1920 (14 page)

But just as the Ku Klux Klan was to be taken seriously for its violence, Garvey and the UNIA were to be taken seriously for both their persistence and their ability to raise money. Whether the Klan contributed or not, Garvey gave speech after speech in support of the Black Star Line, collecting thousands of dollars from African-American families who could barely afford contributions of any denomination but were determined to show their support. And, if possible, to sail back to Africa, their native land, once the steamship line became a reality.

Garvey also sought money for his Negro Factories Corporation, “to encourage black economic independence.”

Slowly but surely his ideas began to catch on. The end of segregation, the beginning of self-rule—it sounded better and better to African-Americans weary of their mistreatment. Self-reliance was, in fact, the theme of one of Garvey's best-known poems, “Have Faith in Self.”

Today I made myself in life anew,

By going to the royal fount of truth,

And searching for the secret of the few

Whose goal in life and aim is joy forsooth.

I found at last the friend and counselor

That taught me all that in life I should know;

It is the soul, the sovereign chancellor,

The guide and keeper of the good you sow.

I am advised—“Go ye, have faith in self,

And seek once more the guide that lives in you. …”

IN NEW YORK, A UNIA
rally attracted 25,000 men and women eager to learn of Garvey's plans to weigh anchor. It was a large turnout, larger than expected, and J. Edgar Hoover didn't like it. Already behaving as if he were the head of the BOI, which he would be before long, he had several times in the past sent agents to listen to Garvey and observe those in attendance. Although he could not publicly admit it, Hoover, along with the Klan, favored the whitest America possible, and he probably would have invested in the Black Star Line himself if he could. He was certainly in favor of the idea behind it.

Still, he was troubled by Garvey, saw him as a rabble-rouser, and feared him for his ability to attract large crowds of black people. J. Edgar Hoover did not like large crowds of people with dark skin, especially when they were listening to a lecturer who whipped up their passions and raised the energy level as they slapped hands with one another in brotherhood and shouted out “Amens!” They might be peaceful now, and they were just that on their night in New York—but who knew what would happen in the future, what those crowds might do if they were all worked up, agitated and inflamed, for some other reason? As Hoover was well aware, they had reasons aplenty for dissatisfaction.

“Garvey is a West Indian Negro,” he jotted down in a memo,

who [has] been particularly active among the radical elements in New York City agitating the Negro movement. Unfortunately, however, he has not as yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an undesirable alien, from the view of deportation. It occurs to me, however … that there might be some proceeding against him for fraud in connection with his Black Star Line propaganda.

As it turned out, there was. Or so ruled the judge and jury that heard the case Hoover brought against Garvey. The defendant was indicted on charges of mail fraud for selling stock in the Black Star Line after it had gone bankrupt. It might have been true; then again, the conviction might have been the result of Hoover's bigotry as much as Garvey's illegal behavior. Historians debate the charge even to the present.

Nonetheless, Garvey was sentenced to five years in prison, and he did not take the verdict with equanimity.

“Mr. Garvey immediately burst into a storm of rage,” reported the
Kansas City Call
. “An undignified tirade of foul abuse and low language followed,” according to [socialist] Hubert Harrison, in which “both judge and district attorney [were described] as ‘damned dirty Jews.'” And the
Call
painted a final pitiful picture of the convicted UNIA leader “escorted to the elevator … by eighteen marshals through a crowd of sobbing sympathizers.”

Eventually it was decided that Garvey's sentence would be reduced to three years, but only if he could provide $15,000 for bail. It was money he did not have, had never had—but Amy Jacques would not be dissuaded. Perhaps the most supportive of Garvey's supporters, she hectored some of her friends and associates, pleaded with others, threatened still more, and within a few weeks had raised the entire amount in either cash or promissory notes.

The money was handed over to authorities and Garvey was free. But not happy. He began a speaking tour of the country on which he spoke more venomously than ever about the treatment of blacks in the United States. Among those who cheered him on were men and women whom he had rescued from poverty by providing them jobs with the UNIA. Among those who didn't were the tyrannical Hoover and members of the almost comically corrupt Harding administration. For them, it was all too much. Garvey had to be silenced.

In fact, he was deported. Speaking out as angrily as he had when first sentenced, Garvey continued to insist on his innocence, to fume at such treatment for a President-General. But his words would soon be heard no more.

Garvey's voyage back to his homeland of Jamaica, according to biographer Grant, was a sad occasion for more than just the deportee. Its implications were much greater.

Garvey's and the Black Star Line's failure was every aspiring black American's failure. Months, sometimes years later, it produced a dull referred pain, whose source was not always immediately obvious, but was reminiscent of so many aches that had gone before. James Saunders Redding recalled how the collapse of the Brown and Stevens Bank—“the richest and safest Negro bank in the world”—in which the Black Star Line had some deposits brought his father to the verge of tears “not because he lost money in that disastrous collapse—he didn't—but because that failure cast dark shadows over the prospects of a self-sustaining Negro culture.”

Garvey stayed in Jamaica for a few years, then took up residence in London, where he died in 1940. He suffered two strokes, at least one of which came, supposedly, after reading an obituary of himself that was, in addition to being slightly premature, full of mistakes and highly critical of his life's work. His body was taken back to Jamaica for burial and enshrinement.

In the United States, it was not an especially sad occasion for the “black intelligentsia,” which, according to historian Page Smith, had always been embarrassed by Garvey's “spectacular antics—words big with bombast, colorful robes, Anglo-Saxon titles of nobility to his staff (Sir William Ferris, K.C.O.N., for instance, was his editor, and Lady Henrietta Vinton Davis, his international organizer); his steam-roller-like mass meetings and parades and lamentable business ventures.”

His work, however, would be more appreciated, and his excesses overlooked, as time went on. Schools in a number of countries, including the United States, have been named after him, as have numerous streets and public parks. In 1965, Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited his shrine in Jamaica, with Dr. King, who would be compared to Garvey as an orator, later receiving the first Marcus Garvey Prize for Human Rights.

In 2011, the Obama administration was petitioned to pardon Garvey for his mail-fraud conviction. The decision was announced at a press conference. The administration had refused, on the grounds that, as a matter of policy, it did not offer pardons posthumously. Obama was not asked for an opinion of Garvey's life and times, nor did he volunteer one. The next reporter to ask a question changed the subject.

DESPITE THEIR BEING CLOSE FRIENDS,
Carter G. Woodson was as different from Marcus Garvey as it was possible for one person to be from another. He did not hatch unrealistically appealing plans like the Black Star Line. He did not dress outrageously or speak with overly practiced elocution; in fact, on those rare occasions when he addressed public forums, his voice was so soft that it was hard to hear at times. Despite his color, and the influence that would eventually be his among learned African-Americans, he never seemed a danger to the white establishment, was never the subject of a memo by J. Edgar Hoover; Woodson was too earnest and scholarly to attract large groups of followers. But his imprint, if not his name, has long outlived him, and after all these years his legacy remains a surprisingly important part of the black experience in the United States today. If only anyone knew.

Woodson, born in Virginia in 1875, is the first American of slave parentage to have earned a Ph.D. in the United States. He may, in fact, be the only one. Neither of his parents could read or write, but they managed to influence their boy's academic yearnings nonetheless—all the more, probably, for they could not bear the thought of their son suffering through their own deficiencies and being fated to similar employment. His father, Woodson would one day relate, insisted that “learning to accept insult, to compromise on principle, to mislead your fellow man, or to betray your people, is to lose your soul.”

Woodson studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and afterward received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from Harvard. By that time, he was well on his way to a conclusion that would influence his entire career: that history “was not the mere gathering of facts. The object of historical study is to arrive at a reasonable interpretation of the facts. History is more than political and military records of peoples and nations. It must include some description of the social conditions of the period being studied.”

The social conditions of 1920 were difficult, painful, even de-humanizing for African-Americans. Yet Woodson, with his training in the great sweep of history, its emphasis on the dispassionate overview rather than the heat of the moment, was able to look at those conditions with an almost detached equanimity. It was not, in many cases, what his fellow blacks were hoping for from him. As far as they were concerned, Woodson contemplated the period with a certain passivity, and much too forgivingly. Even as a young man, he had concluded that racial prejudice “is merely the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind.” It was hardly the talk of a firebrand.

But if Woodson had truly been a passive man, he would not have been able to change that perception. Change it, though, he did—not entirely, but more, it seemed, than any one man possibly could.

Finished with his formal schooling, Woodson began his life's work by forming the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (although the organization still exists, the “Negro” has since been changed to “African American,” without a hyphen). After a few years, the Association started to publish an immediately influential magazine called
The Journal of Negro History
, which concentrated not on polemics but profiles, bringing to life notable black figures of the past and calling attention to their contributions to men and women of both races. In addition, Woodson founded the Associated Publishers, the first African-American publishing company in the United States. Headquartered in a row house in Washington, D.C., the first two stories served as office space and printing facilities. The third floor was where Woodson lived. It was all he could afford at the time, but he did not mind. His life and work were one; there was no reason for them not to share the same abode.

In addition to publishing the magazine, he was able to continue working “on two scholarly projects he had begun the year before: the research on free blacks in the antebellum period and a study of blacks during Reconstruction.” It is no wonder that despite his relative youth, Woodson was by 1920, at the age of forty-five, known as “the Father of Black History.” By those who know his work, he continues to be so regarded today.

It sounds like achievement enough for one man. But there was more. Woodson was also an author, and black self-esteem was a principal theme of his two texts,
The History of the Negro Church
and
The Mis-Education of the Negro
, books that continue to be widely read in academic circles. The latter, in fact, is a particular favorite of Garvey's UNIA, which still exists, and to this day urges African-Americans to study the Woodson volume, finding it “a key to our freedom as a people.” Another of his books,
The Negro in Our History
, had sold 90,000 copies by 1966, by which time it had been published in eleven editions.

Woodson worked closely with schools—those schools that would have him, at least—in emphasizing the historical importance of the black man and woman to our nation's founding and growth. He felt certain that, if he could only carve out a place for the achievements of African-Americans in the curricula of a few institutions, more would surely follow. He could not have imagined the extent of that following. Today, Black Studies, or African-American Studies, is a recognized major in almost every college and university in the United States. No man is more responsible than Carter G. Woodson.

Further, and perhaps of equal importance, Woodson was also the guiding force behind “Negro History Week,” the second week in February, which he chose because within those seven days both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass had been born. According to a brief publication of the NAACP, of which he was a member, “Dr. Woodson often said that he hoped the time would come when Negro History Week would be unnecessary; when all Americans would willingly recognize the contributions of Black Americans as a legitimate and integral part of the history of this country.”

That time has not yet come. But one cannot help concluding that Woodson would have taken some degree of pleasure in knowing that, beginning in 1976, America's bicentennial year, all of February became Black History
Month
—and not only in the United States, but in the United Kingdom and Canada as well.