The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (25 page)

Most surprising, perhaps, was the Jewish connection with black
nationalism as well as with “assimilationist” institutions. Much has been written about the enormous philanthropic support that Jews gave to the
National Urban League, the NAACP, and
Tuskegee Institute, to say nothing of innumerable black schools, artists, musicians, writers, and future leaders of the “Talented Tenth.” Less well known is the fact that Edward
Blyden had concluded by the end of the nineteenth century that blacks and Jews, allied by divine guidance and “a history almost identical of sorrow and oppression,” were destined to become the spiritual leaders of the world.
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Emphasizing the African origins of
Moses and much of Judaism, Blyden hailed “that marvellous[
sic
] movement called
Zionism,” which so closely resembled the mission of former black slaves to return to their African homeland. Significantly,
Theodore Herzl, the “father” of modern Zionism, affirmed in a utopian novel of 1902 that only a Jew could understand what blacks had endured or wish, having “lived to see the restoration of the Jews,” “to pave the way for the restoration of the Negroes.” For his part, Blyden made a statement that seems astoundingly naive for a man who had learned Arabic and traveled to Egypt, Syria, and Jerusalem:

Marcus Garvey and his followers found somewhat similar inspiration in both the biblical and
Zionist sense of mission, though by Garvey’s time the relations between
Jews and blacks were becoming more strained and complex.
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For
Henrietta Vinton Davis, International Organizer of the
UNIA, Garvey was “the reincarnation of King Solomon.” More frequently he was perceived as the black
Moses who faced even more stupendous obstacles than a hardhearted Pharaoh. Garvey himself noted that “we have been as much enslaved mentally, spiritually and physically as any other race and a fair comparison is the race that Moses led out of
Egyptian bondage.”
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In 1924, Dr.
George Alexander McGuire recalled the “solemn awe” that swept the throngs at New York’s Liberty Hall, four years earlier, when the UNIA ratified its
Declaration of Rights: “It was as though we were standing at the foot of Sinai when the Decalogue was pronounced.”
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Garvey repeatedly compared his tribulations to those of Moses, who endured similar recalcitrance, slander, and backsliding; it was reassuring, at least, to see the intrinsic parallels between the proposed liberation of Africa and the Israelites’ recovery of their Promised Land.

As Garvey became more radical in his demands for black power, he was no less attuned to the Zionist and Irish struggles for national independence. In 1919, he admonished blacks to be as determined to reclaim Africa and found a government there as modern Jews had been to recover
Palestine. The alternative—to “live everlastingly under the domination of a white man…[to] bequeath to my children white overlordship”—would be a fate worse than death. UNIA speakers referred frequently to the sufferings of Jews who had been carried away into captivity, who had been deprived in their Diaspora of statehood and respect, and who had finally learned that freedom was inseparable from power. For hundreds of years, Garvey pointed out, blacks had cried out for liberty, justice, and equal opportunities. Their appeals had been no more successful than those of the Jews. Now, at last, the Negro “refuses to admit that he is a cringing sycophant.” The time had arrived for blacks to found their own factories, banks, and steamship lines that would link together the colored peoples of the world.

These objectives were related to Garvey’s remarkable interpretation of Jewish achievements, an interpretation that combined anti-Semitic mythology with more than a touch of admiration. In a speech in 1921 Garvey informed his listeners that for centuries Jews had been a despised race in Europe, “buffeted worse than the Southern Negro today.” Even in the United States “it was a disgrace to be a Jew.” “What did the Jews do?” Garvey asked. They were too few in number to carry out any physical conquest. Therefore, they had devised a master plan for the financial conquest of the world. Jewish financiers had brought on the
First World War, presumably as a profit-making venture, and had then abruptly stopped the war when they were promised the possession of
Palestine. In
Russia, where pogroms had slaughtered millions of Jews,
Trotsky and the financiers had engineered a revolution that had destroyed the Czar and put a Jew in command. “The Jew has gone back to Palestine,” Garvey concluded, “and the Jew it is that has the world in the palm of his hand.” While much of this sounded like Henry Ford and other contemporary anti-Semites, Garvey conveyed no sense of outrage. On the contrary, he was exhorting his followers to learn from the Jewish example. Given their overwhelming numbers, blacks did not need to think in terms of financial conquest. They already had the power needed for the physical conquest of Africa. And since Jews in Palestine had already enhanced the prestige and opportunities for Jews in England, one could be assured that self-governing blacks in Africa would help to liberate blacks in all parts of the world.
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This particular speech omits the sense of prophetic fulfillment that gave Garveyism much of its appeal. As Dr.
McGuire put it, “After ages of almost forlorn hope the Jews are rejoicing in the triumphs of
Zionism and the repossession of the land of their forefathers. Their fullness of time has come. So will ours, for, in the Eternal Volume of Truth it is predicted that ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt.’ ”
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McGuire reported that when Garvey was convicted of mail fraud, he delivered the simple, reverberating sentence: “Gentlemen of the jury, this is a spiritual movement.” McGuire added, “the Jews made of Zionism a spiritual movement and today the goal is achieved, the fact accomplished. Africanism must become a universal spiritual movement among Negroes.” In actuality, when Garvey heard the jury’s verdict, he cursed “the Jews” and shouted anti-Semitic remarks that may have affected the sentence delivered by Judge
Julian W. Mack, a
Jew who had been praised by a black journalist and friend of Garvey’s as a model of understanding and fairness.
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By any material measurement, Garveyism was an even more disastrous failure than the earlier colonization movement. The
Black Star Line and Negro Factories Corporation quickly sank in a sea of incompetence and corruption. Although Garvey attracted thousands of West Indian immigrants, who were derisively called “the black Jews of Harlem” because of their clannishness, enterprise, and business skills, many American blacks were repelled by his megalomania, obsession with racial purity, and contempt for African American culture. Far from unifying the American black community, his movement spawned dissent and became an easy target for infiltration by the federal government’s
Bureau of Investigation. The
Liberian elite, though initially interested in attracting productive settlements in the
Cape Palmas region, soon became alarmed by the prospect of losing its own monopoly of power and acquiring militants bent on expelling Britain,
France,
Belgium, and other colonial nations from Africa. Victimized and betrayed by some of his followers, Garvey was finally imprisoned, pardoned, and deported to
Jamaica. But regardless of the size of his following and the practicability of his program, which are still in dispute, Garvey became a hero and a powerful symbol in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.
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Without considering tributes by such figures as
Kwame Nkrumah,
Jomo Kenyatta,
Norman Manley,
Elijah Mohammed, and
Malcolm X, it is sufficient to turn to a less likely leader. In 1965,
Martin Luther King Jr. laid a wreath at Garvey’s shrine in
Kingston, Jamaica. Before an audience of some two thousand, King summed up Garvey’s meaning for nonseparatist blacks: “Garvey was the first man of color in the history of the United States to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny and make the Negro feel he was somebody.”
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This, we should recall, was the professed goal of Liberia’s founders—although Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, to say nothing of Malcolm X and the
Black Power movement, were precisely what the ACS wanted to prevent. In pre–Civil War America, no one could foresee the circuitous route by which the example of Liberia would help to nourish black nationalism, which would nourish, in its turn, the domestic demand for equal civil rights.

How do these reflections affect our evaluation of the colonization
movement? No doubt early
colonizationists of both races would feel vindicated if we allowed them a
selective
glimpse of the past century and a half: a panorama that included the fratricidal
Civil War, in which President Lincoln long supported various colonizationist plans and in which some 200,000 black soldiers and sailors helped to ensure a Union victory;
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the crushed hopes of
Reconstruction; the suffering inflicted by the
Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow; the
lynching between 1889 and 1946 of nearly four thousand blacks; the growth of festering urban ghettos; the persistence of white
racism and black deprivation; the report that in 1980, a half century after the predicted termination of the most gradual emigration plans, blacks constituted 12 percent of the nation’s population but 45 percent of the inmates of state and federal prisons; that in family income blacks ranked thirteenth out of fourteen American ethnic groups, earning on average 60 percent of the
income of whites, 50 percent of the income of Asian-
Indians, and only 46 percent of the income of
Japanese-Americans; but that in 2012 Americans would reelect a black president.
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With respect to the intractability of prejudice and racial conflict, the colonizationists were clearly better prognosticators than the abolitionists. Edward
Blyden and
Marcus Garvey acknowledged this point. The glaring defect in the colonizationist ideology was the refusal to recognize the vital contributions that blacks had made and would continue to make to American civilization.
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Even the best-intentioned white reformers and missionaries remained obstinately blind to the fact that from the beginnings of American history, the lives of blacks and whites had been intertwined on the most complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological levels.
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America, that mythic amalgam of hope, abstract principles, and mission, was as much black as white.

This reasoning brings us at last to the true and insidious meaning of the colonization movement, which was never dependent on the number of blacks shipped off to
Liberia. It was sufficient to use philanthropic language to expatriate the entire race, to wall blacks off as an extraneous and dangerous presence that someday, somehow would disappear and no longer affront white vision. Psychologically and ritualistically, the ACS “deported” blacks while affirming their capacity to flourish in a distant, tropical clime. This strategy, which simply assumed new forms in the twentieth century, is deceptive precisely because it is seldom cynical and has often been combined with genuine goodwill.

For example, in his annual message to Congress in 1862, Lincoln described his unsuccessful efforts to find sites for voluntary black
colonization in which emigrants would be protected “in all the rights of freemen” and ensured conditions “which shall be equal, just, and humane.”
Liberia and
Haiti, Lincoln observed, are “the only countries to which colonists of
African descent from here, could go with certainty of being received and adopted as citizens.” Unfortunately, the president added, few of the blacks contemplating emigration were willing to go to either Liberia or Haiti. For Lincoln, a man of goodwill who thought he knew the blacks’ best interest, the problem seemed insoluble. While historians debate the timing of Lincoln’s abandonment of colonization,
Eric Foner convincingly argues that it occurred by mid-1864, well after his
Emancipation Proclamation.
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As the war progressed, Lincoln ultimately abandoned colonization and saw the necessity of combining racial coexistence with equal protection of the law. Two months before Lincoln was killed, William
Henry Channing, the abolitionist chaplain of the House of Representatives, invited Henry Highland Garnet to deliver a sermon to Congress commemorating the recent congressional passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment, which Lincoln had strongly supported. Garnet, who had been born a slave and had in 1843 exhorted America’s slaves to rebel, who had become an expatriate in Jamaica and had then become an ardent supporter of the Union cause, was the first black to address Congress.
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Taking as his text the twenty-third verse of St. Matthew, Garnet first denounced the modern scribes and Pharisees who ruled the state. Professing to believe in principles of righteousness passed down from
Moses,
Socrates,
Plato, the early church fathers, the
Magna Carta, and the
Declaration of Independence, America’s leaders had continued to defend or tolerate an institution that embodied the “concentrated essence of all conceivable wickedness,” “snatching man from the high place to which he was lifted by the hand of God, and dragging him down to the level of the brute creation, where he is made to be the companion of the horse and the fellow of the ox.” If slavery had finally been destroyed merely from necessity, in the course of war, as Garnet acknowledged, he exhorted Congress to enfranchise every class “at the dictation of justice. Then we shall have a
Constitution that shall be reverenced by all.”
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