Marcus Garvey: Black Moses

One of the more controversial black leaders, Marcus Garvey divided black and white Americans with his assertion of black pride, and sowed division in the black community as well. Yet, possibly no one has had more global impact on black lives than him.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and here's Jerry and
this is Stuff you Should Know. And over there the

(00:24):
ghost of Marcus Garvey. Yes, who if if you are say, um,
not black, and you or you are black and you
weren't raised to know your black history, you may still
be familiar with that name if you're even tangentially interested
in reggae music, because he pops up a lot. There's

(00:49):
a great Burning Spears song called Marcus Garvey that Sat
O'Connor covered. It's not it's not that good. Um. And
then there's also a great uh well he just not
only him, but also like his teachings pop up a
lot in in reggae, like in the Peter Tosh song African.
It's a hundred percent based on the ideas of Marcus Garvey,

(01:10):
as we'll see. So that's fun to make sure. The Rastafarianism, yes, so,
as we'll talk about later, he's basically considered a profit
of Rastafarianism, like he basically has thought of among rastafari
as predicting the rise of Rastafarianism ten years before it happened,
so very prophetic. Um, And he did a lot of stuff,

(01:34):
a huge amount of stuff. And in fact, Chuck what
I didn't realize because I've heard of him before, because
I do like Peter Tosh and Burning Spear, But Um,
I had no idea that you could put him up
as possibly the most impactful um black activists in in
world history. One. He's up there in the top three easily. Yeah.

(01:59):
I was reading essay by one professor that said when
he starts his his teachings on Garbi, he said he
tries to get the students attention by saying like this
man started a movement that was that dwarfed the civil
rights movement in number, and you know, students are like,
huh who and uh. You know, depending, he's a very

(02:20):
polarizing figure. So depending on who you talked to, I mean,
everyone will agree that he was a great orator and
rally or of people, But depending on who you talked
to that you might find both black and white historians
say that he was a P. T. Barnum esque Charlatan
uh and a bit pompous and full of himself. And

(02:41):
other people might say Uh, No, he was the real deal.
And he was a great leader of men and very
forward thinking progressive views on women at a time where
especially black women were not thought of as much beyond
you know, domestic workers. Right. I noticed that about him too. Yeah,
and he propped them up. And you know, he was

(03:01):
a teetotaler, he didn't believe in alcohol. He was he
was a lot of things. Yeah, I saw it put
very succinctively. He was complicated. He had a lot of
views that even if you agreed with his general outlook,
you probably view as abhorrent. Um. And you said he
was polarizing, He wasn't just polarizing between like the black
community and the white community in the in America, in

(03:26):
South America and the Caribbean and Africa. Um. He was
polarizing within the black community as well. He made enemies
out of a lot of people, including some really prominent
black thinkers and eventual civil rights leaders. UM. And one
of the reasons why, you know, if you're stepping back

(03:46):
as like a person living decades and decades after Marcus
Garvey lived, and there was this transition between you know, um,
blacks under enslavement in America and then like black people
trained existing into you know, free citizens and having to
go through the Jim Crow gauntlet and eventually get to

(04:07):
civil rights living decades and decades after that. It's it's
really easy to see, you know, the black community in
America the turn of the last century or the last
last century year up to the twenties and thirties. Times
we're talking about as like this homogeneous group that all
basically subscribed and thought about the same things. But Marcus
Garvey is a really great instruction and the fact that

(04:29):
there's that that's just such a you can't paint any
one group of people with one brush, and Marcus Garvey
represents that, and that he was very conservative, um and
he represented a conservative way of thinking, you know, of
philosophy of how Black Americans could move forward in a
conservative way, and that put him at odds with like
progressive thinkers like W. B. Du Boys, who you know,

(04:52):
had different ideas for how black people could you know,
rise up and and um raise themselves in America as well.
It's a it's good he there's just so much wrapped
up in his story that I think it's just gonna
be difficult to get it all into one episode. Yeah.
And you know, I guess we should say off the
bad that the main lightning rod in his his style

(05:15):
of radicalism and why he went up against a lot
of leaders in the black community was while they were
saying like, hey, we need to find a way to
to work within the politics of white America and we
need to have white America um assist us with these
things so we can pick ourselves up by the bootstraps,
he was saying, no, no, no, no no, Uh, we

(05:36):
should go back to Africa and we need our own
space and we shouldn't try to fit into white America
and white society. And this was a radical thing too.
And we'll talk about all this in detail, but to
to do something like hey, I'd like to meet with
a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta because
we have similar views on uh going back to Africa

(05:58):
and back to Africa movement, and that did not sit
well within a lot of people in the black community
for obvious reasons. But he was a radical thinker and uh,
just you know, every time I thought they should make
a movie about him, like we were always saying, I
finally found one where they are making a movie. Oh
that's good. Who's playing him? Do you know? I believe
it's the guy that was in Black Panther and Us.

(06:22):
I can't remember his name. Oh, he'd be great, I
think he would. And uh because Garvey was a sort
of a a large fellow. And I think that it's
gonna focus on something we'll talk about later in the episode,
which were the years that, um, who is? Why am
I completely blanking on the worst American uh in history? Hoover? Okay, yeah,

(06:47):
jar Hoover, j Edgar Hoover's uh, you know, planting of
of spies within his own within his own organization. So
I think it focuses on those years that I can't
wait to see it because that was a pretty it's
a pretty insidious set of years for Marcus Garvey. For sure.
Who are the worst American? He's one of them. For

(07:08):
he's up there, he's up there with Kissinger and I
could go on, but every time he uh, every time
we do which episode where Hoover pops up, it's just like,
and here's this awful thing he did. Yeah, I wish
we could just paddle him once in a while. Sure,
just bring him back in, give him a spanking. And
I know that's not cool. But we're talking about Jay

(07:29):
Grew Hoover here, Okay. Should we just start with sort
of the nuts and bolts of who he was and
where he was born and raised and all that good
stuff tots. He came from Jamaica, and he lived in
Jamaica while it was still under British colonial rule. It
was under colonial rule for three hundred seven years, and
he was born relatively towards the end of it, but

(07:49):
still full squarely in it. Um. And he was born
in Marcus Garvey Sr. Who was a Stonemason, and his mom,
Sarah Jane Richards, who was a household servant. He was
born in St. Anne's Bay, Jamaica, which sounds like an
idyllic place, uh in eighteen eighty seven. And um, although
he wasn't, you know, born to wealthy parents, he was
educated um at a colonial school, and he knew how

(08:13):
to read and he was kind of bitten by the
reading bug from a very early age and that helped
develop him starting pretty young. Yeah, and the fact that
he was Jamaican is one thing that uh turned a
lot of African Americans off. Like some of the African
American leaders would point out later in life. It's like this,
it was just Jamaican guy even, Like what does he

(08:35):
know about the American experience because it's not like he
moved to the United States when he was, you know,
five years old or something like that. Like he was
born and raised Jamaican, right, I don't think he moved
to the US until he was in his late twenties. Maybe, Yeah,
So that was sort of a h a bit of
a knock against him in the eyes of some African

(08:56):
American leaders at the time. But he was one of
many kids, but the only one who survived into adulthood
and moved to Kingston at fourteen, and he would get
a job in a print shop there, which is I
guess he learned the trade pretty well because this was
the kind of work that he did off and on
over the years to support himself, working in different print shops.

(09:17):
He always considered himself a journalist. I read and heways
started his own paper, yeah, many of them in magazines.
And um he was very sharp, dude, um, as demonstrated
by that first print shop job because he he started
out with no experience whatsoever and within two years he
was the foreman of the printing shop. So he was
a quick learner. UM. And at some point he decided

(09:40):
to start traveling abroad and UM and during some formative
years he ended up in in Costa Rica. UM because
apparently Costa Rica, Panama, these were places that people in
the America's kind of freely traveled to and moved to
and from what I can tell at the time, much
the same way that like Europeans move around the EU today. Yeah.

(10:02):
So he moved to Costa Rica. Yeah, he had at
least an uncle there, right, and he got a job
on a banana plantation as a timekeeper. UM. And while
he was carrying out this work like basically making sure
people were moving as fast as as possible to keep
everything nice and efficient, UM, he was witnessing and learning

(10:24):
at the same time that like these banana plantations owned
by American and European corporate interests were having a direct,
deeply negative impact on individual you know, Black Caribbean, West
Indian UM people's lives, Central American people's lives too. He
was in Costa Rica that he he just traced a

(10:45):
line directly between that. It was a very eye opening
experience and so we founded a paper uh there in
Costa Rica and started basically railing against the evils of
this stuff, and um made a pretty bad name for
himself among the authorities there quickly. And that's where his
uncle step down. I was like, you need to get
out of Costa Rica right now. Yeah, uh, and he did.
He went to London, one of a few different times

(11:07):
he would live in London throughout his life, and this
was in nineteen twelve. I don't think we actually said
that he was born in eight seven, so I think
really frames where, you know, kind of the time period
that he was learning all this stuff. Uh. He studied
law and philosophy at Burbeck College under the University of
London and again started working for a newspaper there, and

(11:31):
this is where he started to sort of learn about
Pan Africanism a little bit more because the newspaper was
one that you know, just sort of championed that idea
and that is just sort of the notion of bringing
together people of African descent from all over the world
under one cultural identity. And that's you know, there's a
lot to it, but that's sort of a simplified way

(11:53):
to say it. Yeah, Like a lot of times you
hear it referred to as the African diaspora, Black Africans
who moved from Africa, who were forcibly removed from Africa
to become enslaved in the Caribbean, um in America, um
in Canada, even um and and that over time these
people just grew more and more separate. Pan Africanism was

(12:17):
an idea of bringing them back together at the very
least intellectually emotionally um as a as a nation among
other nations, but spread out or as Garvey would later,
really kind of take up this idea, like you were
saying earlier, of actually moving everybody back to Africa and
being like, Okay, Africa's black, you guys, Europe, America, you

(12:38):
guys can have your your white continents. This is the
Black continent, but we're co really ruling the world with you.
That's just how it is. That was his ultimate dream,
and that that was kind of what pan Africanism envisioned
in in Garvey's eyes at least. Yeah, and that would
become sort of the basis of his entire movement as
as far as like just a cultural idea. Uh So,

(13:01):
then he goes back to Jamaica, he got married to
a woman named Amy Ashwood, it was a pretty rough marriage.
They were separated just after a few months, I think
in his mind, legally divorced a few years later, but
she always held onto the notion that they were never

(13:21):
like the The divorce was not legal, and so she
went to her grave saying that she was like the
true wife of Marcus Scarvey. But it got pretty ugly.
They accused one another infidelity. He accused her of being
an alcoholic and like I said, as a teetotal or,
it was something that he did not believe in at all. Um.
But you know, I think it says something about him

(13:43):
and his ideas that regardless of this sort of nasty divorce,
she stayed and worked h with his with his group
he founded along with her, the Universal Negro Improvement Association
and African Communities League of the World. But the Universal
Negro Improvement Association UNIA is the one that really stuck

(14:04):
and is even still around the day. And she stayed
and even as we'll see later, tried to protect him
when there was an attempt on his life taken. Yeah,
and probably did save his life from what I read
um by putting herself in between him and his assassin's bullets.
So yeah, She definitely did a lot of the early
work that he became very well known for, because once

(14:24):
he started to take off his his name and his ideas,
Garvy is um is what it's called, just shot off
like a rocket, and she was there for most of
the groundwork of it. And then they split up shortly
after that, so I could see how she'd be a
little bitter about that, and then in short order he
kind of gave her something else to be unhappy about,
and that was he married Amy Jack's spelled like Jacques Um,

(14:46):
who was a Kingston native Um and was his personal
secretary but also was Amy Ashwood's close friend and maid
of honor at their wedding. Awkward, So I think that's
when reason why Amy Ashwood was a little upset about
the whole thing, in addition to doing a lot of
the groundwork that he later got, you know, so much

(15:07):
credit for and still does today. But um, he has
an Amy Jacques Amy Jack's Um marriage lasted I believe
until his death, correct until nineteen Yeah, I mean they
married a nineteen nineteen uh, And I didn't see anywhere
that they ever split up. No, I think that they did.
And they had two sons, Marcus Mosiah Garvey the third
and Julius Winston Garvey and Amy Amy Jacks was Um

(15:31):
was very accomplished in her own right. She came from
an aristocratic Kingston family. I think her father grandfather was
Mayor of Kingston, and um, she was very well educated,
very well read, very intelligent, and as we'll see, she
helped continue Marcus Garvey's work while he was otherwise occupied
for a while in the twenties. Yeah, and that, you know,
that led to a little bit of which is really

(15:52):
good documentary from PBS. PBS experience as are always really good.
And uh, apparently that caused a little bit of um
internal strife within UNIA was when they eventually found it.
I think it was pretty much their most popular newspaper, uh,
the Negro World. He had a page dedicated to women,

(16:12):
and she ran that page and uh she you know,
she ran it like somebody should run their own page
in the newspaper, and apparently caused a little bit of
strife within the organization because as much as he was
had these progressive ideas about women and uh you know,
propping them up. Uh, not everyone at the time, even
within UNIA, had those same ideas. I think he tried

(16:35):
to sort of spread that message, but you know, there
were some there were some men in the organization still
they were a little bit like, who is this lady?
You know? Yeah, sure, good thing that's over and done with. Yeah, right, solved.
You want to take a break and then come back
and talk a little more about UNIA. Yeah, let's do it. Okay.

(17:06):
Stuff you should know, stuff you should know, alright, Chuck.
So we're talking about UNIA, the United Negro Improvement Association,
which was the brainchild of Marcus Garvey and something he
attempted first in Kingston, I believe in nineteen sixteen something

(17:28):
like that, maybe nineteen fifteen, um, and it did not
quite take off. He had been inspired by Booker T.
Washington's Tuskegee Institute, and in fact, he was kind of
like the intellectual and probably cultural air to book Or T.
Washington's ideas because Washington was a conservative. He believed in UM,

(17:50):
black self enterprise, black self sufficiency, in that black Americans
working UM hard and creating a life of their own
amidst white Americans would show white Americans that blacks weren't inferior.
They just wouldn't be able to ignore it anymore. And
then thus white Americans Black Americans would treat one another equally,

(18:11):
and the the issue of you know, bringing Black America
out of enslavement and from under Jim Crow would be
solved once and for all. That was the very conservative
view of book or t. Washington, and that inspired Marcus
Garvey so much that he started corresponding with book or
t Um and he, uh, he was invited to America

(18:33):
by by Washington. Um, but he arrived about a year
after Washington died, never got to meet him, but he
was deeply inspired by him and in a lot of
ways carried on his work. Yeah, so he was a
little bit late. Uh, and you know, his intention was
definitely to meet with Washington, but it was you know,
this was nineteen sixteen when he moved to New York,

(18:54):
so it's not like it is today, like, uh, you know,
you can't just catch a flight up there real quick
if someone's not doing too well healthwise. So he missed
his opportunity there. But he had those same ideas and
he he basically you know, would ask himself and this
is a quote, where's the black man's government? And he
came to the conclusion that there was none. They had

(19:14):
no representation basically, and so he went on to say
I will help make them and that was his aim
with Unia UH And like he said, it did not
go over too well in Jamaica, but when he got
to the US, it really really started to spread pretty quickly.
I think the first uh US chapter was in nineteen seventeen. Uh.

(19:36):
They only had seventeen members in a basement in Harlem,
but he would eventually go on to buy a building
in Harlem that hosted you know, like six thousand people
at a time, and at the peak of his movement,
he would claim that there were six million members. Uh.
You know, it's tough to give a direct count. People
in history say that he had a knack for just
sort of and this is the PiZZ Barnum side sort

(19:58):
of over inflating everything. So they say it probably wasn't
six million, but I definitely saw you know, it numbered
in the millions worldwide over the course of the movement. Yeah,
because to say that his message resonated with people is
the understatement of the year. He came along at a time,
he came to New York at a time where in

(20:19):
America there was a real um discord and unhappiness and
uneasiness going on with black Americans, a number of whom
who had just returned from fighting in World War One
for America, yes huge and like rightfully so, like they
served for their country, UM, and were rewarded with more

(20:44):
racism than than ever, including race riots and massacres at
the hands of um, you know, white neighbors who you know.
We talked about the Tulsa massacre, UM, and plenty of others,
and in several of our episodes. This is the time
that this was going on. And so I think I
have the impression that black Americans were getting more despondent

(21:06):
after losing hope so suddenly and violently UM, and also
more upset at that idea. And so Marcus Garvey came
along also at a time where the scientific community was
saying like, oh, by the way, if you're black, you're
genetically uh, inferior to white people. Sorry, that's just science. Uh.
And Marcus Garvey came along and said, you know what,

(21:27):
these people could not be wronger. But the one thing
about Garvey was, and this is what kind of separated
him from some of his peers that were highly educated
and sort of a little more of the UH like
the the initial back to Africa movement was started by
the first African American millionaire. So a lot of times
these people had money and they were sort of in

(21:49):
a higher financial class, but he really championed the working class.
That's where he came up. And his whole thing was,
you know, these the women that were working in domestics,
which his mother did, and I think that had big
impact on his views of progressive ideas toward women. But
then the men, you know, they were they were working classmen,

(22:10):
and he said that their official seal for union should
be a washtub, a frying pan, a bail hook, and
a mop. Right. So these these were the people he
was speaking to, yep so, and so ultimately he created
this this um idea, this concept that's referred to as
Garvy is um in it in a nutshell, is basically

(22:30):
taking America's um you know, faith in the ability to
succeed through hard work and enterprise and ingenuity and um
you know, self respect, and combined it with the yearning
of um black Americans, black Caribbeans, black Africans to be

(22:51):
treated as equals, to live free from oppression, and and
mix those two things together and that's what Garvey ISUM
was and and again it rang all over the world.
And um one of the ways that that it kind
of drew people in is he created almost like a
shadow culture in Harlem at the at Union where like

(23:14):
you would go to these meetings. He had like nightly meetings, right,
but they were also like you know, larger, bigger almost conferences.
And then there were huge conferences, but the smaller conferences
might be like a day long thing where like the
whole family comes and you have meals there and you
see like a vaudeville show there, and there's like a
fashion show and like that. You split off into like
breakout sessions to use horrific corporate buzz speak UM where

(23:38):
you would learn like a trade or maybe be like
drilled in military techniques, or you would um learn nursing
and then be sent off to aid in natural disasters,
Like you would learn stuff that the rest of society
had shut you out from. This is where you could
go learn it and you know, lift yourself up and
in turn lift the whole culture up as everyone collectively

(24:01):
was doing this. Yeah, it was. It's the idea was
really cool, I think, and that you wouldn't just go
to a meeting and while there were for short debates
and Marcus Garvey just speaking about things. Uh, I think
he wanted to make it more interesting and inclusive, and
that's why they would have concerts and fashion shows and
stuff like that. The Black Cross and Nurses was a

(24:22):
big part of this progressive idea for black women that
he had. And obviously it's with a lot of the
as you'll see the naming conventions for things he did.
It was a play on something that white people had done.
So they had the Red Cross. He started the Black
Cross Nurses and uh, they were a large organization that
did like so much good work and there was a

(24:43):
lot of pride within that movement of the Black Cross Nurses.
They had you know, their own slogans, they had their
own songs that they wrote. He had his fit very
famous phrase, up you Mighty Race, and it was you know,
I think he nailed it on the head. It wasn't
just um, it was a culture within a culture almost
like he was starting into the years that he was

(25:05):
doing this in nineteen twenties. I think just makes it
all that more impressive what he was able to do. Absolutely,
and another thing that he's credited with is if not UM.
I don't know if he invented it, but he certainly
popularized the what's called the Pan African flag. UM. Usually
it's a three bars or three stripes. Yeah, red, green,

(25:27):
and black. I love those colors together in high school
and go by those stores. Something about the those colors
being together just like spoke to me. I was like, man,
that's really a nice color. Combo. You'd be like, could
I pull it off? No, It's like I can't go there,
but it was. I just always liked those colors together,
always loved looking into those stores. UM. So with the

(25:49):
Pan African flag is also called the African Liberation flag UM,
and it's also the colors of Quanza that would later
be founded in nineteen sixty six. UM. The red represented blood, UM,
the blood that was that united everybody of African ancestry,
but also blood that had been spilled through enslavement, war, colonization. UM.

(26:10):
The black represented Black people as a whole nation, and
the green was for the natural wealth of Africa. And
that was a really big important point that I think
UM Garvey tried to educate UM, Black Caribbeans, black Americans,
and even black Africans, but probably to a lesser extent
about that was like, this is our homeland and it's
probably the most naturally wealthy continent on Earth, and we're

(26:34):
all being treated like second class human beings and yet
this is our homeland. What are we doing here? Let's
we have to right this wrong, basically, And I think
that was also like a big driver for why they
was saying we all need to go back to Africa
and basically just say thank you for caring for this land.
It's ours again now. Uh. He authored the paper Declaration

(26:56):
of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, which
was ratified with twenty thousand people in attendance at Madison
Square Garden in n which is an amazing accomplishment in
and of itself. And this is where he was bestowed
the title of Provisional President of Africa. And I don't
think we've said yet. One of the cool things about

(27:19):
Marcus Scarfy was the way he would dress and he
would outfit himself in this sort of military regalia with
these uh hats with ostrich plumes, big ostrich plumes, and
he was a big guy, so it was you know, this,
this imposing figure comes in wearing this huge Ostrich plume

(27:39):
Like this was a part of sort of the P. T.
Barnum side, which was to come into a room and
grab everyone's attention and to make a statement and you know,
try and ignore me basically was what he put forward
with how he carried himself right, right, But at the
same time it also made him really easy target of

(28:00):
it a cool among his rivals in in UM, the
Black cultural leadership UM because I mean W B. D.
Boys wasn't wearing Ostrich blue and said it was an
embarrassment that he would dress up like that, But right
he was. He was, he was rocking his style. He
totally was, and I'm with you, I respect that style

(28:22):
as well. UM. But again it did make him a target,
and so did things like being being named the provisional
President of Africa Unia Convention in Madison Square Gardens. These
were things that like people could like pick on him for,
but he was his his idea was so strong because
it was appealing to While he was a polarizing figure,

(28:47):
his ideas were unifying. They could take all different kinds
of um, you know, black concepts and black thoughts and
black thinkers and black leaders and bring them all together
and basically say yes, despite our differences, we are all
in agreement. We this is a great way to lift
people up. We might not agree with going back to

(29:07):
Africa or not, but like, yes, we can come together
as a culture and lift ourselves up. That, like his
ideas were unifying, while he himself was polarizing. Should we
go ahead and talk a little bit about the origins
of the back to Africa movement? Yeah, let's see that,
all right, So this goes back. He is not He's
far from the first person to have this idea. Uh.
And like I mentioned earlier, one of the first people

(29:30):
was the first African American Millionaire's name was Paul Cuffey
or Cuffey c Ufe. He was a mixed race, uh,
Massachusetts sea captain and his father was an enslaved African,
and he had this idea that in in fact did so.
He actually returned at least several dozen African Americans to

(29:53):
Africa and to Sierra Leone. And this was an eighteen
fifteen and then later and I think we should totally
do a whole podcast on Liberia because the more I
read about it, just the more interesting it is. But
in eighteen sixteen, the American Colonization Society, which you know
Andrew Jackson and James Monroe were members. They worked with

(30:15):
West African leaders to basically say less established this colony.
It would eventually be Liberia, and over the course of
about forty years, I saw anywhere from ten to twenty thousand, uh,
free black Americans moved back to Africa, yes, and and
lived in this new country that was granted to them, Liberia,

(30:36):
And so like you could totally get you know, um, krusty,
musty old racists like nineteenth century Andrew Jackson and his
cronies being like, yeah, let's let's set up a country
in Africa and send black people back there. Um. But
this also appealed to like you said, I mean, twelve
thousand free black Americans said, I'm out of here. So

(30:56):
there was definitely there was definitely Again, there was It's
so so strange to look at, but there was agreement
between racist white people and some black people who are like,
we we just don't even want to be around you anymore.
Let's just live separately. While there was also a very
i would say much stronger thread uh in the black

(31:17):
community is like, um, I'm a tenth generation American. Even
though a lot of those ancestors of mine were enslaved,
I was still born and raised in America, so are
my parents and my grandparents. I really don't have any
connection to Africa aside from my further back ancestors having
been enslaved there and brought over here. I don't really
have any interest in going back to Africa. Can I

(31:39):
support the idea of rising up as a as a
black community, as a culture without having to go back
to Africa? And Garvey was like, not really, No, we
need to go to Africa. The races should not be intermingled.
And that makes him a very polarizing figure, not just
among the black community, among the white community as well. Yeah,

(31:59):
and you know, I think Liberia definitely deserves its own
episode because I was reading into and it was just
really interesting sort of the ups and downs and what
happens when you have uh, you know, twenty tho African
Americans moving to Africa with their cultural identity that's somewhat
confused and and melding with the locals there, because it was, uh,

(32:21):
it was just really interesting to see what happened over
the years, like through the you know, mid two thousands
in Liberia. So I'm gonna put that one on the list. Okay,
it is officially on the list. On the list. You
made the sound and everything I did. Should we take
another break before we talk about, um, the Black Star
Line and then some troubles. Yeah, things get really interesting

(32:44):
here after the breaks, A stick around spoken. Should know
sh stuff you should know. All right, So you mentioned

(33:10):
the Black Star Line, and if you're listening, you might think,
doesn't Josh mean the White Star Line. No, he didn't,
because this is the naming convention that I talked about.
The White Star Lines was the I mean it was
the Titanic, right was part of the White Star Lines. Uh.
And so Garvey said, you know what, we need our
own industry. We needed our own business, We need our

(33:31):
own shipping. We need to be able to get people
to Africa. So I'm gonna start the Black Star Line
in nineteen nineteen, which was the steamship shipping company to
facilitate shipping goods around the African diaspora and to literally
transport I mean, the ideal was to transport Black Americans

(33:53):
back to Africa. Um. Sadly, they never made it back
to Africa on those ships. There are a host of problems, uh,
including the fact that the ships that he ended up
buying were almost all in pretty bad state of repair,
like former World War One ships. So you know he
was he was working with the money that he had,

(34:14):
which he raised selling five dollar shares at a time
at meetings, uh, and then getting into trouble selling them
through the mail. Yeah. So with that five dollars share,
that was a big deal because that was a low
enough price, about eighty one dollar money, thank you west
Egg Um, that a working class black family could could

(34:36):
afford to buy a share in the Black Star line,
and they were buying a share in like this actual
like enterprise that had the had the legs to knit
black people around the world together economically and physically, like
very everybody around and around and again, like you said,
ultimately help everyone move back to Africa. Um. But this

(34:58):
was even at a time that, like the average weekly
wage earned by the vast majority of Black Americans in
northern cities was less than five dollars a week. So
it wasn't an easy five dollar or share to buy.
But you can imagine how many families that were in
unia Um that scraped together the money or saved up
for it to buy a share in the Black Star Line.
And nothing I've read seems like the Black Star Line

(35:22):
was ever meant to be anything but what it was
stated to be. It's just that things went south because
one of the things Marcus Garvey wasn't by all accounts,
is a shrewd businessman. He is not a biz whiz
by any stretch of the imagination, and that, from what
I understand, is ultimately what brought along the Black Star

(35:43):
Lines downfall. Yeah, I mean there was mismanagement. I read
one story where when they were doing some you know,
because they were trying to make money with this, like
you know, as a shipping company too, so where a
huge shipment of coconuts had gone rotten. But as he
insisted on making these sort of high profile political stops

(36:04):
along the route, whereas the I guess the sea captains
were saying, and these these were completely operated by African Americans,
captain and crewed by African Americans, and they were like,
we need to you know, if you want these coconuts
to be sold and to actually profit in this company,
we need to go straight there. And he insisted on
stopping at different places along the way and he would

(36:26):
you know, things like that would happen kind of time
and time again. It seems like, uh and you know,
like I said, these ships were in disrepair. The first
one he bought was the Yarmouth I think re christen
the Frederick Douglas and it was a thirty year old ship.
One was called the Shady Side. End buying two more.
It eventually sank from a leak because of storm damage
from an ice storm. But you know, they had some successes.

(36:50):
I think I saw in the end it ended up
in in modern dollars, being like a twenty million dollar outfit.
It it just didn't succeed financially, but you know it,
that's a that's a lot of dough. So it wasn't
like something he went into lightly, you know, no, and
it was I mean, it just goes to show you

(37:10):
what an enormous enterprise it was that that that making
twenty million dollars couldn't even allow them to break even. UM.
In addition to the Black Star line, he also helped
found the Negro Factories Corporation UM, which created grocery stores,
restaurant UM, Moving Vans, publishing house obviously UM and all

(37:34):
sorts of other UM black owned businesses that not only
were run directly from the Negro Factories Corporation, but also
we're just affiliated with it. And so part of the
trouble that that Marcus Garvey ran into was and that
demonstrates he wasn't a very good businessman. He was shuffling
money from one enterprise to another to keep them all afloat.

(37:54):
And some were doing better than others from what I understand,
like the grocery store was doing really well, but say
the restaurant wasn't. So he had to um move money
from the grocery store of the restaurant and then maybe
from the restaurant to the Black Star Line. And there
was nothing that that was so monumentally successful it could
keep everything else going. And so even knowing that like
the Black Star Line was in serious financial trouble, UM,

(38:19):
he he would stop on those coconut runs to to
try to sell shares. That's one of the reasons why
he was stopping was that you know, um rustle up
membership in UNIA and membership in UNIA, subscriptions to the
Negro World UM and appearances by him. UM all also
kind of came with pitches for buying shares in the
Black Star line. And that's ultimately what got him in trouble.

(38:42):
He was continuing to sell shares in an enterprise that um,
he may or may not have thought was was in jeopardy.
And the FEDS, who have been trying to get him
for years at this point, UM, finally said I think
we can get him now. Yeah. What they got him
for ultimately was male fraud. And what I saw was

(39:02):
it was specifically the fact that he was sending mailers
for donations, or not donations, but investment opportunities, uh that
featured ships that they did not yet own. So uh,
there was one ship in particular that he was trying
to buy, but the deal wasn't closed, but it was
prominently featured. And they said, wait a minute, this is

(39:25):
mail fraud. You can't. You're misrepresenting the company essentially by
having a ship on there that you don't have yet.
And we've got you. And he ended up serving um
how many years just a few? Right, He was sentenced
to five, but I believe he served two, right, and
his sentence was commuted and he was deported back to Jamaica. UM,

(39:46):
we're still gonna talk about other stuff. Before this, but
that's he ultimately ended up back in Jamaica. But when
you were just talking a second ago, I think one
of the things that is pretty clear was that he
was a He wasn't the best of businessman, but he
was also a victim of over being overly ambitious because
he had health problems through his whole life. He had
pneumonia quite a few times, and I think he had asthma,

(40:11):
and I think he'd had a feeling maybe that he
was not long for this world. So that's why he said,
let's start theaters, and let's start grocery stores, and let's
start restaurants, and let's start a shipping line. I think
he was overly ambitious and tried to move a little
too fast maybe, whereas if he might have slowed down
and put his efforts uh into fewer things, it might

(40:32):
have been a little bit more successful. Yeah, But also
imagine being like, Okay, we really need to make up
for lost time, you know, and then feeling like your
time on earth was was going to be shortened. I mean, yeah,
I know, not at all, but so he um he
did his time in Atlanta, Federal penn which is at
the end of Grant Park now, UM, which is one

(40:54):
of the scariest buildings you can never drive past. UM.
And like he said, he thought his time in this
world was gonna be fairly short. And he actually wrote
a letter from prison saying that you know, um, he
basically expected to die in prison and if he did die,
then he was going to come back. He said, look
for me in the whirlwind. He's gonna bring with him

(41:16):
the souls of all the dead Africans who died enslaved
um and uh, basically right, all the wrongs, if you
know what I mean. The documentary by the way, yeah,
I like our title more Black Moses. I think that's
such an amazing name for him, So awesome. But um,
so he he didn't die in prison. He got out,

(41:38):
like you said. Calvin Coolidge, under tremendous pressure from Union
UM members and his wife Amy Jacks Uh, finally said okay, fine,
he can come out, but he's going to Jamaica. And
that's where he went. And when he went to prison,
I mean, that was just not a good look. Like
this guy who was leading the movement to prop up

(42:00):
and raise up the black community going to prison, Um,
it just made him any even easier target, not just
among the black community, but also among like white observers
now to like, look, he went to jail, like, this
is your this is your leader. Come on, give me
a break. But we haven't really kind of explained it enough.
And and there's a whole other podcast we could do

(42:22):
just on this, but suffice to say he was very
much the victim of government harassment, again at the hands
of Jay Hoover, who somebody said once that he became
so fixated on Garvy it became basically a vendetta. He
just wanted to get rid of Marcus Garvey and tried
for years to do it, and the government sabotaged Black
Star line fuel um fuel supplies so the ships would

(42:46):
would break down. Um, Like, he was harassed. He he
had like every reason to feel persecuted, and then finally
put in prison on a pretty weak charge to begin with,
because of his ideas and because he represented a threat
to you know, white dominance in America and elsewhere. Yeah,

(43:07):
in nineteen nineteen, Hoover hired And by the way, I
thought you were going to quote me a second ago
when he said someone once said about Hoover, I thought
you canna say that he was the worst American. That
would have been the most boss referential joke you've ever
pulled off. Uh So, in nineteen nineteen, Hoover hired the
bureau's first black agent, James Wormley Jones. And you might think, oh, great,

(43:31):
he's being progressive. No, no, no. He hired him specifically
to be a mole and infiltrate Garvey's movement. And I
think he was the one that actually poisoned the fuel lines.
And he had other UH moles that he would install
within the organization. And it wasn't just um, I mean,
it's bad enough if you're doing that just to keep

(43:52):
tabs and report back, but he sent people in there
to agitate and to cause disruption. And I remember reading
one story where there was something about letters being sent
back and forth between different Union UH offices in different cities,
like pretty far apart, and that they were agitating one

(44:12):
another and with these letters, and it turned out that
none they were all written by Hoover or you know,
Hoover's cronies. Yeah, that's a playbook that little Putts would
be using for decades to come. He did that to
the Black Panthers. He tried to do it to the
civil rights leaders, like, yeah, that was he would just
he wouldn't put moles in just to like listen and
report back. He was like he put them in there

(44:34):
to destroy them from within, which is just you know, reprehensible, man,
what a snake. Yeah, and also don't write in I
know what the word putts means and I meant it
with Jay. Uh, we should mention them attempt on his
life that we kind of referenced earlier. Uh, this was
back in nineteen nineteen and October. Uh, he had by

(44:58):
this time, this was kind of I guess hooever was
sort of already getting involved. But the New York d
A Edwin Edwin Kay, I'm sorry, Edwin P. Kilroe started
investigating UNI at first. In October of nineteen nineteen, a
man named George Tyler showed up basically kicked in the
door downstairs and demanded to speak with Garvey. Garby came

(45:20):
out and see what was going on. He opened fire.
H you mentioned that Amy Ashwood got between him and
the bullets. But Garvey was hit three times, I think,
once in the scalp and twice in the legs. And
the rumor was, uh, and this is you know, I
think what Garvey believed was that Tyler was sent by
the d A. That was never proven. There were also

(45:42):
people that said, no, this was a guy who was
had restaurant dealings with him that was angry about how
that business went down. So I don't think we'll ever
know for sure what happened. But there wasn't an assassination attempt.
So um, like I was saying before, when he when
he went to prison, like, it was not it was

(46:02):
not a proud day for UNIA, and union membership started
to drop off fairly precipitously. Amy Jackson's wife was trying
to keep things going, publishing his letters, like giving speeches
on his behalf lobby and Calvin Coolidge to let him
out of prison. Um, but it's just like the the
death blow was kind of struck. Although that's not to

(46:23):
say there's still UNIA today and Marcus Garvey's views and
Garvey is um and a lot of his teachings and
writings and thoughts are still very much espoused and followed
right and and not just in the reggae world. But
um he he uh basically spent the rest of his life,
and his life was relatively short. He died at age

(46:44):
fifty two. In he moved back to Jamaica, where he
was deported, he decided to move back to London. I
could not find what kind of connection he had to
London to live there twice. Um, but that's where he
lived out the rest of his days, and because he
schooled there maybe, but he well, no I knew he
had an actual connection to London. I meant, like on

(47:05):
a an emotional level, like what drew him back to
London a second time? But um, but he died there,
and he died just kind of like um, a bit
of an outcast. And one of the things that really
didn't help, you know, he was kind of losing a
lot of followers and adherents because he went to prison
and then later on he he um, he criticized Holla

(47:26):
Selassie after he was deposed by Mussolini, and he also
looked up to Mussolini for being a strong authoritarian leader.
But the thing that really kind of like sealed his
fate among um, the black cultural leaders is what you
mentioned earlier, the bonkers meeting between him and the leader
of the KKK, Right, Yeah, I mean, uh talk about

(47:49):
a radical idea um for him just to sit down
with a leader of the clan in Atlanta and in
exchange views of agreement on the fact that they each
thought that black Americans should that belonged in Africa. To
say that did not sit well within the leaders of
the black community is is a pretty big understatement. Yeah,

(48:11):
so that was I mean, that was the probably the
biggest thing of of Marcus Garvey's downfall. But you know,
because of that, his his image like really kind of
he he died as an outcast in London, um and
he um he Over the years though like he was,
he seems to have been first picked up and rehabilitated

(48:32):
by the Rastafarians who said, like, hey, no, this guy,
this guy had some amazing ideas. This guy was speaking truth,
like his his teachings were important, and they kind of
picked up his um, his his image and dusted him
off and rehabilitated him. And people have kind of taken
like a closer look at him again and been like, yes,
this guy was one of the most important black activists

(48:53):
in the history of the world. Yeah, I saw. I
think in the PBS documentary they put it like this
that uh in the early nineteen hundreds provided a template
for everybody that came after basically whether it was Malcolm
X or Martin Luther King Jr. Uh, the Rastafarianism, the
Nation of Islam, Like, there were so many organizations and

(49:16):
people that sort of used his life and his uh
cultural ideas as that template that um, it's it's it's
hard to believe that this is something. And we say
this all the time, of course, especially about black history.
But I don't think I ever heard the words Marcus
Garvey in a high school or college history class, not

(49:39):
unless Peter Tosh was teaching. Oh man, I miss uh.
We had this great radio station called album ADI eight Atlanta,
the George State radio station that every Sunday morning they had, uh,
like the best reggae show ever. Uh. And it wasn't
you know, they weren't like, let's play Redemption song by
Bob Marlin. Great song, but it's where you it here

(50:00):
got all the early uh, all the early ska and
like Lee Perry and the Upsiders. Man, it's so good.
And now when we go to the lake on Sunday mornings,
we just dial up a good like fifties and sixties
ska playlist in honor of what what once was at
Georgia State. I think you can still stream it online,
but it was a big deal with they shut it

(50:22):
down basically and said, let's have two NPR stations in
Atlanta the exact same thing at the same time. It
was a terrible, terrible decision that I hope one day
they reversed because I hope maybe eight was so good.
That was the more fire show. By the way, yeah,
and that boy that just openised to so much good
reggae win I was in college and there was a

(50:42):
lot of bad reggae, and then there was like that
was Saturday, I guess you said. That was Saturday around noon,
and before that, in the mornings they would have a
Saturday Morning cartoon music show where they play like Strawberry
Shortcake songs and like just like the most random stuff
that they would get off the kids records. But it
was great. And then the night before that, I don't

(51:02):
know if you remember Adam Bomb, remember, yes, like the
soul like, oh my goodness, that like album Adia eight
had it going on that dash that was like trance
and all that, and then uh, the relent in the
years was sort of you know for the old white folks.
I don't remember that it was. It was really good
deep cuts of of classic rock, so that it's not

(51:25):
like here's Boston's more than a feeling. It's like, here's uh,
this deep cut from Steven Still's second solo album, right exactly. Yeah,
that was that was album A D eight man Man
r I P album R I P. Dare we do
one on Rastafarianism at some point, absolutely, because then my
list it's just it's a tough one. I think, Yeah,
I think so too. But with it, I mean, it's

(51:45):
sufficed to say that Marcus Garvey was a prophet of
Rastafarianism because he predicted the rise of Hollia Selassie, who
became the god of Rastafarianism. And we'll talk more about
that in a different map. How about that, it's good stuff.
I look forward. I believe it's Amazon is making the
Marcus Garvey movie, but definitely see if you can find

(52:05):
the PBS experience American experience. I think it is on
Marcus Garvey. It's good stuff. And the guy who's gonna
play Marcus Garvey that was Winston Duke, You're right, the
dude from US. Yeah, and Black Panther too. Um well,
if you want to know more about Winston Duke, go
check him out on IMDb. But if you want to
know more about Marcus Garvey, um, yeah, like you said,

(52:27):
check out the American Experience on him. But there's so
much stuff in great articles and interesting scholarship to read
about Marcus Garvey and his legacy. So go check it
out because it's pretty interesting. And since I said that
it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this short
and sweet because this was a longer episode. So this

(52:48):
is perfect. Uh. When we did the episode on the
church Choir that didn't explode, we felt bad because we
could not find Reverend Kimple's wife's first name. And wouldn't
you know it, the stuff you should know, Army comes
through for us. Hey, guys, love the show. Been listening
for years. I heard the episode on the church Choir

(53:09):
that didn't explode, and you said you couldn't find Reverend
Kimple's wife in her first name, And I was excited
because I knew that the nineteen fifty census had just
been released on April one, So I guess in our defense,
we recorded that before people first, right. Absolutely, I went
and searched and they were listed in the census. Walter's
wife's name. Can we get a drum roll here is

(53:32):
Eunice Jay Climpole. We probably could a guest in the
nineteen fifties. Units was probably a top five name, uh
for Evelyn in in uh in Beatrice, Nebraska, for sure. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure it's them right county and right profession
and the only Walter Climpole. Yeah, I mean Climpole with

(53:53):
without an e L. It's got to be it. Keep
up with a good work. And that was from a
couple of people in it. But this was from Sue.
Thanks a lot, Sue. Yeah, I did notice a couple
of people wrote in, so it's pretty sharp. The n
censes just come out, and Sue sat bolt upright in
bed and said, I gotta look. Thanks, And that makes you,
uh an official research assistant. Right, So if you want

(54:17):
to be like Sue and send us some unpaid research
where we'd love that, that'd be great, especially if it's accurate. Um,
you can put it in an email and send it
off to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,

(54:39):
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.