Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Men who’d survived the hell’s fire of the trenches, who’d scrambled over the corpses of their comrades, been trapped on the barbed wire in no man’s land, were unlikely to be cowed into submission back home or to embrace a return to the subservience of the past. Rather, as Dr Du Bois intoned in the pages of the Crisis, they would return fighting for equal rights:

  We return

  We return from fighting

  We return fighting

  Make Way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.17

  Du Bois’s feisty rhetoric was an echo of the militancy that ex-combatants like Henry Johnson had shown; the black soldier had acquired a new sense of dignity that he was reluctant to relinquish. Du Bois had been sent to France by the NAACP to determine for himself the new mood amongst the black combatants. And though the Harvard scholar’s survey, The Black Man in the Great War, was tightly drawn around the achievements and frustrations of black Americans, it could equally apply to the black colonial forces of France and Great Britain. Taranto, in Italy, witnessed an early flare-up. Troops of the British West Indies Regiment became disgruntled when they were denied the pay rises and bonuses granted to the British Expeditionary Force on Armistice. In the weeks after the end of hostilities a worse insult was to come. On being ordered to put down their rifles and pick up mops and buckets to slop out the latrines of their white colleagues, the Caribbean soldiers had mutinied. That rebellion had been quelled by Colonel Maxwell Smith who, in his account of the mutiny, drew attention to the ominous dissemination of the Negro World among members of the battalion.18

  The Negro World was not alone in reporting the rebellious impulses that had lain dormant for so long. In the face of McKay’s ‘murderous, cowardly pack’, black Americans had fought back, and for six months in 1919 the violent confrontations between the races were splattered across the front pages of America’s tabloids and broadsheets. This time whites, in increasing numbers, joined blacks in death, as race riots exploded on more than twenty occasions. A great ball of hate rolled through large swathes of the country that summer, knocking over cities – caught up in the conflagration – like ninepins.

  The 90 degrees heat arguably contributed to the factors that tipped Chicago over the brink. On one of the hottest days of the year, tempers flared when blacks, carrying towels and swimwear, were deemed to have broken an unwritten law by invading a beach designated for ‘whites only’ on the banks of Lake Michigan. A rock thrown at a young black bather, Eugene Williams, hit him on the head and he subsequently drowned. Blacks retaliated. The police intervened. Guns were drawn, and a week of murderous reprisals followed. The police were overrun and, in a series of beatings, stabbings and drive-by shootings, more than fifty people were killed and hundreds were injured before the arrival of torrential rains and five regiments of heavily armed National Guard settled the matter.19

  Fewer deaths were recorded in the capital, Washington, DC, on 21 July but the animosity was just as intense. Calm and sobering words, that were desperately needed, would not be found in the pages of the Washington Post. It too showed symptoms of succumbing to the raceriot excitement. Rather than counselling restraint and conciliation, the Post was spoiling for a fight. In language that was more usually found in bigoted local Southern journals advertising an evening’s entertainment of lynching, the nation’s premier newspaper announced that the ‘mobilisation of every available serviceman has been ordered for tomorrow evening near the Knights of Columbus Hut’. And for readers who didn’t get the hint, the Washington Post spelled it out in bold print: ‘The hour of assembly is 9 o’clock, and the purpose is a cleanup that will cause the events of the last two evenings to pale into insignificance.’20 The spur had been the ‘alleged assault by race men upon white women’. And in the following days the Cleveland Advocate reported how a mob of 400 white men ‘composed of soldiers, sailors, marines and civilians, armed with every kind of weapon’ gathered at the appointed hour ‘and proceeded on its avowed mission of cleaning up south-west Washington’.21

  The expression of such violence at the very heart of American civilisation proved the need for continual vigilance throughout the Union. Whenever Marcus Garvey spoke of Washington or Chicago, he warned his audience that the mob would make no distinction between black Americans and Caribbeans. He had in mind those of his fellow islanders who complacently wrapped themselves in the Union Jack (spurning the Stars and Stripes) and consoled themselves with the thought that such things could happen ‘only in America’. They would soon be disheartened and disillusioned by the reports reaching them about the scandalous treatment of their compatriots in Great Britain. One of the worst examples concerned wounded West Indian servicemen – some of whom had lost limbs – recuperating on hospital wards full of war veterans. Trouble flared when some of the white amputees, outraged at the suggestion of sharing recreational facilities with the black soldiers, sought to bar them from the pool room and canteen. Newspaper accounts reported the pitiful sight of amputees unhitching their false legs to use as batons to bludgeon each other. That year Cardiff, London and Liverpool (each with small but significant migrant populations) were convulsed by racial hatred. The ex-servicemen and their families who were burnt out of their homes were offered remuneration towards their repatriation and free passage on ships back to the Caribbean.22

  At least there could be no repatriation of black Americans. The special grievances that W. E. B. Du Bois had once urged blacks to put to one side, he now argued should be at the top of the president’s intray. The black population had fulfilled its end of the bargain, shoulder to shoulder with their white compatriots in the fight against a common enemy; it was time for some reciprocation.

  Stripped of its poetry, Du Bois’s open appeal to the fighting spirit of returning black soldiers was considered a menacing development by the White House. Before the war, such rhetoric would hardly have caused any fluctuation in the rhythm of the presidential heart. In 1917, Wilson was confident of the black doughboys’ support for their commander-in-chief. A paranoid President had just declared war on Germany. ‘These were the days,’ recalled James Weldon Johnson, ‘when the nation was in a panic over the rumours of pro-Germans and spies in their midst, troops were thrown around [government] buildings for their protection … and as I passed the White House, I saw a sight which gave me food for thought … Every man of the troops guarding the home of the President was a black man.’23 Fearing for the security of the White House, Woodrow Wilson had settled on an all-black guard as being the most impenetrable and reliable.

  Aside from the undetected German propaganda at work on the Negro population, Wilson had reasoned on the uncomplicated allegiance of the unhyphenated American who happened to be black. The same could not be said of so many recent immigrants he had in mind, for instance, the 500,000 German-Americans, potential reservists for the Kaiser’s army whose loyalty was called to question. ‘The Afro-American is the only hyphenate, we believe, who has not been suspected of a divided allegiance.’ So said the Baltimore Sun, but it could equally have been speaking for the President. The Woodrow Wilson of 1917 had anticipated Cobb’s conversion to the uniqueness of black patriotism (America was their home and Promised Land; there was nowhere else to go), but the President’s thinking had evidently evolved since then. The war had unleashed a revolutionary fervour throughout Europe, and, en route to France to sign the Armistice, Woodrow Wilson was now quietly alarmed about the exposure of the likes of Private Cooksey to such un-American ideals. He worried in particular that they, the returning black combatants, would be ‘the greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America’.24 The Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, put it more succinctly: there was a great danger, he warned, that ‘the Negro’ was not just a carrier but had already contracted the deadly virus of revolution and ‘was seeing Red’.

  Marcus Garvey had been forewarned of the country’s latent paranoia about the possibility o
f subversives in its midst when summoned by the fastidious and humourless Emmett J. Scott, special adviser to the Secretary of State for War on ‘Negro matters’. The UNIA leader hadn’t helped his cause by speculating in the pages of the Negro World that the next war would be between the white and darker races, aided by the Japanese. It was the kind of loose language which would have led to a prosecution during war-time, and still might, as the terms of peace had yet to be ratified.

  Garvey received Scott’s invitation with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. Whatever the outcome, the recognition of importance it conferred on him was a measure of his success. It didn’t matter that the ‘invitation’ was more of an instruction; he would still have been reluctant to refuse. Garvey hurriedly boarded a train to Washington, adjusted his posture to one of unaccustomed deference, and presented himself at the offices of the special adviser, intent on disarming Scott and disabusing him of any suspicions. Scott was gratified. To his superiors in the military intelligence division, Emmett Scott reported how the West Indian representing the ‘agitator type’ virtually prostrated himself and ‘thanked me most profusely for sending for him’. For close to two decades, Emmett Scott had served as personal secretary to Booker T. Washington, preening himself on his proximity to the man whose voice had governed a people. Yet, in his assessment of Garvey, the special adviser revealed the extent to which he had his finger less than adroitly placed on the pulse of Negro life; he concluded that ‘while he can cause a certain amount of mischief, [Marcus Garvey] is not a man around whom any serious movements can be prompted’.

  Luckily for Garvey, he was caught at the beginning of a wave of repression that had yet to harden its grip and orthodoxy; when there was still room for discretion, for a quiet word to suspects to mend their ways. Scott’s memorandum noted satisfactorily that Garvey ‘promised to change the general policy of his publication [the Negro World]’ and that his ‘activities … should not be seriously regarded’.25 In his role as special adviser, Scott was meant to act as the eyes and ears of the administration, keeping tabs on the Negro temper and morale. Whilst not an invisible man, Garvey clearly benefited from the myopia of the conventional black American leader ship who continued to underestimate his appeal, despite all evidence of his small but growing challenge to their hegemony over the black population.

  Garvey emerged relatively unscathed from his audience with Scott, but the matter would not rest there. He was no longer operating below the radar: from now on he would be watched more closely, becoming the subject of at least two competing investigations. In the first instance, Scott’s preliminary notes on Garvey were dispatched to Major Walter Howard Loving. A charming and sophisticated man, Major Loving, whose first passion was music, had led a military band in the Philippines until his retirement in 1916. When America entered the Great War, Major Loving was brought out of retirement, dusted down and pressed into the service of military intelligence; given a brief to tease out the seriousness of the German propaganda and other elements of subversion responsible for the unrest amongst his fellow Negroes. Loving was a canny negotiator and natural diplomat who’d successfully steered defiant black publications, like the Chicago Defender and the Crisis, towards a more moderate course.

  The major had expected, once the war was over, to slip back into Civvy Street, but towards the end of 1918, he received news that his services were further required. Colonel John Dunn requested an audience with him, and handed over Garvey’s slender file, with orders to thoroughly investigate the practices of the Negro agitator and his associates. Loving went to work the very next day. Attending a highly charged UNIA mass meeting, he brought along a stenographer, and coolly took a seat as speakers on the platform glared at him, warning the congregation to keep a vigil for any spies in the hall.26

  Walter Loving turned out precise and relevant synopses, and shrewd assessments of Garvey and his movement. These were in marked contrast to the rambling, flustered, exaggerated and amateurish reports of the BOI agents who had infiltrated the UNIA and were providing their paymasters with breathless memorandums which, once deciphered, might best be summarised as ‘nothing to report’.

  Having secured a strong foothold in Harlem, Garvey was increasingly inclined to road-test his message and its popularity in other cities with sizeable black populations. The conservative audiences in Baltimore and Washington were not accustomed to the kind of peppery polemic that Marcus Garvey and the street orators delivered daily in Harlem, and at first they sat in ‘awed silence’. Loving kept a record of all attempts to explain or defend Bolshevism to these audiences, and fretted that they were ‘not only growing accustomed [to the radical style of thought] but were applauding it’.27 But it wasn’t Bolshevism, Marxism or Socialism, in any form, that captivated Garvey at the beginning of 1919. He was much more exercised by the window of opportunity that the forthcoming peace conference in Paris offered the Negro race. President Wilson had unveiled a fourteen-point plan for future world peace. There would be no material gain for America. It was an act of enlightened self-interest that propelled Wilson towards his God-given destiny of establishing a new and more equitable world order. The plan enshrined the principle of self-determination for small nations such as Romania and Montenegro, whose people had been the subjects of larger empires. In Paris, President Wilson, ‘Wilson le Juste’, was hailed as a conquering hero by jubilant crowds who showered him and his wife with cascades of flowers. But Garvey complained bitterly that Negroes were ignored in Wilson’s master plan: ‘We never heard one syllable from the lips of Woodrow Wilson or Balfour in England as touching anything relative to the destinies of the Negroes of America or England or of the world.’28 Was not the Negro as deserving as the Montenegrin? This was the message that Garvey expounded, almost as a mantra. For he was not like previous Negro leaders, ‘a prophet of the hereafter’, but a promoter of the thrilling idea that the despised Negro need no longer wait for heaven: he could have his share of the pie here and now.

  Prominent black figures also shared the idea that the time was ripe to prosecute the claims of the race. Among them was the millionaire empress of beauty products, Madam C. J. Walker. She opened the doors of her splendid Villa Lewaro on the banks of the Hudson to a coalition of willing Negro leaders. Garvey and significant others strutted in. They assembled under the umbrella of a new, hastily arranged organisation, the International League of Darker Peoples. The group passed important motions and proposed key amendments and additions to Wilson’s plan. Two delegates, A. Philip Randolph and Ida B. Wells (sponsored by the UNIA), were selected as emissaries to the peace conference to put their case. Specifically they were to insist on a fifteenth point being added to Wilson’s fourteen – the ‘elimination of civil, political, and judicial distinctions based on race or color in all nations for the new era of freedom everywhere’. The outcome of this great whirl of activity would, of course, depend on the willingness of the authorities to pay even the slightest bit of attention. To the intellectual, Hubert Harrison’s, way of thinking, the grand gestures and important-sounding resolutions constituted nothing more than the escape of hot air. It was all ‘sublimely silly’ because ‘only the President has power to designate the American delegates to the Peace Congress’. Garvey and his fellow plaintiffs were largely mimicking the postures of statesmen without any real leverage or chance of success. Rather than waste money on a fool’s errand, Harrison suggested they just ‘send to France for copies of Le Temps or Le Matin’.29

  Marcus Garvey had little time for Harrison’s mocking. Still a rung or two below the major black players, he could now at least hold his own, and on occasion share a platform, with renowned race leaders like Ida B. Wells. The ebullient fifty-five-going-on-twenty-five-year-old woman was, in Loving’s estimation, a far more volatile and dangerous character than the UNIA leader. Loving had monitored the comings and goings at Villa Lewaro and recommended that if Wells attempted to obtain a passport, the US State Department should immediately be alerted to the fact that the ha
rmless-looking, four-foot-six mother of four was a ‘known race agitator’ – a description not intended as a compliment.

  At the age of twenty-one, Ida B. Wells had become tethered to her own legend after she sued the Tennessee railroad company when one of their employees had sought to evict her from an expensive first-class seat. In refusing to budge from a seat reserved for white travellers, Ida B. Wells anticipated by some sixty years Rosa Parks’s famous act of civil disobedience. The Memphis schoolteacher had dug her heels in and bitten the hand of the conductor who’d tried to accost her. Remarkably she won her court case. From personal indignation it was but a short step to vexation over the abuses suffered by the race; her subsequent devotion to full-time advocacy and anti-lynching campaigns had brought her to the locked gates of the White House. Ida B. Wells’s credentials as a one-woman crusader – never travelling without a loaded pistol in her handbag – were unsurpassed. She’d fearlessly spoken out against mob law in Memphis and, consequently forced to flee the South, was always one step ahead of the crackers who dreamed of fashioning a noose for her neck. By her own admission Wells was ‘tempestuous, rebellious and wilfully hard-headed’.30 Walter Loving considered her lost to the virtues of dignified diplomacy and sworn to a lifetime of noisy opposition. Little more could be expected of her, but, to his dismay, several other respected figures were also said to be aligned to Garvey.

  When he challenged John E. Bruce on his dealings with the suspect, Bruce wrote back sharply, as if he’d been slapped in the face, ‘Please do not insult me by linking my name with any movement, plan, scheme or enterprise with which Marcus Garvey is identified.’ Bruce Grit had been around long enough to have experienced an earlier example of America’s periodic pandemic of political hysteria in the 1880s31: he correctly sensed the sinister implications behind Loving’s investigation and with undisguised sarcasm and irony concluded, ‘Put me down as 100% ’Merican, red-hot republican, and a shouting Methodist. If you can manufacture a traitor out of these “ingredients”, send me the formula.’32 It was a portentous comment, as the blood-letting was about to begin in another spasm of political scapegoating and the search for the enemy within.