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While he was preparing to open a tour of Kentucky, the forty-two-year-old Herman died on April 17, 1934. There exist two versions of his death—one that Herman probably would have liked the world to remember and another that was more modest. According to the more popular version, Black Herman collapsed onstage in the middle of a performance at the Old Palace Theater in Louisville, Kentucky. The stunned audience refused to leave—they believed it was all part of his act and that the magician would rise again. When the body was sent to a local funeral home, pandemonium broke out, and police had to be called in to control thousands of mourners who wanted one last look at the stage great. Press reports and Herman’s death certificate, however, indicate that Benjamin Rucker died more quietly, at the Louisville boardinghouse where he and his touring troupe were staying. He complained of indigestion after dinner, and when several “home remedies” failed to work, a doctor was called. The confusion resulted in friends telling the Chicago Defender that Herman had been felled by “acute indigestion.” In fact, he was dead of heart failure before he could be taken to the hospital. His body was returned home to New York, where it lies today in Woodlawn Cemetery in an unmarked grave.

Black Moses

Despite the cultural awareness of Henri Gamache and Black Herman, hoodoo was not directly political. Most conjure and root work focused on regaining lost lovers, fixing troublesome neighbors, avoiding trouble with the law, overcoming unfair bosses, gambling on the right numbers—all practical concerns for men and women taking on life day by day. But a voice was rising on the American scene that combined mystical beliefs and political purpose in a wholly new way.

It belonged to the black-nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. Garvey, who had sojourned from Jamaica to America in 1916, envisioned the creation of a pan-African superpower that would take its place among the empires of the world. For a time, he came closer than many would have imagined possible, attracting tens of thousands of cheering followers to rallies and parades in America, England, and the Caribbean, creating a publishing empire of black newspapers, and assembling the first and largest international black political organization in history. Followers wept openly at Garvey rallies, as the uniformed orator extolled the dignity of black heritage and told of the history and destiny of Africa on the world stage. For many listeners who were old enough to remember slavery, and for others who lived in its shadow, hearing Garvey felt like a spiritual awakening. An FBI report in August 1920 observed of Garvey’s movement that “among the followers it is like a religion,” its leader “looked upon as a black Moses.” In a pillar of Garvey’s program often missed by those who scrutinized him, Garvey, like the social radical Wallace D. Wattles, believed that New Thought metaphysics could build the dreams of disenfranchised men and women around the world. Garvey’s movement represented the boldest—and least understood—effort in history to combine the magic of mind power with the quest for political gain.

Born in the north Jamaican seaside town of St. Ann’s Bay in 1887, Garvey experienced a childhood that verged on brutality. His father was a stonemason and sometime gravedigger who had been born a slave. The elder Marcus, after whom his son was named (Garvey’s mother had wanted to call him Moses), passed on to his children a tough-as-nails view of the world and a demand for the strictest respect. The older Garvey determined to teach Marcus about the rigors of life and the need for absolute self-reliance. One night, Garvey took his son with him to dig a grave, for which the mason had fashioned a headstone. The father told the boy to drop into the grave, and he then snatched up the ladder behind him—leaving Marcus to shiver and cry in the hole all night. It was a torment he never forgot.

Under the island’s colonial education system, Marcus was forced to leave school at age fourteen. Around the same time,