On the Shoulders of Giants

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Though Garvey founded the UNIA while on a visit to Jamaica, it was in Harlem that he established his headquarters and core followers. But Garvey found little support from African-American leaders. Booker T. Washington, who had at first expressed support, did little to help Garvey’s cause, and Du Bois and the NAACP were openly antagonistic to him and his plan. Yet, Garvey was not deterred, and his detractors soon realized how much they had underestimated his determination.

  Invited to address the congregation at Bethel A.M.E. Church, Garvey’s passionate speech there had the two thousand Harlemites shouting back with enthusiastic support. Word quickly spread throughout the Harlem community among the average workaday blacks who didn’t write poetry, play jazz, sing or dance, or who didn’t wear a suit to work. And they liked what they heard when Garvey shouted, “One God, One Aim, One Destiny!” Following the incorporation of the UNIA in New York in 1918, Garvey began publishing his own weekly newspaper, the Negro World, to compete with Du Bois’s Crisis and Johnson’s Opportunity. Because of his call for blacks to abandon their racist countries to return to Africa, the Negro World was banned throughout most of the British and French territories. Still, Garvey’s popularity grew and his speeches in Harlem commonly drew crowds of five thousand. “I have no desire to take all black people back to Africa; there are blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there…. Our success educationally, industrially and politically is based upon the protection of a nation founded by ourselves. And the nation can be nowhere else but in Africa.”

  Garvey’s rejection of black participation in World War I garnered considerable support among the less conservative civil rights organizations, including socialists, Marxists, and black nationalists. But it also brought him under the watchful eye of the federal government. When the State Department granted permission to Du Bois to go to Versailles, France, where the peace treaties ending the war were being signed, but refused Garvey’s handpicked delegation, Garvey launched a vitriolic attack against Du Bois before a rally of five thousand Harlemites. The battle lines had been drawn, and for these two men and their divergent philosophies for black Americans, there would be no peace, no Versailles. In an article in the Crisis entitled “Lunatic or Traitor,” Du Bois called Garvey “the most dangerous threat to the Negro race.” Garvey responded by calling Du Bois “purely and simply a white man’s nigger.” Ridiculing what he considered to be a conservative stance by Du Bois and the NAACP, Garvey wondered, “How can a Negro be conservative? What has he to conserve?”

  Garvey proved just how serious he was in his back-to-Africa rhetoric when he started the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation in 1919 with the intention of purchasing the ships that would transport blacks back to their African homelands. He quickly raised $200,000, mostly from the laborers desperate to improve their lot. One poor Panamanian investor who had already bought $125 in Black Star shares wrote to Garvey to express his hopefulness: “Now I am sending thirty-five dollars for seven more shares. You might think I have money, but the truth, as I have stated before, is that I have no money now. But if I’m to die of hunger it will be all right because I’m determined to do all that’s in my power to better the conditions of my race.”

  While Du Bois had raised the hopes of the black middle and upper classes that through hard work and education they would soon earn their rightful place at the dinner table, Garvey raised the hopes of the hourly wage earner that there was a place where they would not have to endure the daily contempt and hopelessness heaped upon them by each passing white face. White NAACP board of directors member Mary White Ovington captured Garvey’s dynamic allure when she said, “Garvey was the first Negro in the United States to capture the imagination of the masses…. The sweeper of the subway, the elevator boy eternally carrying fat office men and perky girls up and down a shaft, knew that when night came he might march with the African army and bear a wonderful banner to be raised some day in a distant and beautiful land.”

  But it was not to be. For Garvey’s followers, the distant land would remain distant.

  Garvey’s famous quote, “Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm,” became prophetic for his own troubles. Garvey’s Black Star Line did indeed buy ships, but they were mostly in poor condition. One blew a boiler and had to be towed, and another sank. Mismanagement, corrupt crews, and infiltration by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, and even the possibility of sabotage by rivals or government agents, brought the collapse of Black Star in 1922, after only three years of operation. Though the all-black crews and captains had made trips to the West Indies, none had gone to Africa. Worse, the Liberian government, which had at first been supportive of the UNIA’s plans to build schools, roads, and businesses as a first step for the resettlement of Garvey’s followers, withdrew its support in the 1920s under pressure from European business interests. Even in the United States, some of Garvey’s supporters began to withdraw as he aligned himself with the KKK and other racist organizations to embrace separatism of the races. Defiantly, Garvey proclaimed that if one had to choose between the Klan and the “National Association for the Advancement of ‘Certain’ People, give me the Klan for their honesty of purpose toward the Negro.” Du Bois and other black leaders responded with a “Garvey Must Go” campaign, which did much to undercut Garvey’s credibility, if not among his loyal core, then among some of the sympathetic middle class that had previously given him financial support.

  Finally, Garvey was convicted of mail fraud because his Black Star Line stock brochure featured a photo of a ship he did not own, though he was in negotiations to purchase it. Others were also charged, but only Garvey was found guilty. In 1925, he was sentenced to five years in Atlanta Federal Prison. Garvey’s supporters launched a campaign to appeal to President Calvin Coolidge to commute the sentence, arguing that it was politically motivated. One of those supporters was Malcolm X’s Baptist minister father, Earl Little. Years later, Malcolm X recalled his father’s efforts on Garvey’s behalf: “The image that made me proudest was his crusading and militant campaigning with the words of Marcus Garvey…. It was only me that he sometimes took with him to the Garvey UNIA meetings which he held quietly in different people’s homes.” After two years, President Coolidge commuted the sentence. Because Garvey was not a U.S. citizen and had been convicted of a felony, he was deported back to Jamaica. When he arrived in Kingston in 1927, a large crowd of supporters greeted him at the docks and then marched with him to his local UNIA headquarters.

  The Harlem branch of the UNIA began in a bleak basement with Garvey, his wife Amy Jacques Garvey, and seventeen loyal members. A few years later, through sheer force of his vision, charisma, and willpower, he claimed 4 million members worldwide (though most authorities agree that number is greatly exaggerated). Although his affectations—gaudy uniforms, giving himself the title “Provisional President of Africa”—caused the Talented Tenth to ridicule him, there was no doubt he was a true folk hero to many of the rest of the black population. This was the man who, after all, had amassed one hundred thousand blacks to parade through Harlem under his distinctive UNIA flag. The NAACP couldn’t claim such an accomplishment.

  Although Garvey remained active in politics, he moved to England in 1935, where he spent the last five years of his life, dying at the age of fifty-three. The breadth and depth of his influence can be seen in the many buildings, schools, colleges, and highways that bear his name throughout Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States. The red, black, and green flag he designed for the UNIA is now used as the Black Liberation Flag. Those who attended UNIA meetings include a wide variety of world-shakers, including Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam; Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, who while a seaman in his youth had briefly lived in New York; and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, who attended meetings while a student in New York and, in homage to Garvey, named Ghana’s shipping company the Black Star Line.

  In 1980, a bust of Garvey was presented at the Washington,
D.C., Organization of American States’ Hall of Heroes. His remains are kept in the Marcus Garvey National Shrine in Jamaica, where he is considered the “Father of Jamaican Independence” as well as Jamaica’s first national hero. His face adorns the Jamaican half-dollar. Although Garvey did not endorse the Rastafarian movement, its followers in Jamaica believe Garvey to be a religious prophet, perhaps even the reincarnation of John the Baptist, which is why he is the topic of much reggae music.

  Garvey did not see himself as part of the in-crowd that celebrated itself with the lofty term Harlem Renaissance, yet he certainly embodied the attributes that the Renaissance promoted. He was self-reliant, self-motivated, and a charismatic speaker who led what one historian called “the largest, most widespread, most powerful, and most influential movement among people of African descent in world history.”

  Locke of Ages: Alain Locke Introduces The New Negro to the World

  The Talented Tenth were handed their bible and mission statement in one handy volume, The New Negro, produced by one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most important figures (despite that he never actually lived in Harlem). Washington-based Alain LeRoy Locke (1886–1954) is credited as being the main interpreter of the Harlem Renaissance, and the man most responsible for shaping the arts that came out of that era. Because of his remarkable academic, literary, and cultural achievements, Locke not only symbolized the Talented Tenth, but became a mentor to many of the other Talented Tenth writers and artists of Harlem.

  Born in Philadelphia, Locke was raised in a house that emphasized education. Locke’s parents were both teachers and his father had a law degree from Harvard University. This might explain Locke’s admonishment to his own students that “the highest intellectual duty is the duty to be cultured.” And cultured he became, perhaps more so than any other figure in the Renaissance. In 1907, Locke graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University with a degree in philosophy. Locke then became the first African-American Rhodes Scholar, allowing him to attend Oxford University in England, where he studied philosophy, Greek, and literature. After Oxford, he attended the University of Berlin from 1910 to 1911, earning an advanced degree in philosophy. These seven years of university study in America and Europe established an international perspective in Locke that he would later use in his own writings to put the accomplishments of black artists in a larger context of world history.

  But before that could happen, Locke needed a job. Though he returned from Europe in 1912 with the sort of education and accomplishments that any university would ordinarily clamor for, his being black limited his options. Before accepting a teaching position at Howard University, Locke decided to take a personal tour of the South to experience firsthand the blatant and pervasive discrimination that he’d so far mostly experienced in passive and subtle ways. His trip confirmed in him a belief that the only way blacks could be treated as equals by whites was to demonstrate significant intellectual abilities and accomplishments. When he started teaching at Howard University, that’s exactly what he set about to do, struggling to introduce African-American studies into the curriculum. The battle lasted for years, ending in victory only when the white president of the school was replaced by a black president. Locke later earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard, but remained a professor at Howard until he retired in 1953, one year before his death. It was during a three-year leave of absence from Howard that Locke became a predominant force in the Harlem Renaissance.

  Despite being based at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Locke enjoyed frequent trips to Harlem, where he made a point to become acquainted with many of the prominent figures in Harlem’s civil rights and cultural movements, especially W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson. His association with Johnson led to his becoming involved with the National Urban League’s prestigious magazine, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, which Johnson edited. Locke was even the master of ceremonies at the lavish 1924 dinner at New York City’s Civic Club that was meant to introduce black writers to the many white publishers and magazine editors in attendance. The plan worked: as a result of the dinner party Countee Cullen’s poems were published in Harper’s magazine, and an agreement was made for a special edition of the respected sociology and political magazine Survey Graphic to be devoted to the “New Negro.” Though the term New Negro had sporadically been used in the late 1890s, it became the adopted term of the Harlem Renaissance to describe its new renaissance man.

  Some historians point to this March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, which Locke titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” as the official start of the Harlem Renaissance, because this collection of essays, poetry, and fiction captured both the spectrum of issues facing African-Americans as well as the zeitgeist of the movement. This issue was so successful that Locke produced an expanded, book-length edition, titled The New Negro. Published in 1925, The New Negro became the acknowledged bible of the Harlem Renaissance for blacks, and a cultural shot fired over the bow of the ship piloted by the guardians of white American culture. The book was an immediate critical and commercial success—among both blacks and whites. Historian Nathan I. Huggins, in his definitive work The Harlem Renaissance (1971) describes the thirty-nine-year-old Locke’s contribution: “Locke’s editing of and contribution to this volume and his energetic championing of the intellectual achievement of Negroes in the 1920s made him the father of the New Negro and the so-called Harlem Renaissance.”

  Locke lacked both Du Bois’s practical editing experience and credentials as an activist in civil rights politics. Where Du Bois had left academia to toil in the ruthless fields of race relations, Locke had remained the removed intellect, observing from a distance. Du Bois had already written three influential books by the time he was Locke’s age, but Locke had remained content to study and teach. However, now that Locke was given this opportunity to join in the fight, he did do so with all the gusto and dedication he could muster. The result was a volume designed to include a representative group of black and white intellectuals, male and female, young and old—yet who did not veer too far to the left toward more radical attitudes. This exclusion was by choice: The New Negro was specifically aimed to appeal to whites as an introduction to the kind of intellectual depth and literary sophistication that black writers were capable of.

  Locke’s foreword reveals the book’s purpose: “We speak of the offerings of this book embodying the first fruits of the Negro Renaissance.” To many white readers, these “fruits” would be an exotic species never before tasted. The volume included many of the brightest literary, artistic, and intellectual stars of the Harlem firmament: fiction and poetry by Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes; art by Aaron Douglas; essays by Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Charles S. Johnson, Walter White, and Arthur A. Schomburg—and many other leading writers and scholars. The contents avoided provocative attacks on white racism, but did not shy away from a deliberate but measured condemnation. But the book wasn’t just an exposé of the obvious, it was also an effort to put blacks within a historical context of world and American history, to reveal their significant contribution to the past and promise for the future. And that promise for the future rested within the dark hands of the learned New Negro, which Locke describes in the book:

  For generations in the minds of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be “kept down” or “in his place,” or “helped up,” to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden…. [The New Negro] now becomes a conscious contributor and lays aside the status of a beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civilization. The great social gain in this is the releasing of our talented group from the arid fields of controversy and debate to the productive fields of creative expression. The especially cultural recognition they win should in turn prove the
key to that revaluation of the Negro which must precede or accompany any considerable further betterment of race relations…. No one who…views the new scene with its still more abundant promise can be entirely without hope.

  Predictably, controversy followed. Some saw Locke’s selections as elitist, the familiar charge leveled against Du Bois, Johnson, and other self-proclaimed members of the exclusive Talented Tenth. Black journalist George Schuyler, author of an article entitled “The Negro-Art Hokum,” referred to Locke as the “high priest of intellectual snobbocracy.” Perhaps confirming this point is the book’s deliberate snubbing of the considerable influence of Marcus Garvey. Worse, there was animosity among some of those included. Cullen’s poetry style was markedly conservative compared to the more experimental work of Toomer and the jazz style of Hughes. In fact, the following year Hughes would attack Cullen in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” with the claim that Cullen preferred to be known as a poet who happened to be Negro rather than as a Negro poet.

  Locke himself received some of the most brutal criticism from his own contributors. Jean Toomer accused Locke of tricking and misusing him. When Locke, to avoid political fallout, and without consulting Claude McKay, changed the title of his deliberately pointed poem “White House” to the tamer “White Houses,” McKay proclaimed that Locke had “destroyed every vestige of intellectual and fraternal understanding” between them. McKay lamented, “I would much prefer if you dropped me out of your contemptible book.”