I

In her sophisticated neo-Marxian interpretation of Garvey and his movement, Judith Stein has argued that the UNIA's popularity and growth cannot be measured solely by Garvey's objectives, since rank-and-file Garveyites brought many different and personal goals to the organization.Footnote ² Nowhere was this disparity between the goals of Garvey and those of his followers more evident than in the United States, where the movement swelled its ranks among black workers, clerks, homeowners and small business-owners, all of whom yearned for material wealth in post-war America. Stein has ascribed the various meanings given to Garveyite rhetoric to a weak parent body and its failure to “enunciate a principled politics.” Without a unifying political vision, “words like independence, freedom, and status conveyed various meanings to Garveyites of different classes and regions.” Many subsequently misinterpreted Garvey's call for independence to mean property-ownership, free of debt, and mistook his race rhetoric as an endorsement of their local needs.Footnote ³

George Fredrickson offers a less partisan view of the role of ideology in the Garvey movement. As a “structured” set of beliefs with some grass-roots appeal across black communities in the United States and elsewhere, Garveyism, he contends, could be roughly adhered to without embracing all its aspects and implications. Popular or “intrinsic” beliefs would intervene to create a mix that could differ in significant ways from official movement doctrine. Even when Garvey seemed to have given up on America by seeking an accommodation with the Klan, local Garveyites continued to endorse his rhetoric of race pride and solidarity as a means of getting ahead in a liberal capitalist America, rather than as a disengagement from American realities and prospects.Footnote ⁴

The proliferation of UNIA divisions across the major cities was testament to its appeal and influence within the American black community. Supporters from different social groups pledged their allegiance to Garveyism to ease their feelings of powerlessness after the First World War, and in the hope of satisfying their bourgeois aspirations in a segregated environment. The strength of its message turned on its doctrine of black economic nationalism – self-reliance and independence – that had historic significance in the black American community, while its explicit connection between African American liberation and African liberation resonated among those who doubted the future of self-determination in the United States.

The doctrine of race nationalism doubtless instilled tremendous feelings of race pride and loyalty among the mass of black Americans. Yet glimpses of a glorious African past had already reached the margins of the black self-image before Garvey arrived in New York City in 1916; his intellectual antecedents had uncovered the richness of Africa's former civilization and touched the black consciousness with images of African power and beauty. Race consciousness among black Americans was conceived in the earlier emigrationist campaigns and developed independent of Garvey, who, according to Judith Stein, did not arrive in the United States until “the signs of racial progress were everywhere.”Footnote ⁵

Though many black Americans were ready to hear his message of redemption in the post-war racial climate, Garvey channelled their enthusiasm for material success towards a different agenda altogether. His cautious approach to domestic issues did little to interrupt the movement's growth in the United States, since most black Americans, as Fredrickson has shown, brought their own popular beliefs to the movement anyway. This leaves the identity of his core constituents in some doubt. To find the real beneficiaries of his programme of social, economic and moral regeneration, we need to consider two aspects of the movement's growth and development in the United States: first, how the UNIA, in both ideological and organizational terms, acted as a Caribbean organization that, in many ways, facilitated the needs and goals of the people of the Caribbean at home and abroad; and second, how Garvey's rhetoric in the United States, especially his emphasis on the black self-image, race and colour consciousness, served to reinforce the Caribbean migrants' ideology, namely their shared expectations, motivations and goals in a foreign country.

Garvey ideology reflected the cultural background of Jamaican society in a number of ways. In general terms, his doctrine of race nationalism had special meaning to Caribbean immigrants, because it served to support their economic ambitions abroad and aid their social and psychological adjustment in the United States. Despite the incorporation of a New York branch of the UNIA in May 1917, Garvey continued to speak predominantly to the people of the Caribbean at home and abroad, because he shared their colonial mentality and pursuit of social mobility through material wealth. Most immigrants hoped to translate their sojourn abroad into economic and social progress back home, and Garvey believed that this predisposition to return home made them the natural harbingers of democratic reform in colonial society.

His model of political activism was based on the experience of the “Colon men” who returned to Jamaica after the completion of the Panama Canal and Railroad Project in 1914. The remittances from Panama returnees, as well as their exposure to new ideas, made a sizeable impression on the local community. Their contribution to home society was marked by their ability to increase economic options back home, repatriate radical ideas and adopt a more critical view of their island's status quo. These myriad factors served to heighten the political consciousness of the Panama returnee, whose frustration with broader society spread to the black labouring classes and culminated in civil disturbances across British dependencies in the Caribbean in 1919 and 1920. Given such a powerful precedent for the political role of the returnee, Garvey continued to urge Caribbean immigrants to return home: “Negroes of the West Indies, let me tell you that the Universal Negro Improvement Association will expect you to go back to those islands and teach the doctrine of the association.”Footnote ⁶ These expectations were matched only by his own appetite for island politics, which resulted in a flurry of political activity following his return to Jamaica on 10 December 1927. As chairman of the newly formed People's Political Party, Garvey was elected municipal councillor of the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation (KSAC) in October 1929, was re-elected for a two-year term in October 1931, and contested the Legislative Council elections in St. Andrew parish in January 1930.

Not surprisingly, given Garvey's colonial background, his black American critics, notably W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, challenged his verbose attempts to speak on behalf of the black American community. Their initial distrust of his rhetoric was part of a deeper suspicion of opportunists and charlatans who preyed on the vulnerabilities of the black masses. But, as Irma Watkins-Owens has shown, the campaign to undermine Garvey as a leader was conducted in an atmosphere of suspicion of foreigners, in which most American black critics sought to discredit his leadership on the basis of nativist rhetoric rather than on a serious evaluation of his ideas and methods.Footnote ⁷ The African American leadership class claimed repeatedly that Garvey was a foreigner whose movement consisted mainly of immigrants and did not represent black Americans. Their criticism reflected not only the rivalries over constituencies within the black community, but also their desire to separate American blacks from the UNIA for the good of the native-born.

According to Watkins-Owens, Du Bois was so alarmed by Garvey's influence within the black communities, and by his potential to disrupt the native-born dominance in the leadership of the struggle, that his actions were measured to ensure his own hegemony. He thus mocked Garvey's leadership in his editorials in Crisis, repeatedly misrepresented the UNIA as a West Indian organization and openly ridiculed his nationality following his 1922 meeting with the Klan. Following Garvey's deportation in December 1927, Du Bois could barely conceal his relief, now that the perceived threat to the Talented Tenth's leadership of the masses had been banished from the United States:

In fact, Garvey remained detached somewhat from black Americans. Though he spoke of the American experience, his rhetoric often flattered to deceive, as the advancement of their domestic ambitions was never his stated objective, which is not to say that he misunderstood the hopes and dreams of black Americans. When in full rhetorical flower, Garvey chose to praise or criticize either Caribbean or American blacks, depending on his audience. He could celebrate black Americans as the “most progressive and the foremost unit in the chain of scattered Ethiopia” and often contrasted their spirit of self-reliance with the lack of commercial progress among Caribbean immigrants, who claimed with “vain bluff” that conditions were better in their homeland.Footnote ⁹ Yet he could also deliver a different verdict on black Americans, who, he complained, were far from the civilized ideal and lacked the numerical strength and business acumen to effect political reform.Footnote ¹⁰

His readiness to express contrasting viewpoints in this way might attest to his talent as a rhetorician. Indeed, in a statement to his closest allies during “the last few hours of his stay in America” he conceded that his public remarks on behalf of the UNIA did not always represent his personal opinions, for his role as elected leader entailed that he “had to fill it” and “speak not only my sentiments, but the sentiments of the organization.”Footnote ¹¹ On the other hand, his rhetorical adjustments also reflect an ambivalence towards black Americans, which derived from their “riotous living” during wartime, lack of “group soul” and “Potential Menace to American Radicalism.” This cautious view of black Americans was, according to Harold Cruse, an intrinsic part of the “West Indian nationalist psychology,” which shaped Garvey's judgement on the role of black Americans.Footnote ¹²

Though Garvey never fully understood the domestic needs of black Americans, he continued to preach his doctrine of race pride and loyalty at precisely the right time and in the right syllables. His message of race uplift stirred feelings of race consciousness and promised a positive future in America, even though he doubted their capacity as a minority group to challenge white supremacy. His ability to revitalize the expectations and dreams of black Americans in spite of segregation, coupled with his success in soliciting money for a series of ambitious commercial enterprises, were his greatest rhetorical achievements.

Nevertheless, Garvey's emphasis on race enterprise did reveal an appreciation of the speculative mentality and economic aspirations of black Americans after the war. His call for black commercial and industrial autonomy imitated the same marketing strategies of other ethnic businesses in America, and relied on common marketplace values of group solidarity and ethnicity that could sell shares and lead to huge profits in post-war shipping. His campaign to build the Black Star Line (BSL) shipping enterprise into “the biggest industrial and commercial undertaking of the Negro of the twentieth century” was not only a barometer of his commercial ambitions, but indicative of America's post-war economic climate.Footnote ¹³ His promotional rhetoric was designed to raise capital, which had been the main aim of his thirty-eight-state lecture tour across America between May–June 1916 and May 1917. But as audiences withheld their financial support for the regeneration of Caribbean territories, he switched his fundraising efforts to the BSL, and began to market the venture as a “powerful asset to the Negro race in its upward striving.”Footnote ¹⁴

Besides his pecuniary interest in shipping, Garvey embraced this popular business initiative to satisfy the needs and expectations of Caribbean immigrants, though this was seldom clear from the stock-promotion rallies in America. There is less uncertainty about the flurry of enthusiasm for BSL stock among his Caribbean supporters, which reflected not only their interest in his promotional rhetoric, but a genuine belief in the purpose of the movement. Caribbean shareholders, both at home and abroad, placed an additional premium on the regional and practical benefits of investing their money, while black Americans, according to Judith Stein, invested in the shipping line as a way to gain immediate financial returns and aid their bourgeois aspirations.Footnote ¹⁵

Between July 1919 and February 1922 the BSL raised $765,130 by selling approximately 153,026 shares of stock at $5.00 per bond. Some indication of which groups invested in BSL stock might be found in a list of shareholders submitted as evidence during the mail fraud trial of Garvey in May 1923. The document reveals that twenty-six individuals bought shares worth $630.81, including six US citizens who invested just $52.40.Footnote ¹⁶ Whether or not this file is representative of all shareholdings in the BSL remains problematic, as only scattered remains of Garvey's personal and organizational papers survive today. Nevertheless, that the people of the Caribbean were enthusiastic investors in shipping stock is beyond doubt.Footnote ¹⁷

For Caribbean shareholders, an efficient passenger line could improve their access to other prosperous economies, challenge the restrictive trading practices of the United Fruit Company across the Caribbean (as well as its regional monopoly on transportation services) and satisfy the migratory impulses of most colonial subjects. Most black Americans were uninterested in the cargo and passenger services of the BSL. Needless to say, Garvey's appeal for BSL stockholders to seize the chance to own an “exceptionally good passenger service” to transport our people to “new industrial fields” was aimed less at black Americans than at Caribbean shareholders, since they led the migratory lifestyle and incurred the exorbitant rates of passage to richer economic fields abroad.Footnote ¹⁸

While the “extraordinary remunerations that were promised in a very limited time” appealed to all BSL shareholders, the unrivalled enthusiasm among the people of the Caribbean suggests they viewed stockholding as something other than quick financial gain.Footnote ¹⁹ Garvey realized that the profitability of his shipping venture depended on the proper accumulation of capital, which clearly informed his decision to have the SS Yarmouth and the SS Kanawha sail southwards on their maiden voyages to Central America and the Caribbean.Footnote ²⁰ As he prepared to leave for the BSL stock-promotion tour of the Caribbean, he boldly predicted that “the Negro there [would] be ready to a single call.”Footnote ²¹ Perhaps such confidence was not entirely unfounded, for he knew how much a shipping line meant to colonial subjects. Still, Garvey left nothing to chance and warned that failure to invest in the BSL would leave the Caribbean “relegated to the ditch of industrial stagnation.”Footnote ²² Caribbean shareholders accepted his assessment of their economic future and hurried to invest in the BSL, so much so that subscriptions among United Fruit Company employees in Costa Rica reached “approximately $2,000 monthly,” while the people of Nuevitas, Cuba, “went over the top 100 per cent for shares.”Footnote ²³

Unlike its predecessors, the SS Shadyside, the BSL's black excursion steamer, neither rivalled the white shipping lines (the White Star Line and Cunard) in the Caribbean, nor facilitated the migratory impulses of the inhabitants of the region. Consequently, the Shadyside failed to attract investment from black immigrants in America and went out of service just four months after it began excursions along the Hudson River in April 1920. E. D. Cronon has attributed the lack of interest in the Shadyside to its high fares ($1.05 per cruise) and the dilapidated landing stages up-stream, but its failure to contribute to the Caribbean regional economy suggests its collapse was inevitable anyway.Footnote ²⁴

II

At this stage in the search for Garvey's core constituents, it is important to note that tensions between Caribbean immigrants and black Americans peaked during the period of Garvey's greatest influence in the United States, which, according to David Hellwig, was symptomatic of the movement.Footnote ²⁵ Garvey scholars have accepted that both communities benefited in equal measure from Garveyite rhetoric, but cross-group tensions might suggest otherwise. What was it about Garvey ideology that accentuated these divisions?

Garvey's appeal to bourgeois aspirations actually fuelled rivalries between Caribbean immigrants and black Americans due to the segregated African American job market where limited opportunities left native-born blacks continually displaced by each new wave of immigration. Black Americans accused Caribbean newcomers of increasing competition for scarce economic resources, such as housing and jobs, without contributing to the community, and treated the latter's sojourn in the United States with suspicion and envy as many spoke openly about returning home. Caribbean immigrants arrived in steady numbers between 1920 and 1924: 3,535 (1920), 3,397 (1921), 2,516 (1922), 3,179 (1923), 4,507 (1924). But their concentration in the larger metropolitan areas left native-born blacks feeling ambivalent about all immigration. By 1930, 65 percent of all black immigrants resided in New York City – which translates into 54,754 newcomers looking for their share of the local economy.Footnote ²⁶

The ethnic bias that characterized much of the anti-Garvey sentiment did not go unnoticed within the Caribbean community, which protested against the disparaging portrait of their birthplace and foreign status in the white and black press. In fact, the ethnic bias behind the slogan and intent of the “Garvey Must Go” campaign did little to unite key Caribbean and American black Garvey critics.Footnote ²⁷ The ethnic slurs and name-calling received full coverage in the radical socialist magazine Messenger, which had announced its intent to drive Garvey and Garveyism from America. Chandler Owen led the nativist campaign against Garvey, which culminated in a 1923 article entitled “A Supreme Negro Jamaican Jackass.” W. A. Domingo, the Jamaican contributing editor, was quick to alert Owen to the consequences of his jingoistic ethnic bias:

Nevertheless, deep-seated rivalries between the communities continued to characterize relations during the 1920s. The main barrier to cross-group social interaction was cultural and psychological differences between the communities. Caribbean newcomers conducted their primary social relationships mainly with other black immigrants. Their clannishness, often resented by black Americans, was fuelled by that part of the immigrant personality that sought to erase memories of economic dependence and social inferiority back home. Speaking of their island paradises, Caribbean immigrants accentuated their differences from black Americans to protect themselves against economic failure abroad. Black Americans represented the spectre of continued economic and social uncertainty back home, thus any alliance with this segregated minority group might expose them to the realities of America's colour line and jeopardize their expectations abroad and aspirations back home.

No sharp line separated the ambitions of temporary and permanent Caribbean immigrants in post-war America; both groups saw their return home as either imminent or planned. Thus their characteristic litigious and aggressive behaviour abroad reflected their shared expectations of economic freedom back home. Similarly, their clannishness and cautious view of American domestic affairs reflected the single-mindedness of the immigrants' personality, which was driven by a fear of returning home as penniless as they had left. As black newcomers focussed on satisfying their economic ambitions, black Americans grew to distrust their aggressive approach to business and complained that immigrants were economic mercenaries who added to their economic burden. That black newcomers retained an open and emotional attachment to their homeland merely served to confirm native suspicions that these were fair-weather friends who rejected race unity for material gain in the United States – they came to “drink milk, not to count cattle.”Footnote ²⁹

In his short story “City of Refuge,” Rudolph Fisher gives his own verdict on the business cunning of Caribbean newcomers with a nameless “monkey-chaser” who fails to pull off a business ruse and subsequently loses his store job to a southern black migrant. Fisher exposed the unethical business practices of the Caribbean immigrant and captured the feelings of most black Americans by mocking black newcomers as “an achin' pain. Jess de way white folks feels 'bout niggers.”Footnote ³⁰

This characteristic pushiness was not only confined to business enterprise. Though black newcomers denounced segregation, black Americans felt their support was disingenuous and cowardly, for foreign-speaking black immigrants were among the fiercest patriots and continued to parade their differences, knowing that white Americans “regarded anyone who spoke a foreign tongue, particularly Spanish, as being white … .”Footnote ³¹ The advantages enjoyed by Spanish-speaking black immigrants were made explicit in an article printed in the Negro World: American-born blacks were urged to learn the Spanish language and share the “exceptional freedom and opportunity in travel and accommodations and in employment … .” To a lesser degree these white conceptions of foreignness applied to the Caribbean dialect, which newcomers used to their advantage to deflect the prejudices of the colour line.Footnote ³²

These judgements on the motivations and aspirations of Caribbean immigrants are indicative of the different political agendas of America's transient and permanent (native) black populations, though their shared sense of uncertainty in segregated society tended to blur these differences. Despite their collective support for the UNIA, they were not bound by a single goal; both groups welcomed the rhetorical flourishes of race globalism, but continued to pursue separate and personal economic goals. According to George Fredrickson, Garveyism gave black Americans the opportunity for material success, because his ideology of economic self-help allowed blacks from different social groups to satisfy their bourgeois aspirations in a liberal capitalist context.Footnote ³³ Caribbean immigrants shared this pursuit of material wealth, but continued to dream of returning home, which was part of their rationale for emigrating in the first place. As both groups supported Garveyism to aid their different visions of the future, their conflicting interests eventually served to split the UNIA into competing pressure groups. As the movement fragmented under the strain of inter-group rivalry, Garvey never lost sight of his colonial constituents.

Intraracial tensions within the UNIA, though rarely reported in the Negro World, received a full hearing at its third annual convention during August 1922, as Garvey moved to expel the prominent clergyman, the Reverend James W. H. Eason on the grounds of disloyalty: Eason had accused Garvey of favouring Caribbean appointees and condemned his autocratic style of leadership. As “Leader of American Negroes” within the UNIA, Eason's expulsion was a serious breach of solidarity within the movement, which his calls for black Americans to join his newly organized Negro Improvement Alliance only served to accentuate. Relations between Caribbean immigrants and native black American members deteriorated further following his murder at the hands of a Caribbean-born Garvey loyalist in New Orleans in January 1923. While Eason's expulsion marked Garvey's desire to control the UNIA, his murder was the culmination of intraracial tensions within the UNIA, fuelled, in part, by Garvey and Eason's respective loyalties to Caribbean and black American members.

Unity among Garveyites never really characterized the movement even at its peak. As delegates arrived at Liberty Hall in New York in August 1920 for the first month-long UNIA international convention, it was soon apparent that the broad banner of race uplift covered myriad hopes and grievances. Randolph Felix, St. Lucia's delegate, spoke of delays in gaining boat passage to different parts of the world, which was a real concern for island inhabitants who relied on easier access to outside economies to safeguard their livelihoods. Like other delegates, Felix raised the specific and serious needs of his locale. Though a black-owned shipping line had symbolic value that could reach across the globe, Caribbean delegates highlighted its significance in relation to the regional economy.Footnote ³⁴

Dr. George Alexander McGuire, chaplain-general of the UNIA, was another delegate who spoke on a local platform at the UNIA convention. Reporting on the “abominable and deplorable” conditions in his native Antigua, McGuire excoriated the “thraldom of crown officialdom” and its policy of impoverishment that was the common foe of all the islands. His comments helped to move Caribbean delegates towards a regional consciousness, while excluding black American delegates who were unfamiliar with his anti-colonial vocabulary.Footnote ³⁵ Not surprisingly, black American delegates spoke of conditions and problems in their own communities and drew attention to a number of domestic issues, such as mistreatment by white landlords, discriminatory pay differentials and insufficient health provisions. They urged the UNIA assembly to recognize their own domestic priorities, but found Caribbean delegates as indifferent to the black American situation as black Americans were to colonial injustices.

The question remains: which political agenda did Garvey support? On the evidence of delegate reports to the first UNIA convention during August 1920, there seems to be some connection between Garvey and his Caribbean constituents, a union best exemplified by the UNIA's decision to fasten its reputation to the BSL and support Randolph Felix's declaration: “We are surely in need of a boat in that part of the world [St. Lucia].”Footnote ³⁶

Not all Caribbean newcomers turned away from American realities and prospects. Radical Caribbean intellectuals like Hubert Harrison, W. A. Domingo, Cyril Briggs and Claude McKay addressed domestic race issues head on; Harrison and Domingo even joined the staff of the Negro World to advance their class-based model of black radicalism. According to Kevin Gaines, the journalistic writings of these Caribbean intellectuals contributed to the vibrancy of post-war radicalism, as their rethinking of race and class as interdependent categories brought an “international, diasporic, and progressive socialist perspective on domestic race relations … .”Footnote ³⁷

As contributing editor of the Negro World, Harrison found an outlet for his “Race First” black nationalism, which stressed race consciousness as the best means to mobilize blacks across the world. Other elements of his “cosmopolitan brand of black nationalism” deviated from Garvey's race rhetoric and thus made less suitable copy.Footnote ³⁸ These more radical critiques of domestic race issues found a platform elsewhere among independent political groups, which shared his call for militant self-help in the form of armed self-defence, federal anti-lynching legislation and an economic boycott by black residents of town banks.

The Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay faced the pressure of America's colour line in a different way. His autobiographical narrative illuminates the alienation of the black stranger, especially from the black middle class, while conveying the socialist paradigm that tolerance of ethnic diversity exists only among the black working class. McKay chose to marginalize himself from the black establishment and defended his aloofness by condemning those formal white institutions from which he was excluded. He expressed his regret in the following way:

III

Garvey's position within the swell of his supporters' disparate objectives needs further investigation, since his dismissal of the domestic agenda set by the black establishment suggests a larger commitment to race globalism. Theodore Vincent, an advocate of Garvey's global ambitions, has attributed the disunity within the UNIA to his preoccupation with universal race uplift, which served to marginalize the integrationist movement on the basis that social equality would lead to interracial marriage and destroy race unity. Vincent's verdict rests on the assumption that Garvey prioritized the different goals of his followers: that race idealism ranked higher than political and civil equality.Footnote ⁴⁰

Other Garvey scholars, such as Tony Martin and Robert Weisbord, have accepted Vincent's judgement that the UNIA's separatist agenda in America was part of its global vision. Martin has embellished the argument somewhat by suggesting that Garvey's black separatist rhetoric was less a repudiation of the domestic agenda than a commitment to a grander scheme of universal racial uplift that would eventually incorporate these interests. Weisbord, too, has extended this line of enquiry by claiming that Garvey sought to create an African super-state that could protect the interests and future of Africans and the black Diaspora in the New World. His global commitment to race uplift was illuminated by his call for a “Negro Empire, where every black man, whether he was born in Africa or in the Western world, will have the opportunity to develop on his own lines under the protection of the most favourable democratic institutions.”Footnote ⁴¹

Yet, despite his rhetorical flourishes on the subject, Garvey never advocated African empire-building, because he understood that skin colour alone was neither the foundation of nation states nor the only source of national culture. His rhetoric, in this instance, overshadows his more pragmatic approach to nation-building, which called for the universal application of national self-determination based on cultural and political communities, not utopian racial panaceas like an African super-state. Weisbord has linked the movement to the larger struggle for African liberation and framed Garveyism in universal terms based on his more elaborate rhetorical statements, even though his ideas on empire-building were not always consistent. Garveyite rhetoric varied from time to time and place to place and could just as easily demonstrate the opposite. His call for Africa to be built up as a “Negro Empire” did not shape his later thoughts on the subject:

Vincent's assessment also fails to appreciate that pan-negroism was never an object in itself, but a precondition for a practical and localized end, namely Caribbean self-government. Garvey endorsed the notion of black numerical dominance in global terms as a precursor to national redemption, because it could show native blacks across the Caribbean the potential of their own numerical superiority. That Garvey used grand ideals as the basis for local goals adds another dimension to his approach to politics in the United States. Though he called for race consciousness as a means to address regional goals, his vision of universal race uplift was based on the realities of colonial society rather than the domestic problems facing black Americans. This relationship between the UNIA's general and local objectives is central to understanding Garveyism, as his commitment to local democratic reforms was the main reason for the launch of the UNIA in Kingston, Jamaica on 20 July 1914, and the premise upon which he built an entire philosophy.

Garvey's critique of miscegenation not only reflects his attitude towards many of the domestic problems confronting black Americans, but also illustrates how his separatist doctrine was shaped less by international than by regional considerations. His belief in race separation turned on what he considered to be the intrinsic dangers of European colonialism: its tolerance of interracial marriage and subsequent suppression of majority or representative rule, as lighter-skinned blacks, more than other sections of the population, remained devoted to white bias. In the end these conflicting interests would fragment the black national majority, undermine its numerical strength and subvert its governing potential.

The same remnants of colonial society led him to impose his resentment of the privileged mulatto caste in Jamaica on his American detractors. Following his return to the United States from the Caribbean in May 1921, Garvey charged America's black establishment with colour prejudice, because they chose to distance themselves from his crude and inflated conception of the black self. He interpreted this disassociation as social snobbery and blamed colour prejudice for his exclusion, which was how he had responded to Jamaican critics years earlier. His outbursts against America's black elite subsequently took the form of personal insults, which seemed inappropriate outside the cultural systems of European dependencies. What might have been a measured form of retaliation against Jamaica's light-skinned bourgeoisie years earlier, now, according to Gaines, “bordered on an irrational politics of pigmentation” in an American context.Footnote ⁴³ Nowhere was this more apparent than in Garvey's personal feud with Du Bois.

From 1920 onwards Du Bois used his Crisis editorials to openly ridicule Garvey's leadership aspirations in America, claiming he lacked the necessary social and intellectual fibre for such a role. Garvey's public image was damaged further when Du Bois branded him a dangerous demagogue who misled ignorant blacks with his stirring eloquence. Clearly Garvey resented such close inspection of his character and responded with his own personal insults; Du Bois's professed Negro, French and Dutch ancestry was the target of some of his fiercest rhetoric:

On one occasion Garvey accused Du Bois of being “more of a white man than a Negro [and] only a professional Negro at that.” Another time he claimed Du Bois was repelled by anything black, which seemingly explained why “in 1917 he had but the lightest of coloured people in his [NAACP] office, when one could hardly tell whether it was a white show or a coloured vaudeville he was running at 5th Avenue.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Beyond the rhetoric, Garvey's separatist doctrine served to both highlight the plight of majority populations under minority (white) rule and exclude minority ethnic groups from his political agenda. Nowhere was his rejection of national minorities more visible than in his defence of UNIA policy towards the Ku Klux Klan. Garvey's two-hour meeting in Atlanta with Edward Clarke, deputy leader of the Klan, on 25 June 1922 was less a “grievous error” on his part than an uninhibited expression of his reservations about the future of black Americans in a segregated environment. He defended his decision to elicit support from the Klan for his back-to-Africa programme by maintaining that it “will not help us to fight it or its program [the Klan]. The Negro numerical disadvantage in this country is too great.”Footnote ⁴⁶

At first glance, the formation of the Universal Negro Political Union (UNPU) in August 1924 appeared to reverse the UNIA's strategic indifference to domestic politics, for now “the strength of the Union shall be given to any community or country to politically assist it in putting over its political program.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The UNIA's new focus on local politics seemed to reaffirm its ideological purpose that was first published in 1914, for now the global–local relationship, which had hitherto applied solely to Caribbean nationhood, was extended to black Americans. Yet, on closer inspection, Garvey's decision to extend his formula for uplift to local black politics was based less on his commitment to American domestic issues than on his response to the vociferous demands for his deportation from black critics who were outraged and astonished by his capitulation to the Klan's doctrine of white supremacy.Footnote ⁴⁸

Garvey was prepared to broaden his formula for uplift to include American black politics, because it was the only way he could continue to solicit resources in the US to ensure democratic reforms in his beloved Jamaica. By 1924 his avowed commitment to black Americans, expedient in light of anti-Garvey sentiment, was, in fact, another expression of his renewed emphasis on regional uplift outside the United States – a position from which he crafted the UNIA's first statement of local aims and objects in Kingston, Jamaica on 20 July 1914 and never deviated.

The motion to form the UNPU, carried unanimously by delegates attending the fourth UNIA International Convention, marked the beginning of Garvey's politicization and happened to coincide with constitutional reforms towards representative government in the Caribbean, as recommended by the Parliamentary Commission led by Major E. F. L. Wood, under-secretary of state for the colonies, in its West Indies Report.Footnote ⁴⁹ These developments at home did not go unnoticed by Garvey and made a significant impression on his idea of self-rule. Wood (who later became Lord Halifax) had ruled out responsible self-government across the region because of political apathy and backwardness among “great blocks” of the population. Yet despite his reservations about the region's capacity for self-government, he did recommend concessions towards representative government, since democratic sentiments “will in the long run prove irresistible.” Given the inevitability of self-rule, Wood favoured partial representation in Jamaica through a series of cautious constitutional changes over a prolonged period where adjustments to the elected element of the Legislative Council would reflect appropriate social changes.Footnote ⁵⁰

To prepare Jamaica for the next stage of constitutional development, Wood proposed that the majority of seats held by ex-officio members in the Legislative Council be transferred to nominated unofficial and elected members. In 1924 Parliament granted an extension of the elected element in the Legislative Councils in Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago, though still based on a limited franchise, while greater representation was introduced to the Jamaican Council with nominated officials acting independent of the Governor.Footnote ⁵¹

These constitutional advances towards political democracy coincided with an upswing in national consciousness in Jamaica, marked by the Darling Street Riot in Kingston in June 1924, which followed a protest march by a thousand road construction workers demanding higher wages. A strike by banana carriers in Port Antonia also led to violent clashes with the colonial authorities a fortnight later on 21 June. This spirit of unrest later infused the 1925 election campaign with slogans like “Colour for Colour” and “Skin for Skin,” which the Daily Gleaner reported had never been “so powerfully operative as in this instance, and it is possible that it may become still more powerfully operative in the future.” The current of democratic sentiment across the region, as predicted by Wood in 1922, awakened Garvey to a political notion of nationhood, which he doubtless hoped could mobilize the UNPU.Footnote ⁵²

Besides the correlation between extended elected representation in the Caribbean and the politicization of the UNIA, the collapse of the Liberian colonization scheme also influenced Garvey's new political policy. By the time the two surviving members of the UNIA delegation to Liberia reported to the fourth UNIA convention on their failure to obtain separate land settlements, Garvey had already initiated a political alternative to economic nationalism. He explained this shift in policy, rather unconvincingly, on the basis that the “the time has come for the Negro to have a policy in politics.”Footnote ⁵³

The timing of the launch of the UNPU is even more interesting in light of Garvey's appeal to convention delegates to “please wait a while” for “world changes” to “deliver the goods.” The notion that global developments would awaken the “sleeping conscience” of the people alluded less to Africa as the vanguard for change, given his “betrayal” by the Liberian elite, than to the Caribbean where constitutional reforms were fuelling democratic sentiments. The prospect of this current of national consciousness rising to an unstoppable tide convinced Garvey that it was only “a question of time” before the UNIA would fulfil its best work. The fight for African sovereignty was superseded by a new political policy, which above all reflected constitutional developments in the Caribbean. Jamaica was now firmly at the centre of his vision of reform, while Africa was left to “redeem herself when the time comes. Not from without, but from within.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The 1924 convention programme illustrates further how the UNIA's new political agenda served to support the interests of colonial subjects above those of black Americans. The second political point for discussion identified the need to educate “Negroes in communities where they form the majority population to rise to the responsibility of self-government.” This effectively limited black political activity in the United States to local and city-wide affairs, which contrasted with the national political opportunities that Garvey envisaged for his colonial constituents: “When the next political campaign starts in Jamaica we are going to see to it that fourteen black men get into the Legislative Council of Jamaica backed by the Universal Negro Political Union [applause].”Footnote ⁵⁵ Unlike black Americans, native Jamaicans were neither urged to “wait awhile” nor asked to endorse other political candidates in the hope of gaining political leverage later. Rather, as the majority group at home, they could post candidates representing the UNPU and reclaim their universal rights through representative government.Footnote ⁵⁶

Robert Minor, editor of the Daily Worker, raised the matter of this imbalance in one of his editorials. He found it “impossible as yet to make sure what the domestic policy of the Negro Political Union will be.” In fact, it was not until the final days of the UNIA convention on 29 August, and probably in response to Minor's observations, that a motion was introduced to give the UNPU meaning to black Americans. As a result of its delayed introduction, the motion was passed unanimously and appears in the UNIA book of laws as a general statement without much detail or definite course of action. In the end, the motion to create the UNPU failed to clarify its purpose in relation to the United States, which was less an oversight on the part of the committee than a measure of its intent to aid constitutional reform in the Caribbean. Even in America, it seems, Garvey's ideology took account of political developments at home.Footnote ⁵⁷

IV

How, then, do we reconcile Garvey's pessimism about the prospects for political and civil equality in America with the UNIA's popular support among black Americans? Did the mass of black Americans misinterpret Garveyism? Or did they bring their own set of beliefs to the UNIA and create a new mix of ideas and values that worked specifically for them? In his study of UNIA divisions in California, Emory Tolbert has argued that the “need for recognition and a feeling of somebodiness” transcended the myriad motivations for joining the UNIA; in other words, the collective need for personal and psychological revitalization displaced local political considerations.Footnote ⁵⁸ As most black Americans believed material success could aid social mobility, their support for Garveyism tended to reflect their preoccupation with gaining economic security in an uncertain post-war environment.

While Tolbert's observations on West Coast Garveyites have helped to clarify Vincent's earlier and more general portrait of Garvey's American supporters, both studies stress the defensive and compensatory rationalizations behind UNIA membership. Their consensus on the motivational patterns of Garveyites draws on the overwhelming disillusionment among blacks who felt betrayed by their enlistment and loyalty to America during the war. Vincent sums up this despair in the following way: “having tried to work within the established channels for social change – and failing – characterized a number of leading Garveyites.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Tolbert has ascribed Garvey's appeal among the mass of black Americans to the “common-sense of the oppressed,” which echoes the verdict of other Garvey scholars: that Garveyism prospered in the post-war climate, because many black Americans felt powerless and were ready to hear his message of redemption.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet in their accounts of the post-war racial climate, Garvey scholars have overlooked mostly the mood among black immigrants and their parochial view of oppression that alienated them from black Americans. America's segregated environment was a new proposition for Caribbean immigrants which helped to shape their conception of Garveyism. They believed Garveyism could aid their psychological and cultural readjustment in America and accelerate their return home. “Race First” formed part of this strategy and had special meaning to Caribbean immigrants, who were hypersensitive to racial criticism in an unfamiliar biracial climate.

In a similar way, Garvey's emphasis on colour prejudice attempted to bring cohesion and balance to Caribbean immigrants in their new racial climate. Garvey opposed the partial integration of light-skinned blacks, because their access to mainstream society, however limited, blocked structural reforms. His critique of colour worship served to highlight unequal economic opportunities among blacks in America, which he hoped would unite the highly class-conscious group of Caribbean immigrants. This preoccupation with self-image and colour consciousness helped to instil a common identity among Caribbean immigrants in a segregated racial environment.

His concern about colour worship also revealed an appreciation of how immigrant conceptions of skin colour were altered in America, disrupting personal and psychological identity in the process. Black newcomers found the “symbolic” use of skin colour as a status-marker back home was replaced by the overt “stigma” of colour, for they occupied a “special” position as a minority group within a minority black population. Back home the premium on skin colour could be offset by adopting white cultural patterns and partially subordinated as a status-marker to education, occupation and economic opportunities. America's colour line, however, was uncompromising in segregating whites and non-whites. Immigrants who fell outside the measure of whiteness were condemned to permanent inferiority. Under this system of biracialism, skin colour was recharged as a “psychological concept” which disrupted the personal adjustment of Caribbean immigrants in American society.Footnote ⁶¹

Nowhere were these psychological strains for black newcomers in a biracial environment better represented than in (Jamaican-born) Claude McKay's description of the “personal turmoil” and the “sharp mental loss” felt by all black newcomers who are partially absorbed into a “numerical and social black minority” that is excluded from formal white institutions. America's colour line, he warned, had worked to marginalize and dehumanize immigrants by denying them the freedom to control their individual destiny, a delusion to which they had clung to back home.Footnote ⁶²

The conversion of J. G. St. Clair Drake from Garvey critic to UNIA executive officer (international organizer) illustrates how Garveyite rhetoric managed to penetrate the immigrant mindset and generate enthusiasm for the UNIA. Critical of Garvey's rhetoric and exhibitionism in the United States, Drake distanced himself from the UNIA and despaired at Caribbean immigrant support for its utopian rhetoric of race globalism. To Drake's way of thinking, the people of the Caribbean were better placed to expose Garvey's opportunism than black Americans, who were too encumbered by their inferiority status in America. Yet during a visit to his native Barbados in 1923, Drake witnessed the relevance of Garveyism and realized its true meaning in a colonized environment: that it could awaken the native population to democratic reform. He found that only as a returnee, the culmination of the migrant ideology, was he best placed to understand Garvey ideology. Drake's conversion to Garveyism suggests that Caribbean followers were more committed to its programme of local democratic reform than to its rhetoric of universal race uplift, while Tolbert has shown the converse to be true for rank-and-file Garveyites in California, for “debates over details were of little significance” in their search for somebodiness.Footnote ⁶³

Yet symbolism alone was not always sufficient even for American Garveyites. Hence the Los Angeles division of the UNIA, led by Noah Thompson and Charlotta Bass, split from the parent body in late 1921 to form the Pacific Coast Improvement Association. Thompson qualified this move in a statement in the California Eagle, the leading black newspaper of which Bass was the managing editor and publisher: “Do something here on the Pacific Coast and you will do more, yea, ten thousand times more, to redeem Africa than you could by buying shares in Garvey ships, which very truly are ships that pass in the night.”Footnote ⁶⁴

For many black Americans living on the Pacific Coast, the BSL symbolized racial strength and self-confidence, but Thompson's statement sought more than psychological integration. His critique of the BSL as a meaningless venture turned on its failure to address local problems and satisfy immediate goals.

Most black Americans believed material wealth was the safest way to secure their future in a segregated environment. As a minority group that accepted quick, often temporary, economic gains, they invested in immediate material success to allay their anxieties in an uncertain post-war racial climate. Caribbean Garveyites shared this search for somebodiness (less in America than back home), but they brought their own political agenda to the movement and attached their own set of goals to the success of the BSL. Unlike black Americans, they valued the BSL less for its symbolism than for its functional role as a passenger line, which was part of a greater desire to satisfy their migrant ideology.

Race enterprise emerged as the UNIA's collective agenda, but it was always peripheral to local political issues. Stein has argued that Garvey's focus on the BSL highlights the dichotomy between the UNIA's mass appeal and its bourgeois ideology, since his rhetoric was couched in an ethos of economic conservatism that served the personal ambitions of the marginalized petite bourgeoisie but ignored the daily needs of the black wage-worker.Footnote ⁶⁵ With this premium on business enterprise, Stein has identified the lure of middle-class status and individual advancement, not race consciousness, as the source of Garvey's appeal in America. By depicting the UNIA as a movement for marginalized, but not desperate, blacks, Stein has shown why black immigrants had particular reason to join its ranks: bourgeois idealism had powered their emigration to the United States in the first place where race enterprise not only promised to fulfil these ambitions but came to represent their own standard of principled politics.

Stein's criticism of the UNIA – for its failure to deliver a centralized agenda other than race enterprise – overlooks that the latter was a main preoccupation of many Garveyites, particularly Caribbean immigrants, for whom race enterprise and bourgeois idealism offered a kind of collective political agenda of their own that was comparatively absent among black Americans. In fact, these twin tenets of Garveyism promised to aid their middle-class aspirations, facilitate their financial gain abroad and accelerate their return home as socially elevated and economically independent figures. Garvey had already identified these returnees as potential reformers and believed that their elevated status back home would increase their capacity to effect political change. He subsequently warned against their naturalization in America and openly encouraged them to return home, yet there is no way of knowing whether or not his rhetoric influenced the decision of Caribbean immigrants to return home. Nonetheless, between 1920 and 1924 the number of newcomers reached 17,134, while 13,185 returned home; in fact, in 1922 the number of returnees actually exceeded new arrivals by 168 (2,516 to 2,684).Footnote ⁶⁶

The Panama experience illustrates how immigration facilitated new investment back home. Money orders from Panama to Jamaica increased from £12,062 in 1903 to £76,393 in 1913–14, leading to an increase in the number of small retail outlets, houses built and ownership of small holdings.Footnote ⁶⁷ Emigration has traditionally been seen as a means of individual improvement through enhanced economic and social status on returning home after a successful migration, but the home community also expects to benefit from the material wealth of the returnee, which places a heavy premium on the immigrants' capacity to save money during their sojourn abroad. Accordingly, Caribbean immigrants in America helped to swell the number of deposits in the Harlem postal savings bank beyond those of all other branches across America.Footnote ⁶⁸

Though Caribbean immigrants spoke out against the racial status quo in America and criticized inaction among black Americans, their approach to American domestic affairs reflected their aversion to minority group status and desire to confront the status quo back home. Anthony Maingot has suggested that no level of social and economic success in the United States would displace this predisposition to return home or still the urge for political advancement back home.Footnote ⁶⁹ This strategic pursuit of opportunity abroad for the purpose of multiplying options back home is characteristic of the Caribbean social psychology. Garvey had first-hand knowledge of the immigrant experience, having travelled across Central America between 1911 and 1912, and thus understood how a sojourn abroad could enhance the political role of the returnee back home.

Today, Garvey's reputation as a leading pan-Africanist and black American nationalist remains intact. Garvey scholars have generally acknowledged his contribution to enriching the self-image of Africans and the black Diaspora across the New World, while his emphasis on race consciousness and race enterprise in America is usually discussed in terms of universal race uplift. His doctrine of race nationalism reached across the globe, because supporters could adhere to its basic message as a means to satisfy their personal goals without embracing its true agenda, which might explain why his cautious view of American domestic issues did not undermine his popularity in the United States. His message of race pride, race enterprise and race nationalism could continue to alleviate the anxieties of post-war life, for it was merely a matter of interpreting his message to suit this end. His Caribbean constituents, on the other hand, found his rhetoric could satisfy their principal needs without having to alter its meaning, for there was an underlying connection between his ideology and their personal goals, which was not always paraded before American audiences, but it was there nonetheless, in various guises, because Garvey shared their colonial background, cultural identity and bourgeois aspirations.