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The Age of Garvey
How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics
By Adam Ewing PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-5244-4
CHAPTER 1
THE EDUCATION OF MARCUS MOSIAH GARVEY
On the morning of October 11, 1865, men and women streamed out of the small black settlement of Stony Gut, Jamaica and trooped in military formation toward the town of Morant Bay, in the parish of St. Thomas in the East. They were armed with sticks and cutlasses; some carried guns. At their head was a Native Baptist preacher and peasant farmer named Paul Bogle. The columns marched first to the police station, which was ransacked for weapons, then headed to the courthouse, where they confronted the volunteer militia. As the Queen's representative in the parish, Custos Baron von Ketelhodt, read the Riot Act, stones were lobbed at the volunteers by a group of women in the crowd, and the volunteers returned a volley of fire. In the ensuing chaos twenty-nine people were slain, including von Ketelhodt and seven volunteers. The rebellion quickly spread through neighboring sugar plantations and among freeholders. Bogle returned to Stony Gut and declared Jamaica liberated. "The iron bar is now broken in this parish," he proclaimed. "War is at us, my black skin. War is at hand."
If the bloody Christmas revolt of 1831–32 hastened emancipation in the British Empire, the Morant Bay rebellion unleashed the forces of reaction. Governor Edward John Eyre declared martial law and inaugurated a ruthless "reign of terror" that included indiscriminate and "barbarous" floggings, the burning of a thousand homes, and the deaths of more than four hundred—guilty and innocent alike—most by execution. Among the innocent was George William Gordon, the mulatto assemblyman, ally of Bogle and defender of Jamaica's poor, shepherded from his home in Kingston to Morant Bay to face the military tribunal. Bogle was captured on October 23, and hanged the next day. By the end of the year, warning that Jamaica was on the verge of becoming "a second Haiti," a haven for black licentiousness and creeping savagery, the governor had convinced the Legislative Assembly to suspend self-government and embrace the "strong government" of the Queen.
The Morant Bay rebellion was one of the remarkable events of a remarkable year best remembered for the close of the Civil War—and with it, the institution of slavery—in the United States. For British subjects of African descent, already released from bondage, the rebellion marked a "symbolic turning point" in the contest to define the parameters of citizenship and freedom in the postemancipation era, its destruction foreshadowing the coalescence of new and assertive imperial regimes by the end of the century. Since the revolutionary decades of the late eighteenth century, peoples of African descent had forged a rich intellectual tradition premised on an uncompromising commitment to abolitionism and natural rights, an investment in black "nation" making, and an unswerving faith in racial destiny, guided by the understanding that human perfectibility depended on the fulfillment of providential design—that "Princes shall come out of Egypt"; that "Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God" (Psalms 68:31). At times, as at Morant Bay, the advocacy and activism of transatlantic black spokesmen converged explosively with the radical democratic cultures of the black peasantry, often mediated by the contested public sphere of black Christianity. At other times, black intellectuals sustained their faith in a partnership with white allies, wagering that the European and American commitments to free labor, "civilization" building, and global proselytization would hasten the day when they and their race would be respected as equal partners—"co-worker[s]," as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, "in the kingdom of culture."
By 1900, when delegates from Africa, the West Indies, Europe, and the United States assembled at the historic Pan-African Conference in London, the idealism and possibility of the postemancipation period had been undercut by a reinvigorated racial order that deemed Africans and their descendants perpetual hewers of wood and drawers of water, consigned for the distant future to tutelage under the administration and care of "civilized" European administrators. For members of the black intellectual diaspora, bearers and proponents of the pan-African tradition, the two decades before the First World War were a period of experimentation and halting steps. At the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Booker T. Washington established a détente with white supremacy that had unexpected reverberations across the world. From the Gold Coast (now Ghana), barrister, author, and activist J. E. Casely Hayford struggled toward a philosophy of political Ethiopianism that paid homage to the legacy of his mentor, Edward Wilmot Blyden, while articulating a more defiant, anticolonial posture. In London, at the offices of the African Times and Orient Review, Dusé Mohamed Ali, aided by his network of journalists, correspondents, and agents in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, chronicled the first gestures toward the New Negro radicalism that would erupt during and after the war.
The education of Marcus Garvey, who was born in 1887, was both grounded in the decades-old discourse of global pan-Africanism and shaped by the ferment of his era. His youthful experiences and experiments in Jamaica, Central America, and Europe—many of which seem to fly in the face of popular understandings of Garvey and Garveyism—suggest much about the diversity of the pan-African tradition out of which he emerged, and hint at the model of politics Garvey ultimately embraced. Pan-Africanism provided less of a blueprint than a set of assumptions about the common origins of the "race," its shared destiny, and its inevitable, providentially assured ascent. For political activists, it offered what Eddie Glaude has called "vocabularies of agency," a critical arena in which to construct and negotiate identities, build alliances, and invoke shared traditions of experience and fictive meaning. Thinking of pan-Africanism less as an ideology than as an historically conditioned social, cultural, and political field of meaning explains why a tradition dominated by elitism, infused with an abiding scorn for black folk cultures, and partial to Western theories of "civilization" has been able to mobilize peoples of African descent again and again. Proscribing neither radicalism nor conservatism, neither boldness nor caution, neither separatism nor interracial cooperation, the pan-African tradition offered clever and ambitious activists like Marcus Garvey a "potter's clay" that, under the right conditions, might unite a scattered race.
1865
Morant Bay, St. Thomas in the East, Jamaica
The Morant Bay rebellion was not entirely unexpected. Early in January 1865, Edward B. Underhill of the Baptist Missionary Society penned a letter to the British Parliament warning of the rapidly deteriorating conditions on the island. The drought of the past two years had exacerbated an employment crisis created by the decline of the sugar industry. The American Civil War had curtailed the importation of food and cotton products from the North, driving food prices to levels that threatened starvation, and clothing prices to levels that reduced vast numbers of people to a "ragged and even naked condition." The political hegemony of the small white planter class was further cemented in the Franchise Act of 1859, which dramatically reduced the number of Jamaica's eligible voters, and which ensured that the Legislative Assembly—like the planter-dominated courts—would remain unresponsive to the needs and entreaties of the island's majority. The Underhill letter sparked a series of public meetings across the island, many facilitated by George William Gordon, representative to the Legislative Assembly for St. Thomas in the East, and expressing the emerging political voice of what Mimi Sheller describes as an "alternative public—an African, poor, black, urban working class and rural peasant public." Rather than accepting the grievances expressed at the meetings in good faith, or pursuing measures to alleviate the peasantry's misery and discontent, Governor Eyre responded with furious contempt, introducing harsher methods of discipline, including punishments for petty larceny and other minor crimes that bore no small resemblance to those enacted during the days of slavery. Efforts by peasant workers to squat on unused Crown lands and abandoned plantations—to rely on their own productive capacities rather than the island's faltering plantation economy—were rebuffed. When rumors of rebellion and the impending "deliverance of the sons and daughters of Africa," as one placard foretold, emerged in the western parishes over the summer, Eyre responded by sending two men-of-war as a precautionary measure, but demonstrated no inclination to reconsider his government's increasingly perilous course.
Contributing to this lackluster response was the widely shared view that Jamaica's economic misery could be laid at the feet of the island's black population. The architects of the Colonial Office's emancipation policy had expected the formerly enslaved, released from the enervating shackles of their bondage, to exercise their freedom according to the "rational" principles of classical liberalism. They would serve a period of tutelage on their old plantations, imbibe the values of hard work and self-reliance in the school of wage labor, and progress carefully and inexorably toward the attainment of political responsibility. Before the apprenticeship system ended on August 1, 1838, Lord Glenelg, the Colonial Secretary, ordered a sweeping review of colonial law to ensure the unlimited exercise of personal freedom and equality for the newly freed peoples of the British West Indies. But when freedom came, the freed refused to play their assigned part. Jamaica's black peasantry struggled to defend their own understandings of freedom, pursuing an amalgam of strategies that combined independent proprietorship, market production, supplemental wage labor, and the reproduction and expansion of social relations crafted during the long era of slavery, and in Africa itself. Rather than engendering a review of liberal democratic theory, the behavior of the formerly enslaved lent purchase to the possibility that the rules of rational economic behavior may not apply to the "Negro." And if the "Negro" could not be entrusted with the maintenance of the plantation system, it was doubtful that he was suited for the exercise of the franchise, even those who qualified to vote and hold office under Jamaica's restrictive formula. By the 1850s, British policymakers had begun to view their West Indian colonies in a different light than their dominions in places like Canada and Australia, where white settlers were being groomed for self-government. As Thomas C. Holt has demonstrated, the outlines of the "white man's burden" were traced not during the Scramble for Africa at the close of the nineteenth century, but in the struggle between policymakers, planters, and peasants in the postemancipation West Indies.
In a broader sense, then, the Morant Bay rebellion gave credence to an emerging narrative about the lessons of the West Indies. For James Hunt of the newly formed Anthropological Society of London, the rebellion illustrated the folly of a "philanthropic sentimentality" that posited an inherent equality between the Negro and the European, confirmed the consequences of luring the Negro from his "natural subordination to the European," and demonstrated that "English institutions are not suited to the negro race." The Times of London viewed the rebellion as a greater "disappointment" than the Indian Mutiny of 1857. "It seemed to be proved in Jamaica that the negro could become fit for self-government," lamented the paper. "Then they show themselves so wonderfully unchanged.... We have been trying now [for] the best part of a century to wash the blackamoor white, with all kinds of patent soaps, infallible dyes, sweet oils, soothing liniments, rough towels, and soft brushes. But he remains as black as ever, as thick-skinned as ever, his hair as wooly, and his cranium as hard."
By the time James Anthony Froude visited Jamaica in 1887, the year Marcus Garvey was born, the official story about the rebellion was settling into place. Froude argued that the fault lay neither with Governor Eyre and his excesses and neglects, nor with Gordon and his machinations, but with those who, by insisting on "applying a constitutional form of government" to a country with a large majority of black subjects, had ignored the tragic calculus of the "negro problem." The power of Froude's formula, as with subsequent such renderings, was that it subsumed individual and group agency—white and black alike—within a series of abstract and timeless "truths." In Jamaica, Froude argued, an "intelligent white minority" would never submit to an "unintelligent black majority," but neither could Jamaican whites be trusted to resist the exploitative instincts that had been so horribly manifested in the slave trade. The black man had a right to "his prosperity, his freedom, his opportunities of advancing himself," but he must accept his lowly position as a "child race," marked by "thousands of years" of inequality, capable of civilization only under the guidance of the white man. The end of slavery did not mean the end of naturally delegated authority: as wives and children must submit to patriarchal power, blacks must submit to their wiser brothers. Master and servant must conduct themselves well. Essential in maintaining this equilibrium was the steady hand of England, exercising impartial rule, acquitting itself of its "self-chosen responsibilities." The West Indies were to remain "a small limb in the great body corporate of the British Empire," the islands themselves naturalized in a hierarchical relationship that preserved their health and forestalled their decay.
To this fate, Froude assured, the "docile, good-tempered ... and faithful" Negro would happily submit, provided he was "kindly treated," and provided he was denied the poison pill of self-government. But failure to heed the former threatened a war of "extinction." Giving ground on the latter augured a descent into "absolute barbarism." Froude toured nearby Haiti, where he reported sickening smells, overwhelming dirt and disease, shameless sexual immorality, and a "horrible revival of the West African superstitions; the serpent worship, and the child sacrifice, and the cannibalism." Since 1791, when slaves in Haiti (then the French colony of Saint-Domingue) had inaugurated their successful revolution, the New World's second independent republic had been a beacon of inspiration for transatlantic blacks, a place of refuge, a powerful representation of black nationality, of violent resistance in pursuit of freedom. With slavery abolished from the New World and with the reevaluation of black capacities for "improvement" in the postemancipation era, Haiti was transformed from a specter of slave militancy into a cautionary tale, a teaching tool, an early test—as Lothrop Stoddard would later declare—"between the ideals of white supremacy and race equality." If the solution to the vexing "negro problem" remained unresolved, by the turn of the century European policymakers and intellectuals were agreed on the lesson of Morant Bay, on the lesson of Haiti, and on the lesson of "philanthropic sentimentality." As J. A. Hobson, the great British critic of imperialism, wrote in his 1902 masterwork, "the old Liberal notion of our educating lower races in the art of popular government is discredited."
House of Commons, London, England
On February 21, 1865, a Select Committee was formed in London to consider the prospects for, and future of, Britain's colonial presence in West Africa. Since its transition toward a policy of "legitimate commerce," accelerating with Parliament's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the adoption of Sierra Leone as a Crown colony, Britain had sustained a modest presence on the coast. When Lagos Colony was established in 1862, it joined Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and the Gold Coast as the fourth British enclave, coexisting alongside equally modest French, Portuguese, and Spanish territories, the independent republic of Liberia, and large and small African polities and kingdoms stretching into the interior. The British settlements were populated by a cosmopolitan collection of European missionaries, traders, and officials; African American, West Indian, Brazilian, and Cuban emigrants; and tens of thousands of "recaptives," formerly enslaved men and women from all over Africa who had been liberated by the British naval blockade of the west coast. A creole culture had developed that—while certainly not free of racial prejudice—had convinced many coastal Africans that they were involved in a shared project of establishing centers of commerce, Christianity, and civilization at the edges of the Dark Continent. An emergent, European-educated black elite had risen to prominent roles in the colonies as doctors, lawyers, educators, and traders, and several held senior positions in the missions and in the colonial administrations. In 1861, the Church Missionary Society of the Anglican Church (CMS) established the Native Pastorate, intended to lay the groundwork for the establishment of African-governed episcopates. Three years later, Samuel Ajayi Crowther—former recaptive, the first African student of the CMS-run Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, pioneering evangelist in Yorubaland—was ordained the continent's first black bishop.
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Excerpted from The Age of Garvey by Adam Ewing. Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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