Black Political Worlds in Port Cities: Garveyism in 1920s Britain
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Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2022, pp. 1–28 doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwab011
Jake Thorold* Barrister, UK
............................................
Black Political Worlds in Port
Cities: Garveyism in 1920s
Britain†
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Abstract
The presence of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro
Improvement Association (UNIA) in the British ports of London, Manchester,
Cardiff, and Barry during the 1920s has yet to be charted by historians of either
Garveyism or Black Britain. Uncovering this history provides fresh insights
into both fields. Far from the localism emphasized by much of recent
Garveyism historiography, followers of the movement in Britain were closely
connected to their fellow Garveyites distributed around the globe. Meanwhile,
although recent literature on the transnational character of Black Britain has
detailed the activism of relatively elite figures and groups, the presence of
Garveyism in port areas elucidates an alternative vein of diasporic Black polit-
ical culture among working-class seafaring communities extending beyond the
capital. Far from the parochial victims portrayed in much historiography,
Black people living in Britain’s ports were deeply invested in the global project
of Garveyism. Through their travels, readings of and writings to the UNIA’s
Negro World newspaper, and participation in sophisticated aural and visual
cultures, Garveyites in Britain connected their struggles to a mass diasporic
movement which profoundly altered global Black politics.
On Wednesday, 1 August 1921, New York, according to the Negro World
newspaper, ‘witnessed an incredible scene. . . when thousands of Negroes
* jthorold@outlook.com. This article has been made possible by the patient help of others.
The committed archivists at the National Archives, the Black Cultural Archives, and in par-
ticular the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem have all contributed
their expertise to this project. Adam Ewing and the other participants of the April 2016
Global Garveyism conference in Richmond, Virginia have been extremely giving of their time
and knowledge. Oliver Aiken has read multiple drafts and always offered excellent sugges-
tions. Professor Stephen Tuck was an ideal supervisor, full of both encouragement and per-
ceptive critique whenever required. Finally, special thanks must go to the often
unappreciated community archivists and activists who have made studying Garveyism pos-
sible.
†
This article was completed as part of a University of Oxford Master’s degree.
Advance Access publication 21 August 2021
C The Author(s) [2021]. Published by Oxford University Press.
V
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecom-
mons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.2 JAKE THOROLD
paraded the Harlem district’ to mark the opening of the ‘Second Annual
International Convention of Negroes’.1 That same day, an echo sounded
in Cardiff, the Welsh port city on the Atlantic Ocean’s eastern edge.
Commenting on the congregation in Harlem of supporters of Marcus
Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association and African
Communities League (UNIA) movement, W. D. Collins, ‘President of No.
269th Division, U.N.I.A. and A.C.L., Cardiff and Newport, S. Wales’,
reported to the Negro World on a parallel, if quieter, gathering.2 ‘Being un-
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able to send a delegate to the annual convention now sitting in New
York’, Collins reported, ‘we have among the three [UNIA] Divisions here
namely: “Newport-Cardiff,” “Barry” and “London,” held a local repre-
sentative meeting in celebration of the great convention in New York.’3
Aspiring to be as synced with their Harlem counterparts as possible, the
commencement of Cardiff’s festivities was held back until two o’clock in
the afternoon, lining up with a mid-morning start across the Atlantic.
The distance of the UNIA followers, or ‘Garveyites’, gathered in Wales
from Harlem did not dampen enthusiasm. ‘Though we are greatly handi-
capped in many ways materially,’ Collins wrote, ‘we are nevertheless
fighting on in a spirit of never yielding determination for the principles of
“Garveyism” as given to the world of our grand old race by the U.N.I.A.
and A.C.L. movement.’4 Mirroring, if less grandiosely, the bombast and
ceremony in New York, the programme in Cardiff included a ‘small par-
ade’, musical performances, multiple addresses by the Presidents of each
UNIA division, and communal singing of the UNIA’s national hymn,
‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains.’5 By doing the same things at the same
time as their fellow Garveyites cramming Harlem’s boulevards, the ‘little
band of U.N.I.A. workers here’ described by Collins could feel part of
something far bigger.6
Collins didn’t write to the Negro World, the UNIA’s official newspaper,
solely for his own satisfaction. Rather, he intended the report to be for the
newspaper’s fellow readers distributed around the world; across the
USA, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. Having attached the
programme for the Cardiff gathering, Collins impressed that he
hoped it will be inserted in an issue of the ‘World,’ so that our brothers
and sisters may see that we, here in England, are fully awake to the
great new spirit of our people and that our hearts are full to
overflowing of zealous pride.7
1
Negro World (hereafter ‘NW’), 13 August 1921, 2.
2
NW, 3 September 1921, 10.
3
NW, 3 September 1921, 10.
4
NW, 3 September 1921, 10.
5
NW, 3 September 1921, 10.
6
NW, 3 September 1921, 10.
7
NW, 3 September 1921, 10.BLACK POLITICAL WORLDS IN PORT CITIES 3
Collins recognized that, by relaying the news from Cardiff to the
‘World’, he wasn’t simply reporting back to the UNIA’s New York head-
quarters. Instead he was contributing to the knowledge of Garveyites
everywhere, informing his scattered ‘brothers and sisters’ that the move-
ment was making headway even in the most unlikely of places.
Juxtaposed in the Negro World’s ‘U.N.I.A. News’ section to reports from
divisions in ‘Ancon, Panama’, ‘Hamtramck, Michigan’, ‘Kingston,
Jamaica’, and ‘Montreal, Canada’, Collins understood that he was helping
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to demonstrate to the newspaper’s far-flung readers the actual existence
of a ‘Negro World’.8
More than any other twentieth century organization, the UNIA gave
substance to the Pan-African aspiration for a united ‘Negro World’.9
Formed initially in 1914 by Garvey as a self-help organization on Jamaica,
following its 1918 relaunch in New York the UNIA grew rapidly to be-
come ‘by 1921 unquestionably. . . the largest organization of its type in
the history of the race’.10 Alongside 725 chapters in the United States, dur-
ing the organization’s mid-1920s height 271 chapters were active in other
parts of the world, spanning South America, the Caribbean, Africa,
Europe, and even Australia.11 Central to this extraordinary spread was a
vibrant print culture exercised through the Negro World, its international
distribution networks staffed by Black seamen appropriating the ships of
empire and trade to ferry the newspaper below deck.12 Despite the
British, French and United States governments’ efforts to ban its circula-
tion, the Negro World reached all corners of the African diaspora, forming
a ‘global UNIA infrastructure’ by the mid-1920s.13 Although Garveyism
had ceased to be the dominant global Black political movement by the
close of the 1920s, the UNIA continued its work of local community
organizing long into the twentieth century.14 Now iconic figures—
Malcolm X, ‘Queen Mother’ Audley Moore, Jomo Kenyatta to name a
8
NW, 3 September 1921, 10.
9
The best historical survey of the idea of Pan-Africanism is Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism: A
History (London, 2018).
10
Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and
the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Dover, Massachusetts, 1976), 13.
11
Martin, Race First, 15–16.
12
Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early
Twentieth Century America (London, 1998), 71–72. Lara Putnam has emphasized the role of
the British West Indian diaspora in spreading the Negro World. See Lara Putnam, ‘Nothing
Matters but Color: Transnational Circuits, the Interwar Caribbean and the Black
International’, in Michael O. West et al (eds), From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International
since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2009), 107–29.
13
Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and
Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton, NJ, 2014), 77.
14
Remarkably, eleven UNIA divisions apparently remain active across the United States,
the Caribbean, and Central America. See https://www.theunia-acl.com/index.php/divi
sions (as accessed 9 April 2020).4 JAKE THOROLD
few—all share origin stories in Garveyism, each a testament to the depth
of the movement’s impact throughout the African diaspora.15
Fusing an array of intellectual traditions within Black thought,
Garveyism meshed a Pan-African conception of the ‘Negro race’ with a
commitment to the ‘redemption of Africa’ through the replacement of
European imperialism with a Black nation-state or ‘Black Empire’. Racial
economic self-sufficiency, unabashed pride in the history and virtue of
the ‘Negro race’, and a limited emigration of Black people to Africa were
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among the mechanisms identified for achieving these goals.16 Enterprises
such as the Black Star Line steamship company gave these methods sub-
stance, as well as possessing enormous symbolic power. Envisaged as a
fleet of ships ferrying Black-extracted raw materials and Black-produced
products between West Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean,
from 1919 onwards the Black Star Line invited supporters worldwide to
participate as shareholders for $5 a piece. Prior to its bankruptcy the
Black Star Line acquired and operated four ships, all under the command
of sharply uniformed all-Black crews. Simultaneously recalling and refut-
ing the traumas of the Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossings of the Black
Star Line’s ships appeared to Garveyites as a harbinger of a coming biblic-
ally ordained Black redemption: ‘princes shall come out of Egypt;
Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’.17
Marcus Garvey himself possessed close personal ties with Britain.
Before returning to Jamaica, between 1912 and 1914 Garvey worked on
the docks of Cardiff and Liverpool, as well as in odd jobs around
London. From 1935 until his death in 1940, Garvey again lived in
London, where he attempted to revive the UNIA from new West
Kensington headquarters. By then, however, Garvey’s star had waned;
barnstorming speeches to thousands in Harlem’s halls substituted for
Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner soapboxes. Despite Garvey’s own intimacy
with Britain, however, the focus of this article lies beyond his remarkable
but well-documented life.18 Aligning with a major historiographical shift
over the last two decades to emphasize the Garveyite and Garveyism in
place of Garvey himself, attention instead is given to the uncelebrated
characters who sculpted Garvey’s message to align with the exigencies of
working-class Black communities living in the ports of London, Barry,
15
The resonance of Garveyism for anti-imperialist struggles and postcolonial imaginaries
proved particularly strong; members of the Rastafari faith consider Garvey to be a prophet,
while the black star in the centre of the Ghanaian national flag pays tribute to the Black Star
Line.
16
Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity
(Cambridge, MA, 2005), 74–75.
17
Clare Corbould, Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939
(Cambridge, 2009), 26–27.
18
For a biography of Garvey, see Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus
Garvey (London, 2008).BLACK POLITICAL WORLDS IN PORT CITIES 5
Cardiff, and Manchester.19 This decentring of the man in favour of the
movement has proven exceptionally productive, prompting a flurry of
localized studies revealing the richness of Garveyism’s varying manifes-
tations in branches across the USA, the Caribbean, Latin America, and
Africa.20 Overturning earlier characterizations of rank and file Garveyites
as ‘unsophisticated and unlettered masses’ blindly following Garvey’s
dictates, scholarship now emphasizes the autonomy held by local divi-
sions, showing that the content of Garveyism on the ground ‘responded
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to the particular opportunities available in particular places and at
particular times, and flowed from homegrown traditions’.21
How and why Garveyism grew in these variegated conditions remains
a difficult question to answer. The vogue for localism has brought wel-
come dynamism, but has carried a risk that the mechanisms through
which the movement cohered as a whole come to be downplayed.
Ronald Stephens and Adam Ewing have recently recognized this ten-
dency in division-specific Garveyism studies, stressing that the ‘mapping
19
The Manchester UNIA division did not form until 1922, and hence was not represented
at the Cardiff celebrations in 1921. Importantly, scholars working outside of formal academic
institutions have long recognized the significance of the wider movement as distinct from its
leader. See for example: Martin, Race First; Amy Jacques Garvey, Garvey and Garveyism (New
York, 1978); Emory Tolbert, Outpost Garveyism and the UNIA Rank and File, Journal of
Black Studies 5.3 (1975), 233–53; Rupert Lewis and Maureen Warner-Lewis (eds), Garvey:
Africa, Europe and the Americas (Kingston, Jamaica, 1986). For a recent treatment of the rela-
tionship between Garvey and Garveyism, see Adam Ewing, ‘Garvey or Garveyism? Colin
Grant’s Negro with a Hat (2008) and the Search for a New Synthesis in UNIA Scholarship’,
Transition: An International Review, 16/105 (2011), 130–145.
20
An edited collection including studies of Garveyism in the United States, Caribbean,
sub-Saharan Africa and Australia has been recently published: Ronald J. Stephens and
Adam Ewing (eds), Global Garveyism (Gainesville, 2019). Beyond this volume, the literature
on Garveyism at the local level is now so extensive that only a representative sample can be
referenced. For the USA, see: Mary Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism the Universal Negro
Improvement Association in the American South, 1920–1927 (Durham, NC, 2007); and
Claudrena Harold, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942
(New York, 2014). For the Caribbean see: Frank Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and
African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Durham, NC, 2010); Frances Peace
Sullivan, ‘“Forging Ahead” in Banes, Cuba: Garveyism in a United Fruit Company Town’,
New West Indian Guide, 88/3&4 (2014), 231–61; and Adam Ewing, ‘Caribbean Labour
Politics in the Age of Garvey, 1918-1938’, Race and Class, 55/23 (2013), 23–45; in Latin
America, see: Carla Burnett, ‘“Unity is Strength”: Labour, Race, Garveyism and the 1920
Panama Canal Strike, The Global South’, 6/2 (2012), 39–64; Roland Harpelle, ‘Cross
Currents in the Western Hemisphere: Marcus Garvey and the UNIA in Central America’,
Caribbean Studies 31/1 (2003), 35–73; and Frederick Douglass Opie, ‘Garveyism and Labor
Organisation on the Caribbean Coast of Guatemala, 1920-1921’, The Journal of African
American History, 94/2 (2009), 153–71; for Africa, see: Ewing, The Age of Garvey; Michael O.
West, ‘Seeds are Sown: the Garvey Movement in Zimbabwe in the Interwar Years’,
International Journal of African Historical Studies, 35 (2002), 335–62; and Robert T. Vinson,
The Americans are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa
(Athens, 2012).
21
‘Unsophisticated and unlettered masses’ comes from Edmund Cronon, Black Moses: The
Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison, 1955), 203;
Ewing, The Age of Garvey, 1.6 JAKE THOROLD
of transnational phenomena requires more than simply identifying far-
flung points of connection.’22 By exploring Garveyism in Britain, the
activities and strategies through which grassroots Garveyites participated
in and contributed to the wider global movement can come into better
focus. Not simply introverted appropriators of Garvey’s ideas, through
their travels and writings Garveyites in Britain participated in diasporic
conversations which influenced decisions made in the UNIA’s Harlem
heartlands. This agency also cultivated relationships between disparate
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grassroots Garveyites, forging the diasporic linkages which formed the
lifeblood of the Garveyism movement. This interpretation recognizes that
Garveyism was most successful when local and global conditions aligned,
where the struggles of ordinary people were given elevated meaning by
the threads connecting people toiling on the docks of Cardiff with artisans
in Accra and farmers in Florida. As Collins wrote of the Garveyites who
congregated in Cardiff, ‘we fully realise that in unity of action lies our ul-
timate success as a race’.23
How does this discussion of cosmopolitanism in studies of Garveyism
tally with the concerns of Black British history writing? Heeding Paul
Gilroy’s famous call for an ‘intercultural’ approach to ‘the Black Atlantic’,
transnational studies of Black life in Britain have been in vogue of late.24
But as exemplified by two leading books in this vein—Marc Matera’s
‘Black London’ and Kennetta Hammond Perry’s ‘London is the Place for
Me’—the focus of much of this new work has centred on the capital, priv-
ileging a cast of well-travelled activists, intellectuals, and musicians.25
With Jacqueline Nassy-Brown’s work on Black Liverpudlians and Kieran
Connell’s recent contribution on Birmingham’s ‘Black Handsworth’ as
notable exceptions, diasporic Black political cultures beyond the capital
have not received this renewed transnational historiographical atten-
tion.26 While older classics such as Peter Fryer’s ‘Staying Power’ and Ron
Ramdin’s ‘The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain’ did much to
recover the long histories of Black communities across Britain, the
22
Ronald J. Stephens and Adam Ewing, ‘Introduction: Global Garveyism’, in Stephens
and Ewing (eds), Global Garveyism, 8.
23
NW, 3 September 1921, 10.
24
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, 1993). Rob
Waters, Thinking Black: Britain, 1964-1985 (Berkeley, 2018). Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of
Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London (New York, 2014). Hakim Adi,
Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa, and the Diaspora, 1919-
1939 (London, 2013).
25
Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth
Century (Oakland, 2014). Kennetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons,
Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford, 2015).
26
Jacqueline Nassy-Brown, Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black
Liverpool (Princeton, 2005). Kieran Connell, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (Berkeley,
2019). James Cantres’ recent book Blackening Britain also adds to this literature: see James
Cantres, Blackening Britain: Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization (Lanham,
MD, 2021).BLACK POLITICAL WORLDS IN PORT CITIES 7
impetus behind these works was to stake claims to inclusion within
decidedly national, rather than internationalist, historical narratives.27
This foregrounding continues to mark recent work, even on subjects
which fit uneasily within national framings; reviewing Ray Costello’s
book on ‘seafarers of African descent on British ships’, for example, Laura
Tabili observes its aspiration to offer ‘a compensatory history that restores
black people to British history. . . arguing for their centrality to the nation-
al story.’28
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In other explorations of Britain’s interwar seafaring communities,
moreover, focus has often been limited to political violence, with the race
riots that swept through British ports in 1919 looming large. The result is
a simplification. As showcased by the title of Jacqueline Jenkinson’s book
on the 1919 riots, Black subaltern lives are reduced to a tripartite of ‘riots,
racism, and resistance’.29 While London fizzed with Black music, intellec-
tualism, and politics, experiences elsewhere are flattened to the ‘iron gir-
der of racism and xenophobia’, which Panikos Panayi considers definitive
of being Black in Britain since 1800.30 By contrast, the story of Garveyism
in Britain as it is told here illustrates the need to widen the lenses of Black
British history to reveal the rich ‘political worlds’ lived in by subaltern
Black people living in coastal communities around Britain.31 This
included engagement with a diasporic Black public sphere through the
pages of the Negro World, but also immersion in aural and performance
cultures which formed central features of Garveyism’s diasporic project.
In sum, the story of Garveyism reveals a sophisticated political culture
among working-class seafaring communities in Britain, deeply invested
in a global vision promising a better future for members of the African
diaspora. This is a history of agency and invention yet to receive its
historiographical due.
27
Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People on Britain (London, 1984). Ron
Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (London, 1987). Other classic works
in what I term the ‘recovery tradition’ of Black British history include Beverley Bryan, Stella
Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London,
1985), Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain: 1900-1960 (London, 1998), and, more recently,
David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London, 2016). There have also been
important works in the ‘recovery tradition’ focusing on particular places outside of London,
including Ray Costello, Black Liverpool: The Early History of Britain’s Oldest Black Community,
1730-1918 (Liverpool, 2001) and Alan Llwyd, Cymru Ddu: Black Wales (Wrexham, 2005).
28
Laura Tabili, Review of Black Salt: Seafarers of African Descent on British Ships by Ray
Costello (Liverpool, 2012), New West Indian Guide 88/1&2 (2014), 107–09.
29
Jacqueline Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain
(Liverpool, 2009).
30
For an evocation of the vibrancy of Black life in London during the 1920s and 1930s, see
Matera, Black London. Panikos Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural
Racism since 1800 (Harlow, 2010), 24.
31
‘Political worlds’ refers to Steven Hahn’s work unveiling the ‘hidden’ political cultures
of rural Black communities in the USA. Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and
Freedom (Cambridge, MA, 2009).8 JAKE THOROLD
It will not escape notice that the Negro World is relied on extensively in
this article . This reflects the archive as we know it today. The Negro
World is close to the only available source material for the British divi-
sions of the UNIA. We have no reports from the Barry Dock division,
while the Cardiff division sent just three. Although the Manchester and
London divisions were more prolific, reports are written exclusively by
men, and often consist of little more than a list of activities which had
taken place at the particular meeting under discussion. But even these
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scant reports offer tantalizing glimpses into the lives and motivations of
those who pledged their allegiance to Garveyism on the quays of Britain’s
ports. When read carefully, the Negro World can elucidate what it was to
be a Garveyite in some of the movement’s most distant outposts.
Formulaic reports offer slim pickings on the personalities of Garveyites in
Britain, for example, but yet reveal what these characters considered most
important for their scattered fellow readers of the Negro World to know.
***
The UNIA’s core-periphery dynamic
The number of UNIA members in Britain was small, likely never exceed-
ing one hundred in any of the four divisions. In the Negro World reports
of London UNIA division meetings between 1921 and 1926, just thirty-
two names are mentioned; for the Manchester division, there are just six-
teen. Although the convention of such reports was to name only speakers
and senior officials, meaning that overall membership and attendance
would have been bigger, these were not large congregations. The demo-
graphics of Britain at the time make this unsurprising; estimates of Black
people in Britain indicate that the total number of Africans and
Caribbeans in Britain was around 30,000.32 Although overall Black popu-
lation figures for the city were not collected, the Cardiff police stated the
number of ‘Alien and British Coloured Seamen’ based in the city in 1921
to be 952.33 As smaller ports, the numbers for Manchester and Barry are
likely to have been even smaller. The Black population in London—which
included students, intellectuals and musicians along with working class
seafarers—was larger, but likely still only several thousand in a city of
over seven million.
The Cardiff police’s interest in numbers of seamen specifically indicates
that—particularly beyond London—Black life in Britain was tied to the
ocean. Estimates suggest that between 1900 and 1930 non-white men
32
Stephen Bourne, Britain’s Black Community and the Great War (London, 2014). These fig-
ures are Bourne’s estimates, although it is hoped the release of the 1921 census in 2022 will
allow for greater precision.
33
The National Archives, London, HO45/11897/332087/24, Cardiff Immigration Officer
S. A. Wilkes to the Home Office, April 1921.BLACK POLITICAL WORLDS IN PORT CITIES 9
constituted a third of the labour force on British merchant ships, numbering
some 40,000 to 60,000 at any given time.34 The Black people living on land in
British ports similarly had eyes set out to sea, being commonly employed as
dockhands and stevedores. In Cardiff, the Black population was clustered in
Butetown, a stone’s throw from the city’s docks, while in London Black
working-class individuals lived overwhelmingly in the East End’s docklands
areas.35 Garveyism thrived around the world in coastal communities such as
these; the comings and goings of Black sailors provided frequent updates of
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news and print, while also seeming to substantiate Garveyism’s message of
the global interconnectedness of Black people. Garveyites accordingly recog-
nized ports as fertile ground for new recruits. Reporting from ‘on board R.
M. S. P. “Tamar”’ to the Negro World on a meeting of the London UNIA div-
ision in April 1922, for example, T.B. Gordon detailed a speech he had made
at which ‘I pointed to my hearers the need for support of the grand organ-
ization, especially in the East End of London where we were all working
quays.’36 That Gordon wrote his letter from on board a ship is suggestive of
the geographical transience of Black life in British ports, as is the presence in
both Butetown and London’s East End of multiple boarding houses catering
to non-white sailors.37 Frequent comings and goings are hinted at in the
British UNIA divisions’ dispatches to the Negro World; of the thirty-two
names contained in the London division’s reports just eleven appear more
than once.
Black people faced considerable prejudice in British port cities. Banned
from institutions such as the National Union of Seamen, they were often sub-
ject to racially discriminatory hiring practices. Writing in the Negro World in
October 1924, a ‘London correspondent’ reported that ‘the shipping compa-
nies are discriminating against carrying black men as sailors’, noting that
‘this has caused untold hardships on the Negroes in England, and the 4000
in London in particular, the majority of whom are seamen.’38 Racial violence
was a feature of Black life, most notably in 1919 when white mobs attacked
Black residents in nine port cities including London, Manchester, Cardiff
and Barry.39 Garvey himself cited the violence as evidence of the
34
Laura Tabili, ‘The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain: The
Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order 1925’, Journal of British Studies, 33/1
(1994), 68.
35
In 1919, for example, the Cardiff Chief Constable reported to the Home Office that ‘the
coloured men comprised principally West Indians, West Africans, Somalis, Arabs and a few
Indians. They live in boarding houses kept by coloured masters in an area bounded on the
north by Bridge Street, the east by the Taff Vale Railway not very distant, on the west by the
Glamorganshire Canal, and on the south by Patrick Street.’ The National Archives, London,
HO45/11017/377969, folio 71, Chief Constable, Cardiff, to the Home Office, 1919.
36
NW, 10 June 1922, 9.
37
Jacqueline Jenkinson, Colonial, Refugee, and Allied Civilians After the First World War
(Abingdon, 2020), chapter 1.
38
NW, October 20th 1924, 2.
39
Jenkinson, Black 1919.10 JAKE THOROLD
impossibility of ‘Negro’ people being accepted in white countries, raging to
a New York audience in August 1919 that ‘[t]hey mobbed us in Liverpool, in
London and Manchester. The English in Wales (sic) stopped the funeral pro-
cession of a West Indian negro, smashed the coffin, cut off the head of the
dead man and made a football of it.’40 In the face of violence and pervasive
housing discrimination, patterns of residential segregation proliferated. As
late as 1948, sociologist Kenneth Little wrote of Cardiff’s Black population
that they ‘inhabit an area within the city limits of about one square mile in
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extent’, and emphasized ‘their racial, psychological, and geographical separ-
ation from the rest of the city’.41
Nonetheless, multiracial spaces did exist in Britain’s in port cities. In
Cardiff, for example, in 1924 the Western Mail newspaper reported on the
formation of a ‘multiracial seamen’s organization, led by a committee
composed of three white, three West Indian, and three Somali seamen.’42
Garveyism in Britain similarly cautions against depictions of ‘Black’ and
‘white’ as monolithic entities necessarily in conflict with one another.43
During an October 1921 dispute over the eligibility of a ‘prominent
colored business man in the city’ for an elected position within the
London UNIA division, for example, the Negro World reported that the
complainant Mr. Arnold Ward had ‘said that he was not pressing the
point concerning intermarriage’.44 Although intermarriage was clearly
taboo to the extent of being a ‘point that could be pressed’, the publicness
of this relationship nonetheless aligns with research by David Holland
and Laura Tabili demonstrating how cross-racial friendships and roman-
tic relationships forged during the interwar period facilitated both the
mobility of non-white immigrants as well as their integration into British
society.45
Most tangibly, mutual aid functions carried out by UNIA divisions
were an important feature of membership at the local level. Writing to the
Negro World in November 1921, for example, the secretary of the London
division Richard Howard told that ‘a pathetic incident on the agenda for
the evening was the reading of a letter of thanks from a widow, thanking
the organisation for their prompt aid given her on behalf of her husband,
40
M. Garvey, ‘Speech to UNIA Meeting at Carnegie Hall’, New York City, 25 August
1919. Republished in Robert Hill (ed.), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement
Association Papers, Vol I (Los Angeles, 1983), 501.
41
Kenneth Little, Negroes in Britain: A Study of Racial Relations in English Society (London,
1948), 47.
42
Western Mail, 24 November 1924, 8.
43
This point is indebted to work by Laura Tabili. See Laura Tabili, Global Migrants, Local
Culture: Natives and Newcomers in Provincial England, 1841-1939 (Basingstoke, 2011).
44
NW, 12 November 1921, 10.
45
David Holland, ‘The Social Networks of South Asian Migrants in the Sheffield Area
During the Early Twentieth Century’, Past & Present, 236/1 (2017), 243–79. Laura Tabili,
‘Women “of a Very Low Type”: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Imperial Britain’, in Laura L.
Frader and Sonya O. Rose (eds), Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, 1996), 165–92.BLACK POLITICAL WORLDS IN PORT CITIES 11
the late H. Robinson.’46 Operating in tandem with Garvey’s grand eman-
cipatory programme, Garveyism also embraced practical local organizing
that made material differences to lives lived in trying conditions. In
Manchester, community self-help functions went beyond staving off total
destitution. A Negro World report in April 1924 detailed that ‘it had been
decided to hold meetings twice a week in order to give the children a
chance to acquire a knowledge of shorthand, piano-playing, and needle-
work, etc.’47 Organizing of this kind offered a bulwark against impover-
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ishment and sense of community in foreign environments, while also
embracing the self-improvement ethos regularly encouraged by Garvey
in his Negro World articles.
Far from passive vessels unthinkingly carrying out Garvey’s dictates,
however, the UNIA divisions in London, Cardiff, and Manchester each
possessed a distinctive character. Never imported from Harlem whole-
sale, grassroots Garveyites found Garveyism to be a malleable substance,
capable of shape-shifting to suit the personalities and preferences of those
involved. Letters from the Cardiff branch suggest a Garveyism particular-
ly infused with the language of Christianity.48 An August 1921 report in
the Negro World from M. Williams, the ‘chaplain’ of the Cardiff division,
told that ‘Marcus Garvey is sounding a loud trumpet, awakening
Negroes everywhere in the world over—peasants, philosophers, doctors,
princes. The majority had been lulled to sleep on the sands of time by the
false teachings of the white man. . . in his misrepresentation of the
Bible.’49 Similar to how Garveyism acquired millenarian connotations for
Christian revivalist movements in Southern Africa prophesising Garvey’s
banishment of white colonial rule from the African continent, Garvey was
seen by Williams in almost messianic terms; ‘Africa calls us to deliver the
land from its chains’, Williams wrote, before predicting that Garvey
would ‘lead our people out of Babylon’.50 In preparation, Williams
asserted that it was ‘up to the coloured churches and their ministers to
get back to the Bible, the truth, the doctrine of God, and teach it and bring
the colored people out of Babylon, for she is fallen and God is calling out
in these words: Come out of her, My people.’51 While Biblical passages
promising that ‘princes shall come out of Egypt’ and ‘Ethiopia shall soon
stretch forth its hands unto God’ were commonplace in much Garveyite
46
NW, 12 November 1921, 7.
47
NW, 19 April 1924, 8.
48
For the classic account of the role of Christianity in Garveyism, see Randall Burkett,
Garveyism as a Religious Movement: The Institutionalization of a Black Civil Religion (Metuchen,
NJ, 1978).
49
NW, 13 August 1921, 13.
50
Adam Ewing, ‘Kimbanguism, Garveyism, and Rebellious Rumor Making in Post-
World War I Africa’, Souls, 20/2 (2018), 152: NW, 13 August 1921, 13.
51
NW, 13 August 1921, 13.12 JAKE THOROLD
discourse, Williams’ letter indicates that the Cardiff UNIA division incor-
porated a particularly strong religiosity.
Apparently less enamoured than their Cardiff comrades in the Biblical
promises of the two countries, Egypt and Ethiopia nonetheless both fea-
tured in the UNIA’s London division. Describing an October 1921 meeting,
Richard Howard reported to the Negro World that ‘among the officers
elected were members of the race from West Africa, the West Indies, North
and South America, Canada, Egypt and Abyssinia’, before specifying that
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‘Mr Negmil Din Ahmed (Egypt) was appointed one of the first members of
the Advisory Board and Tesfarchannis Teddras (Abyssinia) a member of
the Trustee Board.’52 While the UNIA’s most prominent congregations on
the United States’ east coast were staffed almost exclusively by Caribbean
immigrants, the inclusion of people from Egypt and Ethiopia in the
London division is testament to the breadth of the movement’s appeal fur-
ther afield.53 Similarly, the London and Manchester divisions both wel-
comed white visitors, despite Garvey’s regular paeans denouncing their
evils. A letter from London to the Negro World in August 1926 told of a
meeting with ‘158 white visitors present’ and at which Mr C.W. Burns—
identified as ‘a white friend’—‘addressed us for three quarters of an
hour. . . at the end of his address the place was rapt with applause.’54
Similarly, in September 1923, the Manchester division reported that ‘large
numbers of whites and Negroes attend the meetings each nights, and
sometimes take part in the program.’55 That the Manchester and London
divisions felt comfortable reporting the attendance of white people to the
Negro World—knowing that people with different views as to the involve-
ment of white people would be reading—is testament to the confidence of
grassroots Garveyites in their local UNIA divisions. Garveyites in Britain,
like their counterparts elsewhere, were critically engaged actors, negotiat-
ing a complex process of rearticulating Garvey and the UNIA’s messaging
in ways that best suited their needs and desires.
Grassroots autonomy, however, did not mean disconnection. The most
direct method through which local divisions influenced the UNIA’s
broader direction was through sending representatives to New York.
Although the Cardiff, Barry, and London divisions had been unable to
send a representative to the 1921 Second Annual International
Convention of Negroes in Harlem, among the delegates for the following
year’s event was Richard Memard, of the ‘London Division.’56 Memard
52
NW, 12 November 1921, 7.
53
Robert Hill, ‘Introduction’, in Hill (ed.), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro
Improvement Association Papers, Vol I, xliv.
54
NW, 21 August 1926, 8.
55
NW, 6 October 1923, 5.
56
‘Delegates to the 1922 Convention Listed by Divisions’, in Robert Hill (ed.), The Marcus
Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Volume II (Los Angeles, 1983),
1075.BLACK POLITICAL WORLDS IN PORT CITIES 13
was not in New York to just rubber-stamp Garvey’s desires or to stand by
as witness. Rather he went to shape the UNIA’s agenda. Commenting on
Garvey’s controversial meeting with the Ku Klux Klan earlier in 1922, an
undercover USA government agent reported Memard as saying ‘that
Garvey had made a mistake in trying to handle everything himself as if
he had trusted others, he would have got better advice and the matter
would not have gone so far.’57 Memard’s intervention intimates that
grassroots Garveyites were not simply Garvey’s sycophants. That, as
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Memard told the agent, ‘the organization was sending men all over the
country to inform the Negroes that Garvey’s visit to the Klan was not
intended to be harmful to the Negroes but rather to help them’ is suggest-
ive that critiques from the grassroots were not ignored, but could shift
central UNIA policy.58 Memard’s willingness to publicly criticize Garvey
is evidence enough that the relationship between leader and follower was
not simply one of obeisance.
Limiting the metric of grassroots Garveyites’ influence beyond their
localities to solely impact on policy emanating from New York would,
however, be to overlook a cat’s cradle of translocal threads woven by
local actors upon which the entire movement was built. Garveyism’s
mass appeal derived not only from its political platform, but was also de-
pendent on a diasporic consciousness which convinced people of African
descent living in one place that they were connected with others living
elsewhere. While indebted to Garvey’s initial vision, this ‘way of seeing’
could not be animated in Harlem, but had to be built and sustained piece
by piece through writings, travels, and imaginations. As Ewing has recog-
nized, ‘what was most important about Garveyism was not the bombast’
of Garvey and the mass parades or shipping projects he sponsored, but
‘the engagement of its proponents in a sustained and more informal
project of organizing, networking, and consciousness raising.’59
In this context, travels taken by British Garveyites to different local
divisions around the world represented not simply individual meetings,
but the knitting together of the grassroots beyond the immediate purview
of Harlem. A March 1922 report to the Negro World from the UNIA’s
branch in Colon, a small town in Panama, illustrated how Garveyites in
Britain contributed, the author describing a meeting the previous month
at which ‘Mr T.B. Gordon from the London division paid the above
named chapter a visit and delivered a most stirring address.’60 Colon
57
‘Report by Special Employee Andrew M. Battle, 9th-12th August 1922’ in Robert Hill
(ed.), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol II (Los
Angeles, 1983), 840.
58
‘Report by Special Employee Andrew’.
59
Ewing, The Age of Garvey, 5.
60
NW, 4 March 1922, 10.14 JAKE THOROLD
seemingly wasn’t the only UNIA branch that Gordon visited.
Apparently, he informed his Panamanian audience ‘of the good work
that the U.N.I.A is doing in London and in Bermuda, B.W.I. He also told
of his travel abroad in the interest of this great movement of the
U.N.I.A.’61 A further letter to the Negro World from the Bermuda UNIA
division indicates that Gordon was back on the move in the Caribbean
two years later, the author reporting of a recent meeting at which ‘Major
Gordon of the U.A.L. and member of the London, England, Division of
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the U.N.I.A. was then asked to stand.’62 Never considering his work as
limited to London, Gordon understood that Garveyism depended on con-
necting locality to locality, on the construction of the architecture for an
African diaspora.
Gordon’s itinerations weren’t particularly unusual among Garveyites
based in Britain. In May 1922, for example, John Actie of ‘Dock Cardiff’
wrote to the Negro World to report on ‘what I saw going on in West
Africa’, while in August 1925, the Oakland, California UNIA division
told the newspaper of ‘the speaker of the day, Prof. Barclay of London,
England.’63 In July 1924, the Montreal, Canada UNIA division reminded
the newspaper of the UNIA’s mutual aid functions, telling of ‘Mr Tom
Jacks, of 6 Fakum Street, Cheatnam, Manchester, England’, a ‘native of
British West Guiana’ who had found himself on the division’s ‘sick list’.64
Gordon, Actie, Barclay, and Jacks’ travels to the Caribbean, West Africa,
and Canada all contributed to the tapestry of diasporic connectedness
underpinning the entire Garveyism project. Then reported in the Negro
World, these meetings became evidence for all readers of the newspaper
worldwide to see that the ‘scattered race’ was finding ways to congregate;
physically substantiating the ties that pulled the ‘imagined community’
of ‘our people’ together across divisions of land, sea, and national
borders.65
The position of Britain’s ports as nodes on the well-traversed maritime
networks upon which Garveyism flourished is further indicated by the
story of ‘Mr Brooks’, a guest speaker at a UNIA meeting held in October
1923 by Garveyites in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. In a glowing re-
port from the Negro World’s attendant ‘reporter’, Brooks, a ‘forceful and
powerful speaker’, was heralded as
a member who believes in spreading the doctrine of Garveyism wher-
ever he goes. He took the ‘truth’ to British Guiana in 1920 and was
nearly imprisoned for preaching the doctrine of the Universal Negro
61
NW, 4 March 1922, 10.
62
NW, 17 May 1924, 8.
63
NW, 6 May 1922, 4. NW, 22 August 1925, 6.
64
NW, 5 July 1924, 9.
65
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism (London, 1983).BLACK POLITICAL WORLDS IN PORT CITIES 15
Improvement Association in that country. He sailed to Barbados and
encouraged the members of Westbury and High Street Divisions to
hold fast. From there he went to Liverpool, England, but did not re-
main in Liverpool for long. Hearing that there was a division in the
West End of London, he proceeded there and gave excellent service
during his sojourn in England. Leaving London, he went to Hamilton,
Bermuda. . . From Bermuda, he went to Kingston, Jamaica, there he set
the Liberty Hall on fire and earned the name of the “Belching
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Cannon”.66
While it is unclear whether his apparently less savoury talents were ever
called upon, Brooks’ appearance in the ‘West End’ suggests that his time
in London coincided with the division’s temporary relocation to ‘107
Charlotte Street, London, W.1’ in November 1921.67 Specifying that the
‘description[s] of the different Divisions which he visited were graphic
and impressive,’ the Nassau reporter recognized Brooks’ purpose: to
emphasize linkages and commonalities shared between communities of
grassroots Garveyites living in wildly different geographical locales.
The Negro World and the diasporic Black public sphere
Much more than a vessel for conveying information handed down by
Garvey, the Negro World’s publishing of reports on the activities of
Garveyite divisions around the world—juxtaposing them to one another
on the page—provided weekly proof of the connectedness of Garveyites
everywhere. As the activities of Garveyites in Britain demonstrate, the
Negro World served a central role as a regular dose of information from
Harlem and beyond, but also as a precipitate for cultures of orality and
debate within divisions. Far from just victims of violence, poverty, and
discrimination, members of the African diaspora living in Britain’s ports
were intricately engaged in conversations unfolding across oceans,
plugged in through the copies of the Negro World that escaped border
officials’ attentions, finding their ways into the hands of grateful readers.
Alongside immigration restrictions introduced throughout the British
Empire during the 1920s and the racially discriminatory 1924 Johnson-
Reed Act in the USA, the British government after the First World War
created the beginnings of a bureaucratized system intended to restrict the
movement of non-white persons into Britain.68 The culmination of a suc-
cession of immigration restrictions passed in 1905, 1914, and 1919, the
1925 Coloured Alien Seaman Order formalized a sentiment—shot
through with contemporaneous discourses of eugenics and social
66
NW, 20 October 1923, 5.
67
NW, 12 November 1921, 7.
68
Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2013), 82.16 JAKE THOROLD
Darwinism—that the boundaries of inclusion within the British nation-
state should be drawn around those with heritage on the British archipel-
ago and, most importantly, white skin.69 Requiring ‘coloured’ seamen
arriving in Britain to prove their British ‘imperial citizenship’—meant to
bequeath the same free mobility rights to all subjects of the British em-
pire—or be designated as ‘aliens’, the 1925 act was passed ‘in full know-
ledge that few sailors, Black or white, carried passports, using instead the
continuous discharge book which contained a record of previous voy-
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ages.’70 Garveyites in Britain felt the legislation’s ramifications, the
London division complaining to the Negro World in July 1926 that ‘the
Alien (Colored) Seamen’s Restriction Act does its evil work under the
“alien” pretext.’71
In defiance of this exclusion, the Negro World instead offered inclusion; a
common status as discriminated-against subjects but also membership of an
emancipatory vision promising its participants political structures of their
own. As Lara Putnam has emphasized, ‘the emergence of a circum-
Caribbean/transatlantic black press gave migrants a panoramic view of the
rise of anti-black discrimination worldwide’, a shared experience which
made essential a search for alternatives.72 The Negro World offered both the
political programme and diasporic community with which to imagine a dif-
ferent future. Garvey’s weekly prophecies in the Negro World promising the
redemption of Africa through tangible projects—such as the Black Star Line
shipping company—became symbols of hope, harbingers of a coming Black
modernity in which people of African descent would become participants in
global politics on their own terms. It was for this reason that when at a
February 1925 meeting the London division were read ‘the address deliv-
ered by the president-general Hon. Marcus Garvey on Sunday, January 25,
on the launching and sailing of the S.S. Booker T. Washington’, ‘emotions
could not be hidden’ according to a Negro World report.73
Just as important as Garvey’s speeches and projects, however, was the
community of fellow activists around the globe of which the Negro World
provided a weekly reminder. Having their letters juxtaposed to similar
accounts received from UNIA divisions based in the eclectic pockets to
which Garveyism reached—‘Wheeling, West Virginia’ and ‘Central
Miranda, Cuba’ in the above article’s case (Figure 1)—permitted
Garveyites in Britain to literally picture their activities and identities as
existing alongside those of a myriad of other grassroots Garveyites over-
seas. The act of receiving a newspaper which proved its globetrotting
69
Laura Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial
Britain (Ithaca, 1994), 116.
70
Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’, 121.
71
NW, 3 July 1926, 8. NW, 3 July 1926, 2.
72
Putnam, Radical Moves, 5.
73
NW, 14 March 1925, 8.BLACK POLITICAL WORLDS IN PORT CITIES 17
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Figure 1.
A ‘Negro World’ within the Negro World. NW, 14 March 1925, 8.
credentials with each edition offered a weekly proof that Garveyism pos-
sessed the technologies and techniques able to unite the ‘scattered race’.
For its far-flung readers in Britain, the Negro World provided an expansive
‘imagined community’; the basis of a diasporically shared identity that
unified people struggling here with people struggling elsewhere in a pol-
itical programme which the newspaper itself seemed to demonstrate was
succeeding. Ensuring the regular receipt of the Negro World thus became18 JAKE THOROLD
essential, not just for political communication, but as a central resource
for the sustenance of diasporic identity. As Putnam astutely observes of
the Negro World, ‘each paper added more than just eight pages once a
week: it connected its community to a network of debate that spanned
the Atlantic and cut across boundaries of empire, language, even race.’74
Richard Howard, secretary of the London division was aware of this too,
observing in a November 1921 Negro World report that it was ‘important
that the Negro World be widely read’, and promising that ‘[c]opies would
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be obtained readily’.75
Orryson N’tone Deibol’s apprehension by the British police at
Liverpool’s docks in December 1921 intimates at the centrality of smug-
gling to the Negro World’s distribution. Described by authorities as a ‘pol-
itical negro subject’, after disembarking from the SS Onitsha from
Madeira, Deibol was found to be in possession of ‘a copy of the pro-
gramme of the African Blood Brotherhood Association’ and seemed ‘to
be a member of the African Blood Brotherhood Association and the
Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities
League, of which Marcus Garvey is president.’76 Deibol apparently even-
tually ‘admitted that he was a delegate and associate of Garvey’, with his
subsequent fate left unrevealed.77 While it was not the Negro World that
Deibol carried, his identification with Garveyism and efforts to carry
other ‘seditious materials’ into Britain suggests that sailors’ smuggling in
part facilitated the newspaper’s circulation. Reflecting in a January 1924
edition of the Negro World on the plight of the Black seamen in Liverpool
following the 1919 riots, Hubert J. Cox, a Negro World correspondent,
reminisced that ‘it was during a trip to the Admiralty in aid of these men
that the Negro World first came into my possession and my acquaintance
with our leader began’.78 By transporting the Negro World in sea-battered
steamers—against the wishes of imperial powers who sought to stymie
its spread—sailors like Deibol and those encountered by Cox nourished
the diasporic Garveyism movement.79
74
Putnam, Radical Moves, 134.
75
NW, 12 November 1921, 7.
76
The National Archives, London, CO/323/883, folios 367–70, ‘“ African Blood
Brotherhood Association”, Letter from Director of Intelligence, Scotland House to
Undersecretary of State for the Colonies, 19th December 1921’. The African Blood
Brotherhood (ABB) was formed in 1919 by Cyril Briggs, and adopted a Marxist position
advocating complete racial separation. After initially attempting to organize within the
UNIA, from 1921 onwards Briggs entered into an increasingly hostile feud with Garvey,
being highly critical of Garvey’s capitalist approach and willingness to meet with white su-
premacist organizations including the Ku Klux Klan. See James, Holding Aloft the Banner of
Ethiopia, chapter 5.
77
See note above.
78
NW, 5 January 1924, 2.
79
The British government officially banned the circulation of the Negro World in both the
Caribbean and Africa. See The National Archives, London, CO 323/1518/12, ‘Marcus
Garvey: Universal Negro Improvement Association’.You can also read
