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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 35. The Negro Protest - 7. The Garvey Movement
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748 An American Dilemma
ceremony, ritual, and pomp, Garvey only followed the romantic patterns
of American secret orders, but he certainly made more effective use of them.
All members of his organizations, even if they were not officers or noble-
men, were ‘^fellowmen of the Negro race” and collaborators in a world-
wide struggle to free Negroes and erect again the great African culture.
Garvey set up his organization with local branches and a number of
subsidiary organizations. He traveled and agitated. He published the Negro
World as the official newspaper of the movement. He organized coopera-
tive enterprises—^grocery stores, laundries, restaurants, hotels, printing
plants. He built a big meeting hall, all under the auspices of the Universal
Negro Improvement Association. During 1920- 1921 the movement reached
its peak. It was strong in many parts of the country. In spite of having
practically all the intellectual and organizational Negro forces working
desperately against him, he assembled the Negro masses under his banner.®
Eventually his movement collapsed. His various business ventures failed
or involved him in legal tangles. The counterpropaganda became increas-
ingly effective. The Universal Negro Improvement Association began to
decline toward the end of 1921. He was finally imprisoned by federal
authorities on the charge of using the mails to defraud in connection with
the sale of stock for his Black Star Line. After a long legal contest during
which he foolishly insisted on pleading his own case and turning the trial
into a farce, he was finally sentenced in 1925 and brought to the federal
prison at Atlanta, Georgia, as a convict. After two years, he was released and
deported as an undesirable alien. He continued to agitate from the West
Indies but without any success. In 1940 he died in London, poor and for-
gotten.
The law suit marked the end of his organization as an important mass
movement among American Negroes, even though there are some living
off-shoots in religious sects’* and also in some less important protest organi-
zations.® There must also remain memories in the Negro community. The
precise nature of these are not known. ^When the curtain dropped on the
Garvey theatricals, the black man of America was exactly where Garvey
had found him, though a little bit sadder, perhaps a bit poorer—^if not
wiser,” is Ralph Bunche’s conclusion.*^ But the thinking and the feeling of
the Negro masses on this point remains a mystery.
* is impossible to give an accurate estimate of the total membership of Garvey’s
organization at its peak. Garvey gave the probably exaggerated estimate of 6,000,000
members. William Pickens, on the other hand—one of Garvey’s bitter enemies among the
Negro intellectuals—charged that the organization never enrolled as many as 1,000,000.
Kelly Miller cited the figure of 4,000,000.” (Ralph Bunche, “Programs, Ideologies, Tactics,
and Achievements of Negro Betterment and Inter-racial Organizations,” unpublished
^
See Chapter 40, Section 2.
manuscript prepared for this study [1940], Vol. z, p. 398.)
* See Chapter 39, Section 2,
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