The Americans Are Coming!

Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa

Robert Trent Vinson

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780821444054
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and "American Negroes"—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators.

Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African government as "honorary whites" exempt from segregation, also saw their activities in South Africa as a divinely ordained mission to establish "Africa for Africans, " liberated from European empires. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, the largest black-led movement with two million members and supporters in forty-three countries at its height in the early 1920s, was the most anticipated source of liberation. Though these liberation prophecies went unfulfilled, black South Africans continued to view African Americans as inspirational models and as critical partners in the global antiapartheid struggle.

The Americans Are Coming! is a rare case study that places African history and American history in a global context and centers Africa in African Diaspora studies.

PART II

AMERICAN APOCALYPSE

Prophetic Garveyism and the Dream of American Negro Liberation

3

The Rise of Marcus Garvey and His Gospel of Garveyism in Southern Africa

In 1916, a virtually penniless, twenty-eight-year-old Marcus Garvey, the son of a stonemason and a domestic, arrived in Harlem from his home in Jamaica. His purpose was to raise funds for a school in Jamaica modeled after Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. No one would have predicted that he would not return home for eleven years, after presiding over the rise and the decline of the largest black-led movement in world history before or since.

At the peak of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the early 1920s, the organization had about three hundred thousand dues-paying members in nearly twelve hundred divisions in forty-three countries, among them South Africa, where there were at least twenty-four.¹ In the immediate post–World War I era, Garvey channeled the anger and disillusionment of blacks worldwide to promote his goals of black economic and educational advancement, religious autonomy, African political independence, and racial unity. Skilled blacks, through strong race-based organizations, would be expected to lead the UNIA program of “African redemption,” the resurrection of a glorious African past, in an independent Africa.

Garvey’s record was one of stunning success and tragic failure. He was a master propagandist and organizer but an incompetent businessman whose most ambitious business, the Black Star Line of ships, collapsed in 1922. His ideas of racial purity and racial separatism led to controversial relationships with white supremacists, and in time, these dubious associations led black rivals like W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph to demand his deportation from the United States. He was imprisoned in Atlanta and deported back to Jamaica in 1927. And yet, Garveyism had wide influence, not only in the States but also in the Caribbean and throughout the world, including southern Africa. The movement became what one historian has called the first “global expression of black nationalism.”² Garvey’s ideas took on a life of their own in forms he had not imagined. Indirectly, he played a vital role in bringing about the end of white rule.

FROM EDUCATION TO RADICAL POLITICS

Marcus Garvey was born on 17 August 1887, a subject of the British Empire. He was the youngest child of Sarah Jane Richards, a domestic worker and petty trader, and Malchus Garvey, a stonemason, a bibliophile with a library of his own, and a respected arbiter of village disputes. (Even Malchus’s wife called him Mr. Garvey.) Marcus played cricket and other games with the neighboring white children until his teens, when white parents forbade their offspring to consort with a “nigger.”³ A voracious reader, he consumed all of the books in the libraries of his father and godfather, Alfred Burrowes. He listened closely to the political discussions in his godfather’s print shop, where he was an apprentice, and learned new words from his pocket dictionary.⁴ He observed the rhetorical styles of preachers, street-corner politicians, and teachers, and he took part in debating societies and elocution contests. “All the time when I meet him,” a friend said, “he wear jacket, and, every time, his two pockets full of paper, reading and telling us things that happen all over the world. How him know, I don’t know, but him telling us.”⁵

The editor of the Jamaican Advocate, Joseph Love, became young Garvey’s mentor. The Advocate decried British colonialism and American Jim Crowism and glorified the Haitian Revolution. It also published news of Pan-Africanists like Du Bois; the back-to-Africa advocate Henry McNeal Turner, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; and the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams, whose 1900 Pan-African Conference in London initiated the Pan-African movement. Garvey began to express anticolonial ideals in a short-lived newspaper of his own, Garvey’s Watchman, and in pamphlets of public speeches, as well as when he served as secretary of the National Club, the first black nationalist organization in Jamaica to protest colonial abuses. Blackballed from local jobs when, as the only managerial foreman at a government printing plant, he sided with the workers in a labor strike, he left the island at age twenty-three. In Costa Rica, where he worked as a timekeeper, he saw “mutilated black bodies in the rivers and bushes,” and he complained about working conditions through a daily paper he published, La Nacion, and in numerous petitions to unresponsive local British consuls. After traveling to Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama, outraged at the treatment of blacks everywhere, he arrived in London, the heart of the British Empire and the center of the Pan-African world.⁶

Many black sailors, students, laborers, and other travelers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas were in London at the time. As Garvey worked on the docks in London, Liverpool, and Cardiff, he listened to their stories of racial subjugation. From the balcony of the House of Commons, he heard debates on colonialism, and he made anticolonial speeches of his own in London’s Hyde Park. He took university classes and wrote for the Africa Times and Orient Review, the preeminent Pan-African periodical, edited by a celebrated Egyptian-born author named Duse Mohamed Ali. Ali asserted that ancient Egypt had been a powerful black civilization when Europe’s culture was still primitive. In an essay that would come to be regarded as a landmark, entitled “The British West Indies in the Mirror of Civilization: History Making by Colonial Negroes,” Garvey detailed the history of racial abuses under British colonialism in the Caribbean. The essay predicted that West Indians would unite blacks from around the world to create a black empire as far-reaching as the British Empire itself.⁷

As Garvey sailed back to Jamaica, he learned of the dehumanizing effects of segregation in South Africa from a West Indian missionary and his mo-Sotho wife. He asked himself, as he wrote later: “Where is the black man’s Government? Where is his King and his Kingdom? Where is his President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared, ‘I will help to make them.’ . . . My brain was afire.”⁸ With the help of Amy Ashwood, who was to become his wife, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association (UNIA; “Conservation” was dropped from the official name in 1918) and African Communities (Imperial) League (ACL). The date was 1 August 1914, the eightieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in British territories. Garvey was twenty-seven.

The UNIA began as a fraternal and benevolent society but with ambitious goals to establish an industrial school like Tuskegee, to develop black-owned businesses, and to improve the moral character of blacks in order to attain the “highest level of civilized culture.” Garvey was, in many ways, middle class in style and in program—entrepreneurial, business-oriented, committed to free enterprise and the capitalist model, and focused on the improvement of Negro culture. Echoing Booker T. Washington, he believed “the bulk of our people are in darkness and are really unfit for good society.”⁹ For Garvey, blacks could not demand racial equality until they had made equal contributions to modern civilization.

Despite his initially moderate conception of the UNIA, the ease with which blacks could establish their own UNIA chapters would eventually create a decentralized movement that was united by broadly shared goals but shaped in manifestly different ways to address local conditions. By July 1918, with formal approval from Garvey and a commitment to contribute to the UNIA program, at least seven black, dues-paying individuals could start a chapter. Garvey stipulated that each chapter had to have officers, including a division chaplain, and an advisory board, and each member paid monthly dues of no more than 25¢ and an additional 10¢ per month for a life insurance premium to provide up to $75 for funeral expenses (only a few white-owned insurance companies issued policies to blacks).

The ACL was established as the corporate and propaganda wing of the UNIA for skilled blacks of the diaspora intent on creating independent and powerful African states. It offered membership to any black person in the world who shared its goals of African independence, racial unity, uplift, and advancement.¹⁰

Garvey appealed to Booker T. Washington to provide financial support for a Jamaican Tuskegee. Like Washington with his Tuskegee Student, he published his speeches on the front page of a newspaper of his own, the Negro World, which he established in 1918. He was convinced of the power of the printed word, especially its dissemination to literate blacks everywhere through newspapers. When Washington died in 1915, Garvey organized a UNIA memorial in Jamaica as a tribute to “the greatest hero sprung from the stock of scattered Ethiopia,” a man who had raised “the dignity and manhood of his race . . . to the highest heights.”¹¹

By the year after Washington’s death, Garvey had gone from Jamaica to Harlem to raise money for his Jamaican Tuskegee. But his plans for the school were never realized. The United States offered a larger platform for Garvey, and he stayed there. He invited Du Bois to chair his own first public lecture in the States (Du Bois declined). He met many black luminaries, including Tuskegee president Robert Moton and the bold antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and he revised his belief that West Indians would lead the race.¹² “The Negroes of both hemispheres,” he now wrote, “have to defer to the American brother” who had advanced so rapidly up from slavery.¹³ Yet the East St. Louis race riots of 1917 and outrages committed against black soldiers in Houston convinced him to join an increasingly radicalized Harlem.

Hubert Harrison of the Virgin Islands—“the father of Harlem radicalism,” who was also known as the “Black Socrates”—became his mentor.¹⁴ A. Philip Randolph, then a young socialist organizer, yielded his stepladder on Harlem street corners to Garvey so he could address the crowds. Claude McKay, himself a Jamaican, marveled, “Garvey shouted words, words spinning like bullets, words falling like bombs, sharp words like poisoned daggers, thundering words and phrases lit with all the hues of the rainbow to match the wild approving roar of his people.”¹⁵ After Harrison founded the Liberty League to demand black civil rights, Garvey, breaking with Booker T. Washington’s apolitical model, joined the organization. In nightly speeches, he denounced the “savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.”¹⁶ He criticized Du Bois’s controversial article “Close Ranks” in the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis, of which Du Bois was the editor. Du Bois had urged blacks to “forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy,” since “our second emancipation will be the outcome of this war.”¹⁷ Like Harrison, Garvey scored the NAACP as an elitist organization of “paper protest” politics reflecting the perspective of influential whites in its leadership, even though he himself was committed to paper protests.

By 1919, Garvey had established a UNIA branch in Harlem patterned after the Liberty League, and he was publishing the Negro World, modeled after Harrison’s defunct Voice. In the paper, he announced plans for a black-owned shipping line, the Black Star Line. For it, he appropriated the tricolor flag of the Liberty League, changing its colors to black (for his people), red (for the blood spilled during slavery, Jim Crowism, and colonialism), and green (for the fertility of the African soil).¹⁸ As Garvey told an audience in New York City, metaphorically addressing whites:

The idea is this. You white folk have just finished a war for democracy. You have spread the doctrine that men, nations, races are equal. We negroes fought in that war. Now we want to reap some of the advantages you promised. Lots of our boys came back from the trenches determined never to tolerate the things you have done to negroes in this country. Then the negroes that stayed at home for the first time got decent jobs and pay such as they had never had before. Now we won’t go back to pre-war conditions. We’ve grown out of them.¹⁹

In 1920, black delegates at the UNIA’s annual convention compiled the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. The UNIA Declaration of Rights employed language from the American Declaration of Independence to craft an early foundational document in an international human rights discursive framework that would be adopted decades later in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1947) and the global antiapartheid movement. It declared “all men are created equal and entitled to the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It demanded an end to Jim Crowism and to European colonialism in Africa, with voting rights for blacks, equal access to good jobs, quality education, and health care. It also denounced the League of Nations as “null and void” for allowing European colonialism to continue in Africa. Countries engaged in lynching and other...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Americans Are Coming!
• PART I Providential Design The Alliance of American Negroes and Black South Africans
• PART II American Apocalypse Prophetic Garveyism and the Dream of American Negro Liberation
• Essay on Sources and Methodology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index