by Colin Grant
And spread confusion ever o’er
The advocates of might.
And let them know that righteousness
Is mightier than sin
That might is only selfishness
And cannot, ought not, win
UNIA prayer by John E. Bruce
THE photograph is a study of group reflection. Not one of the ten people – nine men in dark suits and a lone woman in black dress and veil – caught by the photographer, James Van Der Zee, looks at the camera. Most gaze into the distance, to the past and the future. Only two men, a priest and Marcus Garvey, stare into the grave. They have come to bury the grand old man of the movement and ‘Harlem’s first royalty’, the journalist who put grit and verve into every thought, John E. Bruce (‘Bruce Grit’).
A couple of hours before the photo, 5,000 UNIA members, led by the African Legion in full regalia ‘with sabres drawn’, had accompanied the cortège, marching sombrely from the funeral parlour to Liberty Hall. There they recited the prayer of UNIA meetings that Bruce had written and dedicated to the movement back in 1919. At sixty-seven, Bruce Grit’s passing was not unexpected; he’d been ill for the past two years but had grounded the movement on American soil like no other, and his loss created a vacuum which exposed the reduced state of the UNIA, already impoverished by the tragic and premature death of the thirty-six-year-old Robert Poston on his route back from Liberia. Both men were devoted to the UNIA but in Bruce Grit, previously decorated as ‘the Duke of Uganda’, Garvey had found an Afro-centric writer (long before such a term existed) who championed the movement with the crusading ferocity of the convert that he’d become on a chilly autumn evening in 1919.
In the wake of Bruce’s death, the movement seemed, in some part, to have lost its way. Just how far it had strayed might be gleaned from two opposing decisions it subsequently took. Bruce would have applauded the first on a bed of hosannas up to heaven; the second he’d have cast into the furnace of hell. Both were concerned with ideals of blackness. To understand the first, one needed to be reminded of the old African-American joke, which loosely went: If Jesus Christ was alive and looking for accommodation in New York, his dark appearance would have prevented him from living anywhere else but Harlem. During the August convention of 1924, Reverend George McGuire took that conceit one stage further with his ‘canonisation of the Lord Jesus Christ as the Black Man of Sorrows’. Jesus, McGuire informed UNIA members, didn’t just look like a black man; he was a black man – an idea that Garvey endorsed when he announced that ‘since whites are seeing [H]im through the eyes of whiteness, we are going to see [H]im through the eyes of blackness’.1 The second, opposing decision to this celebration of blackness, centred on the urgent need to generate funds. That pressure led the Negro World to renege on a sacred principle by flooding its pages with lucrative adverts for hair-straightening and skin-bleaching preparations. One didn’t celebrate black beauty by applying Tan Off to one’s skin. Pragmatism, then, dictated the un-Bruce-like compromise with ideals. But the week after his old friend’s funeral, Garvey made a spectacular announcement that revealed just why he was prepared to risk John E. Bruce turning in his grave. A deposit of $30,000 had been placed on the SS General G. W. Goethals. The new shipping company had partly purchased its first vessel. To take full possession of the ship, they would need to find another $70,000 – a feat the UNIA had achieved three months later when Amy Jacques broke a bottle of champagne on the bow and rechristened the vessel SS Booker T. Washington. The 5,000-ton vessel was purchased on 20 October 1924. In addition to cargo, the ship could accommodate 75 first-class passengers and 100 second-class.
In the teeth of recession it was a remarkable achievement, as well as the perfect rebuff to the non-stop barrage of corrosive criticism from the likes of George Schuyler. A nasty odour had risen recently from the prose pages of Schuyler – a scholar of sarcasm who believed that Garvey’s best ideas had not come to him after quiet meditation in a university library but rather ‘one evening [when] absently thrusting the remainder of the pigfoot into his overall pocket, he sat in his favourite trash box’. Schuyler had joked mercilessly about looking forward to Garvey’s re-education in ‘his five-year semester’ in a federal penitentiary.2 But, at the beginning of 1925, Marcus Garvey walked out of the darkness that had threatened to engulf the movement and towards the light. He was illuminated by the hope that the Court of Appeal would be persuaded of the merits of his case and overturn the error of judgement of his conviction.
At its heart, Garvey’s counsel argued, the fraud case rested on the simple question: On whose behalf was Garvey being prosecuted? The same investors, whom he was alleged to have swindled, had responded in their thousands, enabling Garvey to purchase the new ship. The stock was never offered to the public; only to Negroes who ‘were more intent on the ultimate and uplifting salvation that was promised to the Negro race … than to the paltry profits that might be realised’. But where Garvey’s lawyers saw sincerity, the Court of Appeal detected the cynicism of a race pimp who may have ‘fancied himself a Moses, if not a Messiah … [but] stripped of its appeal to the ambitions, emotions or race consciousness of men of colour, [his scheme] was a simple and familiar device of which the object was to ascertain how “it could best unload upon the public its capital stock at the largest possible price”’. The Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment. There need be no further delay to Garvey’s removal to the Atlanta Penitentiary.
When the news reached Garvey in Detroit, he wired back immediately, ‘Coming On First Train Out’. His lawyers contacted the District Attorney who, recalled Amy Jacques, ‘gave his personal undertaking that he would bring in his client the following morning’. But a warrant for Garvey’s arrest had already been issued and some papers flashed the news that the UNIA leader was now a fugitive from justice. Special Agent James Amos hurried to Harlem, just as Garvey and his wife travelled back by train to New York. Amos, now accompanied by two US marshals, boarded the train at 125th Street and, moving quickly through the carriages, found and pounced on his prey. A stunned Marcus Garvey was handcuffed, taken back to the Tombs prison and locked up overnight.
By the following morning, Marcus Garvey had recovered some of his composure. 5 February 1925 was to be the most important day in the organisation’s history. The unthinkable was about to happen, and the editors of the Negro World rose to the task, capturing the moment in fine cheery prose on its front page:
‘Tell Mr [Clifford] Bourne to telegraph me at Atlanta word of the ship.’ With these words to his secretary, one of a small group at the Pennsylvania Railroad station, Hon. Marcus Garvey, handcuffed to a deputy marshal, settled in his seat in a coach of the Washington Express, and was soon chatting unconcernedly with that stern-faced officer.
It was 12 o’clock Saturday. Mr Garvey had just been rushed from the Tombs prison to the Pennsylvania station to begin his trip to Atlanta penitentiary. He arrived with two Marshalls, the one … to whom he was handcuffed, and the other a six-footer, with the aspect and bearing of a retired prize-fighter, two pistols strapped to his side … walking along the station platform to the coach, casting uneasy glances behind and beyond. Mr Garvey sees his secretary hurrying past … ‘Hello!’ comes a cheery greeting, with a characteristic smile, ‘everything O.K? Received my message?’ ‘Yes, Sir,’ is the reply and, as if the command ‘eyes right’ was given to a military squad, Marshals and detective, ill-suppressed smiles on their faces, turn and stare. ‘Sir!’ they seem to say, ‘What manner of man is this Garvey?’
Mr Garvey is now seated in the coach, and the crowd outside peering through the windows increases. A reverend gentleman, noticing the suppressed air of excitement among his fellow travellers, lowers his newspaper and takes in the scene. All the passengers are whispering to each other … On the other side of the coach a newspaper photographer is hard at work vainly signalling Mr Garvey to turn his head that he may be the better shot! ‘Make way,’ someone cries, and Mrs Amy Jacques Garvey enters the coach, a thr
ough ticket to Atlanta in her hand. The efforts to deceive as to the time of Mr Garvey’s departure have been unavailing. A sympathetic reporter tipped off Mrs Garvey, a couple of officers of the UNIA and two lawyers, as they waited at the Tombs prison, of his impending departure. A taxi was pressed into service. At the station … practically the whole staff of ‘Red Caps’ … had constituted themselves into a committee to inform them of the moment of the great leader’s arrival. As Mrs Garvey enters the coach and takes her seat, three seats in the rear of her husband, someone taps on the window and Mr Garvey turns and sees his wife. His smile is in evidence again … Mrs Garvey, brave little woman, sits calmly, looking at her husband, then at his custodians, then back at her husband. The coach door slams. The train moves. ‘Damn,’ says a burly ‘Red Cap’ his eyes filled with tears, ‘What a shame!’ The most-feared, greatest Negro in the world is on the way to a federal prison.
On the long journey South, Garvey was not so concerned about his impending incarceration than on leaving the organisation in good working order. Amy Jacques managed to secure some time alone with her husband but there was no possibility of indulging in these last moments of intimacy. Prudently, she had brought along a notebook and ‘took instructions for the officers [of the UNIA]’ and ‘messages’ for the Negro World.
The train arrived in Atlanta the following morning. Husband and wife were now separated. So anxious was she not to lose sight of Garvey that she hurtled off the carriage and rushed through the ‘white’ waiting room and leapt into a cab. The car had been idling but the ignition was now switched off, and Jacques was politely informed that ‘down here, white men can’t drive coloured people’. She didn’t stop to consider how this Southern reception might be translated for her husband once he arrived at the penitentiary. She hurried to the ‘coloured’ section, found a cab and followed her husband to the jail, all the while encouraging the driver to toot the horn so that Garvey would realise she was still close by. Mrs Garvey was stopped at the gates by a guard who coolly, but without malice, informed her that she would not be able to see her husband for two weeks. Masking her tears as best she could, Amy Jacques watched her husband disappear into the belly of the prison.3
The number 19359 was the most popular choice of players of ‘policy’, the illegal lottery in Harlem, throughout the spring and summer of 1925. It became so after the Atlanta penitentiary assigned 19359 to the most famous black man – now most famous imprisoned black man – in the world. The federal prison at Atlanta was often said to resemble a university hall, built in the classical Italianate style that would become so beloved of Mussolini’s Fascists. Visitors approached via a long curving driveway, lined by elegant art-deco lamp posts that guided them to the entrance at its cusp. A carefully tended lawn swept around the front and sides of the building. It was deceptive, designed purposefully so, wrote Eugene Debs, ‘to relieve the grimness of grey wall and steel bars’, and to give the impression that the state had ‘provided [the criminals] a comfortable resort’. Prior to Garvey’s arrival, Debs, the Socialist leader sentenced for sedition during the Great War, had been its most famous guest. Whilst still locked up, in 1920, Eugene Debs convinced close to a million Americans to vote for him as President, revealing that his presidential headquarters was the kind of ‘holiday camp’ where prisoners were compelled to ‘submit to the iron discipline enforced there, eat nauseating food and feel themselves isolated, cramped [and] watched day and night’.4 Prisoner 19359 would find that conditions had not changed in the three years since the release of Eugene Debs.
Garvey, who always had a clear idea of his worth, had set his face at defiance by the time he entered the Atlanta penitentiary. He would not, he said, be beaten by state-sponsored persecution and the indignities of his imprisonment; he would not be ‘dwarfed and dulled by deadly routine’. Marcus Garvey was built to lead and, even from the confines of the Atlanta penitentiary, he would inspire. On the first night of his incarceration, when the malodour of defeat closed in on his darkening cell, Marcus Garvey sat down to write, and roused himself to a height of eloquence previously unsurpassed. In an open letter to the Negro people of the world, he asked his followers to pray for him, and entrusted his wife whom he had left ‘penniless and helpless to face the world’ into their care; and finally he imagined himself dead – his enemies satisfied – and he, like Macbeth’s ghost, forever walking the earth: ‘When I am dead wrap the mantle of the Red, Black and Green around me, for in the new life I shall rise with God’s grace and blessings to lead the millions up the heights of triumph with the colours that you well know. Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you, for, with God’s grace, I shall come and bring with me countless millions of black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for liberty, freedom and life.’5
A night of exaltation was greeted by a dawn of anxiety over intractable difficulties that, once sleep approached, tricked him into their ease of settlement. Waking, it started all over again. The morning post brought a pledge of allegiance from William Sherrill, the acting president-general, dipped in a vat of sycophancy that must have given Garvey pause for thought about the calibre of men whom he’d be relying on outside the prison walls. A month later, Sherrill was writing again to reassure Garvey that he was no Brutus intent on killing Caesar: ‘I have not the genius or breadth of vision possessed by you.’ William Sherrill protested to the nth degree his loyalty to the imprisoned leader, yet kept a distance from Atlanta, and rarely wrote to him save to reaffirm his loyalty.
Sherrill’s perceived lack of respect for Garvey was as nothing compared to the disregard shown by his first wife, Amy Ashwood. With Garvey safely under guard and heading from Harlem to Atlanta, Ashwood hired a number of vans, enlisted a group of helpers and drove round to Garvey’s apartment. Once there, she forced her way in and was intent on liberating various household items (including the grand piano) that she considered her own. Garvey’s neighbours intervened. UNIA officers and the police were called. Ashwood stood down her furniture removers and left without any spoils. But having made an inventory of the furniture, she obtained a restraining order preventing Amy Jacques from doing anything with the contested items whilst Ashwood launched an appeal against the legality of the divorce that Garvey had secured from a court in Missouri.
Amy Ashwood’s challenge to the imprisoned Garvey was a foretaste of what was to come. Though the force of his personality radiated out from the bars of his cell, President-General Garvey’s ability to exert his authority was inevitably retarded. Regular letters and visits from his second wife as well as a procession of UNIA officials – excluding William Sherrill – kept feelings of isolation at bay. Amy Jacques managed to disguise the ‘eloquent hurt in her eyes’ that all admirers felt when calling on the great man in his new surroundings.
Garvey was steadfast, though the shock to his system was considerable. Even the judge, Julian Mack, who’d originally convicted him, was sympathetic to the suggestion that Garvey should be allowed to serve his sentence in the Northern city of Kansas, rather than Atlanta in the South where he now found himself, and where the black man was more likely to be given a raw deal. The first few months of incarceration were true to that expectation. Garvey related that the influence of his enemies had extended to the very heart of the prison. Word had been passed along, such that ‘the deputy warden [Julian A. Schoen] made every effort to carry out [their] wishes … he gave me the hardest and dirtiest tasks in the prison’.6 Garvey, by his own admission, ‘philosophically accepted the duties’ which he euphemistically labelled ‘water working’. Early on, though, he recorded a bruising encounter with a guard who had shouted, ‘Here, you coon.’ Garvey pretended not to hear him until the guard called him ‘coon’ a third time. Whereupon the president-general of the UNIA turned round and asked, ‘Are you speaking to me?’ Garvey’s impertinence elicited a string of uncouth invectives from the jailer who concluded his rant with the assessment, �
�You are nothing but a nigger, a coon. You are not in New York; you are not up above the Mason-Dixon Line, and you are a coon like all the rest.’7 Garvey endeavoured to extract a smattering of dignity from that altercation but the prison record of it hints at the humiliating adjustments that the prisoner would have been forced to make. The prison records cite a violation on 11 May 1926 when Garvey was charged with insolence. The guard is quoted as saying, ‘I told this man not to interfere with the cleaners when I had them on a job. He commenced to argue, I told him to hush. Then he said no man was able to make him hush talking, in a defying way. Even clenched his fist like he was going to strike me.’
Prisoner 19359 was reprimanded and warned. Deputy warden Schoen noted, matter-of-factly, that ‘as head cleaner, this prisoner was over anxious about work’.8
Writers and journalists were especially keen to be granted an audience with the humbled provisional president of Africa – mostly they were refused. The considerate journalist and historian, Joel A. Rogers, who would include Garvey in his incomparable World’s Great Men of Color, was one of the lucky few beyond Garvey’s inner circle allowed to pay his respects and act as guide for the thousands of readers of his syndicated column. Once past the heavy iron-barred door, Rogers was greeted by a stocky figure clad in ordinary workmen’s clothes, ‘nothing to indicate a prisoner in popular belief – but an unbelievable contrast to the figure in the glittering uniform, gold epaulettes, plumed hat, sword and spurs on the prancing steed, who as leader of 400,000,000 Negroes of the World,’ led his followers through the streets of Harlem. Though Garvey had lost a lot of weight, Rogers confirmed for the readers of the New York Amsterdam News that his zest and imagination were unbounded. ‘“When I get out of here,” he [Garvey] said, with all that old fire that had held his great audiences spellbound in Madison Square Garden, “I mean to do a thousand times more.”’ When Rogers asked him about his current duties he was circumspect, simply stating that ‘he was not permitted to name [them]’. Perhaps knowing his friend had been commissioned to write up the interview for a leading black journal, Garvey was embarrassed to register with readers that the provisional president of Africa’s present job description was ‘head cleaner’. Nonetheless, when Rogers’s hour came to an end in the Atlanta penitentiary, he was consumed by one thought: ‘The once humble peasant that had just disappeared behind the clanging gates had started something that, liked or hated, is destined to affect the future of humanity in no mean way.’9
