Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  When, twelve years later, on Independence Day, as the first president of the Republic of Ghana, Nkrumah revelled in the fulfilment of his prediction, Du Bois was again a distinguished guest. But Ghana’s new national flag, red, black and green (the UNIA colours), with a black star in the centre, suggested that the greater influence on the young president had been Du Bois’s nemesis. In his autobiography, Nkrumah had paid tribute to Garvey, acknowledging the impact of the Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey on his own thinking. Nkrumah, said the Ghanaian historian, Adu Boahen, ‘reached out for Du Bois out of reverence and because he was the lone survivor – but Garvey was the source’. In 1957, it wasn’t yet clear, though, whether Marcus Garvey would be remembered more widely as the source of African and Caribbean agitation for independence.3

  The centrality of Marcus Garvey to the UNIA and black people’s perception of that organisation had been evident during his years of incarceration in Atlanta between 1925 and 1927. Then, in Garvey’s absence, cultish characters such as the charismatic Father Divine and Laura Kofey had emerged, appealing to the unsatisfied expectations of a traumatised but still hopeful black population. Without Garvey at the helm, the UNIA shrivelled and along with it the collective memory of its leader.

  After growing up in Jamaica in the 1950s, Robert Hill recalls that Marcus Garvey seemed all but forgotten; at the age of sixteen, Hill had not even heard of him. That Garvey’s name retained some currency was largely down to the obscure religious sect, Rastafari. Overlooking his quarrel with the Emperor of Ethiopia, Marcus Garvey was revered by Rastafarians as the prophet who had foretold the coming of Haile Selassie. ‘No one remember ol’ Marcus Garvey,’ chanted the renowned Reggae group, Burning Spear, but Rastafarians did, and, indeed, still do; they canonised him in their songs and adorned record covers with his iconic image.4 In death, the enigmatic Garvey also became the subject of numerous myths, such as the belief that he was still alive somewhere in Africa. Forgotten was the sad fact that the great leader of the Back-to-Africa movement had always been denied access to the continent by the European colonial powers; he had never actually set foot on his beloved African soil.

  By the early 1960s Garvey seemed such a distant and unimportant figure that when Amy Jacques trawled the publishing houses with a book proposal of her husband’s life, she endured the humiliation of unending rejections; eventually Jacques privately published Garvey and Garveyism in 1963.

  It wasn’t until a little later, when the crisis hit the black world with the rise of the militant Black Power Movement in the USA in the 1960s, and the emergence of black leaders in Africa and the Caribbean, seeking to forge new national identities, that people started to think again of Marcus Garvey. Nursing feelings of vindication, the old Garveyites stepped out of the cold, out of history, and proclaimed that, even in the darkest hours, they always held true to his ideals. Mariamne Samad went as far as moving from Harlem to Kingston in the 1960s to be closer to ‘her man’ as she affectionately referred to Garvey.5

  In November 1964, more than two decades after his death, Marcus Garvey’s last wishes were finally honoured when his remains were returned to the Jamaican capital. Garvey’s body lay in state at the Roman Catholic cathedral whilst thousands of Kingstonians paid their respects, before his casket was taken by motorcade to King George VI Memorial Park and his body reinterred.

  But there remains one last act of unfinished business: to this day, Marcus Garvey’s many admirers still fume over his 1923 conviction for mail fraud, believing him to have been criminalised and stigmatised by a politically motivated prosecution.

  For the last twenty years Garvey’s sons, Julius and Marcus Junior, supported by Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel, have steered the group pressing for a United States presidential pardon for Garvey. In 2006, that call was taken up by Jamaica’s first female prime minister, Portia Simpson-Miller, when she instructed one of the country’s leading lawyers to take a fresh look at the proceedings around Garvey’s original trial with a view to achieving a complete exoneration – as befitting Garvey, Jamaica’s first national hero.

  In the 1930s, the Marxist activist C. L. R. James had described Garvey’s ideas as ‘pitiable rubbish’ but before his own death in 1989, James came to eulogise Marcus Garvey as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.6 Now Garvey’s writings and papers are pored over in microscopic detail by scholars in the United States, Africa and the Caribbean; books by and about him are required reading on university campuses.

  Arguments still roil over what might have been, had Marcus Garvey ever managed to fulfil his dream. He inspires both ambivalence and devotion. Writing on Garvey has lately been a polemical tussle between two camps: one that wants to skewer him as a charlatan and the other that seeks to elevate him to the status of a saint. Ultimately, he remains a figure who many, like W. E. B. Du Bois before them, find ‘a little difficult to characterise’.

  Marcus Garvey’s extraordinary ability to provoke extremes of thought in an individual remains as strong today as it did in 1947 when the Jamaican historian, J. A. Rogers, decided to include him in the World’s Great Men of Colour. Reflecting on the man who, more than anyone, embodied the idea of a Negro Moses, Rogers worried that ‘had [Garvey] ever come to power, he would have been another Robespierre’, sitting on a throne of blood and presiding over a reign of terror. But almost in the same breath Rogers celebrated Marcus Garvey’s sympathetic understanding of black people: ‘Like all other messiahs, he was a poet and romancer and knew how to soothe the suffering of his followers with hopes of paradise.’7

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