. As I have already mentioned, the first day of the bloody Chicago race riot (July 28,1919) came while I was working on the Wolverine run up through M ichigan. When I arrived home from work that afternoon, the whole family greeted me emotionally. We were all there except for Otto. The disagreements I had had with my Father in the past were forgotten. Both my Mother and sister were weeping. Everyone was keyed up and had been worrying about my safety in getting from the station to the house.
Following our brief reunion, I tore loose from the family to find out what was happening outside. I went to the Regimental Armory at Thirty-fifth and Giles Avenue because I wanted to find some of my buddies from the regiment. The street, old Forrest Avenue, had recently been renamed in honor of Lt. Giles, a member of our outfit killed in France. I knew they would be planning an armed defense and I wanted to get in on the action. I found them and they told me of their plans. It was rumored that Irishmen from west of the Wentworth Avenue dividing line were planning to invade the ghetto that night, coming in across the tracks by way of Fifty-first Street. We planned a defensive action to meet them.
It was not surprising that defensive preparations were under way. There had been clashes before, often when white youths in “athletic clubs” invaded the Black community. These “clubs” were really racist gangs, organized by city ward heelers and precinct captains.
One of the guys from the regiment took us to the apartment of a friend. It had a good position overlooking Fifty-first Street near State. Someone had brought a Browning submachine gun; he’d gotten it sometime before, most likely from the Regimental Armory. We didn’t ask where it had come from, or the origin of the 1903 Springfield rifles (Army issue) that appeared. We set to work mounting the submachine gun and set up watch for the invaders. Fortunately for them, they never arrived and we all returned home in the morning. The following day it rained and the National Guard moved into the Black community, so overt raids by whites did not materialize.
Ours was not the only group which used its recent Army training for self-defense of the Black community. We heard rumors about anpther group of veterans who set up a similar ambush. On several occasions groups of whites had driven a truck at breakneck speed up south State Street, in the heart of the Black ghetto, with six or seven men in the back firing indiscriminately at the people on the sidewalks.
The Black veterans set up their ambush at Thirty-fifth and State, waiting in a car with the engine running. When the whites on the truck came through, they pulled in behind and opened up with a machine gun. The truck crashed into a telephone pole at Thirty-ninth Street; most of the men in the truck had been shot down and the others fled. Among them were several Chicago police officers—“off duty,” of course!
I remember standing before the Angeles Flats on Thirty-fifth and Wabash where the day before four Blacks had been shot by police. It appeared that enraged Blacks had set fire to the building and were attacking some white police officers when the latter fired on them.
Along with other Blacks, I gloated over the mysterious killing of two Black cops with a history of viciousness in the Black community. They had been found dead in an alley between State and Wabash. Undoubtedly they had been killed by Blacks who had taken advantage of the confusion to settle old scores with these
Black enforcers of the white man’s law.
Bewilderment and shock struck the Black community as well. I had seen Blacks standing before the burned-out buildings of their former homes, trying to salvage whatever possible. Apparent on their faces was bewilderment and anger.
The Chicago rebellion of 1919 was a pivotal point in my life. Always I had been hot-tempered and never took any insults lying down. This was even more true after the war. I had walked out of a number of jobs because of my refusal to take any crap from anyone. My experiences abroad in the Army and at home with the police left me totally disillusioned about being able to find any solution to the racial problem through the help of the government; for I had seen that official agencies of the country were among the most racist and most dangerous to me and my people.
I began to see that I had to fight; I had to commit myself to struggle against whatever it was that made racism possible. Racism, which erupted in the Chicago riot—and the bombings and terrorist attacks which preceded it—must be eliminated. My spirit was not unique—it was shared by many young Blacks at that time. The returned veterans and other young militants were all fighting back. And there was a lot to fight against. Racism reached a high tide in the summer of 1919. This was the “Red Summer” which involved twenty-six race riots across the country—“red” for the blood that ran in the streets. Chicago was the bloodiest.
The holocaust in Chicago was the worst race riot in the nation’s post-war history. But riots took place in such widely separate places as Long View, Texas; Charleston, South Carolina; Elaine, Arkansas; Knoxville, Tennessee, and Omaha, Nebraska. The flareup of racial violence in Omaha, my old home town, followed the Chicago riots by less than two months. It resulted in the lynching of Will Brown, a packing house worker, for an alleged assault on a white woman. When Omaha’s mayor, Edward P. Smith, sought to intervene, he was seized by the mob. They were close to hanging the mayor from a trolley pole when police cut the rope and rushed him to a hospital, badly injured.1
The common underlying cause of riots in most of the northern cities was the racial tension caused by the migration of tens of thousands of Blacks into these centers and the competition for jobs, housing and the facilities of the city. Rather than being at a temporary peak, this outbreak of racism was more like the rising of a plateau—it never got any higher, but it never really went down, either. Writing in the middle of a riot in Washington, D.C., that summer, the Black poet Claude McKay caught the bitter and belligerent mood of many Blacks:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
° O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! 2
The war and the riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919 left me bitter and frustrated. I felt that I could never again adjust to the situation of Black inequality. But how had it come about? Who was responsible?
Chicago in the early twenties was an ideal place and time for the education of a Black radical. As a result of the migration of Blacks during World War I, the Chicago area came to have the largest concentration of Black proletarians in the country. It was a major point of contact for these masses with the white labor movement and its advanced, radical sector. In the thirties it was to become a main testing ground for Black and white labor unity.
The city itself was the core of a vast urban industrial complex. Sprawling along the southeast shore of Lake Michigan, the area includes five Illinois counties and two in Indiana. The latter contains such industrial towns as East Chicago, Gary and
Hammond. This metropolitan area contains the greatest concentration of heavy industry in the country.
By the second half of the twentieth century, it had forged into the lead of the steel-making industry, surpassing the great Monongahela Valley of Pittsburgh in the production of primary metals; including steel mill, refining and non-ferrous metals operations. There was the gigantic U.S. Steel Corporation in Gary, the Inland Steel Company plant in East Chicago and the U.S. Steel South Works. These are now the three largest steel works in the United States. The steel mills of the Chicago area supply more than 14,000 manufacturing plants.
Chicago was at that time, and remains today, the world’s largest railway center. It ranks first in the manufacture of railroad equipment, including freight and passenger cars, Pullmans, locomotives and specialized rolling stock.
The core city itself was most famous for its wholesale slaughter and meat packing industry. Chicago was known as the meat capital of the world, or in Carl Sandburg’s more homely terms, “hog butcher for the nation.”
The city’s colossal wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few men, who comprised the industrial, commercial and financial oligarchy. Among these were such giants as Judge Gary of the mighty U.S. Steel; Cyrus McCormick of International Harvester; the meat packers Philip D. Armour, Gustavus Swift and the Wilson brothers; George Pullman of the Pullman Works; Rosen-wald of Montgomery Ward; General Wood of Sears and Roebuck; the “merchant prince” Marshall Field; and Samuel Insull of utilities. These were the real rulers. Ostensible political power rested in the notoriously corrupt, gangster ridden, county political machine headed by Mayor William Hale (Big Bill) Thompson, who carried on the tradition exposed as early as 1903 by Lincoln Steffens in his book, The Shame of the Cities.
The glitter and wealth of Chicago’s Gold Coast was based on the most inhuman exploitation of the city’s largely foreign-born working force. A scathing indictment of the horrible conditions in Chicago’s meat packing industry was contained in Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, published in 1910. It was inevitable that the wage slave would rebel, that Chicago should become the scene of some of the nation’s bloodiest battles in the struggle between labor and capital. The first of these clashes was the railroad strike of 1877 which erupted in pitched battles between strikers and federal troops.
Then in 1886 came the famous Haymarket riot which grew out of a strike for the eight-hour day at the McCormick reaper plant. During a protest rally, a bomb was thrown which killed one policeman and injured six others. This led to the arrest of eight anarchist leaders; four were hanged, one committed suicide or was murdered in his cell, and the others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Obviously being tried and executed simply because they were labor leaders, these innocent men became a cause célèbre of international labor. Thousands of visitors made yearly pilgrimages to the city where monuments to the executed men were raised. Haymarket became a rallying word for the eight-hour day. The martyrs were memorialized by the designation of the first of May as International Labor Day.
Several years later the city was the scene of the great Pullman strike led by Eugene V. Debs and his radical but lily-white American Railway Union, which precipitated a nationwide shutdown of railroads in 1894. Again the federal troops were called in and armed clashes between workers and troops ensued. These battles were merely high points in the city’s long history of labor radicalism. It was the national center of the early anarcho-socialist movements. In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or Wobblies) was founded there. The IWW maintained its headquarters and edited its paper, Solidarity, there. In 1921, Chicago was to become the site of the founding convention of the Workers (Communist) Party, USA, which maintained its headquarters and the editorial offices of the Daily Worker there from 1923 to 1927.
Blacks, however, played little or no role in the turbulent early history of the Chicago labor movement. This was so simply because they were not a part of the industrial labor force. Prior to World War I, Blacks were employed mainly in the domestic or personal service occupations, untouched by labor organizations.
They were not needed in industry where the seemingly endless tide of cheap European immigrant labor—Irish, Scots, English, Swedes, Germans, Poles, East Europeans and Italians—sufficed to fill the city’s manpower needs.
The only opportunity Blacks had of entering basic industry was as strikebreakers. Thus, in the early part of the century, Blacks were brought in as strikebreakers on two important occasions; the stockyards strike of 1904 and the city-wide teamsters’ strike in 1905. In the first instance, Blacks were discharged as soon as the strike was broken. After the teamsters’ strike, a relatively large number of Blacks remained. As a result of the defeat of the 1904 strike, the packing houses remained virtually unorganized for thirteen more years, and the animosities which developed toward the Black strikebreakers became a part of the racial tension of the city.3
At the outbreak of World War I, the situation with respect to Chicago’s Black labor underwent a basic change. Now Blacks were needed to fill the labor vacuum caused by the war boom and the quotas on foreign immigration. Chicago’s employers turned to the South, to the vast and untapped reservoir of Black labor eager to escape the conditions of plantation serfdom—exacerbated by the cotton crisis, the boll weevil plague and the wave of lynchings. The “great migrations” began and continued in successive waves through the sixties.
During the war, the occupational status of Blacks thus shifted from largely personal service to basic industry. In the tens of thousands, Blacks flocked to the stockyards and steel mills. During the war, the Black population went from 50,000 to 100,000. Successive waves of Black migration were to bring the Black population to over a million within the next fifty years. Black labor, getting its first foothold in basic industry during the war, had now become an integral part of Chicago’s industrial labor force.4
With the tapping of this vast reservoir of cheap and unskilled labor, there was no longer any need for the peasantry of eastern and southern Europe. There was, however, a difference between the position of Blacks and that of the European immigrants. The latter, after a generation or two, could rise to higher skilled and better paying jobs, to administrative and even managerial positions. They were able to leave the ethnic enclaves and disperse throughout the city—to become assimilated into the national melting pot. The Blacks, to the contrary, found themselves permanently relegated to a second-class status in the labor force, with a large group outside as a permanent surplus labor pool to be replenished when necessary from the inexhaustible reservoir of Black, poverty-ridden and land-starved peasantry of the South.
The employers now had in hand a new source of cheap labor, the victims of racist proscription, to use as a weapon against the workers’ movement. Indeed, this went hand in hand with the Jim Crow policies of the trade union leaders, who had been largely responsible for keeping Blacks out of basic industry in the first place.
These labor bureaucrats premised their racism on the doctrine of *a natural Black inferiority. The theory of an instinctive animosity between the races was a powerful instrument for an antiunion, anti-working class, divide and rule policy. The use of racial differences was found to be a much more effective dividing instrument than the use of cultural and language differences between various white ethnic groups and the native born. As we know, ethnic conflicts proved transient as the various European nationalities became assimilated into the general population. Blacks, on the other hand, remain to this day permanently unassimilable under the present system.
Such were conditions in the days when I undertook my search for answers to the question of Black oppression and the road to liberation. Living conditions were pretty rough then, and I had gone back to my old trade of waiting tables in order to make some sort of living.
But I was restless, moody, short-tempered—qualities ill-suited to the trade. Naturally, I had trouble holding a job. My trouble was not with the guests so much as with my immediate superiors; captains, head waiters and dining car stewards, most of whom were white. In less than a month after the Chicago riot, I lost my job on the Michigan Central as a result of a run-in with an
inspector.
The dining car inspectors were a particularly vicious breed. Their job was to see that discipline was maintained and service kept up to par. These inspectors, whom we called company spies, would board the train unexpectedly anywhere along the route, hoping to catch a member of the crew violating some regulation or not giving what they considered .proper service. They would then reprimand the guilty party personally, or if the offense was sufficiently serious, would turn him in to the main office to be laid off or fired. Usually the inspector’s word was law from which there was no appeal. The dining car crew had no unions in those days.
This particular inspector (his name was McCormick) had taken a dislike to me. He had made that clear on other occasions. The feeling was mutual. Perhaps he sensed my independent attitude. He probably felt I was not sufficiently impressed by him and did not care about my job. He was right on both counts.
He boarded the Chicago-bound train one morning in Detroit. We were serving breakfast. It was just one of those days when everything went wrong. People were lined up at each end of the diner, waiting to be served. Service was slow. The guests were squawking and I was in a mean mood myself. I was cutting bread in the pantry when McCormick peered in and shouted, “Say, Hall, that silver is in terrible condition.”
The silver! What the hell is this man talking about dirty silver when I’ve got all these people out there clamoring for their breakfast. *
“I’ve been noticing you lately,” he continued. “It looks as though you don’t want to work. If you don’t like your job why in hell don’t you quit?”
I took that as downright provocation. “Damn you and your job!” I exploded, advancing on him.
He turned pale and ran out of the pantry. A friend of mine in the crew grabbed me by the wrist.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, Hall? Are you crazy?” It was only then that I realized that I had been waving the bread knife at the inspector.
In a few minutes, the brakeman and the conductor came into the
pantry. McCormick brought up the rear.
“That’s the one,” he said pointing at me.
Addressing me, the conductor said, “The inspector here says you threatened him with a knife. Is that true?”
I denied it, stating that I had been cutting bread when the argument started and had a knife in my hand. I wasn’t threatening him with it. My friend (who had grabbed my wrist) substantiated my story.
“Well,” said the conductor, “you’d better get your things and ride to Chicago in the coach. We don’t want any more trouble here, and the inspector has said he doesn’t want you in the dining car.”
I went up forward in the coach. I got off the train in Chicago at Sixty-third and Stony Island. I didn’t go to the downtown station, thinking that the cops might be waiting there.
So much for my job with the Michigan Central.
I^went back to working sporadically in restaurants, hotels and on trains. I didn’t stay anywhere very long. The first job that I regarded as steady was the Illinois Athletic Club, where I remained for several months. I was beginning to settle down a little and participate in the social life of the community, attending dances, parties and visiting cabarets. The Royal Gardens, a night club on Thirty-first Street, was one of my favorite hangouts. King Oliver and Louis Armstrong were often featured there. At the Panama, on Thirty-fifth Street between State and Wabash, we went to see our favorite comedians—Butter Beans and Susie.
It was on one of these occasions that I met my first wife, Hazel. She belonged to Chicago’s Black social elite, such as it was. Her father had died and her family was on the downgrade. Her mother was left with four children, three girls and a boy, of whom Hazel was the oldest. The other children were still teenagers, and Hazel and her mother had supported them by doing domestic work and catering for wealthy whites. I was twenty-one and she was twenty-five.
Hazel was attractive, a high school graduate. She spoke good English and, as Mother said, “had good manners.” She worked for Montgomery Ward, then owned by the philanthropic Rosenwald family, the first big company to hire Blacks as office clerks. She had a nice singing voice and used to sing around at parties. Her friends were among the Black upper strata and the family belonged to the Episcopal Church on Thirty-eighth and Wabash which at that time was the church of the colored elite. We were married in 1920. I was all decked out in a rented swallowtail coat, striped pants, spats and a derby. The ceremony was impressive. Photos appeared in the Chicago Defender.
In a short time, the romance wore off. Hazel’s ambition to get ahead in the world, “to be somebody,” clashed with my love of freedom. I soon had visions of myself, a quarter century hence— making mortgage payments on a fancy house, installments on furniture, and trapped in a drab, lower middle-class existence, surrounded by a large and quarrelsome family.
The worst of it was having to put up with being kicked around on the job and taking all that crap from head waiters and captains. I had been working at the Athletic Club for several months before I got married. Then nobody had bothered me. When I asked for time off to get married, the white headwaiter and the captain seemed delighted. “Sure Hall, that’s fine. Congratulations. Take a couple of weeks off.”
Upon my return, I immediately felt a change in their attitude. Now that I was married, they felt they had me where they wanted me. They became more and more demanding. One day at lunch I had some difficulty getting my orders out of the kitchen, and the guests were complaining—not an unusual occurrence in any restaurant. Instead of helping me out and calming down the guests, or seeing what the hang-up was in the kitchen, the captain started shouting at me in front of the guests. “What’s the matter with you, Hall? Why don’t you bring these people’s orders?” “Can’t you see that I’m tied up in the kitchen?” I said. “Why don’t you go out and see the chef instead of hollering at me!” All puffed up, he yelled out, “Don’t give me any of your lip or I’ll snatch that badge off you!”
I jerked my badge off, threw both badge and side towel into his face, and shouted, “Take your badge and shove it!”
I was moving on him when a friend of mine, J ohnson, a waiter at the next station, jumped between us. I turned away, walked down the steps, through the kitchen and into the dressing room. Johnson followed me into the dressing room a few minutes later. “Hurry up and get out of here. They’re calling the cops.” I changed and left.
My marriage went down the drain along with the job. That was a period of post-war crisis. Jobs were hard to find, and especially so for me since I had been blacklisted from several places because of my temper. I was no longer the same man that Hazel married, and the truth of the matter was that I wanted it that way. Her hangups were typical of Black aspirants for social status—strivers, we called them—who never really doubted the validity of the prejudice from which they suffered. Hazel slavishly accepted white middle class values. I, on the other hand, was looking around trying to figure out how best to maladjust.
For me, the break-up of our marriage in the spring of 1920 destroyed my last ties with the old conventional way of life. I was completely disenchanted with the middle class crowd into which Hazel was trying to draw me. But more important, I not only rejected the status quo, I was determined to do something about it—to make my rebellion count.
I sought answers to a number of questions: What was the nature of the forces behind Black subjugation? Who were its main beneficiaries? Why was racism being entrenched in the north in this period? How did it differ from the South? Could the situation be altered and, if so, what were the forces for change and the program?
I renewed my search for a way to go, pressed by a driving need for a world view which would provide a rational explanation of society and a clue to securing Black freedom and dignity. My search was to continue during what must have been the most virulent and widespread racist campaign in U.S. history. The forces of racist bigotry unleashed during the riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919 were still on the march through the twenties. Indeed, they had intensified and extended their campaign.
The whole country seemed gripped in a frenzy of racist hate. Anti-Black propaganda was carried in the press, in magazine articles, literature and in theater. D.W. Griffith’s obscene movie, The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and pictured Blacks as depraved animals, was shown to millions.5 Thomas Dickson’s two novels, The Klansman (upon which Griffith’s picture was based) and The Leopard’s Spots (an earlier book on the theme of the white man’s burden) were best sellers. Racist demagogues of the stripe of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina, Vardeman of Mississippi, and “Cotton” Ed Smith of South Carolina, were in demand on northern lecture platforms.
Closely behind the trumpeters of race-hate rode their cavalry. A revived Ku Klux Klan now extended to the north and made its appearance in twenty-seven states.6 This organization, embracing millions, headed the list of a whole rash of super-patriotic groups who were anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-foreign-born and anti-Black. The apostles of white, Anglo-Saxon and Nordic supremacy included in their galaxy of ethnic outcasts Asians (the “yellow peril”), Latin Americans and other foreign-born from southern and eastern Europe. Their hate propaganda pitted Protestants against Catholics, Christians against Jews, native against foreign-born, and all against the Blacks, upon whom was fixed the stigma of inherent and eternal inferiority.
It seemed as though the prophets of the “lost cause” were out to reverse their military defeat at Appomattox by the cultural subversion of the north. That they were receiving encouragement by powerful northern interests was self-evident. Tin Pan Alley added,its contribution to the attack with a spate of Mammy songs, and along the same vein, “That’s Why Darkies Were Born”:
Someone had to pick the cotton,
Someone had to plant the corn,
Someone had to slave and be able to sing.
That’s why darkies were born.
Though the balance is wrong,
Still your faith must be strong,
Accept your destiny brothers, listen to me.
A main objective of the racist assault was the academic establishment. The old crude forms of racist propaganda proved inadequate in an age of advancing science. The hucksters of race hate conducted raids upon the sciences, especially upon the new disciplines—anthropology, ethnology and psychology—in an attempt to establish a scientific foundation for the race myth.
The new “science of race” evolved and flourished during the period. Spadework for this grotesque growth had been done in the middle of the last century by the Frenchman, Count Arthur D. Gobineau, in his work, The Inequality of the Human Races (1851-1853). It was carried on by his disciple, the Englishman turned German, Houston Chamberlain, who asserted that racial mixture was a natural crime. In the U.S., early efforts in this field were the works of Knott and Glidden. Also, there was Ripley’s Races of Mankind.
Carrying on in this pseudoscientific tradition during the war and postwar years were the popular theorists Lathrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color: Against White World Supremacy (1923) and Madison Grant, The Passing of a Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History (1916). The cornerstone of this pseudoscientific structure was Social Darwinism which was an attempt to subvert Darwin’s theory of evolution and arbitrarily apply natural selection in plant and animal society to human society. Acording to the Social Darwinists, led by Herbert Spencer, the British sociologist, history was a continuous struggle for existence between races. In this struggle, the Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, or Aryan civilizations naturally survived as the fittest.
The racists had a field day in history, long the area in which the heroes of the “lost cause” had their greatest, most effective concentration. They had held chairs in some of the nation’s most prestigious universities—Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, etc. Among such historians was William Archibald Dunning, who during his long tenure at Columbia miseducated generations of students by his distortions of the Reconstruction, Civil War and slave periods.7
In the academic world this pseudoscience of racism held sway with only a few open challengers. The latter seemed to be isolated voices in the wilderness, as the counter-offensive was slow in getting underway. In anthropology there was Franz Boaz’s antiracist thrust, Mind of Primitive Man. This was written in 1911, and not widely known at the time. The works of his students and colleagues—most notably Melville Hershovitz, The Myth of the Negro Past, Jane Weltfish, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Otto Klineburg—were not to appear until the next decade.
In history, the movement for revision was then decades away. It only became a trend with the Black Revolt of the sixties. Black scholars had pioneered the reexamination: W.E.B. DuBois, his tour de force, Black Reconstruction, and the epilogue, “Propaganda of History,” which contained a bitter indictment of the white historical establishment, was not to appear until the mid-thirties. J.A. Rogers, popular Black historian, had not yet appeared on the scene. Young Carter Woodson, who had founded his Association for the Study of Negro History in 1915, only began to publish the Journal of Negro History in 1916. His own important historical works were yet to come.
Thus, from its tap-roots in the Southern plantation system, the anti-Black virus had spread throughout the country, shaping the pattern of Black-white relationships in the industrial urban north as well. The dogma of the inherent inferiority of Blacks had permeated the national consciousness to become an integral part of the American way of life. Racist dogma, first a rationale for chattel slavery and then plantation peonage, was now carried over to the north as justification for a new system of de facto segregation.
Black subjugation, city-style Jim Crow, became fixed by the twenties, and continues up to the present day. Its components were the residential segregation of the ghetto with its inferior education, slums and the second class status of Black workers in the labor force where they were relegated to the bottom rung of the occupational ladder and prevented by discrimination from moving into better skills and higher paid jobs.
Although its purpose was not clear to me then, I later realized that the virulent racism of the period served to justify and bulwark the structure of Black powerlessness which was developing in every northern city where we had become a sizable portion of the work force.
At the time the racist deluge simply revealed great gaps in my own education and knowledge. I knew that the propaganda was a tissue of lies, but I felt the need for disproving them on the basis of scientific fact. I rejected racism—the lie of the existence in nature of superior and inferior races—and its concomitant fiction of intuitive hostility between races. For one thing, it ran counter to my own background of experience in Omaha.
Religion as an explanation for the riddles of the universe I had rejected long before. I knew that our predicament was not the result of some divine disposition and therefore that racial oppression was neither a spiritual or natural phenomenon. It was created by man, and therefore must be changed by man. How? Well, that was the question to be explored. I had only a smattering of knowledge of natural and social sciences, much of which I had gathered through reading the lectures of Robert G. Ingersoll. It was through him that I discovered Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution through natural selection.
Armed with a dictionary and a priori knowledge gleaned from Ingersoll’s popularizations, I was able to make my way through Origin of the Species. Darwin showed the origin of the species to be a result of the process of evolution and not the mysterious act of a divine creation. Here at last was a scientific refutation of religious dogma. I had at last found a basis for my atheism which had before been based mainly upon practical knowledge.
Continuing my search, I found myself attracted to other social iconoclasts or image-destroyers, and to their attacks upon established beliefs. I remember staying up all night reading Max Nordau’s Conventional Lies of Our Civilization, being thrilled by his castigation of middle class hypocrisy, prejudices and philistinism. Moving on to the contemporary scene, I discovered H.L. Mencken, “The Sage of Baltimore,” and his “smart set” crowd.
For a short while, I was an avid reader of the Mercury which he helped to establish in 1920 as a forum for his views. I was particularly delighted by his critical potshots at some of the most sacred cultural cows of what he called “the American Babbitry,” “boobocracy,” “anthropoid majority”—Menckenian sobriquets for middle class commoners. Mencken enjoyed a brief popularity among young Black radicals of the day who saw in his searing diatribes against WASP cultural idols ammunition with which to blast the claims of white supremacists. The novelty soon wore off as it became clear that Mencken’s type of iconoclasm posed no real challenge to the prevailing social structure. In fact, it was reactionary. He sought to replace destroyed idols with even more reactionary ones, as I soon found out.
Mencken’s philosophical mentor was none other than the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, prophet of the superman, of the aristocratic minority destined to rule over the unenlightened hoardes of Untermenschen—the “perenially and inherently unequal majority of mankind.” Most Blacks then, including myself, who flirted with Mencken never accepted him fully. The one exception was George Schuyler of the Pittsburgh Courier, who took Mencken’s snobbery and reactionary politics and made a career of them which has lasted for forty years.
What confused me most were the contentions of the Social Darwinists, who claimed to be the authentic continuators of Darwin’s theories. Darwin had not dealt with the question of race per se. But it had seemed to me that his theory of evolution precluded the myth of race. How could Darwin’s theory which had helped me finally and irrevocably throw aside the veil of mysticism and put the understanding of the descent of man within my grasp—how could this be used as an endorsement of racism? Perhaps I had been wrong? Was I reading into Darwin more than what he implied?
It was my brother Otto who finally cleared me up on this point. He and I were running in different circles, but we would meet from time to time and exchange notes. Otto pointed out that Social Darwinists had distorted Darwin by mechanically transferring the laws of existence among plants and animals to the field of social and human relations. Human society had its own laws, he asserted. Ah, what were those laws? That was the subject that I wanted to explore.
“You ought to quit reading those bourgeois authors and start reading Marx and Engels,” Otto told me, suggesting also that I read Henry Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society and the works of Redpath.
About this time I got a job as a clerk at the Chicago Post Office. I heard that jobs were available and that veterans were given preference. Following the advice of friends, I approached S.L. Jackson of the Wabash Avenue YMCA, who at that time was a Black Republican stalwart with connections in the Madden political machine.8 Jackson gave me a note to some Post Office official in charge of employment. I passed the civil service examination, in which veterans were given a ten percent advantage, and was employed as a substitute clerk.
The Post Office job in those days carried considerable prestige. It was almost the only clerical job open to Blacks. Postal workers, along with waiters, Pullman porters and tradesmen, were traditionally considered a part of the Black middle class. A number of prominent community leaders came from this group. Many officers of the old Eighth Illinois were postal employees, a good percentage of them mail-carriers.
The Post Office became a refuge for poor Black students and unemployed university graduates. For some of the latter it was a sort of way-station on the road to their professional careers. Others remained, settling for regular Post Office careers. But even here opportunities were limited. Blacks held only a few supervisory positions, as advancement depended solely on the discretion of the white postmaster.
On the job I found the work extremely boring. It consisted of standing before a case eight hours a night, sorting mail. All substitutes were relegated to the night shift. It took years to get on the day shift which was preempted by the veteran employees.' On the other hand, I found the company of my new young fellow workers very stimulating.
In those days the organization of Black postal employees was the Phalanx Forum. Before the war, the organization had played an important political and social role in the community. It was dominated by the conservative crowd of social climbers and political aspirants, who were the most active group among postal
employees and had close ties with the local Republican machine.
heir leadership was completely ineffective with respect to the job issues of Black rank-and-file employees, and it had little or no influence over the younger group of new employees, which included many veterans and students. The gap between the old, conservative crowd and the new, youthful element was sharp. Among the latter a radical sentiment was growing.
I was immediately attracted to this group among whom I was to find friends who seemed to be impelled by the same motivations as myself—to find new answers to the problems afflicting our people. Most of those with whom I fraternized considered the postal job as temporary, a step to other careers. Our interest at the time, therefore, was not so much with the immediate economic or on-the-job needs of Black postal workers, but with the “race problem” generally. The drive for unionization of postal employees was to come later.9
The issue to which we addressed ourselves was the current campaign of white racist propaganda: how to counter it on the basis of scientific truth. We saw the network of racist lies as clearly aimed at justifying Black subjugation and destroying our dignity as a people. On this question we had long, endless discussions on the job while sorting mail, at rest, during lunch breaks and on Sundays when some of us would meet. I soon identified with what 1 considered the more vocal segment. Among our group of aspirant intellectuals there was a medical student, a couple of law students, a dentist (whom we all called “Doc”), students of education and some intellectually oriented workers like myself. On one Sunday when we had gathered, it was suggested, I think by Joe Mabley, that we organize ourselves as an informal discussion group, and that our purpose would be to answer the racist lies on the basis of scientific truth. The idea was instantly agreed upon.
The discussion circle was loosely organized, not more than a dozen participants in all, and bent on finding answers. The moving spirits of the group were John Heath, Joe Mabley and “Doc.”
Heath was a tall, light-complexioned man with high cheekbones. He was a graduate student in the field of education, and a man whose sterling character and keen intellect we all respected.
Then there was Joe Mabley, a brilliant, small Black man. He had large velvety eyes and was a college dropout. He was married and had a family—two or three children—and had settled down to a regular Post Office job. He and Doc were the only regular postal workers in our group—the rest of us being substitutes. Doc had set up an office on the Southside and was trying hard to build up a clientele while working night shifts.
Originally we had planned to meet every Sunday at noon as the most convenient time for the fellows on our shift. The meeting places were to alternate between the homes or apartments of the members. When we got to procedure, the group would choose a topic of discussion and ask for volunteers or assign a member to make introductory reports. He would then have a week to prepare the report. Our original plans included the eventual organization of a forum in which the issues of the day could be debated, and the holding of social affairs. All of this proved to be too ambitious. We found it impractical to have weekly meetings and finally agreed that twice a month was more feasible. The forum idea never got off the ground.
Among us I think we had most of the answers on the question of race, that is, to all but the big lie, the one that was most convincing to the white masses and is the cornerstone on which the whole structure stood or fell: the assertion that Blacks have no history.
A leading formulator of the lie at that time was John Burgess, professor of political science and history at Columbia University:
The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin from the point of view of political ethics is a great sophism. A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.10
We wanted to refute the slanders on the basis of scientific truth. For this, we needed more ammunition and better weapons, particularly in the field of history. It was about this time that I met George Wells Parker, a brilliant young Black graduate student from Omaha’s Creighton University. I was introduced to him by my brother Otto, who had known him in Omaha. He was in
Chicago to visit relatives and to conduct research for his dissertation. His major was history, I believe. We found him a virtual storehouse of knowledge on the race question, especially Black history. His major objective in life was apparently to refute the prevalent racist lies and to build Black dignity and pride. He possessed wide knowledge and seemed to have read everything.
Parker called our attention to the writings of the great anthropologist Franz Boas; the Egyptologist Virchow; to Max Mueller (philologist who formulated the Aryan myth and then rejected it); to the Frenchman Jean Finot; to Sir Harry Johnstone (British authority on African history); and to the Italian Giuseppe Serg and his theory of the Mediterranean races, a refutation of the Aryan mythology. Proponents of this myth claimed all civilizations—Indian, Near East, Egyptians—as Aryan. One wonders why the Chinese were left out, but then that would have been too palpable a fraud! It was Parker who called our attention to Herodotus (ancient Greek historian) who had described the Egyptians of his time (around 400 B.C.) as “Black and with woolly hair.”
Otto and I introduced Parker to friends and acquaintances, and I, of course, to our discussion circle. He spoke before numerous groups. Everywhere there was hunger for his knowledge. We even brought him before the Bugs Club Forum in Washington Park, where he led a discussion on the race question.
This brilliant young man returned to Omaha to resume his studies. The next winter he was dead. We heard it was the result of a mental breakdown. Thus was a brilliant career cut short and a potentially great scholar lost. Surviving, I believe, was only one brief paper and some notes.
GARVEY’S BACK TO AFRICA MOVEMENT
But time and tide did not stand still to wait for our answers to the social problems of the day, or for the results of our intellectual researches. While we sought arguments with which to counter the racist thrust, the masses were forging their own weapons. Their growing resistance was finally to erupt on the political scene in the greatest mass movement of Blacks since Reconstruction.
Great masses of Blacks found the answer in the Back to Africa program of the West Indian Marcus Garvey. Under his aegis this movement was eventually diverted from the enemy at home into utopian Zionistic channels of peaceful return to Africa and the establishment of a Black state in the ancestral land.
The organizational course of the movement was Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He first launched this organization in Jamaica, British West Indies, in 1914. Coming to the US A, he founded its first section in New York City in 1917. The organization grew rapidly during the war and the immediate post-war period. At its height in the early twenties, it claimed a membership of half a million. While estimates of the organization’s membership vary—from half a million to a million—it was the largest organization in the history of U.S. Blacks. There can be no doubt that its influence extended to millions who identified wholly or partially with its programs.
What in Garvey’s program attracted these masses?
Garvey was a charismatic leader and in that tradition best articulated the sentiments and yearnings of the masses of Black people. In his UNIA he also created the vehicle for their organization. Equally important, he was a master at understanding how to use pageantry, ritual and ceremony to provide the Black peasantry with psychological relief from the daily burdens of their oppression. His apparatus included such high sounding titles as potentate, supreme deputy potentate, knights of the Nile, knights of distinguished service, the order of Ethiopia, the dukes of Nigeria and Uganda. There were Black gods and Black angels and a flag of black, red and green: “Black for the race, Red for their blood and Green for their hopes.”
The movement’s program was fully outlined in the historic Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, adopted at the first convention of the organization in New York City August 13, 1920. In the manner of the Nation of Islam and its publication Muhammad Speaks (Bilalian News), the program of Garvey combined a realistic assessment of the conditions facing
Blacks with a fantasy and mystification about the solution. Along with the Back to Africa slogan, the document contained a devastating indictment of the plight of the Black peoples in the United States. Expressing the militancy of its delegates, it called for opposition to the inequality of wages between Blacks and whites, it protested their exclusion from unions, their deprivation of land, taxation without representation, unjust military service, and Jim Crow laws.
Anticipating the Black Power Revolt of the sixties, the document called for “complete control of our social institutions without the interference of any other race or races.” Reflecting the rising worldwide anti-colonial movement of the period, it called for self-determination of peoples and repudiated the loosely formed League of Nations, declaring its decisions “null and void as far as the Blacks were concerned because it seeks to deprive them of their independence.” This latter point was in reference to the assignment of mandates to European powers over African territories wrested from the Germans.
Through this atmosphere of militancy, expressing the desire of the masses to defend their rights at home, ran the incongruent theme of Back to Africa. Declared Garvey:
Being satisfied to drink of the dregs from the cup of human progress will not demonstrate our fitness as a people to exist alongside others, but when of our own initiative we strike out to build industries, governments, and ultimately empires (sic), then and only then, will we as a race prove to our Creator and to man in general that we are fit to survive and capable of shaping our own destiny.
Wake up, Africa! Let us work toward the one glorious end of a free, redeemed, and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations."
Who were Garvey’s followers?
Garvey’s Zionistic message was beamed mainly to the submerged Black peasantry, especially its uprooted vanguard, the new migrants in such industrial centers as New York City, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis. These masses made up the rank and file of the movement. They were embittered and disillusioned by racist terror and unemployment, and saw in Garvey’s program of Back to Africa the fulfillment of their yearnings for land and freedom to be guaranteed by a government of their own.
On the other hand, Garveyism was the trend of a section of the ghetto lower middle classes, small businessmen, shopkeepers, property holders who were pushed to the wall, ruined or threatened with ruin by the ravages of the post-war crisis. Also attracted to Garveyism were the frustrated and unemployed Black intelligentsia: professionals, doctors, lawyers with impoverished clientele, storefront preachers who had followed their flocks to the promised land of the north, and poverty stricken students.
Garveyism reflected the desperation of these strata before the ruthless encroachments of predatory white corporate interests upon their already meager markets. It reflected an attempt by them to escape from the sharpening racist oppression, the terror of race riots, the lynchings, economic and social frustrations. It was from these strata that the movement drew its leadership cadres.
The immediate pecuniary interests of this element were expressed in the form of ghetto enterprises, the organization of a whole network of cooperative enterprises, including grocery stores, laundries, restaurants, hotels and printing plants. The most ambitious was the Black Star Steamship Line. Several ships were purchased and trade relations were established with groups in the West Indies and Africa, including the Republic of Liberia.
The New York City division comprised a large segment of the intensely nationalistic West Indian immigrants. West Indians were prominent in the leadership, in Garvey’s close coterie, and in the organization’s inner councils. There can be no doubt of the considerable influence of this element on the organization. But the attempt on the part of some writers to brand the movement as a foreign import with no indigenous roots is superficial and without foundation in fact. It is clear that Garveyism had both a social and economic base in Black society of the twenties. Nor was Garvey’s nationalism a new trend among Blacks—nationalist currents had repeatedly emerged, going back even before the Civil War.12
A key role in the movement was also played by deeply disillusioned Black veterans who had fought an illusory battle to “make the world safe for democracy” only to return to continued and even harsher slavery. Veterans were involved in the setting up of the skeleton army for the future African state, and in such paramilitary organizations as the Universal African Legion, the Universal Black Cross Nurses, the African Motor Corps and the Black Eagle Flying Corps. Many Black radicals—even some socialistically inclined—were swept into thfe Garvey movement, attracted by its militancy.
Despite his hostility toward local communists, Garvey seemed to regard the Soviet experience with some favor—at least in the early years of his movement. This probably reflected the sentiments of many of his followers. As late as 1924, in an editorial in the Negro World, he publicly mourned the passing of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, calling him “probably the world’s greatest man between 1917 and ...1924.” On that occasion, he sent a cable to Moscow “expressing the sorrow and condolence of the
400,000,000 Negroes of the world.”13
The Garvey movement revealed the wide rift between the policies of the traditional upper class of the NAACP and associates, and the life needs of the sorely oppressed people. It represented a mass rejection of the policies and programs of this leadership, which during the war had built up false hopes and now offered no tangible proposals for meeting the rampant anti-Black violence and joblessness of the post-war period. This mood was expressed by Garvey, who denounced the whole upper class leadership, claiming that they were motivated solely by the drive for assimilation and banked their hopes for equality on the support of whites—all classes of whom, he contended, were the Black man’s enemy. The policy of this leadership, he maintained, was a policy of compromise.
It was in these conditions that Garvey, as the spokesman for the new ghetto petty bourgeoisie, seized leadership of the incipient Black revolt and diverted it into the blind alley of utopian escapism.
My contact with the movement was limited. I had never seen Garvey. I had missed his appearance in 1919 at the Eighth
Regiment Armory. I never visited the organization’s Liberty Hall headquarters. In Chicago, the movement seemed to spring up overnight. I first took serious notice of it in 1920. I listened to its orators on street corners, watched its spectacular parades through the Southside streets. The black, red and green flag of the movement was carried at the head of the parade. The parades were lively and snappy; marching were the African Legion and the Universal Black Cross Nurses in their spotless white uniforms and white veils. All marched in step with a band. It was quite impressive, but to me it was unreal and had little or no relevance to the actual problems that confronted Blacks.
From the first, the Garvey movement met heavy opposition in Chicago. The powerful Chicago Defender, edited by Robert S. Abbott, took the lead. If not the world’s greatest weekly as its masthead proclaimed, it had great influence among Chicago and Southern Blacks, due to its role in promoting the migration to the north. It was widely read in the South where a daily newspaper of Athens, Georgia, called it “the greatest disturbing element that has yet entered Georgia.”14 The Defender was relentless in its attack, throwing scorn and contempt on the movement and Garvey himself.
In addition to The Defender’s attacks, the so-called Abyssinia Affair in the summer of 1920 served to discredit the movement. The Star Order of Ethiopia and Ethiopian Missionaries to Abyssinia was an extremist split off from Chicago’s UNI A branch. The leaders of the group held a parade and rally on Thirty-fifth and Indiana. Speakers clad in loud African costume called upon the crowd to return to their African ancestral land.
To show their scorn for the U.S., they burned an American flag, and when white policemen sought to intervene, the Abyssinians shot and killed two white men and wounded a third. This incident was blown up in the white press as an armed rebellion of Blacks. It was condemned on all sides in the Black community and by its leaders, including the editors of The Defender, who helped authorities in capturing the Abyssinian dissidents.
Despite its repudiation by the official Garvey organization, the Abyssinian affair served to muddy the Garvey image in Chicago. I was working on the New York Central at the time and heard a graphic account of the affair from my aunts when I arrived in town the next day. They lived right around the corner on Indiana Avenue.
Despite the hostile Black press and the Abyssinian affair, the UNIA grew. At its height, it claimed a Chicago membership of
9,000 devoted followers. This is probably exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the sympathizers numbered in the tens of thousands.
Our Sunday discussion group underestimated the significance of the Garvey movement and the strength it was later to reveal. We regarded it as a transient phenomenon. We applauded some of the cultural aspects of the movement—Garvey’s emphasis on race pride, dignity, self-reliance, his exultation of things Black. This was all to the good, we felt. However, we rejected in its entirety the Back to Africa program as fantastic, unreal and a dangerous diversion which could only lead to desertion of the struggle for our rights in the USA. This was our country, we strongly felt, and Blacks should not waive their just claims to equality and justice in the land to whose wealth and greatness we and our forefathers had made such great contributions,
Finally, we could not go along with Garvey’s idea about inherent racial antagonisms between Black and white. This to us seemed equivalent to ceding the racist enemy one of his main points. While it is true that I personally often wavered in the direction of race against race, I was not prepared to accept the idea as a philosophy. It did not jibe with my experience with whites.
While rejecting Garvey’s program, our ideas for a viable alternative were still vague and unformed. The most important effect the Garvey movement had on us was that it put into clear focus the questions to which we sought answers.
Who were the enemies of the Black freedom struggle? While Garvey claimed the entire white race was the enemy, it did not escape us that he was inconsistent, being soft on white capitalists. His main target was clearly white labor and the trade union movement. According to Garvey:
It seems strange and a paradox, but the only convenient friend the Negro worker or laborer has, in America, at the
present time, is the white capitalist. The capitalist being selfish—seeking only the largest profit out of labor—is willing and glad to use Negro labor wherever possible on a scale “reasonably” below the standard white union wage....but, if the Negro unionizes himself to the level ofthe white worker... the choice and preference of employment is given to the white worker....
If the Negro takes my advice he will organize by himself and always keep his scale of wage a little lower than the whites until he is able to become, through proper leadership, his own employer; by doing so he will keep the good will of the white employer and live a little longer under the present scheme of things.15
There is no doubt that Garvey was voicing the sentiments ofthe vast mass of new migrant workers. And it was not that we had any compunction about strikebreaking in industries from which Blacks were barred. In fact, that had been one of the ways Blacks broke into industries such as stockyards and steel. We were also keenly aware of the Jim Crow policies of the existing trade union leadership and of the anti-Black prejudices rampant among white workers. But in casting Blacks permanently into the role of strikebreakers, Garvey was helping to further divide an already polarized situation and playing into the hands of businessmen, bankers, factory owners and the reactionary leadership of the trade unions.
My own experience with unions in the waiters’ trade was bad. Old waiters would tell us how in the first part of the century they had listened to the siren call of white union leaders. They had gone out on strike, ostensibly to better their conditions, only to find their jobs immediately taken by whites. This had been quite a serious blow because at that time, Black waiters had had jobs in most of the best hotels and in a number of fine restaurants. It is therefore understandable that in 1920, we Black waiters felt not the slightest pang of conscience in taking over the jobs of white waiters on strike at the Marygold Gardens (the old Bismark Gardens) on the Northside, one of the swankiest night spots in Chicago. It was also probably the best waiter’s job in town; in fact, so good that some of the German captains who remained on the job used to drive to and from work in Cadillacs. The strike was broken after several months, and Blacks were turned out.
Strikebreaking to me was not a philosophy or principle as Garvey contended, but an expedient forced upon Blacks by the Jim Crow policies of the bosses and the unions.
Even as Garvey was putting forward such views, times were beginning to change. Large numbers of Blacks had been brought into industry during the war and had joined unions, especially in steel and the packing houses. A new industrial unionism was developing and raising the slogan of Black and white labor unity.
My sister Eppa’s experiences in 1919 at Swift Packing Company were a case in point. She was one of the first Black women to join the union during the organizing drive of the Stockyards Labor Council, which was headed by two communists—William Z. Foster and Jack Johnstone. The drive was supported by John Fitzpatrick, chairman of the Chicago Federation of Labor and a bitter foe of the Jim Crow machine of Samuel Gompers’ AFL. Despite inevitable racial tensions fostered by the employers, Eppa had seen the basic unity of interest between all workers and felt strongly that thé union was the best place to fight for the interests of Black workers.
In looking back at our study of the Garvey movement, it must be evaluated in light of the fact that it was our first confrontation with nationalism as a mass movement. Our mistake, which I was to find out later through my own experience and study of nationalist movements, resulted from the failure to understand the contradictory nature of the nationalism of oppressed peoples. This contradiction or dualism was inherent in the inter-class character of these movements once they assume a popular mass form.
They comprise various classes and social groupings with conflicting interests, tendencies and motives, all gathered under the unifying banner of national liberation, each with its own concept of that goal and how it should be attained. These conflicts, at first submerged, surface as the movement develops.
They are expressed in two main currents (tendencies) within the movement. First of all, there is the nationalism which reflects the interests of the basic masses—workers and peasants—determined to fight for liberation against the oppressor of the nation. Then there is the nationalism of the Black bourgeoisie who, while at time in conflict with the white oppressors, tend toward compromise and accommodation to protect their own weak position.
From the very beginning this dualism was reflected in the Garvey movement. A highly vocal and aggressively dominant current within the movement was the drive of the small business, professional and intellectual elements for a Black controlled economy. They sought fulfillment of this goal through withdrawal to Africa where they envisioned establishment of their own state, their right to exploit their own masses free from the overwhelming competition of dominant white capital. (A historical example of this can be seen in Liberia.) They thought they could accomplish this, presumably with the acquiescence of the American white rulers, and even the active support of some.
On the other hand, there was a grass-roots nationalism of the masses, the uprooted, dispossessed soil-tillers of the South; their poverty-ridden counterparts in the slum ghettoes of the cities. These masses saw in the Black nationalist state fulfillment of their age-old yearnings for land, equality and freedom through power in their own hands to guarantee and protect these freedoms. It was this indigenous, potentially revolutionary nationalism that Garvey diverted with his Back to Africa slogan.
We failed to recognize the objective conflict of interests between these class components of the movement, equating the social and political aims of the ghetto nationalists, the bourgeoisie, to that of the masses—condemning the whole as reactionary, escapist and utopian.
These were the internal contradictions upon which the movement was to flounder and finally collapse. They were brought to a head by the subsiding of the post-war economic depression, the ushering in of the “boom,” and subsequent easing of the plight of Blacks, the partial adjustment of migrants to their new environment and their partial absorption into industry.
The main contradiction inherent in the Garvey movement from its very beginning had been the conflict between the needs of the masses to defend and advance their rights in the USA and the fantastic Back to Africa schemes of the Garvey leadership. Garvey’s emphasis on these fantastic schemes reflected his resolution of the conflict in favor of business interests and against the interests of the masses. The resources and energy of the organization were increasingly diverted to support racial business enterprises such as the Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation. The concentration on selling stock for the Black Star Steamship Line by the UNI A leadership from 1921 on neglected the immediate needs of the masses and began to erode the base of support.
Furthermore, Garvey’s response to the crisis in the movement exposed the dangerously reactionary logic of a program based upon complete separation of the races and its acceptance of the white racist doctrine of natural racial incompatibility. Pursuing the logic of this idea against the backdrop of the organization’s decline inevitably drove Garvey into an alliance of expediency with the most rabid segregationists and race bigots of the period.
Thus, in 1922, Garvey sought the support of Edward Young Clark, the imperial giant of the Ku Klux Klan. This “meeting of the minds” between Garvey and the Klan was not fortuitous. It was an open secret that it took place on the basis of Garvey’s agreement to soft-pedal the struggle for equality in the U.S. in return for help in the settlement of Blacks in Africa. This ideological kinship arose from the mutual acceptance of the racist dogma of natural incompatibility of races, race purity and so forth.
In 1924 Garvey went so far seeking support for his Back to Africa program as to invite John Powell, organizer of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, and other prominent racists to speak at UNIA headquarters. Garvey also publicly praised the KKK. According to W.E.B. DuBois, the Klan issued circulars defending Garvey and declared that the opposition to him was from the Catholic Church.16 In the late thirties, Senator Bilbo of Mississippi introduced a bill to deport thirteen million Blacks to Africa and received the support of the remnants of the Garvey organization.
The final curtain was to drop on the Garvey episode with the failure of the Black Star Line. The movement was torn by factionalism and splits, with some of the leadership and remaining rank and file demanding that the domestic fight for equal rights be emphasized over the Back to Africa scheme of Garvey. The internal struggle drove many out of the organization and others into a multitude of splinter groups, each a variation of Garveyism itself. Taking advantage of this disarray, the government moved in.
In 1925, Garvey was framed on charges of using the mail to defraud in connection with the sale of stocks for the Black Star Line and was sent to the Atlanta federal prison for two years. He was deported to the West Indies upon release from prison. This debacle marked the end of Garveyism as an important mass movement, although the offshoots continued to exist in numbers of smaller groups advocating Garvey’s theory.
At the time, I had taken Garvey’s peculiar brand as representing nationalism in general and had simply rejected the whole ideology as a*foreign import with no roots in the conditions of U.S. Blacks. Seeing only the negative features of nationalism in the UNIA, I was blind to the progressive and potentially revolutionary aspects which were to prove so important in my own later development.
Thus, the great movement that Garvey built passed into history. But nationalism, as a mass trend, persisted in the Black freedom struggle. Existing side by side with the assimilationist trend, it was eclipsed by the latter in so-called normal times while flaring up in times of stress and crisis.
The Garvey movement was the U.S. counterpart of the vast upsurge of national and colonial liberation struggles which swept the world during the war and post-war period. In this period, masses of Blacks had come to consider themselves as an oppressed nation. Garvey’s ability to capture leadership of this nationalist upsurge by default was the result of the immaturity of the revolutionary forces, Black and white. The collapse of the Garvey movement proved conclusively that the petty bourgeois ghetto nationalist current, left to itself, led only to a hopeless blind alley. Unfortunately the forces which could give Black nationalism revolutionary content and direction were only in the process of formation.
The Black working class and its spokesmen had not yet arrived on the scene as an independent force in the Black community and, therefore, was not capable of challenging either the assimilationist leadership of the NAACP or the ghetto nationalism of Garvey. Its counterparts among radical, class-conscious white labor were waging an uphill fight against the Jim Crow-minded AFL bureaucracy led by the Gompers machine. These radical sections of white labor were not yet clear as to the significance of the Black freedom struggle as a revolutionary force in its own right and regarded it simply as a part of the general labor question. Coalescence of these two forces was then a decade away, destined not to take place until the crisis of the thirties.
The preceding analysis is hindsight. I didn’t realize the significance of Garvey’s movement until a few years later, when, as a student in Moscow, I was assigned to a commission to prepare a resolution on the Negro question in the USA for the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928. It was in the course of these discussions that I came to the recognition of nationalism as an authentic and potentially revolutionary trend in the movement.
The assimilationist programs of the NAACP had been easy to reject. Garvey was somewhat more difficult. But while the Garvey movement was forcing me to a consideration of nationalism (which at the time I also rejected) I could not help but notice the other political developments of the period.
Most conspicuous was the concerted and vicious attack being carried out against white radicals and the trade union movement. The same forces appeared to be behind the Palmer raids of 1919 and 1920, behind the wave of racism and behind the violent union and strike busting which took place. The foreigners who were being deported, the radicals who were imprisoned and the workers throughout the country who were attacked by Pinkerton “private armies,” were white as well as Black. In Chicago, the strikes at the stockyards and the steel mills in the area particularly attracted my attention.
For me, the Garvey movement, the racists’ assault and the attacks on labor and the radical movement sharpened my political perceptions. The racial fog lifted and the face and location of the enemy was clearly outlined. I began to see that the main beneficiaries of Black subjugation also profited from the social oppression of poor whites, native and foreign-born.
The enemy was those who controlled and manipulated the levers of power; they were the super-rich, white moneyed interests who owned the nation’s factories and banks, and thus controlled its wealth. They were known by many names: the corporate elite; the industrial, financial (and robber) barons; etc. Chicago was the home base of a significant segment of this ruling class. Here the chain of command was clear: on the political side, it extended from city hall down to the lowliest wardheeler and precinct captain and was tied in at all levels with organized crime. On the economic side, it was represented by such employer organizations as the Chicago Chamber of Commerce, by trade associations and by top management in the giant industrial plants, railroads, big commercial establishments, banks, utilities and insurance firms. Their chain of command extended down to the foremen and department heads, and on-the-job supervisors. These levers of power also controlled education, the media, the arts and all law enforcement agencies, both military and police. At the bottom of this pyramid and bearing its weight were the working people who toiled in the steel mills, the packing plants, the railway yards, and the thousands of other sweatshops. Lowliest among these were the Blacks, pushed to the very bottom by the “divide and rule” policy of the corporate giants and their henchmen, and the complimentary Jim Crow policies and practices of the AFL trade union bureaucracy.