Negro with a Hat
Page 1
COLIN GRANT
Negro With A
Hat
The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey
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Epub ISBN 9781446400449
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Published by Vintage 2009
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Copyright © Colin Grant 2008
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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Jonathan Cape
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Negro with a Hat
List of Illustrations
Introduction to the Vintage edition
Prologue: A Premature Death
1 Bury the Dead and Take Care of the Living
2 Almost an Englishman
3 In the Company of Negroes
4 An Ebony Orator in Harlem
5 No Flag but the Stars and Stripes – and Possibly the Union Jack
6 If We Must Die
7 How to Manufacture a Traitor
8 Harlem Speaks for Scattered Ethiopia
9 Flyin’ Home on the Black Star Line
10 A Star in the Storm
11 He Who Plays the King
12 Last Stop Liberia
13 Not to Mention His Colour
14 Behold the Demagogue or Misunderstood Messiah
15 Caging the Tiger
16 Into the Furnace
17 Silence Mr Garvey
18 Gone to Foreign
Epilogue
Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgements
Plates
In memory of Christopher Grant, 1968–2008.
A wry, gentle, amused and thoroughly splendid fellow.
NEGRO WITH A HAT
Colin Grant is the son of Jamaican parents who came to Britain in the late 1950s. He grew up in Luton and spent five years studying medicine at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel before turning to the stage. He has written and produced numerous plays including The Clinic, based on the lives of the photo journalists Don McCullin and Tim Page. He joined the BBC in 1989 and worked as a script editor and producer of arts programmes on the World Service before joining the radio Science Unit.
He lives in Brighton.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Section 1
1 Kingston Earthquake, 1907 (© National Library of Jamaica) 2 Cowtail and hoe brigade (PBS) 3 Jamaicans preparing a compressed air drill (General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 4 Marcus Garvey wedding photograph (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 5 Edward Wilmot Blyden (New York Public Library, Schomburg Center) 6 Robert Love (© National Library of Jamaica) 7 Dusé Mohamed Ali, African Times and Orient Review, September 1913 (Adam Matthew Publications) 8 A. Philip Randolph (PBS) 9 Amy Ashwood, c.1920 (UNIA Papers Project, James S. Coleman African Studies Center, University College Los Angeles) 10 Hubert Henry Harrison (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 11 The Reason Cartoon, 1920 (General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 12 A Negro Family Just Arrived in Chicago from the Rural South (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 13 Marcus Garvey, 1920 (Getty) 14 UNIA Parade, Harlem, 1924 (Getty) 15 W.E.B. Du Bois (Getty) 16 Booker T. Washington (Getty) 17 The Birth of a Nation, 1914 (Getty) 18 Silent Protest, 1917 (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 19 Liberty Hall during 1921 UNIA convention (UNIA Papers Project, James S. Coleman African Studies Center, University College Los Angeles)
Section 2
20 Marcus Garvey in UNIA ceremonial regalia (Getty) 21 J. Edgar Hoover (Getty) 22 UNIA Convention Parade, 1920 (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 23 Claude McKay (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 24 UNIA Officials reviewing parade during 1922 convention (Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Frank Cass and Co. Ltd) 25 Tulsa Race Riot (Tulsa Historical Society) 26 W.E.B. Du Bois (New York Public Library, Schomburg Center) 27 Garveyite Family, 1924 (James Van Der Zee) 28 Madame C. J. Walker (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 29 Amy Jacques Garvey (UNIA Papers Project, James S. Coleman African Studies Center, University College Los Angeles) 30 Certificate of Black Star Line Stock (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 31 Office buildings of the Black Star Line (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 32 Inspection of the SS Yarmouth (UNIA Papers Project, James S. Coleman African Studies Center, University College Los Angeles) 33 UNIA delegation to Liberia, 1924 (General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 34 Garveyite Family (PBS) 35 Mourners at the grave of John E. Bruce, 1924 (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 36 ‘Garvey Must Go’ cartoon (Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 37 Pr
ison Docket of Marcus Garvey. Prisoner no. 19359, Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, 8 February, 1925 38 Garvey under escort to Manhattan House of Detention, 1925 (© Bettmann/Corbis) 39 The Garvey Club, 1943 (Getty) 40 Marcus Jacques Garvey and Julius Jacques Garvey, Jamaica 1940 (University of Carolina Press) 41 Marcus Garvey giving farewell speech from desk of SS Saramacca, New Orleans, 2 December 1940 AP Bedou (Xavier University Archives and Special Collections, New Orleans) 42 Marcus Garvey Memorial Notice, 1940 (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
INTRODUCTION TO THE
VINTAGE EDITION
‘Marcus Garvey: Lunatic or traitor.’ That was the assessment of W. E. B. Du Bois, the Jamaican’s nemesis and rival for the leadership of 1920s black America. In a withering editorial, Du Bois called for Garvey to be locked up or deported from the United States – a wish that came to pass, on both counts. Thereafter, especially following his death in 1940, the story of Marcus Garvey was largely told from the perspective of his enemies. He was depicted as gauche and bombastic with an embarrassing penchant for dressing up in out-dated Victorian military costumes, complete with epaulettes, ceremonial sword and plumed bicornate helmet.
Even growing up in a Jamaican household in the 1960s there seemed to be something of a stigma attached to the name Garvey. Aside from his eloquence, extraordinary oratory, many achievements and grand ambitions (including the founding of a black-owned shipping line) there was the undeniable problem of his presentation – a difficulty that I had not resolved when I started to write Negro with a Hat. The title, which had proved elusive, suddenly arrived unbidden in 2003, when I stumbled across an exhibition that inadvertently offered a new way at looking at Marcus Garvey.
‘Make Life Beautiful’, the exhibition of ‘The Dandy in Photography’ that toured the UK that year was conforming to type with its alluring, black and white images of Cecil Beaton, Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward & co, when half-way round the gallery, I was pulled up sharply by one print – the profile of an anonymous black man wearing a fedora. The caption read: ‘Negro with Hat’. Adjacent to it was another portrait by the same photographer; it showed a white man in fancy dress wearing a theatrical turban. It’s title: ‘Man with Hat.’ The juxtaposition seemed to pose a question: is a Negro not a man?
When, just over a century ago, the aristocratic photographer, F. Holland Day placed his camera in the service of the anonymous black model, the elegant studio-based portrait of the ‘Negro’ that he produced was intended to be formal and respectful. This was a subject who dignified the term ‘Negro’ – a forerunner of Sidney Poitier whose clean finger-nails and starched white shirt graced the silver screen sixty years later in ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.’
Today ‘Negro’ is a charged word that provokes unease and is a reminder of past humiliations. The exhibition ‘Make Life Beautiful,’ was no exercise in revisionism; there was no nod towards modern sensibility, and I was disturbed by the caption ‘Negro with Hat’ which was included without explanation. But later, when I began to compose my biography of Marcus Garvey, I reached for that title. No publisher would print a book called ‘Negro with a Hat’ unless it was clearly ironical. There was, of course, a danger that the title would be misunderstood or be considered ‘unfortunate’ as it still held the possibility of both respect and abuse. But, ultimately, it captured the conundrum of Marcus Garvey: a proud Negro who was revered and reviled in equal measure.
Marcus Garvey, the great ‘ebony sage’ of 1920s, embraced the word ‘Negro’; to him it was a badge of honour. In August 1920, Garvey master-minded the first international convention of the Negro People of the World. With a mixture of old-world pageantry and new-world carnival, twenty-five thousand of his supporters marched from the headquarters in Harlem to Madison Square Garden to hear the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association announce that their day had come. They had gathered to participate in a ‘racial sacrament’ to witness the elevation of the small stocky Jamaican immigrant, dressed in imperial military regalia, as the ‘provisional president of Africa.’ At the end of that convention, Garvey published a declaration of rights for the Negro People of the World. Declaration No. 12 proclaimed that henceforth the black man would no longer answer to ‘nigger’ but only to ‘Negro.’ In 1930 the New York Times followed Garvey’s lead, producing a style guidebook in which ‘Negro’ would be forever capitalised.
Marcus Garvey was a man of grand, purposeful gestures. His deportment was key. Where critics saw embarrassing pretension, admirers revelled in his dignified Edwardian demeanour; the way that he carried himself was consistent with his philosophy and ambition. With his shrewd promoter’s eye, Garvey understood the power of presentation. He even went so far as to employ James Van Der Zee, the unofficial photographer of the Harlem Renaissance, to capture the spectacular parades that he presided over during his heyday in Harlem.
In the back catalogue of Garvey’s meteoric rise to fame, in photo after photo, Garvey poses as the very model of the civilised, self-improved man. He is hardly ever seen without his hat: there is Garvey with academic mortar-board; Garvey in pith helmet and plumes; Garvey with a fedora.
Marcus Garvey recognised that a large part of the problem of black people lay in the perception of white people. He chose to address this conundrum by using the language of the dominant groups, and that language was both vocal and visual.
Marcus Garvey appealed to the poor, wretched of the earth, the ‘negroes of unmixed stock’; he spoke at ‘some lower level’, at a frequency which fair-skinned African American leaders, the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois, could not or would not receive, but one to which his followers were permanently and perfectly tuned. It was they who patronised his millenary in Harlem and were fitted out with hats to match their ‘Sunday best’ outfits for both the UNIA meetings and parades that lifted them from the drudgery of the working week.
Garvey’s black critics, though, seemed to draw as much attention to what they considered the unfortunate look of the man (‘a character drawn from a serio-comic operetta’) as to the ‘pitiable rubbish’ of his programme. Again and again Garvey is depicted as a child-like Negro at play, trying on the robes of authority as might the fantasying spectacular kings and queens of Caribbean Carnival. Du Bois was particularly vicious, describing his rival as ‘A little fat ugly black man with intelligent eyes and a big head … in a military uniform of the gayest mid-Victorian type.’
Garvey countered the often virulent and vitriolic sneering by asking why it wasn’t absurd for the Pope to dress in a red gown and yet the UNIA leader’s ceremonial robes of authority were considered ridiculous. That sport of jeering at black men for ‘mimicking’ the civilised white man was still prevalent in the middle of the last century. In his fictionalised memoir, A Way in the World, V. S. Naipaul’s composite character recalls the ‘ship-wrecked men’ he continually comes across in the 1950s as ‘extravagant black figures … about on the streets of London. Men in pin-stripe suits and bowler hats and absurd accents.’
In the image of Marcus Garvey, of a proud ‘Negro with a Hat’, resides the lust for distinction. There on display for the public is all the strength and vulnerability of a black leader who was trying to make a way for himself and his people, in a world which robbed them of dignity and barred them from entry into polite society. In his plumed helmet and military uniform, Marcus Garvey put on the toga of race pride. His critics howled with derision and laughter at the pomposity of the man which they argued was further underlined by the titles bequeathed with Napoleonic munificence on himself and his high command – the ‘Baron of the Zambezi’, the ‘Duke of Uganda’ and so on.
Finally, in the roll call of black heroes in the hall of fame, Marcus Garvey occupies a unique position; he’s often depicted hovering somewhere between a craved-for messiah and pathological clown. Negro with a Hat suggests that ambivalence as it evokes the past, causing discomfort and underscoring the enig
ma of Marcus Garvey: visionary or buffoon?
Garvey, I found, was a polarizing figure. And in the polemic that surrounds him, something of the human being was lost, was crusted over. Characterisations of him were monochromatic, and in writing about Garvey, I sought to draw on a richer palette. His short-comings and the tragic-comic events surrounding some aspects of his life would not be glossed over. But all through the telling, I would pay attention to the words of John B. Russworm, a Jamaican predecessor of Garvey and publisher of an early black journal. In answer to the patronising tendencies of even the most well-meaning commentators, Russworm wrote that he was determined to give readers a more accurate portrayal of black life because ‘too long have others spoke for us [such that] our vices and our degradations are ever arrayed against us, but our virtues are passed unnoticed.’
PROLOGUE: A PREMATURE DEATH
In death I shall be a terror to the foes of Negro liberty.
Look for me in the whirlwind or the song of the storm.
Look for me all around you.
Marcus Garvey, Atlanta Penitentiary, 1925
AT the end of May 1940, Marcus Garvey sat cold and forgotten in a tall draughty rented house at 53 Talgarth Road in West Kensington, London. Recovering from a stroke which had left him partially paralysed, he was sorting through the newspapers that his secretary, Daisy Whyte, had placed beside his bed when he came across a headline which he knew could not be true: ‘Marcus Garvey Dies in London.’1 He scanned the other papers, some of which also carried notices of his death. They were not kind obituaries. It took almost a week for many of the papers to issue corrections. By then, wakes and memorials had been held for Marcus Garvey in the Caribbean and the United States. Garvey found himself eulogised by a number of people whom he’d considered enemies and vilified by others who had not forgiven him for his alleged exploitation of black people. Miss Whyte tried to shield her boss from some of the more uncharitable news stories but he insisted on seeing them all. Garvey was still weak from the stroke, but more than the distress and embarrassment of his disability, he was deeply upset by his public and private impotence, by his inability to arrest the decline of his mass movement, and by his estrangement from his family: two years previously, his wife had left him and returned to Jamaica with their children; he hadn’t seen them since. Even if he’d been physically able to travel, there were few transatlantic passenger ships prepared to run the risk of being sunk by the German U-boats patrolling the high seas.