Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (review)

Colin Grant's new biography of Marcus Mosiah Garvey is a dyspeptic view of history's most famous black nationalist, written with considerable literary flair and marred by occasional misstatements, some questionable historical judgments, and an overwhelming reliance on the accounts of Garvey's many enemies in the United States government and at large. Grant shows us a surprisingly negative portrait of the great black nationalist as a conservative and even a reactionary, who infamously met with the leader of the KKK and less famously supported employers over labor unions, acquiesced to Jim Crow, and claimed to have invented fascism. The book focuses on Garvey's two marriages, his organizational struggles, and his failed business venture, the Black Star Line, the enterprise that landed him in the penitentiary and got him expelled from the United States.

The intentionally provocative and crass title of the book is an irreverent and unfortunate choice; a reference to one of Garvey's best known and most often criticized qualities, his taste for pomp and circumstance. By focusing on the hat, the author seems to have missed Garvey's head. According to Grant, "anyone with common sense" would agree with Du Bois about the utter futility of Garvey's program (366). The author seldom takes Garvey seriously as a thinker and hardly explores his ideas or his voluminous writings and speeches. Similarly, in contrast to the best traditions of social history, Grant ignores Garvey's followers, telling us virtually nothing about who was attracted to Garvey and why. Indeed, his thesis is precisely that Garveyites' bond with their leader "was not rational; it was emotional," (323). Other authors have done a better job of investigating both Garvey's ideas and the many rational reasons why millions of black people in fact chose to follow him.

Perhaps Grant's failure to explore such issues is a result of his unfounded and unfootnoted belief that "slavery had not been the best preparation for industrial, commercial and intellectual endeavour: it induced a moral torpor, and though the spell had been broken it might take generations before the curse was lifted. Garvey understood this and the near-unrealisable desire to be just as good as the white man that risked rendering the black man a mere mimic of the real thing," (194). Such a claim ignores the vast literature on slavery, slave resistance, enslaved commercial activity and enslaved creativity, while advancing a suspect notion of "moral torpor." Here and elsewhere, Grant, a journalist with the BBC, evinces a lack of familiarity with relevant historical background literature, although he makes frequent use of the multi-volume Garvey Papers. "Apart from the magnificent churches," Grant asserts, dubiously, "there was no entrée to grandeur in Negro life," (184), ignoring African American fraternal orders, spirituals, jazz, blues, poetry, and letters, let alone the more prosaic experience of grandeur in Harlem nightclubs or 1920s movie palaces.

Other errors are less significant but still jarring: the author frequently refers to W.E.B. Du Bois as "William Du Bois," and claims that Freemason Prince Hall, who died in 1807, was the founder of the Shriners, when that order's white and black branches were actually founded in 1872 and 1893, respectively.

Grant's work is a better guide to Garvey's times than to Garvey himself, and it contains long and well-crafted, occasionally lyrical, passages on Garvey's contemporaries and on the era as a whole. Yet even at the level of craft, this work shows numerous examples of repetition and at times follows narrative eddies that double back upon themselves or turn into dead ends.

In sum, the book provides an entertaining introduction to Marcus Garvey's rise, struggles, and fall, but readers who want to discover why he held such appeal to so many will have to go beyond the hat.