February 3, 2010 • 20 mins
Tune in to this episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class to learn more about the life and philosophy of Marcus Garvey, a black nationalist leader known as "Black Moses."
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and Sarah and
I decided to do some episodes for Black History Month.
(00:20):
So our topic for today is a man some people
know as Black Moses. By nineteen nineteen, this Black Moses
claimed a following of as many as two million people.
And they're African Americans and people from the West Indies
who were just tired of being denied their rights or
subjected to violence just because they're black. But unlike his
(00:43):
predecessor book Or T. Washington and his contemporary W. E. B.
Two Boys, Black Moses didn't preach assimilation. He didn't even
oppose segregation, just the mistreatment that went along with it. Yeah.
And instead his line was pan Africanism, and it was
a desire to unite all the people separated under the
Black daspora as one people. And he believed that once
(01:06):
Africa became associated with quote armies, navies and men of
big affairs, people of African descent wouldn't be denied their
rights anymore and they wouldn't be subjected to violence and
too pity, and this line of thought put him at
the head of America's first major black nationalist movement based
in Harlem, which was known as Garvey Um. And the
(01:28):
name gives you a clue as to the answer to
our question, who was Black Moses. Black Moses was Malchus
Mosiah Garvey, who today we know as Marcus Garvey was
born in eighteen eighty seven at St. Anne's Bay in Jamaica,
and as far as what we know about his parents,
his dad may have been a master mason or perhaps
(01:50):
just someone who broke stones on the roadway. But regardless
of what he did as a profession, he really truly
loved books and he spent as much time as he
good in his own private library, which was a building
actually separate from the family home. I can only hope
and his mother helps support the family by selling her
(02:10):
delectable pastries. But Um later in life, Garvey really emphasized
that he came from a family of quote black negroes.
He really wants to distinguish himself from the other terms
that uh people in the West Indiesies to describe themselves,
like brown or mulatto. He emphasizes that his people are
from Africa, and he's not even completely sure about people
(02:35):
who do have white lineage. As much as he emphasizes
that in himself, he actually does a lot of work
with people who are of mixed race. A lot of
it is kind of taught, yes, but he does make
statements like this, which of course are important when you're
talking about his life. He's largely self taught, but he
does get a valuable apprenticeship with a printer which helped
(02:55):
him learn a lot about the art of composition and
about the business of running a press, which will come
in handy beater. Yeah, he learned the journalistic trade in
this apprenticeship, as well as the mechanics of it. Um.
But he travels some as a youth. He goes to
Central America, where he's really disappointed to find um black
people living in similarly bad conditions as they are in Jamaica,
(03:19):
and as many young people living in countries with a
strong British influence. He is also driven to London and
he lives there from nineteen twelve to nineteen fourteen. And
um he starts to learn about Pan Africanism and uh
that sort of thing when he's in London, but he
also reads book or t Washington's Up from Slavery, and
(03:39):
Garvey was certainly an admire of Washington, even though they
disagree on that major point of integration, Washington obviously being
for it and Garvey not so much. But he did
really like the idea of Washington's Tuskegee Institute and comes
up with the dream of making his own own trade
(04:00):
school in Jamaica, and he writes to Washington and secures
an invitation to visit, but before he can, Washington dives.
So Garvey comes to the United States nevertheless, in nineteen sixteen. Um.
But all right, so before we talk about his early
days in the United States, we should mentioned that in
(04:21):
Jamaica in nineteen fourteen, he founds the very long name,
very unwielder Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African
Communities League, which is usually just called the Universal Negro
Improvement Association, and we're going to call it the u
n i A. And the group had a Pan African agenda,
(04:43):
So we wanted to talk a little bit about what
that means. There's a bit of a spectrum on one side,
according to Wilson Jeremiah Moses, sometimes it just is a
call for unity among black or African peoples wherever they
might reside. That's a quote from Moses. And on the
other side, we've got the goal of uniting the entire
(05:03):
African continent under one government to be controlled by Africans. Yeah,
so I kind of see this as a pan African
light and then a very intense version um. But the
U n I A, which has this Pan African agenda,
doesn't really catch on in Jamaica, and this is partly
why Garvey is attracted to the US, and he actually
(05:25):
becomes so involved in un I A work when he's
in the United States that he eventually abandons his other
motive for coming, which was the Jamaican Trade School plan.
But the un I really picks up steam, especially in
Harlem and in other cities, and by nineteen nineteen he's
got that following of about two million people. This is
(05:46):
really the height of his popularity. So let's talk a
little bit about Garvey and his work with the U
and I A. Garvey is a pitch man, and he
speaks to black power, but specifically black economic power. He's
also interested in black history and an African identity, but
black and economic power is kind of the center of
(06:07):
what he wants to do. Yeah, and that interest in
black history and African identity. We talked about the pan
Africanism already, but he's also interested in afric Centrism, which
is really more of a philosophical movement, and it's the
idea that Africa is the center of black history and
cultural identity, and that black people all around the world
(06:28):
should celebrate the Ethiopians and the Egyptian civilization and kind
of consider that, uh, a golden Age of the Pharaohs
was going on at the same time that Europeans were,
you know, considered barbarians living in caves. And Garby was
also convinced that whenever black people accomplished something amazing, they're
(06:49):
basically reclassified as white. So he went with a whole
racist one drop rule and that one drop of blood
may makes you black, right, and reclaimed it and embrace
stit for historical vindications, saying, well, all right, then the
pharaohs are black with up. So his newspaper, Negro World,
is very afrocentric and it's really his instrument um to
(07:12):
communicate you know, Afrocentrism and pana Africanism to his followers
and he's got a lot of popular articles, not just
on news but on African history and society. And he's
really good at this paper business. We've we've talked a
lot about these great publishing men recently, but um, he's
good at this. He's a journalist and it's the u
(07:34):
n A is big success and something to remember when
we talk about some of its spectacular failures later on.
But Garvey is a born publicist and he's got this
great sense of style and composition, and at its peak, um,
Negro World has a regular circulation of fifty thousand or
more readers. Um. And that doesn't count even all the
(07:56):
people who were listening to it being read aloud at
work or in beauty parts all around the city. So
that's a low estimate. Yeah, definitely. But don't think of
Marcus Garvey as a retiring sort of newspaperman. He's very showy.
He wears plumes and military style clothing. Sarah emailed me
some fabulous pictures earlier than Katie and I are always
(08:18):
interested in the plumes. Well, we're big into that. You're
the green editor we have to be. But he's not
just about talking and promoting and pitching it's it's not
all talk. He wants to be the guy at the
head of this economic revolution that he dreams of, but
unfortunately he is no businessman. And his goal is to
(08:38):
establish an independent black economy, so not integrate into the
existing white economy, but have his own. And so he
establishes the Negro Factories Corporation, and then a line of
black run restaurants and grocery stores, laundries, a hotel, a
printing press, and then most famously, the Black Star Line,
(09:00):
most famously for being a complete misadventures. So the idea
behind the Black Star Line is actually really impressive. It
was a shipping line that was meant to be the
foundation of trade between Africans around the world, so it
would increase the distribution of black made products and make
more money for the black community. And it's popular. People
(09:23):
want to be involved in this. It's incorporated in selling
stocks at five dollars a share, and it has between
thirty thousand and forty thousand stockholders. And these are people
who could have invested in some of the businesses, you know,
the restaurants and the laundry mats and all that, and
many do um. But a lot of people choose the
Black Star Line because it offers economic independence and because
(09:46):
it just seems so militant. It was so bold. It
is a really bold, impressive, showy kind of idea. But
unfortunately terrible investments and mismanagement lead to the line and
garbs downfall. There was just a lot of incompetence, not
only with Garby but also with the people he hired
and surrounded himself with. The vessels are dilapidated and sometimes
(10:09):
just unseaworthy. One of them originally called the Yarmouth and
renamed Frederick Douglas. You'll see this is a they rename
their boats. Um. It was purchased on the advice of
a West Indian captain named Joshua Cockburn, who gets a
six dollar brokerage fee for buying it. And it's not
that great of a ship, but still people are excited
(10:31):
about the inauguration of the Black Star Line and maybe
it seems like it will work out. But on its
voyage to Cuba with a cargo of whiskey, it runs
aground off the Bahamas. Well, Cockburn is asleep, and then
finally it does get to Cuba, makes no profit, runs
aground again off of Boston, and it's sold at public
auction the next year. And this is just this is hitomazes.
(10:53):
These these boats here, they're all sunk, abandoned or sold
at public auction. Shortly they're after And the other side
of this whole shipping line idea was transporting people, because
that was the ultimate plan you would resettle all of
the black people in Africa, which is the scheme Garvey
is probably best known for. Yeah, So one year after
(11:15):
the launch of the Black Star Line, Garvey starts the
Librarian Program and UM. In fact, in nineteen twenty which
once again this is like the height of his popularity.
There's a Madison Square Garden meeting of twenty five thousand
people and they elect him the provisional President of Africa,
which have no idea. That's a rather bold title. But
(11:38):
the idea was to give American blacks an African base
and UM to develop Liberia as a kind of economic powerhouse.
So in nineteen twenty a U n I A delegation
sets up a deal with the Liberian government to set
aside land for the un I to develop and you know,
Librarius is okay, They're agreed, and the UNI sets up
(12:01):
this Liberian Development Corporation and raises seven hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. But this money simply disappears. You got all
the money and then it's gone. So the Liberians, who
are definitely in need of some kind of influx of
capital here they need to develop their country, move on
(12:21):
because at this point there's increasingly bad pr around Garvey
in the u n i A, and France and Great
Britain even pressure Liberria to announce that the U n
i A can't have the land after all. So instead
the Librarians set up a partnership with the American rubber industry,
specifically Firestone Company, because I got to consider it this time.
(12:45):
The automobile industry is really picking up and we need
tires in America, right. But this whole venture is the
beginning of the end for Garvey. We've got some bad
business deals going on, some definite failures um and Garvey's
popularity ensures that the white establishment is looking for a
(13:05):
way to bring him down. He's very powerful and they
don't like it. Yeah, A young j Edgar Hoover is
especially hard after him. He sees him as a threat
to the American way. But he also has enemies from
within and from within his own organization. In guy named
George Tyler actually shoots him four times in the U
(13:26):
n A offices, But then it gets a little sketchy. Yeah,
The state Attorney General UM Edwin P. Kilroe says that
Tyler was going to make damaging revelations about Garvey's business practices,
and then shortly after Tyler dies in police custody, and
UM Garvey sort of puts out the word that maybe
(13:46):
the U and I was a victim of a plot
by Kilroe, the Attorney General, and he says that many
of his followers end up believing him. And Garvey is
also clashing with leaders of other black movements. He's having
confrontations with a Philip Randolph with du Boys, who's head
of the Double A CP at the time, and also
(14:06):
Robert s Abbott, who's the publisher and editor of Chicago Defender,
a rival black paper, but really cannot stand Garvey. He
thinks he's a Charlatan essentially, um but Garvey falls out
hard after the government finally pins some charges on him
on January twelve, two, He's arrested and later indicted on
(14:26):
twelve counts of mail fraud, which you know, mail fraud
lawyers have been hunting for some kind of technical charge
stumbled upon this one. The arrest, though, stirs up a
lot of existing negative press about the Black Star Lines
financial problems, and the black press demands some proof that
(14:47):
this company works, that it's not you know, just a front,
or that their money is not going to waste. Yeah,
I think of all the investment that's gone into this
shipping line. So the Black Star Line says that it
will buy the ship Lion, which they'll rename the Philli
Sweetly Um. And this is really the nail in the
coffin of Garvey's career. At the the purchase is bogged
(15:10):
down by a bunch of legal and financial problems. The
White agent negotiates a purchase and takes a third of
the deposit money for himself, And meanwhile the U S
Shipping Board, which owns the orion Um, is being urged
by the FBI to demand a bond of four hundred
and fifty thousand dollars, which is three times the purchase price.
(15:30):
So Garvey is stuck. You know, he can't get his ship,
can't pay four fifty thou dollars, so he's in a
real pickle by this point, and it really really does
not help that he tries to get pretty much the
worst allies ever. As his popularity plummets. He meets with
the KKK Um meets up with the Imperial Wizard in
(15:52):
Atlanta in June, and if this absolutely makes no sense
to you, he justifies himself by saying, and I quote,
I was speaking to a man who was brutally a
white man, and I was speaking to him as a
man who was brutally a negro. So I can't justify
it for you anymore than Garvey did. So Garvey is
convicted in nineteen and his appeals unsuccessful. He's sentenced to
(16:14):
federal prison, back in Atlanta again for six years, but
Calvin Coolidge commutes his sentence after two and he's deported
to Jamaica, but he ultimately ends up in England, where
he dies in pretty much an obscurity in middle age.
UM the U and I A really can't press on
without charismatic Garvey at its head. And interestingly, though, you know,
(16:39):
despite this black Star line, despite the failed Liberian movement,
it's not seen as a failure. It helps shape what's
to come, which is UM the black nationalism that really
strengthens after World War Two, and according to Wilson, Jeremiah Moses,
again he had quite a lot of accomplishments. This is
a quote from him. Marcus Garvey revealed the ability of
(17:01):
African Americans to combine capital organized politically, create jobs, provide
a forum for writers and intellectuals, and sustain institutions independent
of white philanthropy, which is of note because I mean
even the early Double A CPU was pretty heavy on
white leadership. Um. But kind of a an interesting footnote
(17:23):
to this whole story. UM, if we're not going to
just leave you with mail fraud and dying in obscurity.
In nineteen seven, Representative Charles Wrangle introduced measures to Congress
to have Garvey exonerated on those mail fraud charges. And
he was going off of research then by Robert A. Hill,
who had found evidence in the National Archives that the
(17:45):
conviction was politically motivated because Hoover in the Justice Department
saw links between Garvey is UM and the communist movement
that Hoover that Hoover. UM. So it's interesting and I
think that people are still trying to this happened. It's
kind of um an unprecedented thing to have a a
(18:05):
posthumous pardon, but at least that we know, at least
as far as we know, So send us an email
if you if you have any updates on the Garvey
exoneration process. That History podcast at has to work Stack
home and that brings us to listener mail. We got
an email from Anne from Houston, who had written us
(18:28):
a bit of a follow up to our Burke and
Will's expedition talking about the camels in Australia which have
become a huge problem. She sent her old camel right.
She sent a link to the Times Online a story
from January one of this year, and apparently the government
had committed nineteen million dollars to calling the camel population
(18:53):
of Australia helicopters. Yet that never really goes over well
in the press um and instead some people are trying
to get them sent to Saudi Arabia, where apparently you
can buy a baby camel burger which tastes a lot
like beef. So amnesty for Australian camels, I guess right,
(19:15):
and thank you for the footnote. And but going back
to Garvey if you want to learn more about where
all these movements lead you should read our article how
the Civil Rights Movement worked. Um it's on our home
page www dot how stuff works dot com and we
will inevitably be talking about the sixties and the later
(19:38):
Black History movement when we continue this February series, so
you'll want a little more background, and if you would
also like to connect with us in another way, you
can now follow us on Twitter at missed in History
to come find us. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com and
be sure to check out the stuff you missed in
(19:59):
History clas flogged on the House staff works dot com.
Pound page boom,
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and Sarah and
I decided to do some episodes for Black History Month.
(00:20):
So our topic for today is a man some people
know as Black Moses. By nineteen nineteen, this Black Moses
claimed a following of as many as two million people.
And they're African Americans and people from the West Indies
who were just tired of being denied their rights or
subjected to violence just because they're black. But unlike his
(00:43):
predecessor book Or T. Washington and his contemporary W. E. B.
Two Boys, Black Moses didn't preach assimilation. He didn't even
oppose segregation, just the mistreatment that went along with it. Yeah.
And instead his line was pan Africanism, and it was
a desire to unite all the people separated under the
Black daspora as one people. And he believed that once
(01:06):
Africa became associated with quote armies, navies and men of
big affairs, people of African descent wouldn't be denied their
rights anymore and they wouldn't be subjected to violence and
too pity, and this line of thought put him at
the head of America's first major black nationalist movement based
in Harlem, which was known as Garvey Um. And the
(01:28):
name gives you a clue as to the answer to
our question, who was Black Moses. Black Moses was Malchus
Mosiah Garvey, who today we know as Marcus Garvey was
born in eighteen eighty seven at St. Anne's Bay in Jamaica,
and as far as what we know about his parents,
his dad may have been a master mason or perhaps
(01:50):
just someone who broke stones on the roadway. But regardless
of what he did as a profession, he really truly
loved books and he spent as much time as he
good in his own private library, which was a building
actually separate from the family home. I can only hope
and his mother helps support the family by selling her
(02:10):
delectable pastries. But Um later in life, Garvey really emphasized
that he came from a family of quote black negroes.
He really wants to distinguish himself from the other terms
that uh people in the West Indiesies to describe themselves,
like brown or mulatto. He emphasizes that his people are
from Africa, and he's not even completely sure about people
(02:35):
who do have white lineage. As much as he emphasizes
that in himself, he actually does a lot of work
with people who are of mixed race. A lot of
it is kind of taught, yes, but he does make
statements like this, which of course are important when you're
talking about his life. He's largely self taught, but he
does get a valuable apprenticeship with a printer which helped
(02:55):
him learn a lot about the art of composition and
about the business of running a press, which will come
in handy beater. Yeah, he learned the journalistic trade in
this apprenticeship, as well as the mechanics of it. Um.
But he travels some as a youth. He goes to
Central America, where he's really disappointed to find um black
people living in similarly bad conditions as they are in Jamaica,
(03:19):
and as many young people living in countries with a
strong British influence. He is also driven to London and
he lives there from nineteen twelve to nineteen fourteen. And
um he starts to learn about Pan Africanism and uh
that sort of thing when he's in London, but he
also reads book or t Washington's Up from Slavery, and
(03:39):
Garvey was certainly an admire of Washington, even though they
disagree on that major point of integration, Washington obviously being
for it and Garvey not so much. But he did
really like the idea of Washington's Tuskegee Institute and comes
up with the dream of making his own own trade
(04:00):
school in Jamaica, and he writes to Washington and secures
an invitation to visit, but before he can, Washington dives.
So Garvey comes to the United States nevertheless, in nineteen sixteen. Um.
But all right, so before we talk about his early
days in the United States, we should mentioned that in
(04:21):
Jamaica in nineteen fourteen, he founds the very long name,
very unwielder Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African
Communities League, which is usually just called the Universal Negro
Improvement Association, and we're going to call it the u
n i A. And the group had a Pan African agenda,
(04:43):
So we wanted to talk a little bit about what
that means. There's a bit of a spectrum on one side,
according to Wilson Jeremiah Moses, sometimes it just is a
call for unity among black or African peoples wherever they
might reside. That's a quote from Moses. And on the
other side, we've got the goal of uniting the entire
(05:03):
African continent under one government to be controlled by Africans. Yeah,
so I kind of see this as a pan African
light and then a very intense version um. But the
U n I A, which has this Pan African agenda,
doesn't really catch on in Jamaica, and this is partly
why Garvey is attracted to the US, and he actually
(05:25):
becomes so involved in un I A work when he's
in the United States that he eventually abandons his other
motive for coming, which was the Jamaican Trade School plan.
But the un I really picks up steam, especially in
Harlem and in other cities, and by nineteen nineteen he's
got that following of about two million people. This is
(05:46):
really the height of his popularity. So let's talk a
little bit about Garvey and his work with the U
and I A. Garvey is a pitch man, and he
speaks to black power, but specifically black economic power. He's
also interested in black history and an African identity, but
black and economic power is kind of the center of
(06:07):
what he wants to do. Yeah, and that interest in
black history and African identity. We talked about the pan
Africanism already, but he's also interested in afric Centrism, which
is really more of a philosophical movement, and it's the
idea that Africa is the center of black history and
cultural identity, and that black people all around the world
(06:28):
should celebrate the Ethiopians and the Egyptian civilization and kind
of consider that, uh, a golden Age of the Pharaohs
was going on at the same time that Europeans were,
you know, considered barbarians living in caves. And Garby was
also convinced that whenever black people accomplished something amazing, they're
(06:49):
basically reclassified as white. So he went with a whole
racist one drop rule and that one drop of blood
may makes you black, right, and reclaimed it and embrace
stit for historical vindications, saying, well, all right, then the
pharaohs are black with up. So his newspaper, Negro World,
is very afrocentric and it's really his instrument um to
(07:12):
communicate you know, Afrocentrism and pana Africanism to his followers
and he's got a lot of popular articles, not just
on news but on African history and society. And he's
really good at this paper business. We've we've talked a
lot about these great publishing men recently, but um, he's
good at this. He's a journalist and it's the u
(07:34):
n A is big success and something to remember when
we talk about some of its spectacular failures later on.
But Garvey is a born publicist and he's got this
great sense of style and composition, and at its peak, um,
Negro World has a regular circulation of fifty thousand or
more readers. Um. And that doesn't count even all the
(07:56):
people who were listening to it being read aloud at
work or in beauty parts all around the city. So
that's a low estimate. Yeah, definitely. But don't think of
Marcus Garvey as a retiring sort of newspaperman. He's very showy.
He wears plumes and military style clothing. Sarah emailed me
some fabulous pictures earlier than Katie and I are always
(08:18):
interested in the plumes. Well, we're big into that. You're
the green editor we have to be. But he's not
just about talking and promoting and pitching it's it's not
all talk. He wants to be the guy at the
head of this economic revolution that he dreams of, but
unfortunately he is no businessman. And his goal is to
(08:38):
establish an independent black economy, so not integrate into the
existing white economy, but have his own. And so he
establishes the Negro Factories Corporation, and then a line of
black run restaurants and grocery stores, laundries, a hotel, a
printing press, and then most famously, the Black Star Line,
(09:00):
most famously for being a complete misadventures. So the idea
behind the Black Star Line is actually really impressive. It
was a shipping line that was meant to be the
foundation of trade between Africans around the world, so it
would increase the distribution of black made products and make
more money for the black community. And it's popular. People
(09:23):
want to be involved in this. It's incorporated in selling
stocks at five dollars a share, and it has between
thirty thousand and forty thousand stockholders. And these are people
who could have invested in some of the businesses, you know,
the restaurants and the laundry mats and all that, and
many do um. But a lot of people choose the
Black Star Line because it offers economic independence and because
(09:46):
it just seems so militant. It was so bold. It
is a really bold, impressive, showy kind of idea. But
unfortunately terrible investments and mismanagement lead to the line and
garbs downfall. There was just a lot of incompetence, not
only with Garby but also with the people he hired
and surrounded himself with. The vessels are dilapidated and sometimes
(10:09):
just unseaworthy. One of them originally called the Yarmouth and
renamed Frederick Douglas. You'll see this is a they rename
their boats. Um. It was purchased on the advice of
a West Indian captain named Joshua Cockburn, who gets a
six dollar brokerage fee for buying it. And it's not
that great of a ship, but still people are excited
(10:31):
about the inauguration of the Black Star Line and maybe
it seems like it will work out. But on its
voyage to Cuba with a cargo of whiskey, it runs
aground off the Bahamas. Well, Cockburn is asleep, and then
finally it does get to Cuba, makes no profit, runs
aground again off of Boston, and it's sold at public
auction the next year. And this is just this is hitomazes.
(10:53):
These these boats here, they're all sunk, abandoned or sold
at public auction. Shortly they're after And the other side
of this whole shipping line idea was transporting people, because
that was the ultimate plan you would resettle all of
the black people in Africa, which is the scheme Garvey
is probably best known for. Yeah, So one year after
(11:15):
the launch of the Black Star Line, Garvey starts the
Librarian Program and UM. In fact, in nineteen twenty which
once again this is like the height of his popularity.
There's a Madison Square Garden meeting of twenty five thousand
people and they elect him the provisional President of Africa,
which have no idea. That's a rather bold title. But
(11:38):
the idea was to give American blacks an African base
and UM to develop Liberia as a kind of economic powerhouse.
So in nineteen twenty a U n I A delegation
sets up a deal with the Liberian government to set
aside land for the un I to develop and you know,
Librarius is okay, They're agreed, and the UNI sets up
(12:01):
this Liberian Development Corporation and raises seven hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. But this money simply disappears. You got all
the money and then it's gone. So the Liberians, who
are definitely in need of some kind of influx of
capital here they need to develop their country, move on
(12:21):
because at this point there's increasingly bad pr around Garvey
in the u n i A, and France and Great
Britain even pressure Liberria to announce that the U n
i A can't have the land after all. So instead
the Librarians set up a partnership with the American rubber industry,
specifically Firestone Company, because I got to consider it this time.
(12:45):
The automobile industry is really picking up and we need
tires in America, right. But this whole venture is the
beginning of the end for Garvey. We've got some bad
business deals going on, some definite failures um and Garvey's
popularity ensures that the white establishment is looking for a
(13:05):
way to bring him down. He's very powerful and they
don't like it. Yeah, A young j Edgar Hoover is
especially hard after him. He sees him as a threat
to the American way. But he also has enemies from
within and from within his own organization. In guy named
George Tyler actually shoots him four times in the U
(13:26):
n A offices, But then it gets a little sketchy. Yeah,
The state Attorney General UM Edwin P. Kilroe says that
Tyler was going to make damaging revelations about Garvey's business practices,
and then shortly after Tyler dies in police custody, and
UM Garvey sort of puts out the word that maybe
(13:46):
the U and I was a victim of a plot
by Kilroe, the Attorney General, and he says that many
of his followers end up believing him. And Garvey is
also clashing with leaders of other black movements. He's having
confrontations with a Philip Randolph with du Boys, who's head
of the Double A CP at the time, and also
(14:06):
Robert s Abbott, who's the publisher and editor of Chicago Defender,
a rival black paper, but really cannot stand Garvey. He
thinks he's a Charlatan essentially, um but Garvey falls out
hard after the government finally pins some charges on him
on January twelve, two, He's arrested and later indicted on
(14:26):
twelve counts of mail fraud, which you know, mail fraud
lawyers have been hunting for some kind of technical charge
stumbled upon this one. The arrest, though, stirs up a
lot of existing negative press about the Black Star Lines
financial problems, and the black press demands some proof that
(14:47):
this company works, that it's not you know, just a front,
or that their money is not going to waste. Yeah,
I think of all the investment that's gone into this
shipping line. So the Black Star Line says that it
will buy the ship Lion, which they'll rename the Philli
Sweetly Um. And this is really the nail in the
coffin of Garvey's career. At the the purchase is bogged
(15:10):
down by a bunch of legal and financial problems. The
White agent negotiates a purchase and takes a third of
the deposit money for himself, And meanwhile the U S
Shipping Board, which owns the orion Um, is being urged
by the FBI to demand a bond of four hundred
and fifty thousand dollars, which is three times the purchase price.
(15:30):
So Garvey is stuck. You know, he can't get his ship,
can't pay four fifty thou dollars, so he's in a
real pickle by this point, and it really really does
not help that he tries to get pretty much the
worst allies ever. As his popularity plummets. He meets with
the KKK Um meets up with the Imperial Wizard in
(15:52):
Atlanta in June, and if this absolutely makes no sense
to you, he justifies himself by saying, and I quote,
I was speaking to a man who was brutally a
white man, and I was speaking to him as a
man who was brutally a negro. So I can't justify
it for you anymore than Garvey did. So Garvey is
convicted in nineteen and his appeals unsuccessful. He's sentenced to
(16:14):
federal prison, back in Atlanta again for six years, but
Calvin Coolidge commutes his sentence after two and he's deported
to Jamaica, but he ultimately ends up in England, where
he dies in pretty much an obscurity in middle age.
UM the U and I A really can't press on
without charismatic Garvey at its head. And interestingly, though, you know,
(16:39):
despite this black Star line, despite the failed Liberian movement,
it's not seen as a failure. It helps shape what's
to come, which is UM the black nationalism that really
strengthens after World War Two, and according to Wilson, Jeremiah Moses,
again he had quite a lot of accomplishments. This is
a quote from him. Marcus Garvey revealed the ability of
(17:01):
African Americans to combine capital organized politically, create jobs, provide
a forum for writers and intellectuals, and sustain institutions independent
of white philanthropy, which is of note because I mean
even the early Double A CPU was pretty heavy on
white leadership. Um. But kind of a an interesting footnote
(17:23):
to this whole story. UM, if we're not going to
just leave you with mail fraud and dying in obscurity.
In nineteen seven, Representative Charles Wrangle introduced measures to Congress
to have Garvey exonerated on those mail fraud charges. And
he was going off of research then by Robert A. Hill,
who had found evidence in the National Archives that the
(17:45):
conviction was politically motivated because Hoover in the Justice Department
saw links between Garvey is UM and the communist movement
that Hoover that Hoover. UM. So it's interesting and I
think that people are still trying to this happened. It's
kind of um an unprecedented thing to have a a
(18:05):
posthumous pardon, but at least that we know, at least
as far as we know, So send us an email
if you if you have any updates on the Garvey
exoneration process. That History podcast at has to work Stack
home and that brings us to listener mail. We got
an email from Anne from Houston, who had written us
(18:28):
a bit of a follow up to our Burke and
Will's expedition talking about the camels in Australia which have
become a huge problem. She sent her old camel right.
She sent a link to the Times Online a story
from January one of this year, and apparently the government
had committed nineteen million dollars to calling the camel population
(18:53):
of Australia helicopters. Yet that never really goes over well
in the press um and instead some people are trying
to get them sent to Saudi Arabia, where apparently you
can buy a baby camel burger which tastes a lot
like beef. So amnesty for Australian camels, I guess right,
(19:15):
and thank you for the footnote. And but going back
to Garvey if you want to learn more about where
all these movements lead you should read our article how
the Civil Rights Movement worked. Um it's on our home
page www dot how stuff works dot com and we
will inevitably be talking about the sixties and the later
(19:38):
Black History movement when we continue this February series, so
you'll want a little more background, and if you would
also like to connect with us in another way, you
can now follow us on Twitter at missed in History
to come find us. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com and
be sure to check out the stuff you missed in
(19:59):
History clas flogged on the House staff works dot com.
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