Honoring Garvey For the Right Reasons
[Reprinted from Issues & Views Summer 1997]
Well, this is ironic. There is a movement afoot, among some blacks, to have
the U.S. Congress declare Marcus Garvey "innocent of the charges brought
against him by the U.S. Government." This is the wording of a Resolution
(H.R. 216) now pending in Congress. Irony lies in the fact that Garvey's
tribulations probably would never have escalated to the degree that they did
were it not for the persistent, negative efforts of blacks themselves. Yet to
read this Resolution, you would think that the circumstances that ultimately
drove him from the country were all the white man's doing.
Garvey came to the United States from Jamaica in 1916, eager to meet with
and learn from Booker T. Washington, whom he considered his most important
mentor. The two had carried on a correspondence and were soulmates in their
belief that industry leading to wealth accumulation was the key to black
independence. Unfortunately, Washington died just four months prior to Garvey's
arrival, and the two never met.
It is hard to describe briefly all that Garvey accomplished because so much
of what he left behind lay in intangible precepts that eventually touched
millions. The major vehicle he founded was the Universal Negro Improvement
Association. Unique in itself, UNIA was a sort of mass fraternal organization
that promoted commerce and industry among blacks, while providing practical
instruction and skills, and advocating responsible, moral behavior. (Its goals
were among the noblest: "To establish educational and industrial colleges
for the further education and culture of our boys and girls; To conduct a
worldwide commercial and industrial intercourse; To rescue the fallen from the
pit of infamy and vice.")
At the height of its influence, UNIA had branches in the United States, West
Indies, Central America and Africa. Its membership numbered in the millions.
Members of UNIA were motivated by pride of race and a commitment to work for
the uplift of blacks around the world. Another project, the Negro Factories
Corporation, a chain of businesses in Harlem, was formed with the hope of
making UNIA a self-reliant entity.
But it was the Black Star Steamship Corporation that embodied Garvey's
greatest hopes. And it was this enterprise that would bring about his financial
downfall. The story of the shipping line, through which he had grandiose plans
to unite the world's black populations via trade between the United States,
Caribbean and Africa, is a story of monumental mismanagement. Its failure was
inevitable, mainly due to Garvey's poor choice of associates and his misguided
business policies that were more idealistic than practical.
By the 1920s, Garvey had many enemies, and had wound up on every left-wing
hit list. He had to contend with federal agencies that were investigating the
books of his failing shipping line. He had to counter a rising tide of black
elites, for whom the government was not working fast enough in its prosecution
of him. Fearful of Garvey's positions against integration, these blacks urged
the Attorney General to "speedily push the government's case against
Marcus Garvey," whom they referred to as the leader of a "vicious
movement." Among Garvey's staunchest and most relentless enemies was the
American Communist Party. For all the obvious reasons, both black and white
Party members belligerently attacked his crusade to make capitalists of the
black masses.
Garvey thought like a capitalist and taught blacks to do so. He once asked,
"Why should not Africa give to the world its black Rockefeller, Carnegie
and Henry Ford?" Imagine how the mention of such "capitalist
pigs" rankled Communist sensibilities. Imagine this leader of the largest
mass movement of blacks ever known teaching his followers that "Communism
robs the individual of his personal initiative and ambition or the result
thereof," and claiming that capitalism was "necessary to the progress
of the world." And calling the enemies of capitalism "enemies of
human advancement."
No group worked harder to recruit American blacks than the Communist Party.
Throughout the 1920s, the Communists did all they could to capture Garvey
disciples and undermine his influence. Historian Harold Cruse calls Garvey's
movement "the biggest stumbling block to Communist penetration into Negro
life." And adds that this was "a fact that the Communists never
forgot."
Between the black elites (mainly in the NAACP), who sought to scare whites
with a distorted picture of Garvey's mission, government agencies nipping at
his heels, a labor movement whose leaders resented Garvey's rejection of trade
unionism, and a Communist Party that worked overtime sending its black flunkies
into his organizations to sabotage his efforts--Garvey didn't stand a chance.
After being convicted of mail fraud and income tax evasion and having his
prison sentence commuted by President Coolidge, Garvey was deported from the
country in 1927.
[The story of how certain blacks of this period were putty in the hands of
the country's white Communists, primarily due to these blacks' hungering after
integration, is a story waiting to be told. One of the best cultural histories
of these years is Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A
Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership.]
Those in the mainstream who know about Garvey at all, know only of his call
for blacks to return to Africa or of a questionable history of the African past
that is attributed to him. Garvey did, indeed, mix truth with legend in his
depictions of a glorious ancient Africa. He was no historian, but he believed
that the disillusioned masses could best be motivated to achieve in the here
and now, if they could look back with pride upon a glorious Continent filled
with ancestral heroes. It was not Garvey's fault if, years later, people
calling themselves "scholars" chose to pick up on the more fanciful
aspects of his musings, embellishing further his myths and parables, in order
to weave their strange "Afrocentric" curricula.
Garvey should be honored for the constructive role he played in inspiring a
multitude of ordinary blacks to find their own bootstraps and work diligently
to uplift their lives and become all-around good citizens. He should be honored
especially by the descendants of those who worked so hard to defame and destroy
him.
See also
Without Commerce and Industry, The People Perish
Copyright 1997 © Issues & Views
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