Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [16]
Garvey, by contrast, was a separatist from the start. Self-doubt, he said, “was the cause of the Negro’s impotence” and the most debilitating legacy of slavery. He taught black people that their dark skin was not a mark of their inferiority, but “a glorious symbol of national greatness.” The nation he was referring to, though, was not the United States but Africa. Although Garvey never actually went to Africa, the dream of founding a Negro homeland there was his guiding motivation.
In August 1920, Garvey’s UNIA gathered in Harlem for its first international convention. Delegates, including fabulously dressed African tribal chiefs, came from twenty-five countries. On 2 August the UNIA processed through Harlem to the music of brass bands. Black Cross nurses in their starched uniforms marched proudly alongside African Legion soldiers in immaculate navy-blue trousers, swords hanging at their sides. That night, Garvey addressed 25,000 people at Madison Square Garden. “We do not desire what has belonged to others, though others have always sought to deprive us of that which belonged to us,” he said. “If Europe is for the Europeans, then Africa shall be for the black peoples of the world.”
This was Garvey’s zenith. Despite the passion and sincerity of his message and his inspirational qualities as a visionary and propagandist, Garvey’s own ambitions undid him. Having declared himself leader of an as-yet-unformed African nation in 1922, complete with his own personal bodyguard and an aristocracy made up of his followers, the following year he was convicted of fraud and imprisoned. He served his time in an Atlanta prison, was deported back to Jamaica in 1927, and died in Holland in 1940.
But Garvey’s failure to achieve his goals could not diminish the hope his message had engendered in millions of black Americans. This new sense of possibility was fueled by the flowering of Harlem. The townhouses and apartment blocks of north Manhattan had been built during successive late nineteenth-century construction booms for a well-off white population that never arrived. From 1904 a black businessman, Philip Payton, began bringing black tenants into this unfashionable neighborhood.
For its new inhabitants, Harlem represented opportunity—a freedom from old fears and restraints. Anything suddenly seemed possible in a place where black people could live and prosper according to their own rules. As James Weldon Johnson, the historian of what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, said, Harlem was “a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world.” Harlem was a place where black tenants paid rent to black landlords, where black workers were paid not by white masters but by their own bosses, where the goods sold in shops were for black customers, not white ones. Here, black people could flourish by providing services that they needed. Mrs. Mary Dean, known as Pigfoot Mary, grew rich from the profits of her fried chicken and pigfoot stand on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street.
C. J. Walker, whose parents had been slaves, became (according to the Guinness Book of World Records) the first female millionaire, black or white, making beauty products aimed at the black market. Her most successful treatments were straighteners and growth stimulants for kinky hair, but she emphatically refused to sell skin-whitening creams. As powerfully as did any of Marcus Garvey’s speeches, she taught people to take pride in their blackness. Madame Walker’s tall, big-hearted daughter and heiress, A’Lelia, was “the joygoddess of Harlem’s 1920s.” Wearing a silver turban that showed off her gleaming dark skin, she threw Harlem’s best parties in her extravagantly decorated brownstone townhouse.
Writers and artists met in the novelist Jesse Fauset’s more modest apartment. Drink flowed more temperately there and the conversation, guided by the plump and gracious Fauset, was of a higher tone than at Miss Walker’s—and sometimes conducted in French. Here met the older intellectuals who believed, like Du Bois, Locke and the historian James Weldon Johnson,