Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Bruce had monitored the trajectory of many young race leaders who had flashed across the Harlem landscape. Twenty years earlier, he’d have counted himself among them. As 1917 drew to a close, Bruce still had plenty of grit and a few good years remaining. Garvey and the movement that grew around him would act as a final spur, but that was more than a year away. For now, John Bruce was content to accept the UNIA post of chairman of the advisory board and to lend his support – but not unreservedly so.

  Garvey needed Bruce’s seal of approval if the other Young Turks were going to put aside their own ideas and fledgling societies to embrace his UNIA. Without Bruce’s endorsement, no matter how tepid, Marcus Garvey would remain at the helm of an empty vessel, tacking in violent waters, bereft of an experienced crew.

  In November 1917, that crew consisted largely of conservative figures such as Samuel Duncan and Isaac Allen. In an uncharacteristic gesture of humility, Marcus Garvey relinquished the presidency of the UNIA to Duncan, and limited himself – in theory at least – to the role of international organiser. But even before the fundamental building blocks were put in place, the ideological stress lines were beginning to show. Marcus Garvey wanted to pick up and move on from where he’d left off in Kingston, Jamaica – replicating a society with Negro self-improvement from the peel to the core. But should the organisation be a social or political one? And if meetings were to culminate in rousing renditions of the national anthem, should it be ‘God Save the King’ or ‘The Star Spangled Banner’?

  Since arriving in Harlem, Garvey had steadily steered a course away from his old colonial self (defined through an allegiance to Great Britain and the Caribbean) and towards his newly adopted republican homeland – notwithstanding his unprocessed application for naturalisation and citizenship. How far the same could be said to be true of his new allies was uncertain. Samuel Augustus Duncan’s stewardship of the West Indian Protective Society suggested otherwise. Its annual dinner was held on Empire Day, and it drew support from the kind of member who, on his first brush with racial prejudice in the USA, is reported to have blurted out, ‘But I am a British subject. I will report this to my consulate!’17

  The transfer of their allegiance constituted more of a seismic shift amongst his fellow islanders than Garvey had anticipated. Either he was far ahead in his thinking or they were far behind. Not to be outflanked by these primary West Indians who were, ironically, much more established in Harlem, Garvey brought in his boyhood friend, Wilfred Domingo, a fast-thinking chameleon with an equally fast-twitching smile, to help smooth over some of the teething difficulties with board members.

  Garvey recognised the need to further justify his worth in their eyes. Setting out to win the sympathy of influential friends of the Negro, he drew up a list of the most likely candidates amongst Manhattan’s glitterati. Pretty soon some significant figures were showing up for his massed meetings at the Palace Casino in Harlem. As in Jamaica, Garvey defaulted to the tried and trusted scheme of a popular elocution contest to generate widespread interest. He would signal the serious and civilising nature of the UNIA by the respectful company it kept. To that end, he set out to charm one of the most erudite men in New York, Nicholas Murray Butler, the autocratic and influential president of Columbia University. Out of curiosity or simple voyeurism, Butler astonished all but Garvey when he accepted the invitation to grace the organisation with his presence in judging the State Elocution Contest among the Negro people of New York. ‘My compliments upon the admirable competition,’ he later wrote to Garvey. ‘I left the Hall with a new feeling of pride and satisfaction at what the members of the Association and their friends are accomplishing.’

  Nicholas Butler’s attendance was a coup and steadied the hand of wavering board members. Thereafter, Garvey doggedly pursued Butler like the punter who, having struck gold with his first set of lottery numbers, rigorously sticks to the winning formula. He ignored thediminishing signs of Butler’s ever returning on subsequent invitations, until the polite excuses of his unavailability ‘at this time’ hardened into an unequivocal ‘no!’.

  If Nicholas Butler wasn’t, ultimately, predisposed towards Garvey then neither, on closer inspection, was the movement’s senior adviser. The courtship of John E. Bruce proved a boomerang that returned to strike Garvey. A cautious Bruce, seeking to establish the character of the man he was now aligning himself with, had contacted Garvey’s former associate in London, Dusé Mohamed Ali. Towards the end of 1917, Ali’s response arrived. And as Claude McKay would recall, when the unflattering letter was read out at an open UNIA meeting, ‘it exploded like a well-timed bomb and broke up the organisation’.18 For John Bruce had asked Dusé’s appraisal of Marcus Garvey, ‘the Oxford graduate’. A rather cantankerous Ali had written back disparaging Garvey, pointedly referring to him as a messenger – a not very good one – who’d been discharged, after three months, due to his unsatisfactory conduct. Mohamed Ali went on to surmise that Garvey’s sole pretext for starting the UNIA in America was for collecting money for his own purposes.19 The humiliation didn’t end there. Over the next few weeks, Bruce piled it on ever higher. Believing himself to have been duped, he wrote angrily to the New Negro with a list of questions for Garvey, the ‘wandering alien with a grudge against toil’, to answer. He began by asking, ‘Have you any means of support?’ and ended with, ‘Who are you anyway and what is your game?’20

  Sensing his time was up with the organisation, at least as it was presently configured, Marcus Garvey resigned. But any suggestion that the UNIA could dispense with the services of its inspirational founder were quickly corrected. Far from the resignation being the final honourable act of a man disgraced, Garvey characterised what had happened as a putsch against him, engineered by Samuel Duncan and his supporters. They had sought, Garvey believed, to exploit the organisation for their own political designs. In the short term, the spurned UNIA leader relocated to the Old Fellows Temple and held rival meetings, whilst preparing for an increasingly favoured pastime: litigation. ‘To throw off the political influence [of the rivals] I was even forced into court,’ Garvey later recalled, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, ‘for I had to somewhat beat up Duncan in detaching him from the presidency.’ It was no contest. Garvey successfully wrestled the name back from his enemies, along with the majority of its members whom he now estimated to be 600. And one of the first acts of the newly reconstituted UNIA was to restore its Jamaican founding father to the presidency. The experiment of sharing the top honours with others would not be repeated.

  The UNIA at war with itself was, in 1917, a microcosm of a nation that could similarly be so described. Since its entry into the World War, the internal conflicts within America had sharpened with dark warnings of the wisdom of arming black soldiers. Southern white students of the Negro mind pointed to the ‘extreme emotional temperament of the African … which is easily exalted to passionate partisanships’.21 Put bluntly, could the Negro be trusted? Bureau of Investigation agents fanned out over America, particularly the black conurbations, looking for signs of disloyalty.

  Harlem was riven with rumours of German spies, disguised as cigar-storekeepers and real-estate agents, who were said to be fomenting insurrection in the minds of an increasingly belligerent Negro population. In the weeks and months after black soldiers had run amok in Houston, paranoid doubts began to be voiced in parts of the US administration about the liability to disloyalty of the Negro. One rumour whispered through the district was that, in the aftermath of war and German success, the Negro would receive a fairer deal at the hands of the Kaiser, as well as the promise of ‘social equality’ – that eventuality, dreaded by much of mainstream America, was a code for black men’s desire for sexual relations with white women. In the fevered climate of war such fanciful ideas were not discounted. One only had to look to the German propaganda which sought to undermine Great Britain, by encouraging disunity amongst her colonies; holding up the prospect, for example, of Indian independence, following a German vict
ory.

  A deterrent was needed. The Espionage Act was quickly followed by the Sedition Act in its passage through Congress – both were designed to quash sedition; to penalise those who ‘wilfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States’; and to caution against any other actions that might undermine the war effort. It quickly snared A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, the editors of the largely unread Socialist Messenger magazine (though the Bureau of Investigation took out a subscription) and authors of ‘Pro-Germanism among the Negroes’. A. Philip Randolph, the young radical who’d introduced Garvey to Harlem crowds, had to thank the prejudice of the judge in avoiding a jail sentence. Discounting the possibility that the two young African-Americans were intellectually capable of composing such a treacherous document, he concluded that they must be patsies for sinister white Socialists.22

  Rumours of espionage were further offset by another of even greater potential damage – that of Negro life being callously squandered on the European battlefield. There were many variants of this rumour, but in essence they were the same: Negro soldiers were being used as shock troops, first out of the trenches and last back in, sacrificed as cannon fodder, and suffering terrifying casualties and ghastly injuries. Bureau of Investigation agents in Harlem traced one source of these rumours back to a small, portly street orator, who was gaining some notoriety as a Negro agitator. Marcus Garvey didn’t dampen those suspicions by his tendency to clam up whenever a policeman edged closer to his audience. He would stand down from his soapbox and hurriedly set up on another street corner, away from the patrolman’s gaze.

  East St Louis and subsequent riots had put the authorities on edge. The year before, writing in the New York Age, James Weldon Johnson had reported on the ‘splendid showing’ put on by the new recruits of Pullman porters and railroad redcaps – the soon-to-be Hell Fighters – in a glittering military parade through Harlem. Crowds, including police officers and shopkeepers, cheered and laughed along with the regiment, headed that day by the great black vaudevillian, Bert Williams, sitting astride a magnificent white stallion.23 Complete with an unfamiliar, ramrod military bearing, the droll, sad-eyed minstrel had thrown off his shuffling ‘darky’ impersonation for the day. But no one, it seems, had bothered to inform the horse. Performing from some other script, the horse bolted and headed for the subway. Williams recalled, as if in the midst of a floodlit routine, ‘I talked to [my horse] when it left the parade and I talked to it down there in the subway, but I never did find out why it wanted to go there or why it didn’t want to come out.’24

  Now, one year on, uniformed members of the 369th Regiment caught ‘assembling’ on a Harlem street corner were cause more for suspicion than for laughter – at least to a passing patrolman, who ordered them to disperse. The soldiers stood their ground. The patrolman drew his nightstick, and attempted to arrest the most truculent member of the group. In the ensuing mayhem, police reinforcements quickly arrived and battled with the troopers and several hundred irate Harlemites who armed themselves with bricks and knives and rushed into the mêlée. The New York Times blamed Hubert Harrison and his radical friends who had ‘Urge[d] Negroes to Get Arms’ for inciting Blacks with their invocations of armed resistance.25

  The formation of the 369th Regiment, due imminently to embark for Europe, was an exercise in good race relations that could not afford to fail. And after much lobbying of newspaper editors by the regiment’s white backers, the riot was downgraded in subsequent reports to an unfortunate disturbance. The Harlem Hell Fighters would have the honour of being among the first troops of the entire American Expeditionary Force to be baptised in the bloody battlefields of Europe. But the fact that the ‘unfortunate disturbance’ had happened at all – and in the North – pointed to nationwide tensions that seemed to have been exacerbated by the sight of black men donning military uniforms; it also highlighted the authorities’ growing unease over the influence of relatively unknown Negro agitators such as Marcus Garvey on excitable and febrile minds.

  A. Philip Randolph had noted in his first encounter with Garvey that after his triumphant address, the orator sat down by the podium, composed himself and immediately started organising notes for his next outing; he’d even had the foresight to prepare circulars which were to be distributed amongst the crowd. The Jamaican, Randolph concluded, was a supreme opportunistic propagandist. Now that the USA and its black doughboys were committed to war, it, too, offered up opportunities for propaganda.

  One such opportunity arrived in the diminutive shape of Sergeant Henry Johnson and his teenage compadre, Needham Roberts – members of the Harlem Hell Fighters who had sailed to France and were now enduring an unremitting German onslaught in the Allied trenches. ‘Two Black Yanks Smear 24 Huns’ trumpeted the Stars and Stripes on 24 May 1918. The army’s internal newspaper revealed how the ‘two strapping Negroes, a station porter and elevator boy’ – when in civilian life – had been awarded the Croix de Guerre for valour in France after ‘repelling a raiding party of 24 Germans’. Marvelling at the wounded Johnson, the subsequent headline in the New York World, ‘The Battle of Henry Johnson’, bore testimony to the fearful damage he inflicted with a broken rifle and 9-inch bolo knife in hand-to-hand combat in the trenches.

  Johnson’s heroics validated Negro participation in the conflict, ridiculed Southern doubts over African-American manhood and, for good measure, helped boost the sale of war bonds: ‘Sgt Johnson licked a dozen Germans,’ ran the Liberty Loans campaign. ‘How many Victory Stamps have you licked today?’26 The exploits of Johnson (thereafter dubbed ‘Black Death’) certainly knocked Marcus Garvey off the front pages of Harlem Home News. But now that battle was enjoined, the maturing race leader was prepared to concede that it was going to take ‘the black man to whip the Kaiser’s soldiers’. Despite his stated reservations about the wisdom of black involvement in the war, he revelled in, and drank from, the cup of their success, for surely there was ‘not a more glorious record in the history of the war than the record of those two boys from the New York 15th’.

  Johnson and his fellow Harlem Hell Fighters returned to a heroes’ welcome the following year. The New York Age gathered itself to its full stature before launching into a reverential tribute to the Buffalo soldiers marching up 5th Avenue, passing close to the magnificent victory arch which was just nearing completion: ‘Lieutenant Jim Europe walked sedately ahead, and [the] bandmaster had the great band alternate between two noble French military marches.’ With studied pride the Age continued, ‘On the part of the men, there was no prancing, no showing of teeth, no swank; they marched with a steady stride, and from under their battered tin hats eyes that had looked straight at death were kept to the front.’27

  Marcus Garvey was buried in the midst of the jubilant, flag-waving crowds, straining to get a good look at the returning Hell Fighters on 12 February 1919. He is said to have wept salt tears at the sight of the splendid 369th, knowing full well that the bargain of full civil rights that they had bled and signed up for would not be honoured once the smoke of battle cleared. His suspicion that the old order would swiftly re-establish itself, was borne out by the changing fortunes of Sergeant Henry Johnson.

  The wounded, wiry porter had been inundated with offers of lucrative lecture tours on his return. For the fantastic sum of $1,500 he’d dragged himself along to a first speaking engagement at St Louis. Over the previous months he’d been preened and paraded by officers as if he were a beloved military mascot. His commanding officer noted how the head of the regiment ‘expressed the affectionate feeling of many of us when he said … the least we could do for [Johnson], after all he had done for us, was to treat him as the old 7th Cavalry had treated Custer’s horse – let him nibble grass around Headquarters, and when company came, call him in and show him off’.

  In St Louis, his patrons had reasonably expected a rousing and celebratory tale of how shared privation in the trenches had
forged a unique respect between the races. But in front of an audience primed for adoration, Johnson unleashed a tirade of pent-up frustration over the abuse he and his black troopers had suffered to date. The burghers of St Louis were scandalised when the ‘Black Death’ veered wildly from the script and exposed the special grievances black soldiers felt towards their white comrades-in-arms. They were no band of brothers, he revealed, and the unpalatable truth was that Uncle Sam’s white soldiers had refused to share the same trenches with them. Black members of the audience erupted in applause; the white audience was equally vociferous in its indignation. Johnson had to scuttle out of town. Soon afterwards a warrant for his arrest was issued for wearing his uniform beyond the prescribed date of his commission (even though he was still one month within the limit of his discharge). Thereafter, further speaking engagements did not materialise; overnight, Johnson went from the head of the celebrity list of after-dinner speakers to the top of the military intelligence list of Negro Subversives. A later retraction proved futile. Johnson had been undone by his candour, and Negro agitators like Marcus Garvey were put on note that the victory for democracy abroad had ushered in a new era of intolerance at home.28

  6

  IF WE MUST DIE

  I’m not sure whether I’d prefer

  to be gently lynched in Mississippi