Marcus Garvey founded
the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) which to propose ideals and a
philosophy for Negro self-reliance and African redemption in 1914. In 1917 Garvey along with a handful of compatriots
organized the Harlem chapter of the UNIA. This would later become the parent body of the
revamped UNIA. UNIA grew rapidly into a
mass movement at the end of World War I and with dozens of chapters worldwide
it became the largest and the most influential black organization of its time. UNIA's “First International Convention of the
Negro Peoples of the World” opened in Liberty Hall in New York on August 1,
1920. Approximately two thousand
delegates from twenty-two countries were present, representing approximately three
million paid members. UNIA grew from 100
paid members in 1917 to over three million paid members in 1921 and constituted
the largest U.S.
membership organization led by and for the benefit of African Americans. Did Garvey possess unique talents and skills
of oration and organization that fueled the extraordinary growth of UNIA? A number of historians have attempted to
identify the reason for such growth. It
has been proposed that it was a phenomena of the times; that it satisfied the
need for the community to organize at a macro level in order to address issues
facing all African Americans; or was just one man and his vision and
leadership, specifically Marcus Garvey, “the
right man at the right time in history”?
Black veterans who
returned from WWI hoped to find an American society ready to accept them as
equals. Instead what they found was a
society more violent and intolerant to them than prior to their departure. In the worst period of anti-Black violence in
America,
labeled “Red Summer,” riots and lynchings were abundant from April to November
1919 and claimed hundreds of black lives and left thousands of blacks
homeless. “The Jim Crow laws, lynch
mobs, and the race riots of the nineteen twenties exacerbated the racial
hostility of White Americans towards Black Americans.”[1] “The great hopes of the war years dissolved
into bitter cynicism in the face of the brutal realities of the postwar
situation. It is not surprising that
many blacks sought escape in radicalism or looked for a new leader to provide
relief from the injustices of American life.”[2]
Historians have
acknowledged the postwar period that immediately followed the end of World War
I as a period of transformation from an agrarian society to an urban society. This period coincided with the Progressive
Movement, highlighted by the rise of various mass movements, including the
Women's Trade Union League, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the
National American Woman Suffrage Association, the National Consumers' League, the
second Ku Klux Klan and a vast system of "Americanizing" centers
known as settlement houses. A number of service
organizations were also founded during this period to service the needs and
aspirations of African-Americans, most notably the NAACP in 1909 and fraternal
secret societies on the campuses of historical black colleges between 1906 and
1920. In this climate of hatred and
fear, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded by Marcus
Garvey, presented an organization based on fraternal benefit, racial pride,
mutual improvement of the black community, and cultural self-awareness as an
alternative to political cooperation with the White American
establishment. Garvey was one of many historic
actors involved in the story of UNIA which included W.E.B. Du Bois ((founder of
the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People (NAACP)), A.
Philip Randolph (labor organizer), Hubert Harrison (socialist writer), Calvin
Coolidge (Massachusetts governor, later President of the United States), Eugene
Debs (labor leader and politician), Emma Goldman (anarchist), J. Edgar Hoover
(law enforcement investigator), and A. Mitchell Palmer (attorney general).
The
militant “New Negro Movement” advocated a call for armed self-defense and the
desire to have their political voice heard. Author Hubert Harrison, journalist Cyril
Briggs, and NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois were members of this movement. The most militant member of the “New Negro
Movement” was Marcus Garvey. Garvey’s
speeches and writings which were published daily in three languages in The Negro World advocated
self-improvement and Black liberation. Contributing
to Garvey’s amazing success in the rapid organization of the individuals
sympathetic to his message was his establishment in January, 1918, of The Negro World. “Within a space of a few months The Negro World became one of the
leading Negro weeklies, and as such it proved to be a most effective instrument
for the promulgation of Garvey’s program.”[3]
“The Jamaica-born
Garvey had come to the United States
in March 1916 in order to raise funds to set up an industrial school in Jamaica similar
to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, which he admired.”[4] After traveling through the United States
to raise funds, Garvey inaugurated the New York Division of the UNIA in 1917
with 13 members. “It took a mere three
months for the organization’s dues-paying membership to reach 5,000.”[5] During 1919 and 1920, UNIA enjoyed a
remarkable explosion of growth. “Garvey
traveled extensively throughout the United States and established
branches of the association in most urban centers of Negro population.”[6] In 1919, Garvey was still a fresh voice to
most African-Americans. His ideas
thrilled tens of thousands whenever he spoke.
“Under his leadership UNIA expressed an ideology of black pride and of
black capacity for organization and socio-economic action which, in the United States,
attracted the mass, enthusiastic support of black workers for nearly a decade.”[7] Garvey
said: “Now we have started to speak, and I am only the forerunner of an
awakened Africa that shall never go back to
sleep.”[8] Garvey’s advocacy of racial separatism
appealed to many African-Americans, and the UNIA grew rapidly. “Lynchings and race riots all work to our
advantage by teaching the Negro that we must build a civilization of his own [sic] or forever remain the white man’s
victim,”[9] Garvey
told his supporters. Garvey’s first
speeches were filled with the
flashy rage of his oratory, and fed the
malaise of the Negro Twilight (as real as the Celtic) with his prophecies of
paradise. If they would forget their racial shame and turn it into pride, he
promised a movement on such a scale that the white man would have to bend to
its will. The prize to be wrung,
principally from the white Colonial Powers, was the African continent: there
his race would be able to lift up its head and create a future to match the
splendors of Sheba.[10]
On October 14,
1919 Garvey was the victim of a failed assassination attempt. A man named George Tyler visited Garvey at
his office in Harlem, claiming to have been sent by Manhattan assistant
District Attorney, Edwin Kilroe. Tyler
pulled out a gun and shot Garvey in the right leg and the second shot grazed Garvey’s
head. Tyler was arrested but was reported to have
committed “suicide” outside his jail cell the day after his arrest. Despite Garvey’s injuries, he hastily rearranged
his speaking schedule and booked three engagements immediately after his
hospital discharge. “It was a hugely
transformative moment. From then on,
according to Professor Robert Hill, the curator of Garvey’s papers, the career
of the UNIA leader took on quasi-religious proportions.”[11] Garvey claimed that the assassin’s bullets
were divinely intercepted and that his “mission” was now divinely ordained.[12] Members of the black intellectual circle now wrote
Garvey off as a self-promoter and charlatan who believed his own propaganda. “The most notable of Garvey's rivals, W.E.B.
Du Bois, described him as ‘dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain and very
suspicious.’ ”[13]
Beyond the
propaganda and rhetoric of its charismatic leader, UNIA did appeal to some
fundamental need or psychological need of the urban Black American which would explain
its phenomenal growth in membership. Said
Garvey,
The days of slavery are not gone forever. Slavery is threatened for
every race and nation that remains weak and refuses to organize its strength
for its own protection.[14]
Amy Jacques Garvey, who
posthumously published her husband’s Philosophy
and Opinions of Marcus Garvey in1968, stated that “the UNIA being the first
organization to proclaim self-determination for people of African ancestry it
was in the best position advocate for the disenfranchised and unrepresented
aspirations of Black Americans.”[15] The motto of the organization ‘One God! One Aim! One Destiny!’ may have
been the theme of the first Black Nationalist movement.
Historian
Jeannette Smith-Irvin collected six conversations that offer a unique view of
UNIA from the perspective of some members from its founding years. Collectively, these “griots” have narrated
their experiences regarding the greatest mass movement of Blacks in the world
in her published work, Footsoldiers of
the Universal Negro Improvement Association: Their Own Words (1989). Examples of the attraction of UNIA can be
found in Footsoldiers. Thomas Harvey, who was interviewed by
Smith-Irvin in 1975 and 1975, stated: “When I work for the UNIA I work for me
because the UNIA is about me.”[16]
Harvey
stated that it was also the energy, pageantry, and excitement that attracted
him to UNIA.
He [Garvey] came to
Philadelphia to speak at the old Olympia Theater on Broad Street one Sunday,
and I decided to go down and see what Marcus Garvey looked like. The place was
packed to the rafters, people all in uniforms, parading up and down liked they
were somebody. After a while, someone
got up and shouted, ‘Attention!’ and everybody stood up and this little short
man was striding in with all these men following with Garvey was Chief Justice
James Dorsey from Liberia
and a fellow who was then Commissioner for Pennsylvania. Garvey delivered his message
entitled ‘The World Can Not Disarm.’ I was pretty much sold on Garvey and the
UNIA after that. Several weeks later Garvey was on the front page of The Negro World for a farewell speech he
made before planning to tour the West Indies.[17]
The leaders of UNIA also used the
technology of the times to their advantage to spread their message and
encourage new members. Harvey observed:
We had membership
drives. Members were recruited thought advertisements and through other
members. Members would go out and get someone to come to our meetings or talk
them into joining the UNIA. We used to have something like a narrator at the
meetings, some person who always dealt with the news media, just like a
commentator on the radio. Every Sunday at three o’clock, when the meeting was
opened, we had a person give all the news and tell what was happening around
the World and how it affected Negroes and other people. And a lot of people
used to come just for that.[18]
[1920]
The UNIA carried
itself for a long time mainly on contributions, fundraising drives, and dues.
We established the Black Cross Navigational Trading Company after the Black
Star Line was started. Mr. Garvey would send out executive officers to
different sections of the country and tell them to raise so much money. When
LeVon Sherrill was sent to Detroit, he was told to raise $5,000. When Sherrill
left Detroit he
had raised $10,000.[19]
[1920]
The
interview of John Charles Zampty in 1974 by Smith-Irvin provide insight and offers
a different perspective of African Americans who felt that American society
would never give its minorities equal treatment or equal standing before the
law. UNIA proclaimed self-improvement
and self-reliance rather than accommodation or negotiation with the political
establishment. This attitude far
exceeded the position taken by Booker T. Washington or Garvey’s contempories in
regards to accomidation and cooperation within the larger American
society. Possibly as a result of the
racial violence during the “Red Summer” of 1919, Garvey preached night after
night that African Americans would never be treated as equals without
controlling their own destiny. A UNIA
member recalls that:
Our ideas and
feelings at that time were that the Black man, at some point in his life, had
to begin to lay the foundation for economic salvation and that in so doing he
would be able to let the world know that he has accepted the idea, knowledge,
and wisdom that God helps those who help themselves. The UNIA, at that time,
and even now, has been the most profound, most constructive organization on the
face of the earth, not only among the Black race of the world, but among other
races as well.[20]
There are other
political organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP). Their program has been in existence since 1909, and
I have watched its activities among its officers and members in every area and
I do not think they have accomplished what we have accomplished. I am not in
sympathy with the program of the NAACP. Their program is advocating
integration, and no one – no power on earth or in heaven – can force
integration upon a people unless they themselves are willing to open their
hearts and their minds to accept others. As a result of that, from 1909 to the
present, I do not see any good that the NAACP has done or is doing as far as
their program is concerned.[21]
Garvey’s
philosophy was and is still attractive to the social movements that espouse an
independent, separate and self-reliant objective. In this sense Garvey was a unique social
phenomenon at the turn of the twenty-century. It was different from other black fraternal,
self-improvement societies or religious orders. Garvey aroused the strong passion in African
Americans living in Georgia
as much as those of New York or even in Kenya. This emotion was articulated by a UNIA member
who said, “He [Garvey] made the black man an important person in his immediate
environment. Garvey invented honors and
social distinctions for the black man. He
might be a porter during the day, taking orders from whites, but at night he
was an officer in the Black army when it assembled in Liberty Hall.”[22]
There are however two
monumental examples of Garvey’s failure to use his rhetoric to overcome the
obstacles of racism and barriers to opportunity for African Americans. The Negro Factory Corporation (NFC) and the
Black Star Line (BSL) were two business activities created by the UNIA. “The NFC was patterned after Booker T.
Washington’s National Business League, prescribed to meet all the social and
industrial needs of the black community.”[23] “In principle, the NFC was designed to assist
black cooperatives with technical guidance, organizational skills and initial
monetary capital.”[24] Garvey’s philosophy and opinions quickly demonstrated
that when he spoke of capitalism, he never understood what dictated the
implementation of capital. Garvey was
ultimately unable to accumulate the necessary capital to invest and reinvest in
successful business models. Garvey’s mistaken
position was that race as a whole should dictate all business decisions:
Individualism is largely responsible for our present condition of
affairs. If we buy from our own and
support our own, we can build a place that we own. All we have to do is work together and
co-operate.[25]
To UNIA members, the NFC was to
ensure that the black community, through cooperative activity, “would act as a
repository for black resources, ration profits based on participants’
investments and generate businesses essential to the development of the race.”[26] The initial success of the four NFC industries[27] was
distempered by poor management, theft and lack of acceptable accounting
principles and practices. Within one
year after opening all enterprises they were operating at a huge financial loss
due to mismanagement, theft, and failure to operate in a competitive nature
within the community. Regardless of the
economic failure of these endeavors, Black Harlem was grateful. “Its inhabitants took time off to praise
Garvey’s attempts at self-autonomy and redemption.”[28]
Industrial
enterprises like the UNIA’s were advocated by the late Booker T. Washington,
but the great captain of industry could never make his enterprises obtain in
the North, from which he obtained millions of dollars of support. This failure
was due to Washington’s
advocacy of the return of the Negro to the Southland and live in subjection to
the white man and support him by efficacy in productiveness while the white man
lives in idleness. Marcus Garvey’s
program of race patronage and race industries has obtained in the North because
the movement as, as its goal, the redemption of Africa
and the restoration of the Ethiopian Empire.[29]
The second failure
of UNIA and Garvey was the Black Star Line (BSL). In January 1922 the U.S. government arrested and
charged Garvey with using the U.S. Mail to misrepresent and defraud the public.[30] The BSL was not equipped with sufficient
capital, management or technology to run a shipping line. Garvey did not know anything about ships or
maritime commerce; the BSL vice-president, Jeremiah Certain, was a cigar maker;
the BSL second vice-president, George Tobias, was an elocutionist and reader;
and Green and Johnson, the traffic managers BSL, “were not at all familiar with
the business.”[31] Garvey’s trial ended on June 23, 1923, and
Garvey was sentenced to five years in prison.
After exhausting numerous appeals Garvey began serving his sentence at
the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary on February 8, 1925. Garvey’s sentence was eventually commuted by
President Calvin Coolidge and upon his release in November 1927, Garvey was
deported to Jamaica,
B.W.I. “Though the popularity of the
UNIA diminished greatly following Garvey’s expulsion, he nevertheless remained
committed to his political ideals.”[32]
Hubert Harrison,
a contemporary of Marcus Garvey in the “New Negro Movement,” was highly
critical of Garvey’s egocentric politics and practices and this eventually led
to a break between the two Black nationalists.
Harrison articulated concern regarding
the extravagance of Garvey’s claims of success, Garvey’s ego, and Garvey’s lack
of organizational leadership. Harrison predicted Garvey’s downfall by the conduct of
his stock selling and financial schemes.[33] It seems sad and regrettable that Garvey and
Harrison could not repair their relationship as their goals and aspirations for
the race were identical. “While Harrison
continued to write columns and book reviews for The Negro World into 1922, their political difference grew, and Harrison eventually worked against and sought to develop
political alternatives to Garvey.”[34]
It is clear that
Garvey did strike a fundamentally unique cord in the collective consciousness
of African-Americans. In December 1920 a
leading New York
periodical published the following statement:
The most striking
new figure among American Negroes is Marcus Garvey. His significance lies in
the fact that he embodies and directs a new spirit among Negroes. Whatever may
happen to his grandiose schemes of finance and politics, he is the best point
at which to study what is going on inside the heads of ten million colored
people in the United States.[35]
“The phenomenal
growth of UNIA must be seen against the backdrop of' the urban Negro's
disillusionment following World War I, and their groping for a way out.”[36] It seems apparent that if not Garvey then some
other dynamic figure would have caught the attention of the African-American
community who wanted a leader to articulate their frustrations and anger toward
the lack of legal protection and civil rights.
The instant and phenomenal growth of UNIA was due in part to Garvey’s
use of media and advertising to promote his philosophy of self-determination
and in part to the desire of the African-American community to believe in a
leader who could lead them into the promised land of civil liberties and
economic prosperity, hence Garvey’s nickname, “the Black Moses”. I believe Garvey was “the right man at the right time in history” by his admonition to
his followers, “Up, you mighty race. You
can accomplish what you will.”[37]
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