By MÁRIO MAESTRI*
The Jamaican activist and journalist who captured the world's attention and was instrumental in the pan-African movements in the diaspora and on the African continent
Birth, educationoe craftsMarcus Garvey's tion
Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on August 17, 1887, in Saint Ann's Bay, on the coast of Jamaica, an island about 240 km long and no more than eighty km wide. His small native village had about two thousand inhabitants, and the entire English colony had eight hundred thousand inhabitants. In 1833, slavery had been abolished in the British Empire, and therefore in Jamaica. Jamaican society was made up of 80% black people, descendants of slaves, generally poor, living in rural areas. The middle class, about 18% of the population, was made up of mixed-race people, especially mulattos. The ruling classes, about 2% of the population, were made up of white people, descendants of English, Europeans and Jamaicans, with more or less distant black ancestors.
The dominant socio-racial contradiction was between the whites and even the mulattos and the poor black peasant population, which was numerically dominant. The mulattos strove to overcome, through marriage, the “color line” that separated them from the “whites”, and to avoid being racially confused with the poor black population. The Jamaican racial reality had qualitative differences from that of the United States, where anyone who had even a drop of black blood, that is, a distant Afro-descendant, was defined as black. [DU BOIS, 1923.]
Marcus Garvey attended school integrated, where black, white and mixed-race children of both sexes lived together without problems. He only became aware of what racism was when he was fourteen. This was when one of his little girlfriend from school, the daughter of a wealthy white neighboring family, was sent to study in Scotland, with the prohibition of writing to him, because he was “black” and, certainly, poor. Her white male classmates and friends, as they grew up and progressed socially, began to ignore him. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 2; LAWLER, 1990, 30 et seq; JOHNSON, 2019, p.14.]
Black and poor
The boy Garvey grew up in a poor black family. His father worked as a bricklayer when there was work, and made a living from farming, losing the few family plots of land in legal disputes. An avid reader, he owned a small library and wrote letters to illiterate neighbors. He is said to have had eleven children from three marriages, and only Garvey, the youngest, and his sister, Indiara, children from his last marriage, survived childhood. His father is said to have let himself be overcome by depression and died in a nursing home. His mother, Sarah Jane Richards, married at the age of 42, two years after Marcus was born, and began to support the family with her work very early on. The Garveys proudly claimed to be pure black, descendants of quilombolas.
Marcus Garvey attended primary school at the Methodist College in Saint Ann's Bay, and perhaps a few years of secondary school, supported by an uncle, whom he helped with the accounting for his business. Small, short, tending towards obesity, never considered handsome, he would sneak into his father's small library, which, despite treating him harshly, would have influenced him, with his concerns that he never managed to materialize, in an oppressive social and intellectual environment. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.6.]
In 1903, at the age of fourteen, after his father abandoned his mother to help support the family, Garvey entered the workshop of his godfather as an apprentice printer, which had a strong influence on his life. In traditional printing shops, with the text handwritten by hand, the printer would manually place the sequences of letters, spaces, etc., molded in iron, into lines, paragraphs, etc. It was only at the end of the 19th century that printers typed texts on huge machines, linotypes, which cast the texts to be published on lead plates. [LAWLER, 1990, p. 17 et seq.; DU BOIS, 1923; BENJAMIM, 2013, 17 et seq.]
cultured workers
The typographer or linotypist was a literate worker who read and reread the texts he printed. Producing notices, magazines, newspapers, and books, typographies and printing shops were places where journalists, writers, politicians, and intellectuals flocked. Until the profession disappeared due to technological advances, typographers and linotypists were educated, combative, and often organized and politicized workers, since they were generally conscientious and poorly paid. Garvey's professional training prepared him for journalism, for founding publications, and for the political issues of his time.
From a young age, Marcus Garvey would reveal the soul of a wanderer, traveling to many countries in the Americas in search of work. In 1904, he went to work at the branch opened by his godfather in Port Maria, a town of a few thousand inhabitants, the administrative center of the region where he was born. In 1905, at the age of eighteen, he moved to Kingston, the capital of the Jamaican colony, then with a few tens of thousands of inhabitants. [JOHNSON, 2019, p. 13.]
In Kingston, with a letter of recommendation from his godfather, he got a job in the printing department of an export company. On January 14, 1907, a major earthquake hit, which worsened the already difficult living conditions of the workers and the common people. In November 1908, a strike by the printers broke out for a wage increase, in which Garvey participated. The strike failed and he was fired, finding a job at the local British Printing Office. In early 1910, he founded a small magazine, which had no future, Garvey's The Watsch Mans. [HISTORYDRAFT; JOHNSON, 2019, p.20.]
Union initiation and politicsítica
In March 1909, SAG Cox, a lawyer, who was discriminated against in obtaining a position because of his skin color, despite being a light mulatto, in association with HAL Simpson, founded the short-lived National Club, which had, in its program, the fight for the independence of Jamaica, in the style of Canada and Australia; the end of racial discrimination and English colonial policy; the recognition of trade unions; the distribution of public lands among peasants; the prohibition of import de coolies Asians. Based in Kingston, the club's proposals resonated in Central America.
The National Club would be restricted to Jamaicans and its fortnightly, “Our Own,” [“Our Own”], would publish about three thousand copies. Garvey participated, without prominence, in the movement. However, he established relations with its founder and with the main members of the Club. SAG Cox was an admirer of the Irish nationalist movement, in which Garvey was also interested.
In the last edition of the newspaper, on July 1, 1911, SAG Cox would propose: “The Negroes and Coloureds in Jamaica can only hope to improve their conditions when they unite with the Negroes and Coloureds of the USA and with those of the other West Indies and, in fact, with all the Negroes of the world.” Proposal for a worldwide union of blacks and coloureds taken up by Garvey, who left the mulattos out. [LAWLER, 1990, p. 25; BENJAMIM, 2013, p. 24; JOHNSON, 2019, p. 20; RABELO, 2013, p. 495-541.]
In Américh Central and South and England
In late 1910, at the age of 23, Marcus Garvey traveled to Costa Rica to work as a plantation administrator, contributing to a small bilingual magazine, “La Nación,” and was arrested for the allegations he published. In Central America, he observed with indignation that the conditions for black workers were even worse than in Jamaica. He then moved to Panama, where the construction of the Canal attracted workers from all over the region, and found the same situation for black workers and others. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.22.]
In Panama, in the port of Colón, he is said to have organized another publication, “La Prensa”. Always looking for work, he is said to have visited Guatemala, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. “In all these Spanish-speaking republics, there were workers from the West Indies who had left their overpopulated islands because of unemployment and poverty […].” [IDENTIDÁFRICA, 07.06.2022.]
In 1912, Marcus Garvey left for England, his passage having been paid for by his sister, Indiana, a domestic servant or housekeeper in London. Garvey is said to have worked in the outskirts of London, in Liverpool, etc. among other activities, in the stevedores of the port. On Sundays, he attended the famous “Speaker's Cornes", in Hyde Park, where everyone can speak about whatever they want, according to tradition. He attended some Law and Philosophy classes at a community school for workers. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.6.]
Marcus Garvey is said to have attended House of Commons debates and attended the British Museum, where he would have become a great admirer of Napoleon and marveled at BT Washington's autobiography, Up from slavery, 1901. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 2; MAESTRI, 2024.]. After reading the work, he would have made the decision to become a black leader. BTWashington's life and his proposal for professional schools pointed out an eventual path to success for him, a black man, without connections, coming from a family without resources.
Traveling through Europe
In London, he worked as an office assistant at the magazine “The African Times and Orient Review” [1911-1919], a monthly, pan-Asian and pan-African publication dedicated to “people of color”. The publication’s editor, Duse Mohammed Ali [1866-1945], an Egyptian journalist and actor of Sudanese mother, had published, in 1911, the first history of Egypt written by a national. [ALI, 1911.]
Mohammed Ali had participated in the “First International Race Congress,” held in 1911 at the University of London for four days with perhaps two thousand participants. At the congress, he had understood the urgency of a pan-African and pan-Oriental publication criticizing English and European colonialism. WEB Du Bois had participated in that event.
In October 1913, Garvey published the article “The British West Indies and the Mirror of Civilization” in Mohammed Ali’s magazine, where he proposed that “a transformation will quickly take place in the history of the West Indies,” and the people who “inhabit it […] will be the instrument” that will reunite a “dispersed race” in order to found in the future an “empire in which the sun will shine unceasingly,” as in the “Empire of the North,” that is, England. [TÊTÊVI, 1995, p. 29; ; BENJAMIM, 2013, p. 26.]
With the bullet in the chamber
In Europe, Marcus Garvey visited France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Hungary, and Germany. On June 8, 1914, he departed back to Jamaica, where he landed on July 15. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 3.] Five days after his return, he founded, with Amy Ashwood, a Jamaican woman whom he married in 1919, the “Universal Negro Advancement Association” [“Universal Negro Improvement Association and African (Imperial) League”, [UNIA]. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 3.]
The organization’s name was reportedly chosen during the trip, when he had gained superficial information about the African reality. Years later, he proposed that the association’s objectives were “to organize all the black peoples of the world into one great entity and establish a [black] country and government of their own.” [BENJAMIM, 2013, p.13; JOHNSON, 2019, p. 30.] With the outbreak of war, Garvey would have announced the UNIA’s allegiance to the British Empire, King George V, and the English war effort. [HISTORYDRAFT]
Marcus Garvey's project to become a black leader was influenced by the reality he had encountered during his travels and, above all, by his experience in Jamaica as a black man. He sought to interpret the feelings of rebellion of the poor black peasant community, discriminated against by whites and also by mulattos, who were rich or trying to become rich, paying little attention to the social roots of racial inequalities.
VISão epiérmic
By proposing the union of all black of the world, Garvey defined them epidermally in opposition to whites. He ignored the multiple singularities between and within the Afro-descendant national communities of the Americas. The simplicity of his “pan-Africanism” was also rooted in his lack of knowledge of the infinite riches and diversity of African communities. His Eurocentrism was clear, as he dreamed of a colonization of the African populations, seen as backward, by black Americans. [RABELO, 2013, 499.]
In general, biographies of Marcus Garvey are poor on the nineteen months he spent in Jamaica trying to advance the UNIA, which soon found itself “in financial difficulties.” In fact, he failed to found an agricultural school, as proposed by BT Washington, and created animosity among his followers by living, he and Amy, off the funds raised for the schools and the UNIA. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.30; MAESTRI, 2024.]
In September 1923, Marcus Garvey proposed that the UNIA program had been poorly received, especially by the middle-class mulatto community, which resisted conceiving itself as “black,” as he proposed. Instead, it demanded that it be considered and treated as, or nearly as, white. Garvey records that he managed to make some progress in his organization with the support, above all, of “the help of a Catholic bishop, Governor Sir John Pringle; of the Reverend William Graham, a Scottish clergyman; and of several other white friends.” [GARVEY, 1917, p.5.]
If Jamaican mulattos mobilized to cross the relatively permeable Jamaican “color line” to be treated as whites, British authorities and citizens were interested in strengthening the same line, differentiating whites roots of mulattos, even the lightest ones. It would not be the only time that Marcus Garvey relied on racist white allies to advance his proposals and interests.
II. Towards the Conquest of America
On March 23, 1916, Marcus Garvey left for the United States. Some authors propose that his goal was to seek financial support to found a Tuskegee Institute in Jamaica, the heart of BT Washington's American empire, as he had already tried and failed. In England, he wrote and received an invitation from the black leader to go to the USA and discuss that project. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 3.]
It is also proposed that he traveled to New York when his move, and he, skated, as we have seen. Marcus Garvey stated that he left with the intention of returning to Jamaica. More pertinently, it is suggested that he traveled with the intention of settling in New York, resuming the black leadership role of BT Washington, who had died on November 14, 1915, four months before his trip. At that time, he had an organization and a political program, pointing in another direction. In the big city, he visited well-known black leaders and intellectuals, such as WEB Du Bois, whom he and the UNIA received, without much tact, when the important black intellectual visited Kingston, Jamaica, in 1915.
Marcus Garvey then undertook a lengthy visit to 38 of the then 48 states in the country, where he met, according to him, so-called black leaders [“so-called Negros leaders”], who would have no programs and would live off the good faith of the black people. He proposed and certainly saw himself as a prophet disembarked from the Antilles, to spread the black word in the Promised Land! [GARVEY, 2017, p.5; TÉTÉ-ADJALOGO, 1995, p. 271.]
Surprising success
At the end of 1916, Marcus Garvey opened a branch of the UNIA in Harlem, New York. Due to its almost immediate success, he proposed that he abandon his plan to return to Jamaica. The choice of Harlem was not random. The former block of elegant white family homes had become the home of thousands of blacks who had arrived from the West Indies and the southern United States. In 1914, around 50 blacks lived there, while by 1930 there were already 200, of whom around 55 were West Indies.
In the early days, the UNIA gained a few hundred members, who had to pay 25 cents a month as dues. Marcus Garvey states that there were between 800 and 1917, “many of them immigrants from the West Indies,” with Jamaicans standing out. Soon, the UNIA grew, with the membership of other black leaders and associations. In December 1918, it experienced a split, which was overcome in January 1.500, when it reached 2017 members. Garvey maneuvered to be elected president of the UNIA headquarters, now in New York. [GARVEY, 2013; BENJAMIM, 32, p. 2019; JOHNSON, 42, p. XNUMX.]
The success of the UNIA cannot be explained by Marcus Garvey's preaching or magnetism. The seed was sown in a very fertile soil. BT Washington had died when his preaching of the emancipation of the black population through manual labor had already failed. And when the Jamaican set foot in Promised Land, had been preceded by a mass immigration of black Jamaicans, West Indians and Southerners, attracted by the expansion of the labor supply due to World War I.
Returning from the war
In 1919, after the end of the conflict, hundreds of thousands of black American soldiers returned to the country, disgusted with the treatment they had suffered before, during and after the end of the war. The uprooted, often illiterate, West Indian emigrants, with the prejudices brought from their countries against whites and mulattos, would have been Marcus Garvey's most faithful followers in the United States. [DU BOIS, 1923, p. 541.]
In the same year, with the UNIA having thousands of members and supporters, Marcus Garvey founded, in New York, the weekly “The Black World”, the cornerstone of the organization in the following years. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 6.] By the end of its first year, the magazine would publish some ten thousand copies. And in a singular boldness, the Jamaican put forward the explosive proposal of founding a shipping company, the “Black Star Line”, and of black business corporation, the “Negro Factories Corporation”. And, in this context, the UNIA bought an old church in Harlem, which was transformed into an auditorium for six thousand people, the “Liberty Hall”. However, a few years of plenty followed. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.46.]
In October 1919, George Tyler, a member of the UNIA, wounded Marcus Garvey in the head and leg with a . 38 caliber revolver. At that time, the struggle for the organization's leadership and its resources was fierce. In 1920, the UNIA's proposals began to take shape. At that time, it would have about thirty sections and, according to Garvey, two million members. Du Bois, a highly respected black social scientist, proposed that, by 1920, the UNIA would have about eighty thousand members, with about thirty to twenty-five thousand paying their monthly dues. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 6; DU BOIS, 1923.]
expandsare portentous
In 1921, the UNIA reached the pinnacle of its success. Marcus Garvey claims that by that year, there were six million members worldwide. “Studies indicate that between 1925 and 1927, in the United States, there were between 719 and 725 [UNIA] divisions, and they had spread to 41 other countries.” A UNIA “division” could meet in a headquarters, with dozens or even hundreds of associates, or in a private home, with a few associate members. [BENJAMIM, 2013, p. 34.]
As a boy, Malcolm X accompanied his father, the Reverend Earl Little, to the UNIA meetings he led, which were attended by no more than twenty participants. They were held “quietly,” in the narrow kitchens or living rooms of private homes, “always distinguished” in Lansing, Michigan, near the Canadian border. At the meetings, his father circulated photos of Marcus Garvey, “a huge [sic] Negro who wore a dazzling uniform […] and an extraordinary hat with wide plumes.” [BENJAMIM, 2013, p. 35; MALCOLM X, 2019, p. 15, 17.]
If we estimate, on average, fifty paying members per division, we would have the 35 thousand members proposed by Du Bois. What is certain and indisputable is that Marcus Garvey had become the most successful black political leader among the American working classes, even though, as proposed, the black Jamaican and West Indian immigrant peasants were his most unrestricted supporters. [TÉTÉ-ADJALOGO, 1995, p.268 et seq.; BENJAMIM, 2013; DU BOIS, 1923.]
III. International conventions
On August 20, 1920, Marcus Garvey held the “First International Convention of Negro Peoples” in Harlem for a month, with delegates from various parts of the United States, Central America, the West Indies and even a few from Africa. Before that meeting, there had been others of various natures. Between July 23 and 25, 1900, the First Pan-African Conference, called by the African Association, which was attended by WEB Du Bois.
In 1911, also in London, the “First International Congress of Races” took place, which, although not centered on the black-African issue, brought together pan-Africanist leaders, among them WEB Du Bois, who would stand out at the event. From April 17 to 19, 1912, an “International Conference on the Negro” took place at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The meeting, with about a hundred delegates, mainly theologians and missionaries, aimed to extend BT Washington’s network of schools to black Africa. [TÉTÉ-ADJALOGO, 1995, p.56 et seq; JOHNSON, 2019, p.13; PARQUE, 1912, p. 117-120.]
The “First International Negro People’s Convention” was called and directed by the UNIA and by Marcus Garvey, who was enthroned as the sovereign of his brief and fanciful reign, which proposed to materialize, in small, what he dreamed of doing, in large, in Black Africa. The highlight of the Convention was the parade, through the streets of Harlem, on August 1, of the various military legionss of the UNIA: the “World African Legion”; the “Motorized Army” and the “Black Cross”; the “Youth Corps” and the “Black Eagle Flying Corps”. The members of the detachments wore flashy uniforms, with the officers at the front carrying swords.
Marcus Garvey took part in the parade as a sovereign, in the back seat of an open automobile, wearing a plumed hat, wearing a heavy blue military uniform with gold lace and cords, and carrying a sword. On the same day, he was cheered by thousands of listeners at the Madison Square Garden II, promising to liberate every inch of Africa at the head of an army of four hundred thousand men. He wore a purple, green and gold toga over his shoulders. In 1927, he wrote that, with the Convention, “Garvey’s name began to be known as the leader of his race”. According to him, this motivated leaders, especially “light-skinned blacks”, to conspire for his downfall. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 7, 8.]
Liberating catharsisria
Marcus Garvey's audience and followers were mainly made up of immigrants from the West Indies and blacks from the South, often illiterate and exiled. A people who have always been humiliated and diminished by civil institutions, by the dominant culture, by their living conditions and, above all, but not only in the case of Afro-Southerners, by the violence of institutions, bosses and white supremacists, summed up in the Apartheid, from the South, and in the heavy racism, from the North.
The parade of the uniformed UNIA cohorts, led by a black potentate, dressed elegantly, transmitted to the participants and assistants, pride in race and feelings of strength and belonging to a powerful movement on the march. As a boy, Malcolm X, present at semi-clandestine UNIA meetings, recorded the pride that these parades aroused among the humble followers of Marcus Garvey. [MALCOLM X, 2019, p.15-17.] They lived a collective liberatory catharsis, without development or continuity, which instead of pointing to the future, immobilized them. Marcus Garvey promised as a solution to their sufferings a fanciful transfer to Black Africa, to be conquered by his cohorts.
The UNIA triumphal march was not the first, nor was it by far the largest, in terms of black participants and spectators. On February 17, 1919, the parade for the return of the 369th Black Regiment of the US Army, which had arrived from Europe, reportedly attracted up to a million spectators. Similar parades were held in other large cities. In them, black ex-soldiers marched, “marked by their war experiences and their post-war treatment.” [DU BOIS, 1923.] These demonstrations of force also failed to produce social and political consequences.
Semi-absolutist African State
Marcus Garvey sought to create, in Africa, and imposed, in the UNIA, an authoritarian and anti-democratic order. In 1937, as Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, he recorded his admiration for the Duce, proposed himself as a precursor of fascism. For him, the “Government should be absolute and the leader […] completely responsible for himself and the actions of his subordinates”. [GARVEY, 1967, p. 12, 74; RABELO, 2013, p. 505-508.]
At the “Convention,” Marcus Garvey had himself acclaimed as the first “Provisional President of Africa” by the UNIA armies. Africans present protested that the provisional president of Africa was not a native African. The African people, of course, had not been consulted about the appointment of their first president.
And since there were many personalities of the movement to be honored, noble orders of “Ethiopia”, “Ashanti”, “Mozambique” were created for the future African kingdom, with, among others, a “Duke of the Nile”, a “Count of Congo”, a “Viscount of Niger”, a “Baron of Zambezi”, and a “suzerain of Uganda”. All with their respective colorful and showy attire.
His Greatness the Potentate
Marcus Garvey, with the title of “His Greatness, the Potentate,” began to lead a High Executive Council of eighteen members. A “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro People of the World” was voted on and approved. African-American leaders mobilized in favor of education and organization of the population denounced Marcus Garvey for the rustic, carnivalesque and populace manipulation that intoxicated the simple black people and diverted them from the fight for their rights.
Among the critical organizations, the “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People” [NAAPC] stood out, with blacks, whites, mulattos and Jews participating. WEB Du Bois was the editor of the organization’s main publication. Garvey countered the criticisms by defining them as coming mainly from mulattos and elitist segments of the black movement. [TÉTÉ-ADJALOGO, 1995, p. 271.]
The second “International Convention” met during the month of August 1921, without the splendor of the first. At that time, as we will see, the successive and inexplicable loss of ships of the “Black Star Linand” it hurt the prestige of the founder of UNIA. Parades and rallies were repeated and new titles of nobility for men and women were created. Night sessions were held to educate those present about the doctrine of UNIA and the teachings of Marcus Garvey.
Brotherhood of Blood
The radical black pan-Africanist group, the “African Blood Brotherhood,” was expelled from the meeting as “Bolshevist” for denouncing the contradiction between the grandiloquence of many UNIA proposals and the lack of political guidance for the population. It also denounced Garvey’s proposal that one could be loyal to the flag of an oppressor nation and at the same time fight against it.
The BBB was founded in 1919 by Cyril Valentine Briggs, a light-skinned Caribbean mulatto who lived in the USA and defended - and promoted - the armed defense of the black community in the South. The BBB also proposed the formation of a “great pan-African army” for the liberation of Black Africa. Cyril Briggs [1888-1966] would join the Communist Party of the United States in 1921, for supporting the Bolshevik policy of nationalities in the USSR.
The Communist Party of the United States, in the early days, without confronting the UNIA, supported the proposal to expel the imperialists from Africa, to defend the self-determination of the African peoples, encouraging the struggle of black peoples in the United States and throughout the world for their rights. [BRIGGS, 1921; TÉTÉ-ADJALOGO, 1995, p.75; The Liberator, October 1924.]
IV. Black Star line: Marcus Garvey's Titanic
In 1919, for prepare appáafrican triad, Marcus Garvey proposed the founding of a “Negro Industrial Corporation,” which would consolidate multiple “black capitalist” initiatives, with emphasis on food stores; laundries; hotels; restaurants; ice cream parlors; amusement arcades, publishing houses, manufacturing, etc. The funds were obtained by selling shares to UNIA activists and sympathizers, at a value of five dollars each, or about 120 dollars today. The sale of the shares was widely publicized in the weekly “The Dark World”. [BENJAMIM, 2013, p. 40.]
The “Black Industrial Corporation” was not a pioneering act of “black entrepreneurship.” Since the previous century, thousands of small, medium and even large businesses of all types owned by African-Americans had emerged and consolidated, especially in the large cities of the North. The UNIA aimed to consolidate a black commercial-industrial corporate nucleus within the American capitalist order, with the black population as its market.
Beyond his black nationalist and racist rhetoric and the fantasy of founding a powerful nation in Africa, it was the clearly bourgeois-capitalist character that organized Marcus Garvey’s program. He would declare that “capitalism is necessary for the progress of this world and those who are foolish and only wish to oppose or fight it are enemies of human advancement.” Garvey always went out of his way to repress trade unionist or socialist slip-ups within the UNIA. [RABELO, 2013, p.505.]
Lots of smoke, little firewood
The success of the UNIA Black Corporation was meager, despite being boosted by non-refundable donations from activists and admirers of the movement. The initiatives were limited to the founding and management of a few supermarkets, restaurants, barbershops, a publishing house, etc., which were often in deficit.
Marcus Garvey hoped that the repatriation of black Americans would be financed by the white population and the racist state. Also in 1919, as we have seen, he announced the founding of a shipping company, the Black Star Line Incorporation. According to him, it would facilitate migration towards Liberia and establish economic and social exchanges between blacks from all over the world. The few voyages of the ships of the Black Star left mainly from the United States towards the Caribbean, to the joy of their supporters in those regions.
The launch of Black Star Linand, above all, the purchase of the first ship “left his critics and opponents breathless.” “The announcement was electrifying even to those who did not believe in Garvey,” in the words of Du Bois, who certainly did not believe in Garvey. [DU BOIS, 1923.] The excessive and voluntarist operation was a true Titanic for Marcus Garvey and the UNIA.
Sinkingo Clinic
The purchase of old and overpriced ships, inept management, waste of resources and fraud by black and white advisors, plunged the company into a sequence of resounding failures and million-dollar losses, which depressed Marcus Garvey's prestige and facilitated the FBI's attack on him and the UNIA.
On June 27, 1919, the Black Star Line was incorporated in the state of Delaware with an initial capital of five hundred thousand dollars, divided into one hundred thousand shares of five dollars each. The low unit value of the shares allowed activists and sympathizers of the poor black community to buy the shares to support the initiative and not as an investment. Marcus Garvey assumed the paid presidency of the company. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 6.]
In September 1919, the administrators of the Black Star Line they bought an old coal mine for $165, SS Yarmouth (1887), which was intended to be renamed as SS Frederick Douglas. It was not worth a quarter of the amount paid for, and its black captain was subsequently held responsible for the fraud. After three voyages in three years to the Caribbean, semi-dead, it was sold at auction in 1921 for US$1.625! In February 1920, the capital of Black Star Line was raised to ten million dollars, to be paid up through the sale of new shares. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.75.]
Excursionsrivers
In April 1920, a small, old steam yacht was purchased for $65. SS Kanawha (1899), built for a tycoon, used during the world war, also overpriced. He demanded almost the purchase price to be able to sail. Named SS Antonio Maceo, the Cuban mulatto hero of the struggle for independence, the steam yacht finally set sail for the high seas in June 1920. In February 1922, it was permanently immobilized.
With money already short, the decision was made to buy a river barge, SS Shadyside, for $35, for use during the summer for recreational trips on the Hudson River. She too sank and was abandoned in March 1921. Up until that time, the Black Star Line accounted for a million-dollar loss! [JOHNSON, 2019, p.78.]
In 1921 the Black Star Line had advanced $25.500 for the purchase of the steamship Orion, for US$250. The initial deposit was forfeited when payment was not completed. In December 1921, The Black Star Line suspended commercial activities, becoming bankrupt, with a loss, in updated values, of some ten million dollars. [FOHLEN, 1973, p. 54-57; DU BOIS, 1923.]
Hangover
In mid-1922, as we shall see, there was a paradoxical meeting between Marcus Garvey and the top leadership of the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta, which had a very negative impact on the black population and on the leadership of the UNIA itself. Reverend James Eason, from the top leadership of the movement and known as the “Leader of the American Negroes”, criticized this approach internally, and Garvey began a campaign to discredit him, accusing him of alcoholism and sexual harassment, among other sins.
In August 1922, just over a month after the Atlanta meeting, at the “Third Convention,” James Eason denounced Garvey for the meeting with the Klan for administrative incompetence and for promoting racial hatred. Garvey obtained Eason’s dismissal, forcing the resignation of the entire leadership. He thus obtained the right to appoint the previously elected UNIA leaders. A few months later, Eason was assassinated in a church, denouncing the attackers as Garveyites before he died. It is believed that he intended to report Garvey’s irregularities to the courts. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.78.]
At the same “Convention”, Marcus Garvey also obtained support for the founding of a new maritime company, the “Companhia Marítima e Comercia”l of the Black Cross". In January 1925, the fifth ship, renamed SS Booker T. Washingtonn, set off on a first commercial voyage towards the Antilles. With the new ship, it was hoped to bury the literal wreck of its companion and previous ships.
Total failure
O SS BT Washingtonn set out to sea, but the voyage was not completed, as the ship was seized by the courts to pay the new company's debts. The reasons for the failure of the Black Star Line There were several. Marcus Garvey, the company's president, had no commercial experience and used the company as a propaganda tool. The company's launch did not come from serious planning. The company's administrators, as well as the president, all paid, were incompetent and often corrupt. The business management continued until the value obtained from the sale of shares ran out. Marcus Garvey had no qualms about lying to the shareholders about the company's situation. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.78.]
In 1923, Marcus Garvey wrote that with the Black Star Line, his name became known on “four continents”, and UNIA had four million members. The first statement was true, the second, fanciful. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 6.] The shipping companies achieved a publicity success, for UNIA and Garvey, beyond expectations. However, the scale of the companies’ failure revealed, at the very least, the administrative inability of Marcus Garvey and the directors of the operation chosen by him. The depression was made worse by the concomitant sinking of the operation “Back to Liberia”, as we will see below.
But as bad as it is, it can always get worse. In 1923, Garvey and three other members of the Black Star board were charged with mail fraud, distributing false propaganda through the U.S. mail to raise funds by selling Black Star stock. Black Cross Navigation. The advertisement was illustrated by a ship that did not belong to the Company and did not alert potential buyers to the semi-bankruptcy of the company. The judicial machinery that would send Marcus Garvey to prison and expel him from the United States forever was set in motion. The entire operation was commanded by the future FBI.
V. "Back to Africa": Marcus Garvey, the Mosesés Black
Black nationalism was an old impulse among the African-American population. Broadly speaking, the main banner of the UNIA was the worldwide union of the black diaspora and, above all, its return to Africa, where a powerful black nation would be founded. A 1929 pamphlet proposed: “The culmination of all the efforts of the UNIA must end in an independent black nation on the African continent.” The “ultimate goal” was “a powerful nation for the black race. Black nationalism is necessary. It means political power and control.” [BENJAMIM, 2013, p. 35.] To give some content to his preaching, Marcus Garvey proposed the central slogan of “Return to Africa” [“Back to Africa”]. The conquest of African territory to found the powerful black state would be carried out, as we have seen, by the military bodies of the UNIA.
A return to Africa was a proposal that had been discussed by the free African-American population since the early 19th century, if not earlier, and was not well received by them, knowing that Africa offered them living conditions inferior to those they enjoyed in the United States. Because of this certainty, Garvey proposed that, first, educated men and women capable of preparing, in Africa, even limited comforts for the black population of the United States, should set out as pioneers. Due to ease and tradition, Liberia was the country chosen to found the powerful black nation.
In the early 19th century, among the destinations considered by racist slave owners and abolitionists to rid themselves of the free black population, seen as naturally inferior and a source of social unrest, were mainly Sierra Leone, and then Liberia, where Africans were dumped from slave ships captured by the English Royal Navy, when the transatlantic slave trade was repressed in the 19th century. The Antilles, Haiti, Mexico, Canada and the wild lands of the American West were also proposed as dump territories.
Even after the founding of the colony of Liberia, a very small portion of the free black community in the United States chose Haiti, Central America, and, above all, Canada as a possible land of liberation. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, free blacks migrated to Kansas and Oklahoma, fleeing racial discrimination, which soon caught up with them. [TÉTÉ-ADJALOGO, 1995, p.145 et seq.]
Foundation of Libéria
Liberia was an initiative of the “American Society for Sending the Free Colored People of the United States to Colonize Lands Abroad.” The society was conceived in 1816 and founded in 1818 on the premises of Congress in Washington, DC, supported and financed by wealthy southern slave owners. [US Federal Census for Truro Parish, Fairfax County Virginia p. 15.; CLEMENTI, 1974, p. 24.]
At the beginning of the 19th century, 250 free blacks lived in the United States. It was feared that they would lead the vast mass of enslaved people. The dream of some ideological slave owners was that, after a life of slavery, the free blacks would return to Africa, gradually transforming the United States into a nation exclusively of Protestant Anglo-Saxons. An African-American colony would also allow for good business. [American Colonization, n.d.]
In 1821, the “American Society” purchased from African chiefs, for a handful of dollars, a portion of land on the west coast of Africa, where the city of Monrovia, capital of the colony of Liberia, was built. The unhealthy region, with an equatorial climate, experienced torrential rains on the coast, followed by a dry and windy season. Inland, dense equatorial forests dominated. The native population soon opposed the initiative, as best they could.
Haiti and Canada are betterá
Only about twelve thousand free blacks left for Liberia between 1821 and 1867 – on average, a few more than two hundred per year, with many returning to the country. The “American Society” promoted a few collective trips and, above all, paid for the passage of those who wanted to go there. The proposal was fiercely opposed by black leaders.
In January 1817, a pioneering meeting of three thousand free blacks in Philadelphia, a northern city with a large African-American population, came out strongly against returning to Africa and organized to combat any initiative to “exile” the black population from the United States. [DRAPER, 1969: 26.] However, Haiti and, above all, Canada were considered possible destinations, although not advisable. A few thousand free black-Americans left for those two countries. During slavery, Canada was also a refuge for escaped captives.
The few black American settlers who settled in Liberia formed an oligarchy that perpetuated itself in power, despising and exploiting the natives. Africans were enslaved on some of the commercial plantations they organized. The Free Republic of Liberia, formally independent in 1847, remained under the economic domination of the Yankees, Europe and “American Society,” run by white capitalists. It was dissolved only in 1964. [FOHLEN, 1973, p. 54.]
UNIA will to theAfrica
In 1920, 1923 and 1924, Marcus Garvey sent UNIA delegations to Liberia to explore the possibility of the operation and to negotiate with Charles D. B. King (1920-1930), president of the African country. The establishment of trade relations, the sending of waves of colonizers and the founding of factories were promised. The initiative had the support of the racist US government, interested in the voluntary expatriation of black Americans.[BENJAMIM, 2013, p. 41.]
In 1920, a first emissary, Elie Garcia, established promising relations with the Liberian authorities and produced an extremely positive public report and a secret one for Marcus Garvey and UNIA leaders. In the second document, he proposed that the Liberian government authorities were inept and lazy. He therefore recommended that, after consolidating their position in the country, black Americans, under the direction of the UNIA, should lead the founding of the new nation in Liberia. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.65-8.]
In 1923, the UNIA opened a symbolic embassy in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Garvey launched a successful fundraising campaign of three million dollars at the time to subsidize the operation.Back to Liberia”. The Liberian government and UNIA representatives chose Cap Palmas for the American immigrants to settle and a two hundred-hectare plot of land was donated for the UNIA to begin operations.
Ádown the waters
The support that the operation had received in the Senate and motivated opposition from black leaders in the United States and from European colonial governments, frightened by Marcus Garvey's grandiloquence and fearing that the United States was behind the operation. Garvey was known for his lack of diplomatic tact. He thought and verbalized the UNIA's fanciful intentions of using Liberia as a wedge in the conquest of Black Africa.
The UNIA began to send technicians, machines and appoint staff. It promised to transfer its headquarters to Liberia in January 1922. The plan to conquer the continent reflected, on the one hand, wild fantasy about the UNIA's real forces and, on the other, ignorance about the size and complexity of the Dark Continent. However, Marcus Garvey's musings about the conquest of Africa intoxicated his followers.
The colonial governments would have questioned the Liberian government about the UNIA’s plans and certainly facilitated the secret 1920 report reaching the Liberian president. On October 26, 1924, Liberian leaders declared their opposition to the UNIA project. In addition to the secret report on the country, the interest of members of the Liberian government in obtaining advantages from the UNIA and of leaders of that organization in conducting good private business in Liberia, among them Marcus Garvey, who sought to buy land in the African country, would have contributed to the breakdown of the partnership. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.70.]
End of party
At the end of 1924, the UNIA was in full swing, as reported by major newspapers and the black press. At that time, the “Black Star Line", the great initiative of the UNIA, was in bankruptcy and Marcus Garvey was appealing a five-year prison sentence while free. The Liberian government withdrew the concession of the land granted to the UNIA and seized the machinery and materials sent to build housing for the first wave of emigrants.
With the breakdown of relations between the UNIA and the Liberian government, Operation “Back to Africa” was shipwrecked, like the ships of Black Star Line. Many of the former followers abandoned Marcus Garvey as unbelievers. [BENJAMIM, 2013, p. 40.] The “Back to Africa“It was an escapist, magical-fantastical proposal and objective, which seduced above all the imagination of an urban black population, based in the North, coming from the Antilles or recently separated from their cultural, family and historical roots in the South.
The profound dissociation of black Americans from the institutions of the State and the Nation facilitated a merely symbolic acceptance of the invitation to rebuild a life in a free, non-racist land, in this case, in Black Africa in general and in Liberia in particular, a region about which almost nothing was known. The black population, however, had deep-rooted roots in their native regions and in the communities in which they had been born and lived in the United States.
VI. Sleeping with the Enemy: Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan
Marcus Garvey supported his proposal for the voluntary exile of black Americans on the idea that the Afro-descendant community had no sense of belonging to its homeland. On the contrary, it would be part of an international black collective imagined with national roots in Black Africa, seen as a uniform whole. Therefore, it should not participate in American parties and demand citizenship rights in a nation that would not be its own, but rather be concerned with its transfer to the Dark Continent.
A policy, on the one hand, attacked by black leaders who fought for civil and social rights and, on the other, valued by the managers of Apartheid, in the South, and by racists, in the North. Racists called members of the black community “Africans,” a people and a race completely foreign to a country created and belonging to the Anglo-Saxons. A nation that, beyond supremacist musings, especially in the South, had been literally built by enslaved and free African workers and Afro-descendants. At that time, the black community, opposed to emigration, began to abandon the designation of Africans and call themselves “blacks,” also to register their belonging to the American homeland.
On June 25, 1922, Marcus Garvey took his proposal to alienate the black community from the country of his birth to the extreme, meeting with Edward Young Clarke of the Ku Klux Klan at the organization's Atlanta office. The friendly meeting with the top leader of the most well-known racist society in the United States was widely reported, not only by the black media. Although the Klan never reported on the negotiations, it is believed that the KKK would open the South to Marcus Garvey in exchange for the NAACP, the organization's greatest enemy, fighting against the Klan. Apartheid, by UNIA. [JOHNSON, 2017, p. 94-103.]
Explaining the unexplainedable
On July 9, 1922, days after meeting with the top leader of the Klan, Marcus Garvey began an explanatory rehearsal for his audience, in Liberty Hall, in New York. On the 15th, the oral intervention was published in the “The Negro World”, UNIA’s main publication. The justification for the bizarre meeting, to say the least, is poor, circular and based on a crude and conscious distortion of reality. It is, however, informative about Marcus Garvey’s worldview and objectives. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 74.]
It has been suggested that Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, in economic difficulties, looked greedily to the South, where the overwhelming majority of the American black population was to be found, largely illiterate and semi-illiterate. With the mediatized collusion between the leaders of the UNIA and the Klan, Marcus Garvey sought to make clear the enormous agreement between the two movements.
Above all, Marcus Garvey pointed to the important collaboration and legitimacy that the UNIA doctrine could provide to Apartheid and the Southern ruling classes. He thus expected the Klan's support for financing the Black Star Line, in economic difficulties. Like BT Washington, who moved among the white supremacists of the South like a fish in water, Marcus Garvey wanted and asked permission to swim in the Southern racist pool. However, things were not so simple, as we will see.
In search of Paraíonly on Earth
Establishment in the South was economically and politically essential for the consolidation of the UNIA. Marcus Garvey proposed in the aforementioned article: “The largest number of blacks in the United States of America live below the Mason and Dixon Line […]” – a line that demarcated the slave South from the free North. Three out of every four African-Americans lived in the Southern states under the heel of institutionalized racism, kept in the most profound exploitation, lack of culture and oppression. It was there that the desire to seek better living conditions in another region had penetrated most deeply. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 74.]
Around 1916, when Marcus Garvey arrived in New York, the Great Migration of the Southern black community in search of work in the North was taking place. As we have seen, a large part of Garvey's followers had arrived from the South in search of work. However, despite suffering from institutional racism (not always mild) and the terrible pogroms that followed in the industrial cities of the North, the black community put down roots, took advantage of all the opportunities that were or were opening up, dreaming and demanding what was due to them, in the United States, and not in some miserable region of Black Africa. They wanted to progress, not regress. The news of the meeting between the UNIA and the Klan caused a national scandal. The malicious rumor spread that Marcus Garvey was a member of the Klan. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 8.]
This was not a mere political or ideological debate. The Klan was born immediately after the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865 in Georgia, founded by former Southern combatants, not to expel the slaves who had just been freed from the South, but, on the contrary, to keep them there in submission and in poorly paid labor. It was responsible for the lynching and massacre of multitudes of black Americans and, to a lesser extent, Jews, Chinese, natives and non-racist whites or those with interracial ties.
Distortion of reality
The rapprochement with the Klan had begun a few months earlier, with the UNIA press trying to explain the actions and reasons of the white supremacist organization, already under the astonishment and strong criticism of leaders and the black community. The interview was the conclusion of this rapprochement and, certainly, of negotiations about which we know little. The reasons given by Marcus Garvey for the indecent interview were simple. According to him, the Klan represented practically the entire white population of the United States, being as strong in the North as in the South. It was the “invisible government of the country”. Both false statements.
And Marcus Garvey continued, in his explanation, constructing fantasy realities according to his beliefs, desires and needs. For him, the Klan had nothing against black people, in particular. It only sought to protect the interests of the white race in the United States. They mobilized so that “America” would be a “white man’s country”. And they would be right, explained Marcus Garvey, since the UNIA wanted to make “Africa a country entirely for the black man”! [GARVEY, 2017, p. 74.]
The problem was that the alleged desire to build a nation of exclusively white inhabitants violated, through criminal acts, the rights of the black population of the United States. The Klan was an organized movement to impose terror on blacks through the practice of violence. And to justify this reality, because Marcus Garvey raved about an Africa belonging to blacks from all over the world, without consulting the Africans, was like exchanging a fat chicken in the hand for a pile of clouds, which, for Marcus Garvey, was a flock of birds.
No white with black, no black with white
According to Marcus Garvey, the parallelism in the struggle of the two organizations was deeper, more structural. “[…] the UNIA is doing exactly what the Ku Klux Klan is doing – [pursuing] the purity of the white race in the South.” And the UNIA went deeper than the Klan, by proposing the “purity of the Negro race not only in the South, but throughout the world.” Therefore, no blacks flirting with whites, no whites flirting with blacks, in the South, in the North, in the World. For the happiness of all, and racial purity, every monkey on its branch! [GARVEY, 2017, p. 74.]
The reasons given for the rapprochement between the UNIA and the racist organization were pathetic and false. The Klan and the fundamentalists propagated the racial purity of the white man, trampling on millions of black Americans, who they wanted to keep working in the South, where they were overexploited. Marcus Garvey defended black racial purity, only hurting the intelligence of those who listened to him and, of course, offending mulattos and mixed-race people, which he did habitually. And, what's more, he corroborated the propaganda of the white fundamentalists, in order to gain their good graces.
According to Marcus Garvey, black Americans could not stay in the United States. He proposed that the Klan had made him “understand that their attitude is based on the assumption that this country was discovered by the white man; this country was first settled and settled by white men” and that the Klan would do everything possible to keep it that way. And Garvey did not respond to this flawed argument, remaining silent, more out of opportunism than ignorance, that the participation of Africans and Afro-descendants in the construction of the United States, to varying degrees, had occurred since the arrival of the first colonizers.
From Braçthose with the Enemy
Being a minority, and, above all, a visitor in the land where he was born, black Americans should therefore pack their bags and leave, argued Marcus Garvey. There was no need to focus their efforts on fighting the Klan and racism, or claiming denied civil rights. They should focus on the “Return to Africa” campaign prepared by the UNIA. This slogan supported, in fact, the supremacists’ “America for whites.” Marcus Garvey alienated what was not his in exchange for the right to go fishing in the South. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 74.]
To advance his interests, Garvey falsified reality, trampling on the interests of the black community. The Klan did not even represent the majority of the population of the South, much less the North. And, as already mentioned, the Southern ruling classes, certainly in favor of “racial purity,” were decidedly against the abandonment of the South by the black community. They had fought and lost a war in defense of their blacks, to whom they clung tooth and nail. The sinister organization was born to keep the black worker in the South forever, subjugated and exploited.
In his autobiography, Malcolm X recalls that the Klan surrounded his home in Omaha, Nebraska, threatening his mother because his father, a 1'96", "very black" man, an itinerant preacher, Garveyite and UNIA activist, seduced "good blacks" with proposals to leave the South for Africa. Later, in 1929, in East Lansing, Michigan, a supremacist "Black Legion" continued to persecute his father, set fire to his house and eventually murdered him for the same reason, leaving the family in enormous difficulties. Three of Malcolm X's paternal uncles had been killed by white men and a fourth had been lynched. [MALCOLM X, 2019, p. 11-12.]
This was not a diplomatic dialogue between the top leadership of the white people and the black people, as Garvey proposed. The Klan and the UNIA represented only tiny portions of the whites and blacks, and had no right to speak on behalf of the entirety of those communities. However, the damage had been done. The UNIA was, no matter what it stood for, a prominent organization of the black population of the North. Its main leader had gone to the South to embrace, defend and show solidarity with a terrorist association in the service of Apartheid.
Since the início
Garvey proposed that every white person was a visceral racist, wishing and campaigning for the departure of black Americans from the USA. That blacks were a minority always waiting to be ejected from the country in which they were born, but that they did not belong there. That the only solution was for black Americans to return to Africa, the land of Africans, which had already failed completely with the break with the government of Liberia. But when and why, really, was the UNIA's proposal born of "Back to Africa"?
Marcus Garvey's transfer to the United States in 1916 should perhaps also be understood as a result of the need to find a country that would better adapt, than Jamaica, to his proposals for a return to Africa and the radical racial separation of whites and blacks. In his homeland, after the founding of the UNIA in 1914, this equation did not work. There, proposing that blacks should leave for Africa was nonsense, since the vast majority of the island's population was black, without any racial mixing.
On the big island, Marcus Garvey should, following his racist worldview, propose the expulsion of the small groups of whites and the mulattos and mixed-race people, only more numerous, following the example of Haiti. This would lead to profound social transformations, since the ownership of wealth was a semi-monopoly of the English, the Europeans and the rich mulattos and mixed-race people.
The defense of racial purity was unnecessary among a population of peasants who were mostly of African descent. And the anti-racist struggle itself required mediation, in a country where he had lived, until the age of fourteen, without knowing what racism was. As proposed, in Jamaica, his defense of a rigid dividing line between blacks and whites did not prosper among the mulattos and mixed-race people, finding support and understanding above all among the racist English and Europeans.
Garvey Must Go
After the meeting with the Klan, the reaction against Marcus Garvey was enormous. Black leaders organized themselves into a committee, launching the slogan “Garvey Must Go” [“Garvey Must Go”], when the third international congress of the UNIA was being held. He was demanded to leave the country, to go wherever he wanted! The NAACP, with almost 1919 chapters, joined that pressure group in 4.500. Garvey defended himself by accusing the NAACP of being elitist and trying to silence him for losing thousands of members to the UNIA.
Later, in 1927, the NAACP and prominent black leaders supported the court order to expel Marcus Garvey from the United States after his incarceration. Conversely, white supremacist and Klan leaders visited him in prison and campaigned against his deportation and then for his return to the United States. They did not want to lose their valuable ally.
Opposition to Marcus Garvey was joined by WEB Du Bois, a famous African-American intellectual and activist with a socialist and pan-Africanist orientation, who had broken ranks with BT Washington, largely for the same reasons. Marcus Garvey defined his critic as an “unhappy mulatto who regrets every drop ofand black blood in the veins". However, Du Bois did not participate in the campaign. "Garvey Must Go” and declared himself against his perpetual banishment. [RABELO, 2013, p. 506; TÉTÉ-ADJALOGO, 1995, p. 228 et passim; DU BOIS, 1923.]
Scientific racistífico
Marcus Garvey continued to maintain public and solid relations with white supremacists who, in the South, supported by the law, attacked and repressed any attempt at interracial relationships and marriages, in favor of maintaining a racially pure white population, a policy he defended. Subsequently, it was common for white racist and Garveyist speakers to exchange opinions at meetings, assemblies and gatherings of their respective organizations.
Marcus Garvey explicitly embraced scientific racism. He advocated the need for “purity of both races,” black and white, and attacked interracial marriage. In 1923, he proposed that advocating racial equality, “as certain colored leaders do, for blacks and whites to unite,” is a “wicked and dangerous doctrine” that would destroy the “racial purity” of the black and white races. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 8.]
Marcus Garvey anathematized racial miscegenation, disqualifying the mixed-race and the mulatto. However, BT Washington and Frederick Douglas, for him important figures, were mulattos. And he, who was proud to be a black man pure, married a mulatto woman for the second time. In the USA, the UNIA's racist preaching was well received among the peasant emigrants from Jamaica, where they were discriminated against by whites and mulattos. In the land of the Founding Fathers, there was no such thing as opening Jamaican for mulattos, by a majority white population.
Under increasing pressureo
Concomitant with the meeting with the Klan leader, on July 27, 1922, Garvey separated from his wife and co-founder of the UNIA, Amy Ashwood [1997-1969], in a tense and publicized divorce, due to the relationship he had with his secretary and, later, his second wife, Amy Jacques [1895-1973], Jamaican, mixed race, born into a middle-class family, future mother of his two children.
During the divorce, accusations of adultery were not only made by the former spouses. Apparently, Marcus Garvey was not a big fan of marital fidelity. [GARVEY, 2017, p. 8.] His first marriage, to Amy Ashwood, was the social event of the year in Harlem, celebrated by five ministers and attended by three thousand guests. The second marriage took place discreetly.
His political and ideological excesses, the economic disaster of his business initiatives, his tormented divorce, and the accusation of having ordered the murder of Reverend James Eason contributed to the erosion of support for him and the UNIA. Under pressure, Marcus Garvey reportedly began to use his bodyguards and the UNIA's intelligence service to resolve internal and external issues. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.70; TÉTÉ-ADJALOGO, 1995, p.280.]
VII. The Structure of UNIA
The UNIA had a red, black and green flag and took on an apparently paramilitary character, which must have worried the strongly racist US authorities. Its local branches met in rented headquarters or at a member's home, generally on Sunday nights. The branches were supposed to be self-financing and send a contribution to the central headquarters, located in Liberty Hall, in New York. New groups were to be recognized by the center. “Activities included debates; conversations with sailors, merchants, professionals, students, itinerant meetings; recruitment campaigns; sewing classes; dances and concerts.” [BENJAMIM, 2013, p. 37.]
The UNIA had several organizations. In the main one, the “Universal African Legion”, members received brief military training as future soldiers for African liberation. In the United States, training was done with firearms. There was a bodyguard corps, wearing a uniform with red and green striped pants, who provided security for Marcus Garvey and the UNIA events. A secret information service was set up, linked directly to the movement’s top leader.
Young and adult women, members of the “Pan-African Motorized Corps,” gathered for military training and to learn how to drive. They would drive the “cars, taxis and ambulances” during the anticipated wars of “liberation in Black Africa.” The “Black Cross Nurses” [Black Cross Nurses], was founded and directed by Garvey's first wife. She taught courses in "first aid and medical care." During World War I, the Red Cross would not accept black nurses.
Áwingless guide
A “Youth Corps” and a “Black Eagle Flying Corps” were created [“Black Eagle Flying Corps”], which did not materialize due to a lack of planes and pilots. Officers were assigned to all these corps, with their respective super-colorful uniforms, habitually decorated, which strengthened adherence to the UNIA and, above all, to Marcus Garvey. [BENJAMIM, 2013, p. 38; RABELO, 2013, p. 515; TÉTÉ-ADJALOGO, 1995, p. 318.]
The UNIA was organized to regulate the most diverse spheres of the personal and domestic lives of its militants, giving them a strong sense of belonging. It encouraged marriage between members of the organization, and their children, as soon as they were born, received birth certificates from the movement. They were called “children of the UNIA” and “children of Garvey.” Children and pre-teens were required to memorize a poem by Garvey each week, and listened to uplifting stories about the great leader and other prominent black figures.
Parents scolded their disobedient children, saying, “Garvey doesn’t like it when you do that!” Uncle Thom's Cabinás, by Harriet Beecher Stower, was required reading. Children were required to memorize the decalogue of UNIA principles and girls were given black dolls to play with, a practice attributed to the UNIA. [BENJAMIM, 2013, p. 39.]
UNIA never financed itself by making a profit on its investments. It depended on membership fees, the sale of products [publications, actions, etc.] and, above all, donations during weekly meetings, conferences, fundraising campaigns. Its maintenance costs were high, since it operated like a company, paying administrators, publications, and prominent personalities who joined the UNIA. [JOHNSON, 2019, p.70.] For Garvey and the movement's leaders, the UNIA was also a business.
African Orthodox Church
Religion was too important a sphere of life to be left outside the control of the UNIA. In 1918, Marcus Garvey pushed for the founding of an African Orthodox Church [“African Orthodox Church”], which still functions today, without much brilliance, in the United States and in Black Africa. In that year, the West Indian Reverend George Alexander McGuire [1866-1934] was appointed chief chaplain of the UNIA and promoted the confluence of scattered black Protestant churches from the United States, Canada and Cuba into the African Orthodox Church, founded on September 2, 1921.
George Alexander McGuire was consecrated bishop by the Greek Orthodox Church and later archbishop and finally patriarch, with the title of Alexander I. Despite the reference to Orthodoxy, the preaching was essentially Anglo-Protestant. The Garveyite Church, under black control, addressed itself primarily to the black and African population, but did not reject believers of other colors.
In the new Church, and in the interesting universal catechism that it produced, God the Father, Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the angels were black and the devil, logically, white, in repetition of what was proposed by Chimpa-Vita, a young prophet and nationalist of the Kingdom of Kongo, burned alive by the Portuguese on July 1, 1706. [MAESTRI, 2022, p. 125.] The African Orthodox Church founded a periodical, “The Negro Churchman”, which served as a liaison between churches in the United States and abroad. She founded a theological seminary.
Before the founding of the Garveyite Church, there was a huge variety of black-American Protestant churches, which would have hindered its development, which would never have surpassed thirty thousand followers. Not having embraced worship of African origin and privileging Christian creed in negative terms is another record that Marcus Garvey saw the march towards Black Africa also as a movement for its Western civilization. [RABELO, 2013, p. 521.]
Newspapers and magazines
Fate conspired in Marcus Garvey's favor when, at the age of fourteen, he was sent as an apprentice printer, a professional training that allowed him to participate in the production of all types of printed matter. Although he had never been a highly talented writer, he distinguished himself as an editor of newspapers and magazines, which allowed him to take his political and ideological proposals very far.
Marcus Garvey declared his intention to establish a network of publications that, within ten years, would encompass “the principal cities of the United States, Europe, West and South Africa, and all the principal islands of the West Indies.” This was his dream that reached a greater realization. [BENJAMIM, 2013, p.46.]
On August 17, 1918, Marcus Garvey founded the weekly “The Dark World” main vehicle for the dissemination of information by the UNIA, published in English, but with articles in French and Spanish, proposing to express “solely the interests of the black race”. With ten to sixteen pages, it had an international editorial and a women’s editorial, the responsibility of Garvey’s wives. [FOHLEN, 1973, p. 55.] The publication had a discreet distribution in some African countries.
When it was founded, “The Dark World"did not accept advertising for hair-straightening and skin-lightening products, as most black publications did. Position abandoned due to cash flow problems. Marcus Garvey unsuccessfully asked Du Bois to write for the paper, which covered issues concerning Africa, the black diaspora, and the United States. On the front page, an editorial by Garvey ran.
The great leap forward
The weekly newspaper actively participated in the campaigns to sell shares in UNIA companies and in publicizing international meetings. Initially distributing a few thousand copies, its circulation increased significantly in 1920. The proposed circulation of 200 copies is possibly another exaggeration. The magazine's reach was greater than its distribution, since it passed from hand to hand.
Due to the proposal of “Africa for Africans”, the circulation of “The Dark World“it would have been prohibited in the French, Italian, Portuguese and Belgian colonies in Africa, escaping the ban only in some English colonies.”The Dark World” ceased to appear in 1933, after fifteen years of existence.
In Harlem in 1922, Marcus Garvey published the “Daily Negro Times”, a short-lived newspaper affiliated with the United Press news agency. In Jamaica, from 1929 to 1931, he launched the newspaper “Blackman”, which supported the People's Political Party, founded by him, who, back in Jamaica, abandoned the ban on political participation that he had preached in the USA, having even been elected as a councilor in the capital.
In 1929, “Blackman” published 15 copies. In 1930, it became a weekly and, in February 1931, in debt, it stopped circulation. In 1932-1933, Marcus Garvey directed the “New Jamaican”, and in December 1933, the magazine “Black man”, which accompanied him when he moved to England, where he remained until 1939. The magazine had readers in the Americas and in West and South Africa. [BENJAMIM, 2013. p. 47.]
Pan-Africanism with an American flavor
In the early 20th century, strong pan-Africanist sentiments influenced Marcus Garvey, who absorbed them from multiple sources. Among them was Edward Blyden [1832-1912], a famous intellectual of African descent born in the Danish East Indies to free parents, who immigrated to Liberia in 1850 and married a woman from the local ruling classes, of African-American descent.
In Liberia, Edward Blyden became a journalist, politician and diplomat. His main slogan was “Africa for Africans”, taken up by Marcus Garvey. Although a Presbyterian minister, he proposed that Islam was a more African religion than Christianity and, therefore, more appropriate for blacks in the United States and abroad. His main book was Christianity, Islam and the Raçthe black one, published in London in 1887. [RABELO, 2013, p. 503.]
Among Marcus Garvey’s many other pan-Africanist influences was SAG Cox. On July 1, 1911, he wrote in the last issue of the National Club newspaper: “The Negroes and Coloureds in Jamaica can only hope to improve their conditions when they unite with the Negroes and Coloureds of the United States and with […] all the Negroes of the world.” A proposal taken up by Garvey, who excluded Coloureds from the proposed international pact. [LEWIS, apud RABELO, 2013.]
The Agony of Mosesés African-American
In the sights of J.E. Hoover, head of the US federal internal repression, Garvey and three of his other agents were tried in 1923 for mail fraud, for sending false advertisements for the sale of shares by mail. The charge was not serious, but it was made worse by the megalomania and ineptitude of Marcus Garvey, who himself defended himself in court, intending to turn the trial into a platform to publicize his leadership and actions. Unaware of the rites and the law, he went from stumbling block to stumbling block, facilitating and aggravating his conviction.
Marcus Garvey was convicted and his three aides were acquitted. When, after the jury returned, the judge announced that he was the only one guilty, Garvey allegedly insulted the court, calling the judge, the district attorney and the jurors “dirty Jews”, which would have increased his sentence – five years in prison and a fine of $1,000. Released on bail for the first time, Marcus Garvey abandoned his apolitical stance and ran UNIA candidates, generally in opposition to candidates supported by the NAACP, which also interested the Klan. His candidates did not achieve much success.
On February 2, 1925, the sentence was confirmed and he was incarcerated, at the end of March, in a low-security prison in Atlanta, where he was visited by far-right white racists and the Klan, his faithful friends. In prison, Garvey handed over the leadership of the UNIA to his second wife and wrote an epic poem about the evils of the white man, which circumscribes his rustic view of history and his limited poetic gifts. [GARVEY, 2020.]
Back to the past
The movement for his release, by UNIA militants, supported by the Klan leadership, which never became widespread, led to a presidential pardon, when he had already served a good part of his sentence, on the condition that he leave the country forever, which was what the US government wanted.
On November 18, 1927, Marcus Garvey left for Jamaica. He was returning to his starting point, where he had begun building the most important organized black American movement known to date, a defeat from which he would never recover. [TÉTÉ-ADJALOGO, 1995, p. 279-285.]
Marcus Garvey and his wife settled in an upscale neighborhood in the capital of Jamaica, where they bought a prestigious home with the help they received from the United States, from where his art objects and some 18 books from his library arrived. In his homeland, he founded a party and publications. Unable to relaunch his rapidly declining movement, he moved to England.
In London, Marcus Garvey, separated from his wife and children, continued to lead the UNIA and organize international conventions, with decreasing repercussion. After his death on June 10, 1940, the UNIA suffered successive crises and dissidences, remaining only supported by the success it had had in the past.
* Mario Maestri is a historian. Author, among other books, of Awakening the Dragon: The Birth and Consolidation of Chinese Imperialism (1949-2021) (FCM Editora).
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TÉTÉ-ADJALOGO, T. Goldwin. Marcus Garvey: Père of l´Unitis African of people. I. Sa via, sa pensa, ser réalisations. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995.
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