"There is no use calling on the Lord - He never hears."
- Casey in Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
One and one-half million Negroes left Southern farms to come North during and immediately after World War I. These two unprecedented waves of migration in 1916-1918 and again in 1921-1924 brought about an unparalleled population explosion that seemed to have happened over-night, whether it was such a phenomenal growth in Negro population as in Gary, Ind., which experienced a 1,200 per cent growth or "only" a 66.3 per cent increase in New York from 91,709 to 151,847. Detroit's Negro population between 1910 -1920 jumped from a mere 5,741 to 40,838, a 611.3 per cent increase.
Far from finding paradise "up North," however, the Negroes soon discovered that they had been brought from Southern plantations to take the most ill-paid, back-breaking jobs in Chicago stockyards, Pittsburgh steel mills, Detroit auto factories, Philadelphia docks. Sometimes they had been brought in to break a strike, and in any case they found the union doors as closed to them as industry had been hitherto. Indeed, so long as basic industries remained unorganized, the Negro couldn't become an integral part of the trade unions which were divided by crafts limited to the skilled workers. The color bar was thus both industry and union made.
The second shock that hit the migrant worker was that the move from country to city was not really to the big city but to the small, overcrowded ghetto, where he was surrounded on all sides by prejudiced whites. Unemployment would soon, with the end of the war, reinforce the prejudice through competition for jobs. And the Klan had followed the Negroes North to organize anti-Negro prejudices and outright attacks against them. This was whipped up further by the anti-foreign, anti-Red hysteria following the end of the war and the success of the Russian Revolution which had had such a great impact the world over, including the United States.
The social humiliation to which the Negroes were subjected daily, in and out of the factory, in and out of the ghetto, in and out of stores and places of entertainment, was not limited to Negro migrants. Whatever generation had got lost in Paris, the black veteran had to return from fighting a war "to save democracy" to face a Jim Crow America where bigotry and intolerance seemed to reign supreme.
Bloody race riots and a barbaric outburst of lynchings climaxed the move North. "Red Summer 1919" was a description, not of the extension of the Russian Revolution, but of the fantastic number of race riots - no less than 26 in the last months of 1919.
The Negroes did not take all this lying down. They gave as good as they got. And then they searched for an organization, a philosophy that would express not only their frustrations and profound disillusionment, but their spirit of revolt and desire for total freedom. But they found neither an existing Negro organization nor a Negro leadership. The so-called "talented tenth" might as well speak Greek as English. Communication between leadership-self-styled and otherwise-and mass had broken down.
Into this great divide within the American Negro a West Indian printer and orator named Marcus Garvey stepped with a dream of "uniting all the Negro peoples of the world into one great body to establish a country and Government absolutely their own."
"We are the descendants of a suffering people; we are the descendants of a people determined to suffer no longer."
- Marcus Garvey
In January 1918 Marcus Garvey began to publish a weekly called NEGRO WORLD, claiming to reach "the mass of Negroes throughout the World." Very nearly overnight it attained a circulation of 50,000, and at its height in 1920-1921 claimed 200,000. It literally shook up also the colonial world and was banned in much of Africa.29
Its internationalism did not exhaust itself by its West Indian editorship, nor by its home in the United States, nor its appeal to Africa. Sections of it were printed in French and Spanish for the benefit of other West Indian and Central American Negroes. Garvey's editorials were always front-paged, and addressed to the "Fellowmen of the Negro Race." Its pages stirred with pride over the heroes of the Negro: from tales of Negro slave revolts in America to the Zulu Revolt of 1906 against British rule; from the rise of the Ethiopian empire to Toussaint L'Ouverture's victory against the French in Haiti.
There were, as well, newly-told tales of great African civilizations "when Europe was inhabited by a race of cannibals, a race of savages, naked men, heathens and pagans . . . Black men, you were once great: you shall be great again. Lose not courage, lose not faith, go forward. The thing to do is get organized; keep separated and you will be exploited, you will be robbed, you will be killed. Get organized, and you will compel the world to respect you. If the world fails to give you consideration, because you are black men, because you are Negroes, four hundred millions of you shall through organization, shake the pillars of the universe and bring down creation, even as Samson brought down the temple upon his head and upon the heads of the Philistines."30
Garvey set about organizing the American Negroes and immediately disproved the myth that they "couldn't be organized." Literally by the millions they flocked into his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). This was the first time that a Negro organization was established on a country-wide basis. At its height in 1920-1921, it claimed six million. It was overwhelmingly proletarian. Marcus Garvey had appealed to the American Negro over the heads of the established Negro leaders who lived in a world far removed from the daily lives of the Negro mass. Where they were preoccupied with themselves as the "talented tenth," or, at best, participated in long-drawn-out legal battles, Garvey spoke of what to do here and now.
It was easy for the Negro intellectual to expose the fakery in such schemes as "the Black Star Line" that would take the American Negro "back to Africa," as well as "to prove" that the Negro wanted to integrate into, not separate from, the mainstream of American life. But thereby the Negro intellectuals also proved how isolated they were from the profound unrest stirring the mass of Negroes, their total despair of ever achieving full democracy within the post-World War I American civilization.
Where they had urged and were proud of the Negro's participation in the war, Garvey lashed out: "We are going to organize ourselves all over the world that when the white men say - any white man wants a black man to die in the future, they have to tell us what we are going to die for. (Applause). The first dying that is to be done by the black man in the future will be done to make himself free."31
Long before the African revolutionaries came onto the historic scene, Marcus Garvey raised the slogan "Africa for the Africans." Impractical as were the specifics of the "Back to Africa" scheme in the historic context of an Africa divided up among the European imperialist powers, the concept of "Africa for the African" anticipated the African revolutions that would put an end to colonialism. And it was totally opposed to the Pan-Africanism of the "talented tenth" of Du Bois and Diagne. Where the latter appealed to the League of Nations for "partial self-determination of natives of the German colonies" (my emphasis), asking the League to hold "the land and its natural resources . . . in trust for the natives," Garvey declared the League "null and void as far as the Negro is concerned in that it seeks to deprive the Negroes of their liberty." In its stead he demanded that black men themselves, here and now, "establish "Africa for the Africans."
The "talented tenth" still obscures the connection between this great mass movement of Negro Americans immediately after World War I and the flowering of Negro genius in music, literature and sports. It is precisely to this great unrest that the Harlem Renaissance and what became known as the "New Negro" owe their existence. The mass movement gave the "talented tenth" their voice and not the other way around.32
It was not the fakery in Garvey's schemes, like the money collected for the Black Star Line, that made Du Bois, along with almost all other Negro intellectuals, actually sign a petition addressed to the United States Department of Justice, demanding his deportation. It was that the American Negro intellectual had never been able to break through to the Negro masses.33 Garvey most certainly had. In retrospect, W. E. B. DuBois finally saw it and had to write: "It was a grandiose and bombastic scheme, utterly impracticable as a whole, but it was sincere and had some practical features; and Garvey proved not only an astonishingly popular leader, but a master of propaganda. Within a few years, news of his movement, of his promises and plans, reached Europe and Asia, and penetrated every corner of Africa."34
To other intellectuals, like Ralph Bunche, Garveyism remained beyond comprehension even as late as 1940 when he wrote: "When the curtain dropped on the Garvey theatricals, the black man of America was exactly where Garvey had found him, though a little bit sadder, perhaps a bit poorer -if not wiser."35 Dr. Bunche, clearly, was no wiser.
"When in 1920 the American government started to investigate and to suppress radical propaganda among Negroes, the small radical Negro groups in America retaliated by publishing the fact that the Socialists stood for the emancipation of the Negroes, and that reformist America could do nothing for them. Then, I think, for the first time in American history, the American Negroes found that Karl Marx had been interested in their emancipation, and had fought valiantly for it."36
The speaker was the great Negro poet, Claude McKay. The place was Moscow. The year was 1922, long before Communism had become transformed into today's totalitarianism. At the previous Congress, in 1920, Lenin had presented his special Theses on the National and Colonial Questions, and preliminary to that Congress he had included Ireland and "the Negro in America" as part of the National Question and asked "all comrades, particularly those who have definite information on any of these very complicated questions, to express their opinion and make suggestions for amendments or additions . . ."
Lenin used the word, "nation," in its broad sense of oppressed nations and minority groups; and included both national minorities and colonial majorities in the Theses. In his very numerous polemics on the National Question, throughout World War I, and again in his 1920 Theses after he had gained power in Russia, Lenin emphasized that concrete historic situations, not abstract considerations, formed the focal point of both the theory and the actions on the National Question.
The decisive thing was that "all national oppression calls forth resistance of the broad masses of people." It is insufficient to state that revolutionists would support these movements, he maintained. It is not only a question of support. It is a question of support and the development of national struggles, not for abstract reasons, but because these struggles must inevitably develop along the lines of independent mass activity.
Ever since his study of Imperialism in 1916, Lenin held that imperialism has brought about a differentiation not only between the oppressor nations and the oppressed ones, but also within the proletariat. Lenin was especially adamant on this point in his polemics with his Bolshevik colleagues.
In his polemic with Pyatakov on the National Question, Lenin defended a "dualism" of propaganda on the ground that the proletariat in the oppressor nation differs from the proletariat in the oppressed nation "all along the line": economically, the worker of the oppressor nation more easily becomes part of the labor aristocracy; politically, he participates more fully in the life of the country; and intellectually, he feels superior because he is taught disdain for the laborer of the oppressed nation.37
Lenin threw the accusation of "national egoism" against those Marxists who failed to recognize the merits of the National Question as it applied both to easily recognized nations like the Irish, or minorities like the ghetto Jew in Poland or the Negro in the United States. The problem of national egoism does not, of course, resolve itself merely into the fact that the proletariat of the oppressing nation is taught disdain for the worker of the oppressed nation. National egoism has a firmer basis: an economic foundation. The point of specific political implication in Lenin's Imperialism is that, owing to the super-profits of imperialism, imperialism is able to bribe a section of its own proletariat and thereby lay the basis of political opportunism.
This precisely applied to the American Socialists and Communists.38 Claude McKay said that "they are not willing to face the Negro Question."
Much has since been written of the sameness of the Negro and American culture in order to prove that the Negroes are not a nation. But what these writers have failed to show is: why, then, does there nevertheless exist a Negro problem? The sameness of the Negro and American culture does not explain this. And that is the hub of the matter.
It is the general success of assimilation in the historic development of a country like the United States that lends credence to the type of ultra-left phraseology behind which lurks national egoism. In Europe the national minorities fought for independence from the larger society. But in the United States the national minorities that came to this country fought for integration within the larger society. They, the immigrants, more or less succeeded. The exception to the integration is the Negro. Why? Surely it isn't the Negro's doing; he only wants his assimilation accepted. We see that here is a complex pattern that cannot be solved by abstract criteria as to what constitutes a nation.
It is the Negro's special oppression, the deprivation of his political rights, the discrimination against him on the job, Jim Crowism and racial segregation that makes of him "a problem."
It was McKay, writing critically on "Garvey as a Negro Moses," (LIBERATOR, April 1922) who said: "Where men like Booker T. Washington, Dr. DuBois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and William Monroe Trotter of the Equal Rights League had but little success, Garvey succeeded in bringing the Associated Press to his knees every time he bellowed. And his words were trumpeted round the degenerate pale-face world trembling with fear of the new Negro . . . He was the biggest popularizer of the Negro problem, especially among Negroes, since 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. He attained the sublime."
The fact that the Negro masses could embrace so Utopian a scheme as "Back to Africa"- a utopianism all the more suicidal since their customs, language, and culture are American-reveals both how frustrated the Negroes feel at ever achieving full democratic rights in America and how desperately repressed they feel as a national minority. And, what is more important, they mean to do something about this.
If the movement developed into diversionary channels, as the Garvey movement did, and if the socialists were unable to make a dent in its ranks, it only proves that the only way to influence masses in motion is by understanding the underlying, economic, philosophic and social causes, not by throwing epithets at them.
Those who failed to understand that the principles of the Marxist approach to the National Question apply to the Negro struggle for assimilation into the national culture as much as to the European national struggle for independence from the national culture of the oppressing nation are the very ones who were disoriented when the African Revolutions in our era opened both as national revolutions and under a banner of Marxist Humanism and internationalism.
Until the Communists began to vie for this third new world in our era, Lenin's 1920 Theses on the National and Colonial Question seemed to have been "lost." Their "rediscovery" of the Theses in Khrushchev's time was for the same purpose as their "application" of it to the American Negro in 1928 when it was sloganized as "Self-Determination of the Negroes in the Black Belt." This sounded to the Negroes as yet one other form of segregation. By the time of World War II it became outright betrayal.
(Paradoxically enough, the demand for a separate territory for the black nation is the very basis of today's Black Muslim movement. While its origins date back to the remnants of the Garvey movement, it is only recently that they have come to national prominence and claim 100,000 members. It is the negative features of their program - of being anti-white - that wins them a following. Their positive program - whether it refers to the superiority of men over women, of Islam over Christianity, or their rejection of the very idea of integration - makes them only peripheral to the mainstream of the Negro struggle today rather than at the heart of it).
(When the Black Muslims try to separate the races again at this stage, they not only cannot compare in mass allegiance with that won by Marcus Garvey at a far different historic period, but they find themselves following some of the caucuses within the unions rather than leading out of the unions. With the rise of the CIO the Negro did become an integral part of the labor movement, and thus the frustrations that persist in the life of a minority in this country are inseparable from the general struggle for a new society here. Greater detail on the Muslim movement is contained in The Black Muslims in America, by C. Eric Lincoln, Beacon, 1961. See also their official newspaper, Muhammud Speaks.)
29 Mr. George Shepperson, a professor in Scotland who has specialized on the African, (especially Nyasaland) independence movements, and the "triangular trade" of ideas between America, the West Indies and Africa, states that it is not altogether out of bounds. For example, the migratory labor cycle between Nyasaland and South Africa did help disseminate Garveyism as seen from the case of the African "who was sentenced to three years' hard labor in September 1926 for importing into the Protectorate two copies of The Worker's Herald and six of The Negro World . . ." (Phylon, Fall 1961). See also "Notes on Negro American Influence on the Emergence of African Nationalism" by George Shepperson in the Journal of African History (1-2, 1960).
30 Black Moses, by Edmund David Cronon, Univ. of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1955, is a good biography, in which many of Garvey's speeches are included and the general historic period is analyzed. But it is no substitute for Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, edited by his widow, Mrs. Amy Jacques Gorvey, the first volume of which was published in 1923 and the second in 1926. (Universal Publishing House, N.Y.)
31 Revolutionary Radicalism, Report of the Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, Filed April 24, 1920, in the Senate of the State of New York, Part I Revolutionary and Subversive Movement Abroad and at Home, Vol. II, Ch. V, Propaganda Among Negroes, pp. 1476-1520. There are several speeches by Marcus Garvey the one quoted here appears on p. 1514. There is a most valuable section on A. Philip Randolph and the remarkable magazine. Messenger, with some beautiful cartoons, as well as a report on the I.W.W. and Ben Fletcher. Considering the reactionary nature as well as pure stupidity of this infamous Lusk Committee it is all the more surprising that such valuable source material can be gotten here. Published in Albany, N.Y. This was also the period of the frameup of the martyred Sacco and Vanzatti. It was in this period when Alabama passed the anti-labor law against the striking Birmingham miners which was used against Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in an attempt to break the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
32 In Black Moses Cronon quotes Garvey's "Declaration of the Rights of the Negro People of the World" which deals with the capitalization of the word "Negro." He also includes the 1929 New York State Board of Education's order that this be done, as well as the New York Times report in 1930 explaining that it was done, in "recognition of racial self-respect for those who have been for generations 'in the lower case'." The American Negro scholar, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, founder of The Association for The Study of Negro History, did yoeman's work here as well as in establishing Negro History Week. For the Harlem Renaissance in general, see The New Negro by Alaine Locke, and also Anthology of American Negro Literature, Modern Library book, 1944.
33 Henry Lee Moon did recognize this division between "talented tenth" and the masses, when he summed up, in retrospect, the Niagara Movement led by Du-Bois and others in 1903: "Their cause was just, their motives pure, their goals noble and practical; but they were perhaps too tar removed from the masses to inspire them to action - too conscious of their own privileged position as a black elite" Balance of Power.
34 Dusk of Dawn, by W. E. B. Du Bois.
35 A World View of Race, submitted as manuscript for Myrdal's An American Dilemma, available in Schomburg Collection, New York City.
36 Fourth Congress of the Communist International, Abridged Report of Meetings held at Petrograd and Moscow, November 7 - December 3, 1922. McKay's speech appears on pages 260-261. Published in Great Britain. The previous report of the American delegates in which L. Fraino and John Reed appeared on the same subject can be obtained from the Stenographic Report, Second Congress of the Communist International, 1921, but that is available only in Russian, Consult especially pp. 131-132.
37 Lenin, Collected Works Vol. XIX, p. 248. See also Selected Works. Vol. X, for the Preliminary Draft of Theses on the National and Colonial Questions," and for the Report of the Commission, pp. 231-244.
38 The Communists were not the only ones who could not understand the Negro as a "National Question." The Socialists could not either. Nor was it only a question of being white and thus insensitive to the duality and intensity of the oppression of the Negro. The Debsian 1903 formula - "Properly speaking, there is no Negro question outside the labor question" (International Socialist Review. Vol. VI, 1903, p. 1113) - dominated A. Philip Randolph as well during the very height of Garveyism. It would take another 20 years and another World War, and especially the neverending Depression, before A. Philip Randolph would act on this specialized basis both in the organization of the March on Washington, and Committee to End Jim Crow in the Army.