 Let me begin with a quote by Marcus Carvey from his Declaration of Rights for the Negro Peoples of the World. One of his points reads, we believe in the freedom of Africa for the Negro people of the world and by the principle of Europe for the Europeans and Asia for the Asiatics. We also demand Africa for the Africans at home and abroad. Today I want to pick up on the theme I ended at the last lecture with, and that is that black Americans talking, talking about the 19 teens heading into World War I were now in the wake of the challenges of that era and the domestic disappointments of World War I when soldiers came home and some were lynched, that black Americans were going to claim their civil rights instead of wait patiently for them. These were, as a group, and I'm generalizing here, the new Negroes. This is a term used now and again really after 1900, and one of the first proponents of the phrase was Booker T. Washington, but using it in a very different way. I'm using it in a very different way than Washington was using it. And people talk about new Negroes. They're most often using it in a very different way than Washington intended. Anyway, these were the new Negroes. This new, this new kind of black consciousness that really becomes articulated on a wide scale when black troops come home after World War I. The new Negro, then, was forged out of political and economic frustration. And it's always important to remember that this frustration grew out of more than just returning soldiers. It grew out of the race rights of 1917 and 1919. It grew out of the cultural shocks and changes that were part of the Great Migration as well. I want to show an image right now that captures some of that spirit. The new Negro crowd making America safe for himself. To play up Woodrow Wilson's, the new, the war just drew a complete blank. Thank you so much. Making the world safe for democracy. I don't know why. It's already a long day. Anyway, you see a black troop in an army jeep or some kind of vehicle, the new Negro blazoned on the side, guns coming out in all directions. He's going after German troops, giving the Hun a dose of his own medicine. But notice the banner that he's carrying. Longview, Texas, a side of a race right. Washington, D.C., a side of a race right. Chicago, Illinois, a side of a race right. Since the government won't stop mob violence, I'll take a hand. The new Negro, in this case the black soldier. If Wilson can't do it for black soldiers, for black citizens, if the country can't do it, blacks will take it upon themselves to do it. This is, this editorial cartoon is yet one manifestation of a new Negro mentality. Another point, another aspect that's important to understand about the new Negro mentality and this phenomenon in general was that it wasn't just about black self-assertion, like this cartoon suggests. It was also about white reaction. The white reaction to the new Negro manifests itself in negative and positive ways. The positive ways, although fraught with complication, will be really the foundation for Wednesday's lecture. Today we're going to hear more about the more obvious negative manifestations of white reaction to this new Negro mentality. The most, the clearest manifestation, of course is the rise of the Lynch mob, again the resurrection of the Klan, but from an institutional standpoint, from the standpoint of the state, the most negative manifestation of white reaction to new Negro mentality is federal surveillance. The rise of 1917 and 1919 made white politicians nervous. Property was at stake, after all. Perhaps it goes without saying that these same politicians easily ignored the real race dynamics of the riots, where white employers and property owners, black and white, well, black and white property in terms of raising rents, but white employers and property owners attacked and organized attacks against black residents. This anxiety is deeply felt and broadly felt and becomes manifest in a very famous way with one politician in particular. The story for this person begins in 1919. The person I'm talking about is 24 years old, 24 years old, the native of Washington, D.C., becomes the head of the Department of Justice's new organization, the General Intelligence Division, the G.I.D., Young Man. His job is to keep tabs on, and I'm quoting here, liberal activity, whatever that's going to mean. Among other organizations being investigated, you have a wide range of black groups that are targeted for some sort of investigation, the conservative black elks, who are anything but liberal, to the radical and separatist African blood brotherhood. The man in question is J. Edgar Hoover. His leadership of the General Intelligence Division parlays itself into the directorship of the FBI when that organization is formed and the position that he would hold until his death in 1972, the field of claim that he was the most powerful person in the country. There's a lot of merit to that kind of claim for the way that he investigates, seemingly everybody. Now, why does Hoover's foundational moment matter? It matters in part because of Hoover's world view. When race riots occur in Washington, D.C., Hoover, who was a native of the area, concluded that their cause lay in the quote, serious, excuse me, the numerous assaults committed by Negroes against white women. Once again, the trope appears, the fear of black male interlopers attacking or alluring white women. But aside from this recurring trope that demonized black males and exalted white women, why is Hoover's story so important? It's important not only because Hoover would organize obsessive campaigns against Martin Luther King Jr. and social activist groups of the 1960s, and we'll come to this later on in the course, because it's also important because it's under Hoover's leadership that the Federal Surveillance of African Americans starts and its most intense focus of the surveillance rest upon a black nationalist Jamaican who took up residence in Harlem in 1916. And I'm talking here about Marcus Garvey. Garvey's born in Jamaica in 1887, but he is mainly educated in London. Now, there's no little irony in the fact that this person who eventually fights against the spread of a white empire that oppresses black people around the world, and it organizes this fight by calling for his own black empire. There's no little irony in the fact that he himself was trained in the seat of empire. Apparently, while in London, he learned his lessons well. A colonial subject training the heart of colonial control who ends up advocating a new colonial presence. I mean, in a nutshell, this is sort of the sort of fundamental irony of Marcus Garvey. I'll be expanding upon it for the course of the lecture. Anyway, Garvey's educated for the most part in London and returns to Jamaica in 1914. And he has a plan. Having learned how to organize movements and how empire operated at its core, he decides in short order to organize the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the UNIA. In formulating his plan for the UNIA, Garvey was inspired by a book or two, Washington's Up from Slavery. This book published at the turn of the century, but its most famous section or chapter is the story of Washington's famous Atlanta Cotton Exposition Address, something that Garvey sort of from an ideological standpoint embraced. Now, Garvey was not interested in that element of Washington's plan that called for at least a temporary accommodation to the White South, but he was committed ideologically, deeply so, to Washington's idea of economic self-sufficiency. If you remember back to Washington, in all things purely social, separate as the fingers, Garvey soon realized that his plan to emancipate blacks by economic empowerment, that his plan to emancipate blacks across the globes with a vehicle of empire formation would not take off from Jamaica. The platform was too small. Two years after he comes back to Jamaica, he decides that if he really wanted to get at the heart and solo blacks throughout the world, he had to move his operation to what was then popularly considered the heart of the black world, and that's New York City more specifically Harlem. Now, this is all a rather new phenomenon, Harlem, as far as being the sort of the center of the black world as, again, popularly felt. This is a direct result of the Great Migration, and as we'll see on Wednesday's lecture sort of focusing a fair amount on what's happening in Harlem for particular reasons, but from the standpoint of propagating a message, demographics and such, New York City was the place to be. Garvey's family had a background in typesetting and printing, and he gets his own training in publishing and quickly produces a magazine or paper called The Negro World, a journal that serves as the mouthpiece for his nationalist philosophy of race pride and race unity. In short order, when he moves his operation to New York City, The Negro World would have the second largest circulation of black periodicals in the country, second only to the Chicago Defender. So, sort of out of the blue, Garvey steps into the fray and becomes incredibly popular, as does his periodical. Garvey would claim, soon, up to six million followers, although there were never nearly that many official Garveyites, the best estimates of official followers of Garvey's movement, members of the UNIA, were around 500,000. But there's no doubting the importance of the UNIA or the significance of Garvey himself. The UNIA established laundries, groceries and other retail operations that were buying for black people, or more accurately UNIA members. The UNIA was about instilling race pride, and Garvey embodied it with ostentatious displays that smacked, more than smacked of, that represented sort of the logic of, of empire. He would organize these parades with his auxiliaries, black UNIA members dressed up in uniforms, in hierarchy and orders, marching in parades, Garvey as the grand marshal, epaulets, gold buttons and trim, plumage, all the trappings of the benevolent, benevolent emperor. This was a performance, certainly, that was designed to instill race pride among so-journing blacks who were struggling with city life. Indeed, the most popular, or Garvey's, and his movement were most popular amongst individuals who were fairly recently revived and arrived to the cities. The UNIA then inspires hope for the future and also racial solidarity. You can go to a safe space, a UNIA laundry, or grocery store, or the store, buy what you need, believe you're not getting ripped off like you were if you were going to a planter's store, if you're a sharecropper, or if you're one generation moved from sharecropping. You could buy from the race, be treated with respect, and be part of something bigger than yourself. Now Garvey's aware that there's a growing desire for self-determination by oppressed people around the world, especially after World War I, and Garvey, aside from just having these stores and these parades, marries this desire for self-determination with a call for blacks to return to Africa and to build their own country. So it's not just the trappings of military and of empire in terms of just what you're dressed in, what you're wearing, but also a call to actually create that space back in Africa. Garvey first tries to get permission to establish his own colony in Africa. His target is Liberia, but he's denied permission, upset over the rebuff. Garvey decides to form quasi-militaristic groups that were designed to kick whites out of Africa, even declared himself the provisional president of the new empire of Africa, naming potentates to rule with him and creating a nobility of anointed knights. He wanted all of the sort of the trappings, the declarations of empire. Maybe this might get him there, but to no avail. But he does organize something that for a moment it seems, at least for a lot of followers, seems that Garvey might be more than just about words and retail operations. And this is the Black Star Steamship Line. This is the crown jewel of Garvey's efforts, UNIA's efforts. Garvey unfolds his plan in 1919, again this incredibly important year, this changing notion of possibility with African-Americans, unfolds his plan in 1919 to build the Steamship Line, and he sees it as representing an effort to demonstrate Black self-sufficiency and truly the potential for Black nation-building. Now this is an area you need to realize that you built nations, you express international power by navies, and Garvey's idea is eventually to build his navy and have that be the vehicle, literally and figuratively the vehicle for his empire. By 1920, the Black Star Steamship Line is now the focus of Garvey's back to Africa movement. And he starts to sell bonds to raise money to purchase these ships. These ships would embody Black power. They would have all Black crews, for example. They would be the means for Blacks to get to Africa. They would become the linchpin in the global economy. Garvey shares his idea, this vision, this excitement, and within three months of his first call for contributions to purchase a ship, he buys his first ship. It seems to me to be that this might actually happen, at least some change. Well, the Black Star Steamship Line quickly becomes Garvey's undoing. The Steamship Line ends up being three ships over the course of the Steamship Line's existence. Garvey drastically overpaid for each of the three ships. The first ship he probably paid 800 percent more than he should have. The captain as it turns out was taking kickbacks. The second ship sprang a leak and sank shortly after the UNI purchased it. And the third ship blew a boiler on its maiden voyage and killed a man. Comedy of errors and tragedies. But when the ships, those ships that actually proved seaworthy for a little while, when the ships actually did make it to a port of Cal, traveling up and down the North American seaboard on the east coast, thousands of black well-wishers crowded the piers, stand on the hillsides, wanting to catch a glimpse of the first all-Black crew that they had ever seen. Certainly the Black Star Line was a complete business fiasco. There's no doubting about that. But it was a powerful symbol for Black stability. And for that reason alone it would be important. But the importance doesn't end there. The Black Star Line, the business dealings that created, remain important for the shady financing that eventually gives J.R.Gerhoover the hook that he needed to snare Garvey. We can't forget Hoover through all of this. Garvey's mass popularity, his appeals for race pride, his haughty imperialist style, all of these conspired to make people like Hoover more than a little worried. Now the fact is although that we'll never know how many people were actually following Garvey, his movement did represent the first organized grassroots mass protest movement in African-American history. It was the first organized grassroots mass protest movement in African-American history. So if one were concerned about Black autonomy and one were already convinced that Blacks, particularly Black males, represented a perpetual threat, then Garvey's UNIA, Garvey himself, would have appeared terrifying. What was he going to do? When you add the specter of Garvey, the mass movement of the UNIA to the violence in 1917 and 1919 ripping through cities, where the UNIA was at that most powerful, then you would have been convinced if you were someone like Hoover that something had to be done. So Hoover took action. He decides he's going to put Garvey in jail and then sets out to find a justification for his arrest. So he knows he's going to put him in jail. He's got to find a way to do it. The first thing Hoover does is hire four Black agents and assign them to infiltrate the UNIA. It's really remarkable. The Garvey papers, it's a massive collection. Yale has it on microfilm. And you can look at the reports from these agents going back to their superiors, pits of information redacted as we become used to in our modern world. The sometimes just sort of it's the level of silliness about going to Mrs. Johnson's last night for her suspected UNIA involvement. She made a wonderful pie and we drank tea. I mean this is by the extent of some reports. The infiltration did not get very far. Hoover then tries to prove that Garvey was an agent of the British or Canadian governments. Which would have made him something like an unregistered foreign agent. I mean this is rather stretching things since the British and Canadian governments really aren't such powerful enemies of the United States. But this is still Hoover's next gambit. Doesn't work. Garvey's star is rising. We're now into the 1920s. Then Hoover finally succeeds in getting him indicted. Gets him indicted on mail fraud charges. Gets Garvey thrown in jail in 1925 for five years. But before Garvey's term could be completed he's pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge on the condition that he leaves the country, that he's deported as an undesirable alien at the moment of his release from jail. So Hoover gets mail fraud charges leveled against Garvey in 23. He's in jail in 25. He's out in 27 but he is sent down to Jamaica immediately. With Garvey's deportation federal surveillance of blacks basically disappears until the start of World War II. And it's really quite shocking that it disappears because this is an era of real radicalism as you'll see in the many Marible Reader for this week. This week and next week. This is an era of real political radicalism. Yet Hoover was so focused on Garvey. And his exhortations of a back to Africa movement and race pride that the other organizations just don't merit his attention, not nearly the same level of attention. And once Garvey's gone the problem is gone. Now what are the charges? What are those sort of steps that Garvey kicked out of the country? And what about Garvey's relationship to other blacks? I mean he was not the only black leader of this era. And also what should we make of Garvey's political legacy? The charges were literally trumped up but they were actually basically true. Garvey was at best an inept and at worst a dishonest businessman. He sold bonds many times over when he shouldn't have been selling them to raise money for his ships. He did commit mail fraud. Is it enough to deport somebody? That's another issue. What about his relationship with black leaders? Other black leaders, the most prominent ones, did not have a high opinion of Garvey. Du Bois, who offered information to Hoover to try to get Garvey in trouble. Du Bois called him and I quote, a little fat black man, ugly but with intelligent eyes and a big head. He was to Du Bois quote, the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and the world, either a lunatic or a traitor. A. Philip Randolph, a powerful labor leader that we'll be talking about next week. Referred to Garvey, who is powerful at this moment in time. Referred to Garvey as quote, the supreme Negro Jamaican jackass or monumental monkey who is also an unquestionable fool and ignoramus. Why such anger? Jealousy is certainly part of the equation. Du Bois have been struggling for his entire adult life to build the kind of movement that Garvey shows up and builds within three or four years. Du Bois, powerful intellect, influential editor, but he could not command the same kind of numbers and followers as Garvey could. Randolph, a rising labor leader, couldn't command the kind of following and passions that Garvey could. So certainly jealousy. But there's also an awareness of what they saw, Du Bois and Randolph saw as limitations to Garvey's agenda. How was a back to Africa movement really going to happen? Was it even possible? There had been back to Africa movements for 100 years at this point. Led by black radicals, led by very conservative whites, led by progressive whites, you know, everybody politically across the spectrum is trying to figure out a way to get blacks out of the country. None of them work. They logistically weren't feasible. So what's Garvey selling here? Du Bois and Randolph says our problems, black problems are here on this soil. We need to solve them here. Du Bois and Randolph wondered if Garvey was merely preying on the wild aspirations of those people who could least afford to invest their money in his plan. Garvey raised money from a lot of recent migrants to places like New York and Chicago, Detroit, people who didn't have much money at all to spend, not extra, not disposable income. Du Bois and Randolph believed that they, in their own separate ways, were leading the charge to care for this most vulnerable population and that Garvey was doing something different. And now what about Garvey's political legacy? Was it radical or was it conservative? Was Garvey a revolutionary, like Hoover believed? Or was he merely a black capitalist? Did he want to save Africa or merely establish economic and political control over part of it? I mean, think of his militaristic and imperialist trappings, the performance of his attire during his parades. Think of the rhetoric that I used to begin the lecture. We demand Africa for the Africans. To get at some of the answers to these questions, was Garvey radical? Was he conservative? Was he revolutionary or capitalist? Do you want to save Africa for Africans or for blacks, black Americans? To get at some of the answers, it's useful to helpful to plumb the depth of Garvey's own publicly offered philosophies. These are all very short excerpts from the Manning Marible and Leith Mullings Reader. But I want to call your attention to a few choice phrases here. On race pride and race suspicion, I guess it's a clumsy way of putting it, Garvey's dumbfounded by the white leadership of the NAACP. Dubois, he said, represents a group that hates the Negro blood in its veins and has been working subtly to build up a caste aristocracy that would socially divide the race into two groups, one the superior because of color, of color cast, and the other the inferior, hence the pretentious work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Now there's no doubt that Dubois is an elitist. There's no doubting that, and that he believed that the Talents and Tent were the people to save the race. But getting into political bed with these white progressives, Garvey thought was insane. You cannot trust white people to do the right thing in that regard. Dubois hated the blood in his own, the quote, Negro blood in his own veins. One racial self-preservation. Garvey was against blacks fighting for the United States in World War I. He says here, the first dying that is to be done by the black man in the future will be done to make himself free. And then when we are finished, if we have any charity to bestow, we may die for the white man. But as for me, I think I have stopped dying for him. Powerful words, kind of words you might hear out of a different revolutionary some 40 years later. Similarly, we declare that no Negro shall engage himself in the battle for an alien race without first obtaining the consent of the leader of the Negro people of the world except in a matter of national self-defense. Blacks will not fight unless the leader of the Negro people says they should fight. That would be Garvey. And so he said that, you know, blacks should not fight for the white man, except as a matter of national defense. So when we do get our land, our plot in what was then and still is Liberia, sort of his real goal, his first goal, then we fight for self-defense. We don't fight for them. Speaking about racial pride, Garvey had much to say. We have outgrown slavery, he said, but our minds are still enslaved to the thinking of the master race. Now take those kinks out of your mind instead of out of your hair, you are capable of all that is common to men of other races. We have a beautiful history and we shall create another one in the future. The faith we have is a faith that will ultimately take us back to that ancient place, that ancient position that we once occupied when Ethiopia was in her glory. You can't trust whites, you can't fight for whites, you need to recognize the glory of our own past. And if this sounds a bit like the civilizationist rhetoric that I was talking about in two weeks or so ago, you're exactly right, Garvey was a civilizationist in this way. No negro, he said, let him be American, European, West Indian or African shall be truly respected until the race as a whole has emancipated itself through self-achievement and progress from universal prejudice. The negro will have to build his own government, industry, art, science, literature and culture before the world will stop to consider him. Until then, we are but wards of a superior race and civilization and the outcast of a standard, outcast of a standard social system. The race needs workers at this time, not plagiarists, copyists and mere imitators, but men and women who are able to create, to originate and improve and thus make an independent racial contribution to the world and civilization. The powers within African Americans, but they aren't expressing it. And when they do, tap into those great things from their own racial past, recognize their long history of civilizationist behavior, looking back in antiquity, when they take the kinks out of their mind instead of out of their hair, then they will rise up, demonstrate their greatness to the world, be respected, have their nation, have their civilization, and as part of this, have their king. That would be Garvey. Now, just as Garvey wasn't the only race leader operating in this sort of trying to save the race, the mode you have Du Bois, you'll learn more about A. Philip Randolph next week, there was another charismatic individual at the same time operating another African American who's really operating at the other end of a sort of spectrum of a sense from Marcus Garvey, but also tremendously popular. His name is Father Divine. Well, that's his popular name. His birth name is George Baker, known as Father Divine, and also known by his followers as God. Father Divine was born, excuse me, was head of the Peace Mission Movement. It becomes very popular during this era. But where Garvey's UNIA was absolutely mono-racial, it was black only. Divine's was absolutely interracial. And it's very structure, black and white come together. Now, while historians are learning more about the women in the UNIA and the very important roles that they played, from the standpoint of the public perception of the UNIA, it's a very male-ordered and dominated organization. Father Divine is a very different sort of thing, the Peace Mission Movement. He relies on his angels to do a lot of work, black women and white women. Now, there were some similarities. The most important for our purposes right now is that both the UNIA and the Peace Mission Movement were profoundly self-help in their orientation. And it is in this way that Father Divine, like Garvey, was deemed a threat, a threat to authorities. He's deemed a threat because he represents to so many black autonomy. He's also deemed a threat because he consorts openly with white women. And his organization has white women involved in such prominent positions. Now, quickly here, who was Father Divine and what did he do, actually? His early history is murky. He's an itinerant preacher who extolled the virtues of what was called New Thought, power of positive thinking, regimen, like we've seen as a precursor of sorts to the New Age ideologies of the 1980s. God wasn't every person, according to Divine's philosophy, but he was perfectly manifested in Divine himself, Divine advocated, as I said before, interracial life, strict celibacy, communal living, and most famously communal feasts. He was known for serving feasts every Sunday at his various Peace Missions that were around the country, and this was a national organization. And these feasts would run all day long with seemingly endless supplies of food available to anybody who wanted to come by as long as he stayed for the meal and for some proselytizing. Divine did not represent a back to Africa movement. He was very Victorian in his style, but he was determined to support materially and also from the standpoint of faith African-Americans who were overwhelmingly the people he was serving during this age of great instability and change. Garvey sees a threatened father divine, and he attacks divine for preaching race suicide, celibacy and interracial relationships. You don't get more black babies if you have interracial relationships and also if you're really preaching celibacy. The problem is, is that many of Garvey's followers also follow the Peace Movement, but you can't reconcile the two from the standpoint of the ideologies. How do you make sense of it? You make sense of it in light of the migration, the violence of the era, and the increasing poverty of the area. Overcrowded cities, slum lords black and white, charged in exorbitant rents, a lack of support, despite the fact you might be getting four black babies. Garvey gave hope to African Americans who were poor and struggling, new to the city. He gave them safe places to conduct commerce. Divine tapped into a sense of a larger belonging, something much greater than the individual to something metaphysical perhaps, and he fed people. So thinking about Garvey and Divine and how to make sense of these two different ideologies, one race, interracial, back to Africa, taking care of business here, it sort of undergirds the sense of flux, that's the society's at the moment. People are being opportunistic on the ground trying to find a way to make ends meet, to try to find a better way of living, better quality of life, exhausted by external threats, whether it's federal surveillance or the Klan, or simple systematic segregation, blacks were scrambling. That doesn't help that in addition to this federal surveillance and the rise of the Klan, Garvey's actually goes to negotiate with the Klan, with Klan leadership, trying to get their support for back to Africa politics. If you believe Ports, the leaders of the Klan and Garvey actually admired each other for at least being honest about not liking the other person. They can find a way to work together to get them out of each other's hair. Divine himself courts white leaders a very different type than Klan, but people with money who bolster the peace mission movements various holdings, they provide all their own food, they own all their own property, they're a cash and carry operation, a lot of it is coming from white benefactors. So you have this curious mix of high level interactions between blacks and whites in Garvey and in the peace mission movement. You have the erasure of that interaction in the UNIA movement because you couldn't trust whites actually. You have the embracing of it in the peace mission movement in a racial support cooperation. You have a extensive, a wide scope of interactions when you sort of throw the veil back from all of this stuff between whites and blacks during this era. Despite the popularity of the UNIA despite the racial violence there is a great amount of exchange politically, socially and culturally. In this cultural exchange where we're going to pick up matters on Wednesday. And that's when I'll see you again. Thank you very much.