Lucien White on Marcus Garvey

One hundred years ago today … The New York Age published an extensive feature about Marcus Garvey by Lucien H. White, the paper’s music columnist and one of the most influential Black critics of the Harlem Renaissance. (See our post about White for February 13, 1920, here, and other mentions here and here.) 

In what would now be called a longform article, White explains, “There is not today in America a Negro who occupies the limelight to the same extent as does Marcus Garvey.” White’s take on Garvey is alternately descriptive, laudatory, and withering; the piece is so remarkable that we have taken the step of reproducing it in its entirety below. 

Note: NY1920s has featured Garvey several times. (Click here, here, here, here, and especially a guest post by William J. Maxwell here.)

1922 had been another eventful year in Garvey’s tumultuous life; he had been arrested in February (see our post here) and charged with fraud in the ongoing case of the Black Star Line, his shipping venture. On June 25, famously and quixotically, Garvey had done what his biographer Coln Grant considers something that, “ no black person in America had ever contemplated: he headed straight for the offices of the Ku Klux Klan” (320). Garvey’s meeting with Edward Clarke, the KKK Imperial Grand Wizard, “would mark a significant turning point in his popularity, as even his most ardent fans were confused,” writes Grant (321), adding that it showed Garvey’s “enormous personal courage” and “colossal arrogance in disregarding how his actions might be perceived” (333). That August, Garvey presided over the third annual pan-African congress, at which anti-Garvey sentiment simmered. The Literary Digest of August 19, calling Garvey, “the Negro Moses,” quotes the New York World reporting that during a procession through Harlem:

A “Garveyite” took exception to a remark of an onlooker charging Garvey with being a black member of the Ku Klux Klan. This is an unpopular subject in Harlem and the crowd was with the anti-Garvey man.

These controversies seem to have inspired White to pen his piece, readable below.

References:

Grant, Colin. Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

– Jonathan Goldman, Oct. 21, 2022

TAGS: Black leaders, civil rights, African American history, journalism, race, West Indian, white supremacy