Celebrations Today Will Mark 100th Birthday of Marcus Garvey : Black Leader Stirred Inspiration, Controversy

In the early 1900s, when Harlem, with its artists and writers and poets and intellectuals, was the political and cultural center of the black world, 7th Avenue and 132nd Street was the geographical focus.

On that corner stood an elm tree, known to Harlemites as the tree of hope. And if you were a musician or dancer or even a gambler or a new employee heading off to work, legend has it, you would pass that tree and touch it.

Tree of Hope

It was under that tree in January, 1918, that a short, squat Jamaican mounted a soapbox and launched one of the largest mass movements of blacks ever, and, in a sense, became that tree of hope for black people on four continents--and eventually for four generations to come.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, preaching black pride, black nationalism and black separatism, struck a resounding chord among black masses around the world.

Garvey’s slogan: “Up you mighty race. You can accomplish what you will.”

And from it sprang the Universal Negro Improvement Assn., which boasted an assortment of black-owned businesses, an internationally circulated newspaper and nearly 1,000 chapters in the Uni1952801824America, Europe and all over sub-Saharan Africa.

‘Took Wishbone Out of Us’

“It was in the breeze, almost,” recalled Charles L. James of Chicago, an eventual Garvey lieutenant who was 17 when he came to Harlem from Antigua in 1923 in search of the movement. “You could almost breathe it. He was the psychological exponent of black people’s aspirations. He took the wishbone out of us and put in a backbone.”

Through the UNIA, Garvey pounded out his message of self-sufficiency with the Negro Factories Corp. The UNIA’s Liberty Grocery Stores, Liberty Tailors and Liberty Restaurants began popping up across the country. The Black Star Lines, a shipping fleet, was established to promote trade and eventually return blacks to Africa. Its stock could be sold only to blacks.

The UNIA employed about 1,000 workers. The Black Cross Nurses, the UNIA equivalent of the Red Cross, helped flood victims in New Orleans and earthquake victims in Costa Rica. Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro World, carried his messages of a proud African heritage so forcefully that it was banned in some countries.

But as quickly as Garvey’s movement rose, it crumbled.

Hounded in America by his detractors and ultimately deported after a mail fraud conviction in 1924, Garvey died ignominiously in London on June 10, 1940. His final indignity was to read his own widely published obituary a month before his death.

Seen as a Black Moses

Today, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, the controversial Garvey is being hailed worldwide as a black Moses, a visionary whose ideology has fueled freedom struggles by blacks in America, helped spark the liberation movements that led to the eventual decolonization of Africa and continues to serve as an inspiration.

Celebrations heralding “The Tiger,” as he was called by his followers, and his ideology are scheduled in London, Ghana, Montreal, Jamaica and all over the United States. In Washington, all 32 ambassadors of the Organization of American States will meet today in special commemorative session, and Congress is even considering a resolution to exonerate him of his conviction for mail fraud.

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), whose district includes Harlem, has introduced House Concurrent Resolution 84 to “express the sense of the Congress that the mail fraud charges brought against Marcus Garvey by the federal government were not substantiated and that his conviction was unjust and unwarranted.”

The House subcommittee on criminal justice, headed by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), heard testimony last month from historians, Garvey’s two sons and those familiar with his organization that the mail fraud charges were phony, primarily the workings of a young J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the investigation.

Rodino Gives Backing

Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), a member of the subcommittee, agrees. Edwards said that he expects the resolution to move quickly on to the House Judiciary Committee, where Chairman Peter W. Rodino Jr. (D-N.J.) has already announced his support for the legislation. If approved by that committee, it would go to the full House for a vote.

“I hadn’t heard of (Garvey) before,” Edwards said. “I was very much impressed by what I heard. If you look at the mail fraud charges, they wouldn’t receive any attention today.

“What Hoover was doing, and I’m using his words, was ‘getting rid of a Negro agitator.’ He intercepted mail, followed him around and infiltrated this very decent organization that Mr. Garvey had. I’m sure that it rankles . . . black Americans to think that one of their great leaders was prosecuted wrongfully, and we should apologize for it.”

Meanwhile, in New York, an exhaustive exhibit of Garvey’s papers and memorabilia is being featured for six months at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

In Jamaica, where Garvey was born in St. Anne’s Bay Parish, symposiums, seminars, essay and oratorical contests and television programs commemorating him have been going on since April. They culminate today with delegations from the United States, Senegal, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Costa Rica, Panama, Trinidad, Barbados and London attending.

Slow Turnaround

It has been a slow, but dramatic turnaround from the days when Garvey was vilified by black and white critics as a “fabulous con man” and a “strident demagogue with inflated ambitions” and his programs labeled “wild, imaginary.”

W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and among Garvey’s chief critics, ridiculed his idea of returning blacks to Africa to establish a colony. Ironically, while Garvey never set foot in Africa, a disillusioned Du Bois left the United States permanently in 1961 and became a citizen of Ghana, then headed by Garvey disciple Kwame Nkrumah, where he died in 1963.

For one of Garvey’s two sons, Julius, a New York heart surgeon, this revived interest in his father is “a very wonderful time.”

“It is vindication of the path my father took,” he said. “It showed his extreme foresight.”

“The Garvey legacy has lived on in a remarkable way,” says Robert Hill, a UCLA associate professor and leading Garvey expert. Hill has edited a six-volume collection of Garvey’s papers, some 7,000 pages, and established the Marcus Garvey and UNIA Project Papers project at UCLA.

Hill notes, for instance, that many contemporary black leaders’ families have direct ties to the Garvey movement.

Father of Rep. Stokes

The father of Rep. Louis Stokes (D-Ohio), a member of the Iran- contra hearings panel, and his brother, Cleveland judge Carl Stokes, first black mayor of that city, was a lieutenant in the Cleveland UNIA.

Former Reps. Shirley Chisolm, Charles Diggs and Adam Clayton Powell, Malcolm X and black writer Paula Marshall had parents who were active UNIA members.

Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, was a lieutenant in the Detroit UNIA, and Saint William Grant, the mobilizer of the labor rebellion in Jamaica in 1938, was president of the UNIA Tiger division in Harlem.

In Africa, a number of nationalist leaders claimed Garvey as a major influence, including Nkrumah, first prime minister of Ghana; Benjamin Azikiwe, first president of Nigeria, and Jomo Kenyatta, first president of Kenya.

“What the movement spawned became much greater and larger than the Garvey movement per se,” Hill said. “For example, in the ‘60s, when black people in America moved toward African racial consciousness, they rediscovered Marcus Garvey as the 20th-Century progenitor of ‘black is beautiful.’ The liberation struggles in Africa and in the Caribbean, we found, can be directly linked to Garveyism. We need to look upon the Garvey movement as a catalyst and not an end unto itself.”

Chapters Remain

Sixty years after the UNIA passed from the scene as a major organization, there are still remnants of the Garvey movement scattered about the country, with UNIA chapters in New York, Washington, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia.

A few active supporters and divisions are found throughout sub-Saharan Africa, mostly in the bigger cities of former British colonies such as Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Lesoto.

But long gone are the days when annual UNIA conventions attracted more than 25,000 members from around the globe.

Only a scant few, such as Charles James, now 82 and president of the International UNIA, can recall the spectacular yearly UNIA parades that swept through Harlem, the Universal African Legion leading the procession on horseback with their black and red military uniforms, the Black Cross nurses, garbed in flowing white dresses and headdress, the juvenile divisions, the motorcade division hailing “the New Negro” and carrying placards of “Africa for the Africans” and, finally, Garvey.

Flag Last Tangible Symbol

The only tangible symbol left of Garvey’s movement is the UNIA’s red, black and green flag. The red, Garvey said, stood for the blood that black people shed in slavery in America and abroad, the black stood for racial pride and cultural heritage and the green stood for the green fields of Africa.

However, it is that flag, Hill says, that may best encapsule the most enduring accomplishments of the Garvey movement.

“That flag has a timelessness and a global significance that crosses national boundaries,” said Hill, who for 14 years has traveled the world researching Garvey. “If you are black, no matter where you are in the world, no matter what flag you live under, the minute you see that flag, you know you have another flag. The red, black and green is your flag. If you are in the Caribbean, or in England or in France, and you see that flag, the message is clear--black freedom, black pride, black liberation.”