Marcus Garvey was, without question, one of the most consequential and infuriating Black thinkers and activists of the twentieth century. Born and raised in Jamaica, Garvey had his world rocked reading Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up From Slavery. "Where is the black man's government?" Garvey asked himself. "Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his President, his ambassador, his country, his men of big affairs? I could not find them," he said, "and then declared, 'I will help to make them.
In 1914, Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston, Jamaica. By May of 1917, Garvey relocated the UNIA in Harlem and began to use speeches and his newspaper, The Negro World, to spread his message across the United States to an increasingly receptive African American community.
Garvyism resonated with the rapidly urbanizing black community and spread beyond the United States to the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. Regardless of the locale, Garvey's UNIA promised black economic uplift via self-reliance, political equality via self-determination, and the "liberation of Africa from European colonialism via a Black army marching under the Red, Black, and Green flag of Black manhood."
Garvey's most ambitious effort was the establishment of the Black Star Steamship Line. Garvey hoped that this joint stock corporation would develop lucrative commercial networks between the United States, the Caribbean, and the continent of Africa. He also hoped that his three ships would help in the return of millions of Blacks in the diaspora to Mother Africa. However, because of heavy debt and mismanagement, the steamship line went bankrupt, and Garvey, in January 1922, was arrested and charged with using the US Mail to defraud stock investors.
The long-delayed trial finally took place in the spring of 1923, and Garvey, in accordance with the hubris that had both made and destroyed him, once again proved the maxim that "the man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client."He blew his defense in court, and the jury found him guilty. Upon this pronouncement, Garvey burst into a storm of rage, denouncing both the judge and district attorney as "damned dirty Jews."
Fuming at the perceived injustice of the verdict, he wrote that night, "The peculiar and outstanding feature of the whole case is that I am being punished for the crime of the Jew, Silverstone … who has caused the ruin of the company … I was prosecuted by Maxwell Mattuck, another Jew, and I am to be sentenced by Judge Julian Mack, the erminent Jewish Jurist."
This is factually correct. All of these men were Jews, but were they acting in concert as part of a Jewish conspiracy? Prior to the trial, Garvey had never displayed antisemitic tendencies. Rather, he had celebrated Jewish thrift and group solidarity and voiced common cause with the concept of Zionism – applied to Africa rather than to Israel.
I believe that in his anger, Garvey reached for the antisemitic trope of Jewish conspiracies that was always in the air and ready to hand. Antisemitism was never a sustained theme of Garveyism, and Garvey himself only spoke of a Jewish cabal in connection with his trial. His remarks, though not widely disseminated, may have influenced Judge Mack (a prominent Zionist and president of the first American Jewish Congress) to impose the maximum penalty: five years in jail and a fine of $1000.
Based on this one incident, calling Garvey an antisemite could be overstating the case. But he never repudiated his statements, and there was nothing to stop antisemitism from encrusting itself into the ideological children of Garvey's movement, most notably the Black nationalism of the 1960s.
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