Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

Garvey and the Klan: Why folks still get it wrong

There are two things about Marcus Garvey that most people get twisted:

1) Garvey was about going back to Africa.
2) Garvey was down with the Klan.

The first mischaracterization can be understood because most people are introduced to Marcus Garvey via a blurb in a history book. Of course no one had picked up The Philosophies and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. The second issue is usually found among people that dared to go beyond what they were told (if told anything at all). Somehow the meeting between Garvey and the Grand Wizard of the KKK get misconstrued as meaning that Garvey and the Klan had the same aims or at a minimum Garvey was giving in to the Klan. Neither position is the truth and it takes only a cursory glance at Garvey’s own words to realize this.

Last week while in correspondence with someone who’s opinions I respect, I was shocked to receive the following comment:

In my opinion, as someone who was half-raised in Jim Crow Georgia, Garvey's explanation far beyond weak: it is ludicrous. Garvey's internal logic ceded the U.S. to the white man - an ideological convergence with white American Manifest Destiny. His Klan overtures were a consequence of that logic.

Moreover, for a Jamaican to describe African Americans - northern- or
southern-born, as being out of touch with the realities of American racism
is outrageously pretentious bombast.

Had I been any other person I guess such a comment would have gone past me as fact or at least an informed opinion. However, this is “Garvey’s Ghost” and no way such a position can be allowed to stand.

First let’s look at Garvey’s own words regarding his meeting with the Klan and why he chose to engage them in dialog:

”I repeat, knowing the power and influence and intentions of the Klan, I interviewed them for the purpose of getting them, if possible, to adopt a different attitude towards the race and thus prevent a repetition in many ways of what happened during the days of reconstruction. Because of this, my efforts to stave off an impeding danger by a better understanding of the attitudes of this organization, this unthinking bombast [George Harris] steps out with the full authority of his ignorance to accuse me of surrendering to the Wizard and forming an alliance with the Klan. This has been the attitude of a large number of Negro editors who live in the North, who do not come into daily contact with the Ku Klux Klan as millions of our people do in the Southern States. These wiseacres and so called race-patriots remain 1500 and 2000 miles away and write all kinds of stuff against the South, and against the Ku Klux Klan, and against people with whom they do not come in contact, leaving the people who really come into contact with them to suffer from the result of their senseless and hypocritical propaganda. Some Negro men who talk and write up North will make a big noise as far as Washington, but whenever the conductor requests of them to change cars they become mum as an oyster”
-Marcus Garvey
Negro World, July 22,1922

Why would Garvey be worried about impending “danger?” what was his motivation?
In 1920 a group under Reverend T.C. Glashen organized a local chapter of the UNIA in Key West, Florida. Immediately following, the whites of that community organized a local KKK branch. Rev. Glashen was given 24 hours to leave town by the president of the “chamber of commerce” (suuuuuuuuuure he was….). When the Reverend refused he was arrested and jailed. After intervention from the UNIA in headquarters a Judge visited Glashen and requested he leave in order to avoid clashes between a white mob and the UNIA. Glashen left for NY via Havana CUBA since it was believed that he would be killed if he attempted the trip overland.

In 1922 R.B. Mosely, UNIA high commissioner for Texas was jailed while organizing for the UNIA. Upon release from jail he was beaten by a gang of eight white men.
Further stories of harassment were related by delegates at the 1922 UNIA convention, In one case a young man was lynched for selling UNIA stock

The 1921 convention parade featured a banner that proclaimed “ The Negro is Ready for The Klan” But given the actual danger that the UNIA was putting it’s members into Garvey seeing the bigger picture decided that he would make a deal. Clearly then, this is not a case of Garvey being an outsider and not aware of the Klan. Thus the charge that Garvey was giving in or such things are false and in this day and age slanderous.

What of the charge that Garvey’s “internal logic ceded the US to the white man.” First, before getting into Garvey’s own words I must say that Garvey was not a dreamer, but a realist and a planner. Garvey was not the type to deal in moral suasion or emotional appeals to white people in order to do what he knew had to be done. Garvey was dealing with power, its acquisition and it’s use. Garvey said:

It does not mean that all Negroes should leave America and the West Indies and go to Africa to build up a government. It did not take all the peoples of Europe to come over to America to lay the foundation of the great republic; therefore those who write disparagingly of the grand programme of Africa are doing so without paying attention to history… we say to all Negroes of America, the West Indies and elsewhere, seize all opportunities that come to you, but remember out successes educationally, industrially and politically is based upon the protection of a nation founded by ourselves. And that nation can be nowhere else but in Africa”

Clearly then, the charge that Garvey ceded the US to the white man is unfounded. Garvey was well aware that in 1922 blacks had no power in the US, a situation that has changed only nominally. Today blacks still do not own Black Star Lines, Black Star factories, etc. And the Blacks who could own such things outsource to Asia or to white owned companies (Sean John anyone?). Thus it wasn’t an issue of ceding anything to the white man; it was merely observing that which was. Why is it that when blacks talk of Africa they are looked at as being crazy, yet as Garvey pointed out repeatedly, everybody else seems to find good reason to go set up shop there and extract it’s resources. This goes back to the larger picture I mentioned earlier.

The Ku Klux Klan believes that black people are genetically inferior to whites. As such they expect that blacks will always have a dependent relationship with whites. In addition to this they, being Americans, also believe that they can take whatever they want from blacks whenever they want. Garveyism, in the long run would counter such sentiments. Garveyism followed and practiced would make for strong black countries (perhaps even a global federated state) that whites (including the Klan types) would not be able to control and exploit as they are able to do today (see Haiti and Venezuela for recent examples). The existence of such an economically and militarily powerful state would not be exploitable the “west” would lose its sources of raw material (and sports and entertainers to boot). But most, but by no means all, Klan members are too shortsighted to see this. So long as they think that Negroes are in their place and out of community sight, they think they have “won.” This is why Bilbo and others of Garvey’s time thought they had “much in common” with Garvey. As written in The Art of War:

It is one of the most important tasks of command ‘to effect timely and proper change of tactics according to the conditions of the units and of the terrain, both on the enemy’s side and our own’ One yields when it is expedient [like member threatened with lynching]; he gives A in order to take B [he arranges a truce with a violent enemy in order to give his organization organizing room]. my comments.

Clearly then the author of the note I received via email is just plain wrong on all counts regarding Garvey. I do hope they read this and it spurs them to do proper research on Garvey and Garveyism.