Book Review:
Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey

Colin Grant brings an exciting and historical figure to life in ways no one has ever done. Whao? Marcus Mosiah Garvey. And Garvey’s end song was as controversial as his life.

Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey is a fully detailed and definitive biography by fellow Jamaican Grant. This book is the justice Garvey didn’t get while living, Despite his critics, detractors, and saboteurs (W.E. B. DuBois included), Grant shows that Garvey’s implementation of his beliefs were genuine and sincere.

Garvey was dogged by accusations of financial impropriety before ever coming to America. His accusers were jealous of his purposeful drive, rising star and vision to unite West Indians against the classicism they were subjected to by their colonizers.

The “crabs in a barrel syndrome” among his fellow countrymen (and later, others) becomes quite evident throughout the visionary’s life. So what if Garvey made a few technical blunders … like elevating his credentials to get support financially and politically from the wealthy and socially connected? Had he been rich, highly educated, and of an unquestionable social standing he would most likely have still been the subject of FBI investigations and British Military Intelligence efforts to destroy his organization. The man and his organization were simply too revolutionary not to be.

Grant takes us from Garvey’s modest beginnings and birth in Jamaica to his journeys across Europe to America, and to his eventual death as a brokenhearted pauper in London after seeing his dream die in America. He was forced to leave the “land of the free and the home of the brave” in disgrace because of trumped up mail fraud charges.

By the time Garvey came to America in March 1916, he had already planted the seeds for his UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) in his homeland Jamaica. Those seeds were already sprouting, though support for his dream ebbed and flowed in the Caribbean.

But significant portions of Garvey’s life are major intersections in American history. Among these crossings are: WWI, Harlem and its soapboxes, fellow Jamaican and poet/writer Claude McKay, A. Phillip Randolph, W.E. B. DuBois and the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, the Chicago Defender, Socialist newspapers and magazines (such as the Messenger and Liberator that were all vying for the same audience of black people wherever they were). Ida B. Wells and Madam C. J. Walker became staunch supporters of Garvey and the UNIA. As a matter of fact, t is Walker who initially helps to fund the UNIA before her untimely death, Grant points out.

And there are other major Garvey/American history intersections. Namely, the creation of the FBI with J. Edgar Hoover at the helm. Politically, the creation of the Sedition and Espionage Acts were created as much for perceived Communist takeover as they were to keep everybody else in line, too … especially America’s negras, who were developing new attitudes of self-sufficiency, self pride, and self esteem. The intrusive tactics used by the government never ceased, and by the late ‘60s came to be known as COINTELPRO.

Grant paints Garvey in Negro With a Hat as a master promoter, optimist, and idealist. He generated either love or hatred, and people were often filled with envy and jealousy or fear that he’d be successful—W. E. B. DuBois among them. Garvey was allegedly called a “race pimp” and a “fraud,” prior to and during the UNIA’s apex because of its dynamic growth. He was considered a Jamaican agitator and a threat to the American way of life and the country’s vision for its darkies.

The UNIA had a vision, too, so delegates created a Declaration of Rights with several meaningful statements on what people of African descent expected. One of these tenets were, “We deprecate the use of the term “nigger”, as applied to Negroes and demand that “Negro” will be written with a capital “N.” According to Grant, more than 100 delegates from Africa, the Caribbean and America signed the declaration. Another one of the rights was, “ We strongly condemn the cupidity of those nations of the world who , by open aggression or secret schemes, have seized the territories and inexhaustible natural wealth of Africa, and we place on record our most solemn determination to reclaim the treasures and possession of the vast continent of our forefathers.” Garvey’s thrust was Africa for the Africans the same way Ireland was for the Irish, and Germany was for the Germans. Another part of his vision was to create a black world equal to that of the mainstream.

The Garvey movement was global although its greatest membership was in the United States. At one time it boasted nearly 500,000 members. It remains an excellent study in black self determination, implementation and the pitfalls that can destroy the best of intentions. When selecting colors for a flag to represent the UNIA, Garvey choose, red, black and green . Sound familiar? He is not given full credit for Pan-Africanism, but it was Garvey who developed and implemented it. The man and his efforts were so influential that there was a time that anyone caught reading his Negro World in the Caribbean would be put in jail.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey is an unforgettable part of American history, and ideally, future biographers will be as thorough, diligent and objective about him as Colin Grant is in Negro with a Hat.