Marcus Garvey can be credited in America, with linking Blackness to Africa
WAS MARCUS GARVEY GREAT?
Nassau, The Bahamas
Strange as it may seem now, that association with Africa was verboten; as whites had convinced blacks and blacks convinced themselves, that there was nothing of value to and/or in Africa.
Countee Cullen - the American poet who was Black, who moved me most, who was the high school teacher of James Baldwin and married to WEB Dubois’ daughter - wrote “what is Africa to me/Spicy grove, cinnamon tree/what is Africa to me?” (Derek Walcott - the St Lucian Nobel Laureate poet - also wondered about the conundrums of a far distant Africa and the alien beloved tongue in which he wrote now. In “A Far Cry From Africa” (a double entendre titling), he wrote: “The gorilla wrestles with the superman/I who am poisoned with the blood of both/Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?/I who have cursed/The drunken officer of British rule, how choose/Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?”
This in many ways was the more enlightened, but not the general sentiment.
It wasn’t until in the Harlem Renaissance - 1920, the Benin Bronzes were shown and Alain Locke - father of the Harlem Renaissance - posited the cultural history of Africa in his “Essays on Value”, which lead Blacks to take a second look eventually. Then came the structural decolonising/independence movements after 1950, which quickened the rise of Africa in America; even and especially amongst Blacks…including in the Caribbean.
Garvey initiated that in the 1920 with his Universal Negro Improvement Association and his philosophy of Pan-Africanism, which argued for the intellectual and cultural plentitude of Africa.
Garvey was quite entrepreneurial and established his own black Shipping Company: Black Star Line…with an unthinkable self-confidence, which was mimicked by persons such as Jack Johnson, the Black heavyweight champion boxer.
In 1922, Garvey was charged and convicted of wire fraud, but it was not for defrauding schemes of any sort. It involved the selling of shares in his shipping company…and it is agreed by most scholars that the charges were used to silence him.
Joe Kennedy at the time was engaged in actual fraud and opium dealing…and yet saw no pause in his freedom. Garvey’s sentence was commuted by President Andrew Jackson and in 1927, President Calvin Coolidge ordered Garvey deported to Jamaica.
Two points of note:
1. Garvey’s main opposition in America was not whites, but Blacks like A. Philip Randolph and Walter Wilkins. They were elite blacks who had gotten inroads with whites. They felt that Garvey - a bit of a show off was compromising their status, speaking about this hated Africa, which they regarded as backwards. They appealed to the Attorney General to investigate Garvey; who as a bit of a ‘dandy’, which didn’t help because of his flamboyance. These are the same Blacks who rail-roaded Paul Roberson and who opposed Dr. Martin Luther King jr. who - from 1963 until his death - was the most hated Black man in America for his stance on the Vietnam War and for planning the “Poor People’s March on Washington”.
2. Marcus Garvey never set foot on the African continent. Why? Because before 1950, the countries were all colonies and no colonial government would allow his entry, which would have been a challenge to their authority.
Even in dress Garvey was audacious: there is a rich history to the uniform he wore…but in the simplest terms, he mimicked W.E.B. Dubois, who himself mimicked the Prussian elite nation builders - like Karl von Bismarck and others - who established the state of German in 1870. Dubois studied at the Univeristy of Berlin - which I’ve visited for research purposes and where he is still well regarded - having helped to developed the discipline of sociology with Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber and others. Dubois and Garvey wanted to achieve the same ends in the manner…that at last…all the German people were united; so they wished to advance the same amongst Blacks in the diaspora with the African continent.
So was Garvey a great man?
His contribution was significant. He lacked the multivarious talents or global prominence of Paul Roberson, the majesty, education, pedigree and vision of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. or the sheer natural brilliance and discipline of Malcom X. But they rose and stood on the shoulders of his natural audacity to think Africa and African origins and of an African future as substantive.
His ideas were 100 years before their time: only now we see in the Sahel, where 5 nations - Mali, Niger, now Togo and Chad together with Burkina Faso (led by the magnetic Ibrahim Traoré) have broken (are breaking) from France…steeped they are…the philosophy of Marcus Garvey, as there is no other self-dependent blueprint for Black nations confident in their significance. Garvey is the sole philosopher in that space. And as it was for Garvey, Roberson and King, their most strident opposition came from fellow Black presidents of African nations over-tethered to the West…even against or within their own narrow interests!
