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Marcus Garvey
Look for Me in the Whirlwind
review by Cynthia Fuchs, 16 February
2001
I
will help to make them
"Where
is the black man's government? Where is his king and his kingdom?
Where is his President, his ambassador, his country, his men of big
affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared, 'I will help to
make them.'"
These
are the words of Marcus Garvey. For all his ambition, political
acumen, and fiery oratory, Garvey may be best remembered for his
uniforms. Featuring shiny buttons, epaulets, and a hat resembling
that worn by Napoleon Bonaparte (plume and all), Garvey's was a
serious uniform, and, judging by every portrait I've seen of him in
it, he was quite aware of its seriousness. He knew as well that
uniforms tend to instill pride in their wearers, as do parades for
their marchers, and rallies for their participants. He worked all of
these avenues to bring to his followers a sense of self-esteem and,
importantly, entitlement. Believing that black people the world over
had been convinced that they were unworthy of land, wealth, and
self-governance, even civil rights, in the early twentieth century,
Garvey made it his mission to remind black men and women of their
honorable heritage and inspire them to move on toward a glorious
future based on international unity.
PBS's
Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind, part of their
"American Experience" Series, presents the many sides and
struggles of Marcus Garvey. The documentary follows a general
trajectory, describing a bit about Garvey's childhood in St. Ann's
Bay, Jamaica. Born in 1887, he was raised by a strict father (who
once left him alone at the bottom of a grave to teach him --
perversely -- self-reliance) and an encouraging mother (she believed
he was destined for great things, even wanting to name him
"Moses"). As a child, the documentary reports, Garvey
played with a young white girl; but as they entered adolescence, her
father sent her away to school to avoid further contact with him. At
this point, apparently, fourteen-year-old Garvey
"discovered" racism and vowed to do something about it.
In
1914, inspired by his reading of Booker T. Washington's Up from
Slavery, Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (U.N.I.A.) and African Community's League (A.C.L.), both
dedicated to racial unity, economic independence, moral melioration,
and educational achievement, but within two years, he had run into
money trouble -- a kind of trouble that would plague him throughout
his career -- and he headed for the United States, where he soon
settled in Harlem.
There,
he restarted the U.N.I.A., based at first on support from New York's
West Indian immigrant community. In order to publicize his extensive
plans for black education and self-employment, he founded a
newspaper, The Negro World, and in order to finance them, he
started a shipping company, the Black Star Line, and the Negro
Factories Corporation (started in 1920), which developed grocery
stores, a restaurant, a laundry, a moving van company, and a
publishing house. During these years (1919-1922 or so), Garvey was
also busy touring, giving speeches, opening chapters of the U.N.I.A.
all over the U.S, marrying his "soulmate," Amy Ashwood,
and surviving an assassination attempt (which, for his followers,
only made him seem more clearly "chosen" to lead them). It
wasn't long before he caught the attention of the FBI; in 1919, the
Bureau assigned a young Justice Department operative, one J. Edgar
Hoover, to gather damaging information on Garvey, a scheme which
meant hiring the first African American agent to go undercover and
befriend and betray Garvey (and so, the strategy behind COINTELPRO
was instituted). He also met with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan,
stating that he believed these were the true power-holders in the
United States. Eventually, Garvey and his organizations would be
undone -- he would lose all his money, be jailed for mail fraud,
rejected by black U.S. leaders (W.E.B. Du Bois called him
"dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain, and very
suspicious"), and deported to Jamaica in 1927. Though he and
his second wife, his former secretary Amy Jacques, would have two
sons (both interviewed briefly for this film), Garvey would die a
broken and lonely man, in 1940, in London.
Marcus
Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind tracks most of the events in Garvey's remarkable life,
using standard documentary devices -- talking heads (mostly
historians who opine on the man's psychology or, more usefully,
establish historical contexts for his actions and reactions, as well
as some eyewitnesses, who recall the thrill of seeing Garvey when
they were children), artfully blurred dramatic reenactments, and a
few of those period-music-accompanied slow zooms on old photographs
that Ken Burns has made famous. The American Experience website
includes materials cited in the film, including transcripts of key
primary documents, such as Garvey's autobiographical statement, The
Negro's Greatest Enemy (written while he was in New York's Tombs
prison) and the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the
World, which was drafted and adopted at U.N.I.A. Convention held in
New York's Madison Square Garden in 1920, which also elected Garvey
"Provisional President of Africa." This extraordinary text
begins with the following preamble: "Be it Resolved, That the
Negro people of the world, through their chosen representatives in
convention assembled... protest against the wrongs and injustices
they are suffering at the hands of their white brethren, and state
what they deem their fair and just rights, as well as the treatment
they propose to demand of all men in the future." Such protest,
as we know, continues in less unified forms to this day.
The
documentary paints a multi-faceted portrait of Garvey, without final
answers as to why and how he happened when he did. He emerges as a
fascinating and frustrating figure, at once vain and inspirational,
authoritarian and enigmatic, self-absorbed to the point of driving
friends and supporters away, and yet so dedicated to his greater
cause that many people around the diasporic world -- Africans,
African Americans, West Indians -- were moved to support him with
whatever meager means they had (one woman remembers her father
investing the family's food money in the Black Star Line, much to
her mother's chagrin). To capture such a "whirlwind" would
be impossible; but Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind
provides a provocative introduction to this compelling, complex man.
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