Marcus Garvey: Black Moses

in reggae music, because he pops up a lot. There's a great Burning Spears song called Marcus Garvey that Sat O'Connor covered. It's not it's not that good. Um. And then there's also a great uh well he just not only him, but also like his teachings pop up a lot in in reggae, like in the Peter Tosh song African. It's a hundred percent based on the ideas of Marcus Garvey,

as we'll see. So that's fun to make sure. The Rastafarianism, yes, so, as we'll talk about later, he's basically considered a profit of Rastafarianism, like he basically has thought of among rastafari as predicting the rise of Rastafarianism ten years before it happened, so very prophetic. Um, And he did a lot of stuff,

a huge amount of stuff. And in fact, Chuck what I didn't realize because I've heard of him before, because I do like Peter Tosh and Burning Spear, But Um, I had no idea that you could put him up as possibly the most impactful um black activists in in world history. One. He's up there in the top three easily. Yeah.

I was reading essay by one professor that said when he starts his his teachings on Garbi, he said he tries to get the students attention by saying like this man started a movement that was that dwarfed the civil rights movement in number, and you know, students are like, huh who and uh. You know, depending, he's a very

polarizing figure. So depending on who you talked to, I mean, everyone will agree that he was a great orator and rally or of people, But depending on who you talked to that you might find both black and white historians say that he was a P. T. Barnum esque Charlatan uh and a bit pompous and full of himself. And other people might say Uh, No, he was the real deal.

And he was a great leader of men and very forward thinking progressive views on women at a time where especially black women were not thought of as much beyond you know, domestic workers. Right. I noticed that about him too. Yeah, and he propped them up. And you know, he was a teetotaler, he didn't believe in alcohol. He was he was a lot of things. Yeah, I saw it put very succinctively. He was complicated. He had a lot of views that even if you agreed with his general outlook,

you probably view as abhorrent. Um. And you said he was polarizing, He wasn't just polarizing between like the black community and the white community in the in America, in South America and the Caribbean and Africa. Um. He was polarizing within the black community as well. He made enemies out of a lot of people, including some really prominent

black thinkers and eventual civil rights leaders. UM. And one of the reasons why, you know, if you're stepping back as like a person living decades and decades after Marcus Garvey lived, and there was this transition between you know, um, blacks under enslavement in America and then like black people trained existing into you know, free citizens and having to go through the Jim Crow gauntlet and eventually get to

civil rights living decades and decades after that. It's it's really easy to see, you know, the black community in America the turn of the last century or the last last century year up to the twenties and thirties. Times we're talking about as like this homogeneous group that all

basically subscribed and thought about the same things. But Marcus Garvey is a really great instruction and the fact that there's that that's just such a you can't paint any one group of people with one brush, and Marcus Garvey represents that, and that he was very conservative, um and he represented a conservative way of thinking, you know, of philosophy of how Black Americans could move forward in a conservative way, and that put him at odds with like

progressive thinkers like W. B. Du Boys, who you know, had different ideas for how black people could you know, rise up and and um raise themselves in America as well. It's a it's good he there's just so much wrapped up in his story that I think it's just gonna be difficult to get it all into one episode. Yeah.

And you know, I guess we should say off the bad that the main lightning rod in his his style of radicalism and why he went up against a lot of leaders in the black community was while they were saying like, hey, we need to find a way to to work within the politics of white America and we need to have white America um assist us with these things so we can pick ourselves up by the bootstraps, he was saying, no, no, no, no no, Uh, we should go back to Africa and we need our own

space and we shouldn't try to fit into white America and white society. And this was a radical thing too. And we'll talk about all this in detail, but to to do something like hey, I'd like to meet with a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta because we have similar views on uh going back to Africa and back to Africa movement, and that did not sit well within a lot of people in the black community

for obvious reasons. But he was a radical thinker and uh, just you know, every time I thought they should make a movie about him, like we were always saying, I finally found one where they are making a movie. Oh that's good. Who's playing him? Do you know? I believe it's the guy that was in Black Panther and Us. I can't remember his name. Oh, he'd be great, I think he would. And uh because Garvey was a sort

of a a large fellow. And I think that it's gonna focus on something we'll talk about later in the episode, which were the years that, um, who is? Why am I completely blanking on the worst American uh in history? Hoover? Okay, yeah, jar Hoover, j Edgar Hoover's uh, you know, planting of of spies within his own within his own organization. So I think it focuses on those years that I can't wait to see it because that was a pretty it's a pretty insidious set of years for Marcus Garvey. For sure.

Who are the worst American? He's one of them. For he's up there, he's up there with Kissinger and I could go on, but every time he uh, every time we do which episode where Hoover pops up, it's just like, and here's this awful thing he did. Yeah, I wish we could just paddle him once in a while. Sure, just bring him back in, give him a spanking. And I know that's not cool. But we're talking about Jay

Grew Hoover here, Okay. Should we just start with sort of the nuts and bolts of who he was and where he was born and raised and all that good stuff tots. He came from Jamaica, and he lived in Jamaica while it was still under British colonial rule. It was under colonial rule for three hundred seven years, and he was born relatively towards the end of it, but still full squarely in it. Um. And he was born in Marcus Garvey Sr. Who was a Stonemason, and his mom,

Sarah Jane Richards, who was a household servant. He was born in St. Anne's Bay, Jamaica, which sounds like an idyllic place, uh in eighteen eighty seven. And um, although he wasn't, you know, born to wealthy parents, he was educated um at a colonial school, and he knew how to read and he was kind of bitten by the reading bug from a very early age and that helped develop him starting pretty young. Yeah, and the fact that he was Jamaican is one thing that uh turned a

lot of African Americans off. Like some of the African American leaders would point out later in life. It's like this, it was just Jamaican guy even, Like what does he know about the American experience because it's not like he moved to the United States when he was, you know, five years old or something like that. Like he was born and raised Jamaican, right, I don't think he moved

to the US until he was in his late twenties. Maybe, Yeah, So that was sort of a h a bit of a knock against him in the eyes of some African American leaders at the time. But he was one of many kids, but the only one who survived into adulthood and moved to Kingston at fourteen, and he would get a job in a print shop there, which is I guess he learned the trade pretty well because this was the kind of work that he did off and on over the years to support himself, working in different print shops.

He always considered himself a journalist. I read and heways started his own paper, yeah, many of them in magazines. And um he was very sharp, dude, um, as demonstrated by that first print shop job because he he started out with no experience whatsoever and within two years he was the foreman of the printing shop. So he was a quick learner. UM. And at some point he decided to start traveling abroad and UM and during some formative

years he ended up in in Costa Rica. UM because apparently Costa Rica, Panama, these were places that people in the America's kind of freely traveled to and moved to and from what I can tell at the time, much the same way that like Europeans move around the EU today. Yeah. So he moved to Costa Rica. Yeah, he had at least an uncle there, right, and he got a job

on a banana plantation as a timekeeper. UM. And while he was carrying out this work like basically making sure people were moving as fast as as possible to keep everything nice and efficient, UM, he was witnessing and learning at the same time that like these banana plantations owned by American and European corporate interests were having a direct, deeply negative impact on individual you know, Black Caribbean, West

Indian UM people's lives, Central American people's lives too. He was in Costa Rica that he he just traced a line directly between that. It was a very eye opening experience and so we founded a paper uh there in Costa Rica and started basically railing against the evils of this stuff, and um made a pretty bad name for himself among the authorities there quickly. And that's where his uncle step down. I was like, you need to get out of Costa Rica right now. Yeah, uh, and he did.

He went to London, one of a few different times he would live in London throughout his life, and this was in nineteen twelve. I don't think we actually said that he was born in eight seven, so I think really frames where, you know, kind of the time period

that he was learning all this stuff. Uh. He studied law and philosophy at Burbeck College under the University of London and again started working for a newspaper there, and this is where he started to sort of learn about Pan Africanism a little bit more because the newspaper was one that you know, just sort of championed that idea and that is just sort of the notion of bringing together people of African descent from all over the world

under one cultural identity. And that's you know, there's a lot to it, but that's sort of a simplified way to say it. Yeah, Like a lot of times you hear it referred to as the African diaspora, Black Africans who moved from Africa, who were forcibly removed from Africa to become enslaved in the Caribbean, um in America, um in Canada, even um and and that over time these

people just grew more and more separate. Pan Africanism was an idea of bringing them back together at the very least intellectually emotionally um as a as a nation among other nations, but spread out or as Garvey would later, really kind of take up this idea, like you were saying earlier, of actually moving everybody back to Africa and being like, Okay, Africa's black, you guys, Europe, America, you

guys can have your your white continents. This is the Black continent, but we're co really ruling the world with you. That's just how it is. That was his ultimate dream, and that that was kind of what pan Africanism envisioned in in Garvey's eyes at least. Yeah, and that would become sort of the basis of his entire movement as as far as like just a cultural idea. Uh So, then he goes back to Jamaica, he got married to a woman named Amy Ashwood, it was a pretty rough marriage.

They were separated just after a few months, I think in his mind, legally divorced a few years later, but she always held onto the notion that they were never like the The divorce was not legal, and so she went to her grave saying that she was like the true wife of Marcus Scarvey. But it got pretty ugly. They accused one another infidelity. He accused her of being an alcoholic and like I said, as a teetotal or,

it was something that he did not believe in at all. Um. But you know, I think it says something about him and his ideas that regardless of this sort of nasty divorce, she stayed and worked h with his with his group he founded along with her, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League of the World. But the Universal Negro Improvement Association UNIA is the one that really stuck

and is even still around the day. And she stayed and even as we'll see later, tried to protect him when there was an attempt on his life taken. Yeah, and probably did save his life from what I read um by putting herself in between him and his assassin's bullets.

So yeah, She definitely did a lot of the early work that he became very well known for, because once he started to take off his his name and his ideas, Garvy is um is what it's called, just shot off like a rocket, and she was there for most of

the groundwork of it. And then they split up shortly after that, so I could see how she'd be a little bitter about that, and then in short order he kind of gave her something else to be unhappy about, and that was he married Amy Jack's spelled like Jacques Um, who was a Kingston native Um and was his personal secretary but also was Amy Ashwood's close friend and maid

of honor at their wedding. Awkward, So I think that's when reason why Amy Ashwood was a little upset about the whole thing, in addition to doing a lot of the groundwork that he later got, you know, so much credit for and still does today. But um, he has an Amy Jacques Amy Jack's Um marriage lasted I believe until his death, correct until nineteen Yeah, I mean they married a nineteen nineteen uh, And I didn't see anywhere that they ever split up. No, I think that they did.

And they had two sons, Marcus Mosiah Garvey the third and Julius Winston Garvey and Amy Amy Jacks was Um was very accomplished in her own right. She came from an aristocratic Kingston family. I think her father grandfather was Mayor of Kingston, and um, she was very well educated, very well read, very intelligent, and as we'll see, she helped continue Marcus Garvey's work while he was otherwise occupied

for a while in the twenties. Yeah, and that, you know, that led to a little bit of which is really good documentary from PBS. PBS experience as are always really good. And uh, apparently that caused a little bit of um internal strife within UNIA was when they eventually found it. I think it was pretty much their most popular newspaper, uh,

the Negro World. He had a page dedicated to women, and she ran that page and uh she you know, she ran it like somebody should run their own page in the newspaper, and apparently caused a little bit of strife within the organization because as much as he was had these progressive ideas about women and uh you know, propping them up. Uh, not everyone at the time, even

within UNIA, had those same ideas. I think he tried to sort of spread that message, but you know, there were some there were some men in the organization still they were a little bit like, who is this lady? You know? Yeah, sure, good thing that's over and done with. Yeah, right, solved. You want to take a break and then come back and talk a little more about UNIA. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Stuff you should know, stuff you should know, alright, Chuck.

So we're talking about UNIA, the United Negro Improvement Association, which was the brainchild of Marcus Garvey and something he attempted first in Kingston, I believe in nineteen sixteen something like that, maybe nineteen fifteen, um, and it did not quite take off. He had been inspired by Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, and in fact, he was kind of like the intellectual and probably cultural air to book Or T.

Washington's ideas because Washington was a conservative. He believed in UM, black self enterprise, black self sufficiency, in that black Americans working UM hard and creating a life of their own amidst white Americans would show white Americans that blacks weren't inferior.

They just wouldn't be able to ignore it anymore. And then thus white Americans Black Americans would treat one another equally, and the the issue of you know, bringing Black America out of enslavement and from under Jim Crow would be solved once and for all. That was the very conservative view of book or t. Washington, and that inspired Marcus Garvey so much that he started corresponding with book or t Um and he, uh, he was invited to America

by by Washington. Um, but he arrived about a year after Washington died, never got to meet him, but he was deeply inspired by him and in a lot of ways carried on his work. Yeah, so he was a little bit late. Uh, and you know, his intention was definitely to meet with Washington, but it was you know, this was nineteen sixteen when he moved to New York, so it's not like it is today, like, uh, you know, you can't just catch a flight up there real quick

if someone's not doing too well healthwise. So he missed his opportunity there. But he had those same ideas and he he basically you know, would ask himself and this is a quote, where's the black man's government? And he

came to the conclusion that there was none. They had no representation basically, and so he went on to say I will help make them and that was his aim with Unia UH And like he said, it did not go over too well in Jamaica, but when he got to the US, it really really started to spread pretty quickly.

I think the first uh US chapter was in nineteen seventeen. Uh. They only had seventeen members in a basement in Harlem, but he would eventually go on to buy a building in Harlem that hosted you know, like six thousand people at a time, and at the peak of his movement, he would claim that there were six million members. Uh. You know, it's tough to give a direct count. People in history say that he had a knack for just sort of and this is the PiZZ Barnum side sort

of over inflating everything. So they say it probably wasn't six million, but I definitely saw you know, it numbered in the millions worldwide over the course of the movement. Yeah, because to say that his message resonated with people is

the understatement of the year. He came along at a time, he came to New York at a time where in America there was a real um discord and unhappiness and uneasiness going on with black Americans, a number of whom who had just returned from fighting in World War One for America, yes huge and like rightfully so, like they served for their country, UM, and were rewarded with more racism than than ever, including race riots and massacres at the hands of um, you know, white neighbors who you know.

We talked about the Tulsa massacre, UM, and plenty of others, and in several of our episodes. This is the time that this was going on. And so I think I have the impression that black Americans were getting more despondent after losing hope so suddenly and violently UM, and also more upset at that idea. And so Marcus Garvey came along also at a time where the scientific community was saying like, oh, by the way, if you're black, you're

genetically uh, inferior to white people. Sorry, that's just science. Uh. And Marcus Garvey came along and said, you know what, these people could not be wronger. But the one thing about Garvey was, and this is what kind of separated him from some of his peers that were highly educated and sort of a little more of the UH like the the initial back to Africa movement was started by

the first African American millionaire. So a lot of times these people had money and they were sort of in a higher financial class, but he really championed the working class. That's where he came up. And his whole thing was, you know, these the women that were working in domestics, which his mother did, and I think that had big

impact on his views of progressive ideas toward women. But then the men, you know, they were they were working classmen, and he said that their official seal for union should be a washtub, a frying pan, a bail hook, and

a mop. Right. So these these were the people he was speaking to, yep so, and so ultimately he created this this um idea, this concept that's referred to as Garvy is um in it in a nutshell, is basically taking America's um you know, faith in the ability to succeed through hard work and enterprise and ingenuity and um you know, self respect, and combined it with the yearning of um black Americans, black Caribbeans, black Africans to be treated as equals, to live free from oppression, and and

mix those two things together and that's what Garvey ISUM was and and again it rang all over the world. And um one of the ways that that it kind of drew people in is he created almost like a shadow culture in Harlem at the at Union where like you would go to these meetings. He had like nightly meetings, right, but they were also like you know, larger, bigger almost conferences.

And then there were huge conferences, but the smaller conferences might be like a day long thing where like the whole family comes and you have meals there and you see like a vaudeville show there, and there's like a

fashion show and like that. You split off into like breakout sessions to use horrific corporate buzz speak UM where you would learn like a trade or maybe be like drilled in military techniques, or you would um learn nursing and then be sent off to aid in natural disasters, Like you would learn stuff that the rest of society had shut you out from. This is where you could go learn it and you know, lift yourself up and in turn lift the whole culture up as everyone collectively

was doing this. Yeah, it was. It's the idea was really cool, I think, and that you wouldn't just go to a meeting and while there were for short debates and Marcus Garvey just speaking about things. Uh, I think he wanted to make it more interesting and inclusive, and that's why they would have concerts and fashion shows and stuff like that. The Black Cross and Nurses was a big part of this progressive idea for black women that

he had. And obviously it's with a lot of the as you'll see the naming conventions for things he did. It was a play on something that white people had done. So they had the Red Cross. He started the Black Cross Nurses and uh, they were a large organization that did like so much good work and there was a lot of pride within that movement of the Black Cross Nurses. They had you know, their own slogans, they had their

own songs that they wrote. He had his fit very famous phrase, up you Mighty Race, and it was you know, I think he nailed it on the head. It wasn't just um, it was a culture within a culture almost like he was starting into the years that he was doing this in nineteen twenties. I think just makes it all that more impressive what he was able to do. Absolutely, and another thing that he's credited with is if not UM. I don't know if he invented it, but he certainly

popularized the what's called the Pan African flag. UM. Usually it's a three bars or three stripes. Yeah, red, green, and black. I love those colors together in high school and go by those stores. Something about the those colors being together just like spoke to me. I was like, man, that's really a nice color. Combo. You'd be like, could I pull it off? No, It's like I can't go there, but it was. I just always liked those colors together,

always loved looking into those stores. UM. So with the Pan African flag is also called the African Liberation flag UM, and it's also the colors of Quanza that would later be founded in nineteen sixty six. UM. The red represented blood, UM, the blood that was that united everybody of African ancestry, but also blood that had been spilled through enslavement, war, colonization. UM. The black represented Black people as a whole nation, and

the green was for the natural wealth of Africa. And that was a really big important point that I think UM Garvey tried to educate UM, Black Caribbeans, black Americans, and even black Africans, but probably to a lesser extent about that was like, this is our homeland and it's probably the most naturally wealthy continent on Earth, and we're all being treated like second class human beings and yet

this is our homeland. What are we doing here? Let's we have to right this wrong, basically, And I think that was also like a big driver for why they was saying we all need to go back to Africa and basically just say thank you for caring for this land. It's ours again now. Uh. He authored the paper Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, which was ratified with twenty thousand people in attendance at Madison Square Garden in n which is an amazing accomplishment in

and of itself. And this is where he was bestowed the title of Provisional President of Africa. And I don't

think we've said yet. One of the cool things about Marcus Scarfy was the way he would dress and he would outfit himself in this sort of military regalia with these uh hats with ostrich plumes, big ostrich plumes, and he was a big guy, so it was you know, this, this imposing figure comes in wearing this huge Ostrich plume Like this was a part of sort of the P. T. Barnum side, which was to come into a room and grab everyone's attention and to make a statement and you know,

try and ignore me basically was what he put forward with how he carried himself right, right, But at the same time it also made him really easy target of it a cool among his rivals in in UM, the Black cultural leadership UM because I mean W B. D. Boys wasn't wearing Ostrich blue and said it was an embarrassment that he would dress up like that, But right he was. He was, he was rocking his style. He totally was, and I'm with you, I respect that style

as well. UM. But again it did make him a target, and so did things like being being named the provisional President of Africa Unia Convention in Madison Square Gardens. These were things that like people could like pick on him for, but he was his his idea was so strong because it was appealing to While he was a polarizing figure,

his ideas were unifying. They could take all different kinds of um, you know, black concepts and black thoughts and black thinkers and black leaders and bring them all together and basically say yes, despite our differences, we are all in agreement. We this is a great way to lift people up. We might not agree with going back to Africa or not, but like, yes, we can come together as a culture and lift ourselves up. That, like his

ideas were unifying, while he himself was polarizing. Should we go ahead and talk a little bit about the origins of the back to Africa movement? Yeah, let's see that, all right, So this goes back. He is not He's far from the first person to have this idea. Uh. And like I mentioned earlier, one of the first people was the first African American Millionaire's name was Paul Cuffey

or Cuffey c Ufe. He was a mixed race, uh, Massachusetts sea captain and his father was an enslaved African, and he had this idea that in in fact did so. He actually returned at least several dozen African Americans to Africa and to Sierra Leone. And this was an eighteen fifteen and then later and I think we should totally do a whole podcast on Liberia because the more I read about it, just the more interesting it is. But in eighteen sixteen, the American Colonization Society, which you know

Andrew Jackson and James Monroe were members. They worked with West African leaders to basically say less established this colony.

It would eventually be Liberia, and over the course of about forty years, I saw anywhere from ten to twenty thousand, uh, free black Americans moved back to Africa, yes, and and lived in this new country that was granted to them, Liberia, And so like you could totally get you know, um, krusty, musty old racists like nineteenth century Andrew Jackson and his cronies being like, yeah, let's let's set up a country

in Africa and send black people back there. Um. But this also appealed to like you said, I mean, twelve thousand free black Americans said, I'm out of here. So there was definitely there was definitely Again, there was It's so so strange to look at, but there was agreement between racist white people and some black people who are like, we we just don't even want to be around you anymore. Let's just live separately. While there was also a very i would say much stronger thread uh in the black

community is like, um, I'm a tenth generation American. Even though a lot of those ancestors of mine were enslaved, I was still born and raised in America, so are my parents and my grandparents. I really don't have any connection to Africa aside from my further back ancestors having been enslaved there and brought over here. I don't really have any interest in going back to Africa. Can I support the idea of rising up as a as a black community, as a culture without having to go back

to Africa? And Garvey was like, not really, No, we need to go to Africa. The races should not be intermingled. And that makes him a very polarizing figure, not just

among the black community, among the white community as well. Yeah, and you know, I think Liberia definitely deserves its own episode because I was reading into and it was just really interesting sort of the ups and downs and what happens when you have uh, you know, twenty tho African Americans moving to Africa with their cultural identity that's somewhat confused and and melding with the locals there, because it was, uh, it was just really interesting to see what happened over

the years, like through the you know, mid two thousands in Liberia. So I'm gonna put that one on the list. Okay, it is officially on the list. On the list. You made the sound and everything I did. Should we take another break before we talk about, um, the Black Star Line and then some troubles. Yeah, things get really interesting here after the breaks, A stick around spoken. Should know

sh stuff you should know. All right, So you mentioned the Black Star Line, and if you're listening, you might think, doesn't Josh mean the White Star Line. No, he didn't, because this is the naming convention that I talked about. The White Star Lines was the I mean it was the Titanic, right was part of the White Star Lines. Uh. And so Garvey said, you know what, we need our own industry. We needed our own business, We need our own shipping. We need to be able to get people

to Africa. So I'm gonna start the Black Star Line in nineteen nineteen, which was the steamship shipping company to facilitate shipping goods around the African diaspora and to literally transport I mean, the ideal was to transport Black Americans back to Africa. Um. Sadly, they never made it back to Africa on those ships. There are a host of problems, uh, including the fact that the ships that he ended up buying were almost all in pretty bad state of repair,

like former World War One ships. So you know he was he was working with the money that he had, which he raised selling five dollar shares at a time at meetings, uh, and then getting into trouble selling them

through the mail. Yeah. So with that five dollars share, that was a big deal because that was a low enough price, about eighty one dollar money, thank you west Egg Um, that a working class black family could could afford to buy a share in the Black Star line, and they were buying a share in like this actual like enterprise that had the had the legs to knit black people around the world together economically and physically, like very everybody around and around and again, like you said,

ultimately help everyone move back to Africa. Um. But this was even at a time that, like the average weekly wage earned by the vast majority of Black Americans in northern cities was less than five dollars a week. So it wasn't an easy five dollar or share to buy. But you can imagine how many families that were in unia Um that scraped together the money or saved up for it to buy a share in the Black Star Line.

And nothing I've read seems like the Black Star Line was ever meant to be anything but what it was stated to be. It's just that things went south because one of the things Marcus Garvey wasn't by all accounts, is a shrewd businessman. He is not a biz whiz by any stretch of the imagination, and that, from what I understand, is ultimately what brought along the Black Star

Lines downfall. Yeah, I mean there was mismanagement. I read one story where when they were doing some you know, because they were trying to make money with this, like you know, as a shipping company too, so where a

huge shipment of coconuts had gone rotten. But as he insisted on making these sort of high profile political stops along the route, whereas the I guess the sea captains were saying, and these these were completely operated by African Americans, captain and crewed by African Americans, and they were like, we need to you know, if you want these coconuts to be sold and to actually profit in this company,

we need to go straight there. And he insisted on stopping at different places along the way and he would you know, things like that would happen kind of time and time again. It seems like, uh and you know, like I said, these ships were in disrepair. The first one he bought was the Yarmouth I think re christen the Frederick Douglas and it was a thirty year old ship. One was called the Shady Side. End buying two more. It eventually sank from a leak because of storm damage

from an ice storm. But you know, they had some successes. I think I saw in the end it ended up in in modern dollars, being like a twenty million dollar outfit. It it just didn't succeed financially, but you know it, that's a that's a lot of dough. So it wasn't like something he went into lightly, you know, no, and it was I mean, it just goes to show you what an enormous enterprise it was that that that making

twenty million dollars couldn't even allow them to break even. UM. In addition to the Black Star line, he also helped found the Negro Factories Corporation UM, which created grocery stores, restaurant UM, Moving Vans, publishing house obviously UM and all sorts of other UM black owned businesses that not only were run directly from the Negro Factories Corporation, but also we're just affiliated with it. And so part of the trouble that that Marcus Garvey ran into was and that

demonstrates he wasn't a very good businessman. He was shuffling money from one enterprise to another to keep them all afloat. And some were doing better than others from what I understand, like the grocery store was doing really well, but say the restaurant wasn't. So he had to um move money from the grocery store of the restaurant and then maybe from the restaurant to the Black Star Line. And there was nothing that that was so monumentally successful it could

keep everything else going. And so even knowing that like the Black Star Line was in serious financial trouble, UM, he he would stop on those coconut runs to to try to sell shares. That's one of the reasons why he was stopping was that you know, um rustle up membership in UNIA and membership in UNIA, subscriptions to the Negro World UM and appearances by him. UM all also kind of came with pitches for buying shares in the Black Star line. And that's ultimately what got him in trouble.

He was continuing to sell shares in an enterprise that um, he may or may not have thought was was in jeopardy. And the FEDS, who have been trying to get him for years at this point, UM, finally said I think we can get him now. Yeah. What they got him for ultimately was male fraud. And what I saw was it was specifically the fact that he was sending mailers for donations, or not donations, but investment opportunities, uh that

featured ships that they did not yet own. So uh, there was one ship in particular that he was trying to buy, but the deal wasn't closed, but it was prominently featured. And they said, wait a minute, this is mail fraud. You can't. You're misrepresenting the company essentially by having a ship on there that you don't have yet. And we've got you. And he ended up serving um how many years just a few? Right, He was sentenced to five, but I believe he served two, right, and

his sentence was commuted and he was deported back to Jamaica. UM, we're still gonna talk about other stuff. Before this, but that's he ultimately ended up back in Jamaica. But when you were just talking a second ago, I think one of the things that is pretty clear was that he was a He wasn't the best of businessman, but he was also a victim of over being overly ambitious because

he had health problems through his whole life. He had pneumonia quite a few times, and I think he had asthma, and I think he'd had a feeling maybe that he was not long for this world. So that's why he said, let's start theaters, and let's start grocery stores, and let's start restaurants, and let's start a shipping line. I think he was overly ambitious and tried to move a little too fast maybe, whereas if he might have slowed down and put his efforts uh into fewer things, it might

have been a little bit more successful. Yeah, But also imagine being like, Okay, we really need to make up for lost time, you know, and then feeling like your time on earth was was going to be shortened. I mean, yeah, I know, not at all, but so he um he did his time in Atlanta, Federal penn which is at the end of Grant Park now, UM, which is one of the scariest buildings you can never drive past. UM. And like he said, he thought his time in this

world was gonna be fairly short. And he actually wrote a letter from prison saying that you know, um, he basically expected to die in prison and if he did die, then he was going to come back. He said, look for me in the whirlwind. He's gonna bring with him the souls of all the dead Africans who died enslaved um and uh, basically right, all the wrongs, if you know what I mean. The documentary by the way, yeah, I like our title more Black Moses. I think that's

such an amazing name for him, So awesome. But um, so he he didn't die in prison. He got out, like you said. Calvin Coolidge, under tremendous pressure from Union UM members and his wife Amy Jacks Uh, finally said okay, fine, he can come out, but he's going to Jamaica. And that's where he went. And when he went to prison,

I mean, that was just not a good look. Like this guy who was leading the movement to prop up and raise up the black community going to prison, Um, it just made him any even easier target, not just among the black community, but also among like white observers now to like, look, he went to jail, like, this is your this is your leader. Come on, give me a break. But we haven't really kind of explained it enough.

And and there's a whole other podcast we could do just on this, but suffice to say he was very much the victim of government harassment, again at the hands of Jay Hoover, who somebody said once that he became so fixated on Garvy it became basically a vendetta. He just wanted to get rid of Marcus Garvey and tried for years to do it, and the government sabotaged Black Star line fuel um fuel supplies so the ships would

would break down. Um, Like, he was harassed. He he had like every reason to feel persecuted, and then finally put in prison on a pretty weak charge to begin with, because of his ideas and because he represented a threat to you know, white dominance in America and elsewhere. Yeah, in nineteen nineteen, Hoover hired And by the way, I thought you were going to quote me a second ago when he said someone once said about Hoover, I thought

you canna say that he was the worst American. That would have been the most boss referential joke you've ever pulled off. Uh So, in nineteen nineteen, Hoover hired the bureau's first black agent, James Wormley Jones. And you might think, oh, great, he's being progressive. No, no, no. He hired him specifically to be a mole and infiltrate Garvey's movement. And I think he was the one that actually poisoned the fuel lines. And he had other UH moles that he would install

within the organization. And it wasn't just um, I mean, it's bad enough if you're doing that just to keep tabs and report back, but he sent people in there

to agitate and to cause disruption. And I remember reading one story where there was something about letters being sent back and forth between different Union UH offices in different cities, like pretty far apart, and that they were agitating one another and with these letters, and it turned out that none they were all written by Hoover or you know, Hoover's cronies. Yeah, that's a playbook that little Putts would be using for decades to come. He did that to

the Black Panthers. He tried to do it to the civil rights leaders, like, yeah, that was he would just he wouldn't put moles in just to like listen and report back. He was like he put them in there to destroy them from within, which is just you know, reprehensible, man, what a snake. Yeah, and also don't write in I know what the word putts means and I meant it with Jay. Uh, we should mention them attempt on his life that we kind of referenced earlier. Uh, this was

back in nineteen nineteen and October. Uh, he had by this time, this was kind of I guess hooever was sort of already getting involved. But the New York d A Edwin Edwin Kay, I'm sorry, Edwin P. Kilroe started investigating UNI at first. In October of nineteen nineteen, a man named George Tyler showed up basically kicked in the door downstairs and demanded to speak with Garvey. Garby came out and see what was going on. He opened fire. H you mentioned that Amy Ashwood got between him and

the bullets. But Garvey was hit three times, I think, once in the scalp and twice in the legs. And the rumor was, uh, and this is you know, I think what Garvey believed was that Tyler was sent by the d A. That was never proven. There were also people that said, no, this was a guy who was had restaurant dealings with him that was angry about how that business went down. So I don't think we'll ever know for sure what happened. But there wasn't an assassination attempt.

So um, like I was saying before, when he when he went to prison, like, it was not it was not a proud day for UNIA, and union membership started to drop off fairly precipitously. Amy Jackson's wife was trying to keep things going, publishing his letters, like giving speeches on his behalf lobby and Calvin Coolidge to let him out of prison. Um, but it's just like the the

death blow was kind of struck. Although that's not to say there's still UNIA today and Marcus Garvey's views and Garvey is um and a lot of his teachings and writings and thoughts are still very much espoused and followed right and and not just in the reggae world. But um he he uh basically spent the rest of his life, and his life was relatively short. He died at age fifty two. In he moved back to Jamaica, where he

was deported, he decided to move back to London. I could not find what kind of connection he had to London to live there twice. Um, but that's where he lived out the rest of his days, and because he schooled there maybe, but he well, no I knew he had an actual connection to London. I meant, like on a an emotional level, like what drew him back to London a second time? But um, but he died there, and he died just kind of like um, a bit

of an outcast. And one of the things that really didn't help, you know, he was kind of losing a lot of followers and adherents because he went to prison and then later on he he um, he criticized Holla Selassie after he was deposed by Mussolini, and he also looked up to Mussolini for being a strong authoritarian leader.

But the thing that really kind of like sealed his fate among um, the black cultural leaders is what you mentioned earlier, the bonkers meeting between him and the leader of the KKK, Right, Yeah, I mean, uh talk about a radical idea um for him just to sit down with a leader of the clan in Atlanta and in exchange views of agreement on the fact that they each thought that black Americans should that belonged in Africa. To say that did not sit well within the leaders of

the black community is is a pretty big understatement. Yeah, so that was I mean, that was the probably the biggest thing of of Marcus Garvey's downfall. But you know, because of that, his his image like really kind of he he died as an outcast in London, um and he um he Over the years though like he was, he seems to have been first picked up and rehabilitated by the Rastafarians who said, like, hey, no, this guy,

this guy had some amazing ideas. This guy was speaking truth, like his his teachings were important, and they kind of picked up his um, his his image and dusted him off and rehabilitated him. And people have kind of taken like a closer look at him again and been like, yes, this guy was one of the most important black activists

in the history of the world. Yeah, I saw. I think in the PBS documentary they put it like this that uh in the early nineteen hundreds provided a template for everybody that came after basically whether it was Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. Uh, the Rastafarianism, the Nation of Islam, Like, there were so many organizations and people that sort of used his life and his uh cultural ideas as that template that um, it's it's it's

hard to believe that this is something. And we say this all the time, of course, especially about black history. But I don't think I ever heard the words Marcus Garvey in a high school or college history class, not unless Peter Tosh was teaching. Oh man, I miss uh. We had this great radio station called album ADI eight Atlanta, the George State radio station that every Sunday morning they had, uh,

like the best reggae show ever. Uh. And it wasn't you know, they weren't like, let's play Redemption song by Bob Marlin. Great song, but it's where you it here got all the early uh, all the early ska and like Lee Perry and the Upsiders. Man, it's so good. And now when we go to the lake on Sunday mornings, we just dial up a good like fifties and sixties ska playlist in honor of what what once was at

Georgia State. I think you can still stream it online, but it was a big deal with they shut it down basically and said, let's have two NPR stations in Atlanta the exact same thing at the same time. It was a terrible, terrible decision that I hope one day they reversed because I hope maybe eight was so good. That was the more fire show. By the way, yeah, and that boy that just openised to so much good reggae win I was in college and there was a lot of bad reggae, and then there was like that

was Saturday, I guess you said. That was Saturday around noon, and before that, in the mornings they would have a Saturday Morning cartoon music show where they play like Strawberry Shortcake songs and like just like the most random stuff that they would get off the kids records. But it

was great. And then the night before that, I don't know if you remember Adam Bomb, remember, yes, like the soul like, oh my goodness, that like album Adia eight had it going on that dash that was like trance and all that, and then uh, the relent in the years was sort of you know for the old white folks. I don't remember that it was. It was really good deep cuts of of classic rock, so that it's not like here's Boston's more than a feeling. It's like, here's uh,

this deep cut from Steven Still's second solo album, right exactly. Yeah, that was that was album A D eight man Man r I P album R I P. Dare we do one on Rastafarianism at some point, absolutely, because then my list it's just it's a tough one. I think, Yeah, I think so too. But with it, I mean, it's sufficed to say that Marcus Garvey was a prophet of Rastafarianism because he predicted the rise of Hollia Selassie, who became the god of Rastafarianism. And we'll talk more about

that in a different map. How about that, it's good stuff. I look forward. I believe it's Amazon is making the Marcus Garvey movie, but definitely see if you can find the PBS experience American experience. I think it is on Marcus Garvey. It's good stuff. And the guy who's gonna play Marcus Garvey that was Winston Duke, You're right, the dude from US. Yeah, and Black Panther too. Um well, if you want to know more about Winston Duke, go

check him out on IMDb. But if you want to know more about Marcus Garvey, um, yeah, like you said, check out the American Experience on him. But there's so much stuff in great articles and interesting scholarship to read about Marcus Garvey and his legacy. So go check it out because it's pretty interesting. And since I said that it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this short and sweet because this was a longer episode. So this

is perfect. Uh. When we did the episode on the church Choir that didn't explode, we felt bad because we could not find Reverend Kimple's wife's first name. And wouldn't you know it, the stuff you should know, Army comes through for us. Hey, guys, love the show. Been listening

for years. I heard the episode on the church Choir that didn't explode, and you said you couldn't find Reverend Kimple's wife in her first name, And I was excited because I knew that the nineteen fifty census had just been released on April one, So I guess in our defense, we recorded that before people first, right. Absolutely, I went and searched and they were listed in the census. Walter's wife's name. Can we get a drum roll here is Eunice Jay Climpole. We probably could a guest in the

nineteen fifties. Units was probably a top five name, uh for Evelyn in in uh in Beatrice, Nebraska, for sure. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's them right county and right profession and the only Walter Climpole. Yeah, I mean Climpole with without an e L. It's got to be it. Keep up with a good work. And that was from a couple of people in it. But this was from Sue. Thanks a lot, Sue. Yeah, I did notice a couple

of people wrote in, so it's pretty sharp. The n censes just come out, and Sue sat bolt upright in bed and said, I gotta look. Thanks, And that makes you, uh an official research assistant. Right, So if you want to be like Sue and send us some unpaid research where we'd love that, that'd be great, especially if it's accurate. Um, you can put it in an email and send it off to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff

you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.