As racial violence erupted in the United States during and following the war, especially the Red Summer of 1919, Garvey, along with many African-Americans, began to give up on racial cooperation as a means to uplifting blacks from their conditions. Black soldiers returning from fighting for freedom in the war grew justifiably frustrated when faced with second class citizenship at home. Racial riots encompassed the United States during this period. The rise of white violence against blacks during and after the war forced African Americans to unite in resistance, creating a new racial consciousness that Garvey would use. The brutality of the Red Summer of 1919 and the United States government’s failure to protect black citizens from lynching incentivized many leaders in the black community to take action. In October 1919, Dr. George Edmund Haynes, co-founder of the National Urban League, issued a report that was published in the New York Times calling for national action, notably on lynching.186 William H.
Ferris would later attest that these riots, especially the brutal East St. Louis Riot of July 1917, were a catalyst for Garvey’s transformation into a nationalist champion of his race.187
184 Ibid. 185 Ibid.
186 George Edmund Haynes, “For Action on Race Riot Peril,” New York Times, October 5, 1919. 187 Philadelphia Tribune, Thursday, June 27, 1940, in Hill, 1:lxviii.
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While Garvey was on a lecture tour in New Orleans in 1917, East St. Louis, Illinois, Mayor Fred W. Mollman gave an interview to the New Orleans press encouraging blacks to go to East St. Louis, where he promised available work. In response the Louisiana Farmers and Board of Trade met with him and asked him to discourage blacks from going North, especially to East St. Louis, out of fear of losing their labor force. Mayor Mollman complied, giving a second interview the next day in which he stated that East St. Louis did not want Negroes and that he promised to do all in his power to prevent them from going there.188 White workers in East St.
Louis had been locked out in the midst of a labor strike and rumors that non-unionized black laborers were being recruited as strike-breakers created a hostile environment.189 Violence
ensued, including a number of lynchings, and the most brutal race riot in decades occurred. White organized labor officials, the most prominent of which was Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, became apologists for white labor’s role and blamed the riots on the “excessive and abnormal number of negroes” in St. Louis.190
Hubert Harrison, a radical socialist and founder of the Liberty League, who will be discussed in the next chapter, advised African Americans who feared mob violence to take direct action and “supply themselves with rifles and fight if necessary to defend their lives and
property.”191 This call for armed self-defense was echoed by Garvey in impassioned speeches
following the riot. Garvey’s reaction to the East St. Louis riot and the seemingly indifferent authorities reflected his increasingly hostile temperament. Days after the riot Garvey spoke at the
188 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century (Chicago: The Negro Fellowship Herald Press, 1917).
189 Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Negro Radicalism, 1883-1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 297.
190 Grant, 98. 191 Perry, 299.
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Lafayette Hall in New York, blaming Mayor Mollman for the violence. Witnessing first-hand the discriminatory practices of labor unions, Garvey was becoming convinced that blacks across the country and throughout the world were in need of unity:
I can not see wherefrom Mayor Mollman got the authority to discourage blackmen going into East St. Louis, when there was work for them, except he got that authority from mob sentiment and mob law. It was because he knew that he could gain a following and support on the issue of race why he was bold enough…He has succeeded in driving out fully 10,000 in one day out of the city, and the South has gone wild over the splendid performance…Can you wonder at the conspiracy of the whole affair? White people are taking advantage of blackmen to-day because blackmen all over the world are
disunited.192
Garvey attested that the United States had grown “from the labours of the people…until her wealth to-day is computed above that of any two nations,”193 and referred to the East St. Louis
Riot as a massacre that would “go down in history as one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind for which any class of people could be held guilty.” An article he wrote to the New York Tribune, questioning Theodore Roosevelt’s analysis of the riot, namely his accusation that organized labor was at fault, demonstrates Garvey’s growing radicalism. Garvey argued that since the conflict was racial, not economic, that it could not be resolved through “arbitration or something other than war.”194 As Hodge Kirnon observed in a report on the Garvey movement in
1922, “an association of Negro peoples with the redemption of Africa as its ideal and ‘Africa for the Africans’ as a slogan seemed entirely foreign to Garvey’s mind at the time (of the founding of the UNIA in New York in the spring of 1918).”195 Kirnon attributes these changes in Garvey’s
192 “Printed Address by Marcus Garvey on the East St. Louis Riots,” Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C., Conspiracy of the East St. Louis Riots Speech by Marcus Garvey Delivered
at Lafayette Hall, New York, Sunday, July 8, 1917 (n.p., n.d.), in Hill, 1:212-222. 193 Ibid.
194 Marcus Garvey, New York Tribune, Jul 11, 1917, quoted in Stein, 41-42.
195 “Hodge Kirnon Analyzes the Garvey Movement,” Negro World, Saturday, January 28, 1922, p.7, in Hill, 1:lxix.
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original views to a “broader perspective which Garvey had gained in the course of time.”196 The
race riots and the end of the war were catalysts for Garvey’s ideological evolution from a program of benevolence and self-improvement to a political program of African redemption.