Garvey, Black Star Officials indicted

The second 1922 post for our annual celebration of Black History Month.

One hundred years ago today … Marcus Garvey, Elle Garcia, George Tobias, and Orlando Thompson were indicted by a federal grand jury for the charge of mail fraud in association with the Black Star Line, the flagship Black-owned business of U.N.I.A.

Garvey had been arrested on January 12th from his apartment on 129 West 130th Street. The charges were latest in series of attempts by J. Edgar Hoover and the US’s Bureau of Investigation to defame, deflate and defang U.N.I.A. and get Garvey deported. See for example, our post for February 3, 1920.

In Negro With a Hat, Colin Grant writes:

Specifically, Garvey was accused of sending circulars through the postal system, advertising the sale of stocks in a ship, the Orion, that his corporation did not yet own. The circular included a photograph of the ship, presumably the Orion but with its name scratched out and Phyllis Wheatley written in its place.

Marcus Garvey was deeply affronted by the ignominy of his arrest; particularly by the accusation that he stood to gain personally by duping naive stockholders into investing in a phantom ship. Newspapers were quick to sketch him as the equivalent of a fancy and flamboyant medicine man dispensing snake oil to ignorant black folk. Garvey winced at the headlines. (324)

The offending circular:

Note: We have featured Garvey and U.N.I.A. previously on our site, in posts from January 25 and 30, July 22,  and August 1 and 3 of 1920. Garcia in particular we wrote about in our June 8, 1920 post.

The four were convicted in a 1923 trial, with the sentence later commuted, after which Garvey was deported to Jamaica. Garvey’s descendents recently petitioned for a posthumous pardon.

References/ Further Reading:

Hansford, Justin, “Jailing a Rainbow: The Marcus Garvey Case” (December 29, 2008). Georgetown Journal of Modern Critical Race Perspectives, Vol. 2, 2009.

Hobbs, Steven H.  & Frank H. Fitch III, “The Marcus Garvey Case: A Law and Power Theory Analysis of Political Suppression of Human Dignity,” 2 Geo. Mason U. C.R. L.J. 15 (1991).

– Jonathan Goldman, Feb 3, 2022

TAGS: Black history, African American, civil rights, law, legal, shipping, persecution