Negro with a Hat or Doing Business in 21st Century India

Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa

Author: Colin Grant

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was once the most famous black man on earth. A brilliant orator who electrified his audiences, he inspired thousands to join his "Back to Africa" movement, which aimed to create an independent homeland through Pan-African emigration. At the pinnacle of his fame in the early 1920s, Garvey was a power to be reckoned with. His Universal Negro Improvement Association boasted millions of members in more than forty countries, and he was an influential champion of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing Claude McKay and Langston Hughes in his newspaper The Negro World.
To his admirers, Garvey was the "Black Moses," though he made enemies almost as easily as friends: early in his career both Winston Churchill and J. Edgar Hoover deemed him enough of a threat to warrant continual surveillance. Indeed, so alarmed by Garvey was Hoover that he labored for years to discover a way to prosecute him, finally settling on dubious charges of mail fraud, for which Garvey served several years in an Atlanta prison. W.E.B. DuBois, a bitter rival, believed Garvey to be merely an outlandish "negro with a hat."
In the first full-length biography of Garvey in a generation, Colin Grant captures the full sweep and epic dimensions of Garvey's life, the dazzling triumphs and the dreary exile. He spent most of his adult life outside of Jamaica, but was crowned the island's first national hero after his death. He advocated for a return to Africa, but was barred by colonial powers from ever setting foot on the continent. As Grant shows, Garvey was a man of contradictions: a self-educated, poetry-writing aesthete and unabashed propagandist, an admirer of Lenin, and a dandy givento elaborate public displays. Above all, he was a shrewd promoter whose use of pageantry evoked a lost African civilization and fired the imagination of his followers. Negro With a Hat restores Garvey to his place as one of the founders of black nationalism and a key figure of the 20th century.

The New York Times - Paul Devlin

The story of Marcus Garvey, the charismatic and tireless black leader who had a meteoric rise and fall in the late 1910s and early '20s, makes for enthralling reading, and Garvey has found an engaging and objective biographer in Colin Grant…[his] book is not all politics, ideology, money and lawsuits. (Garvey was often embroiled in litigation.) It is also an engrossing social history that goes to such pains to set up contexts that Garvey is occasionally obscured…Nonetheless, Negro With a Hat is an achievement on a scale Garvey might have appreciated.

Tonya Briggs - School Library Journal

A great biography reveals the personality of its subject chapter by chapter, but Grant's dreary book lacks the coherence or demonstrated research to do that. Garvey built an international organization focused on uniting and advancing Africans and those of African descent globally, and any biography of him should demonstrate why so many people believed in his movement and continue to do so. Grant (producer, BBC Radio) quotes James Weldon Johnson, who echoed many contemporaries in observing that Garvey had a "magnetic personality, torrential eloquence, and intuitive knowledge of crowd psychology." It is hence puzzling that this biographer omits Garvey's own words, especially as Garvey's speeches and papers have been collected and published. In this slanted portrait (Garvey is called "a supreme opportunistic propagandist"), there is little about Garvey's own life. The most interesting parts of the book are about others, including Garvey's mentors, Duse Mohamed Ali and Hubert Harrison, and one of his followers, Josie Gatlin. But there is too much biographical information about fellow Jamaican Claude McKay, who was not a follower of Garvey, and W.E.B. DuBois, whose NAACP competed with Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) for members and staff. Libraries should have Rupert Lewis's Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion, which includes a chapter about Garvey's oratorical skills, instead of this disappointing book. Not recommended. (Index not seen.)

Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

Dazzling, definitive biography of the controversial activist who led the 1920s "Back to Africa" movement. BBC radio producer Grant, himself the son of Caribbean immigrants, delivers a spellbinding portrait of Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), a printer who mobilized millions through his creation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey's program of racial pride and economic uplift proposed an exodus of black people from the United States, the Caribbean and Central America to a colony in Liberia. Operating mainly from Harlem, he saw his dream of a thriving African homeland for blacks collapse in 1923 after he was convicted of mail fraud, an offense for which he later served a two-year prison sentence. Disgraced, dispirited and largely forgotten by the adoring throngs who once invested in his Black Star shipping line and other self-help business enterprises, the colorful self-styled "President-King" of Africa endured the agony of reading premature (and often vicious) obituaries published long before his death in London at age 52. The author notes that he was drawn to the myth and mystery of Garvey after accompanying his mother on a trip to her native Jamaica. Grant's learned passion for his subject shimmers on every page, but that doesn't prevent him from delivering a clear-eyed portrait of a man whose genuine commitment to bettering the lives of blacks was compromised by an outsized ego, a penchant for pageantry and unbridled disdain for mainstream crusaders such as NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois. Instead, Grant reveals, Garvey publicly and proudly claimed an ally in the Ku Klux Klan's Imperial Wizard, who naturally cheered his "Back to Africa" scheme. A riveting andwell-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders.

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations     ix
Prologue: A Premature Death     1
Bury the Dead and Take Care of the Living     4
Almost an Englishman     34
In the Company of Negroes     52
An Ebony Orator in Harlem     73
No Flag but the Stars and Stripes - and Possibly the Union Jack     95
If We Must Die     114
How to Manufacture a Traitor     131
Harlem Speaks for Scattered Ethiopia     160
Flyin' Home on the Black Star Line     184
A Star in the Storm     217
He Who Plays the King     242
Last Stop Liberia     268
Not to Mention His Colour     298
Behold the Demagogue or Misunderstood Messiah     318
Caging the Tiger     349
Into the Furnace     388
Silence Mr Garvey     413
Gone to Foreign     436
Epilogue     451
Bibliography     456
Notes     465
Acknowledgments     505
Index     507

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