Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [11]
It was at this moment of intense political debates among blacks that the charismatic Marcus Garvey arrived in New York City, on March 24, 1916. Born in Jamaica in 1887, Garvey had been a printer and journalist in the Caribbean, Central America, and England. He had come to the United States at the urging of Booker T. Washington to garner support for a college in Jamaica, a project which came to naught but which launched the flamboyant young man on a different mission, a new and ambitious political and social movement for blacks. Inspired by Washington’s conservative ideas, Garvey did not object to racial segregation laws or separate schools, but astutely he paired these ideas with a fiery polemical attack on white racism and white colonial rule. Unlike the NAACP, which appealed to a rising middle class, Garvey recruited the black poor, the working class, and rural workers. After establishing a small base of supporters in Harlem, he embarked on a yearlong national tour in which he appealed to blacks to see themselves as “a mighty race,” linking their efforts not only with people of African descent from the Caribbean but with Africa itself. In uncompromising language, he preached self-respect, the necessity for blacks to establish their own educational organizations, and the cultivation of the religious and cultural institutions that nurtured black families. In January 1918, the New York UNIA branch was formally established, and later that year Garvey started his own newspaper, Negro World; the following year the UNIA set up its international headquarters in Harlem, naming their building Liberty Hall.
Central to Garvey’s appeal were his enthusiastic embrace of capitalism and his gospel of success; self-mastery, willpower, and hard work would provide the steps to lift black Americans. “Be not deceived,” he told his followers, “wealth is strength, wealth is power, wealth is influence, wealth is justice, is liberty, is real human rights.” The purpose of the African Communities League was to set up, in his words, “commercial houses, distributing houses, and also to engage in business of all kinds, wholesale and retail.” Starting in Harlem, the league opened grocery stores and restaurants, and even financed the purchase of a steam laundry. In 1920, Garvey incorporated the Negro Factories Corporation to supervise the movement’s growing list of businesses. His best-known and most controversial start-up, however, was the Black Star Line, a steamship company backed by tens of thousands of blacks who bought five- and ten-dollar shares. Ironically, all this activity depended on the existence of de facto racial segregation, which limited competition from white businesses, all of which refused to invest in urban ghettos.
Racial separation, Garvey preached, was essential for his people’s progress, not only in the States but worldwide. His program was an informal mélange of ideas extracted from such disparate sources as Frederick Douglass, Andrew Carnegie, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio Alger, and Benjamin Franklin, set now in a framework of achievement occupying a separate sphere from whites. Blacks would never respect themselves as a people so long as they were dependent upon others for their employment, business, and financial affairs. Like Booker T. Washington, Garvey sensed that Jim Crow segregation would not disappear quickly. It was logical, therefore, to turn an inescapable evil into a cornerstone of group advancement. Blacks had to reject the divisive distinctions of