Negro with a Hat review by Josh

Huh, just realized I never posted my notes on this from like a year ago. Here they are:

This book might been entitled "The Negro's Greatest Enemy". That's the name of an essay Garvey wrote in 1923. To some, the title might have suggested the KKK, whose ~3-4m members Garvey saw as representing the white people of the the U.S. In a more abstract sense it might evoke the white power structure more generally.

But, according to Garvey, the Negro's greatest enemy was himself. Ironically, as Grant amply documents, Garvey was himself a walking exemplar of this claim. He was constantly getting into fight - big and small - with other black leaders. Most notable of these was W.E.B. DuBois, with whom he a long standing feud that DuBois seems to have been mostly baffled by.

Garvey argued that "white people are taking advantage of black men today because black men all over the world are disunited." (102) At first, this claims seems odd, since white people clearly were not united either. They had, just a few years earlier killed several million of each other in the first world war. And Garvey was well aware of the contempt many upper class whites for poor whites, and of persistent racism towards groups like the Irish. But, while white people disagreed about many things, they were generally on the same page about white supremacy. This was the most salient issue to most non-white people, and Garvey was clearly right that black people needed organizations to protect and promote their common interests.

Part of what enabled the creation of the post-slavery apartheid system in the southern US was that the freed slaves lacked the organizational infrastructure to mobilize and defend their rights. We can see the impact of this in the anti-lynching movement. Lynchings had been a semi-regular part of southern life for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1890s that Ida Tarbell’s journalism tied together these highly local events into a single phenomenon that could be tracked and measured. This turned lynchings from an unfortunate event that liberals might bemoan but couldn’t conceive of preventing into a social problem that could be actively opposed and legislated against.

The reason this campaign started in the 1890s instead of the 1860s wasn’t that lynchings had become more common. They hadn’t. In fact they had become steadily less common in the decades before the campaign began. What changed was that by the 1890s the black literacy rate had soared and black newspapers had emerged in most major cities (among them the Memphis Free Speech, which Wells worked for.

Garvey was a supporter of the emerging concept of ethnonationalism. This basic idea - that nation states should be coextensive with ethnic groups - would notably be embraced by both fascists and zionists. Indeed, Garvey expressed his support for the creation a Jewish state and Mussolini’s government which he saw as making Italy a state exclusively for Italians (he only changed his views on Mussolini when il duce attacked Ethiopia).

It’s important to note that Garvey doesn’t seem to have seen ethnicity in quite the same was as modern anthropologists. He saw all black people as forming a unified ethnic group, regardless of language, religion, tribal affiliation or other differences. This view was no doubt heavily influenced by his time in the U.S. where he was indignant to find that he - an educated and sophisticated man - was still treated with contempt based purely on the color of his skin.

While Garvey fought for black causes, like the abolition of lynching, he seems to have dedicated just as much energy to berating black people for what he perceived as their failure to improve themselves. His association held regular diction competitions in which black members would compete to read Shakespeare and the like in their best queen’s English. As a young man he accepted the line of the British imperial history texts he’d been raised on, that before Europeans arrived in Africa the people had been completely uncivilized and that the Europeans had done them a great service by enslaving them and later colonizing them. The aim of black folks, on this view, ought to be become more like white people.

Garvey’s views on this gradually evolved. He famously refused to carry advertising for skin whitening or hair straightening cosmetics in his newspaper. This was a significant sacrifice in a time when these were among the most heavily advertised products to black people. (Though he maintained a close relationship with Madame C.J. Walker, probably the wealthiest African American of time, whose fortune was built on just such cosmetics.)

No survey of Garvey’s life would be complete without considering his ‘Back to Africa’ campaign and The Black Star Line - the steamship company that was to make it a reality. When I first hear about this in high school history it seemed like a madly quixotic idea. In previous generations efforts to persuade (or sometimes coerce) African Americans to ret