Strange Bedfellows: The Curious Courtship Black Nationalists And White Supremacists

By Paul  Lee

 

[Originally published, in slightly different form, in The Michigan Citizen (Highland Park), Feb. 24-March 2, 2002]

 

It might seem surprising that black nationalists and white supremacists could find common ground across the yawning chasm of America’s racial divide.

 

However, this ironic association has a long, strange history that dates back at least to the early 1920s and involved the two prototypical exponents of these philosophies—Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest black nationalist movement in modern times, and a newly resurrected and powerful Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

 

In an era of European and Asian empires, Garvey called for “Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad.” He sought to unite black people in the West with those on the African continent to create a powerful black nationality—one that would be, as he declared in 1922, “strong enough to lend protection to the members of our race scattered all over the world, and to compel the respect of the nations and races of the earth.”

However, in June of that year, the UNIA leader “committed his most grievous error,” according to Garvey scholar Ted Vincent in his groundbreaking 1971 revisionist history, Black Power and the Garvey Movement.

 

He met with Edward Young Clarke, the acting imperial wizard of the KKK, during a trip to Atlanta, Ga.

 

Modern Black Nationalism : From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan by William L. Van Deburg (Editor)

For his part, Garvey saw this as a responsible and, indeed, courageous act by the leader of a worldwide black movement whose members were daily exposed to the dangers of the robbed and hooded Klan in the South and the blue uniformed and three-piece-suited version in the North.

 

Moreover, as he explained to UNIA meetings a month later, he believed that the Klan was “really the invisible government of the United States of America” and represented, “if not in membership, the spirit of nearly every well-thinking white American.”

 

Garvey publicly agreed with the Klan’s view that America was a “white man’s country.” Further, he applauded the Klan’s position on “social equality,” declaring that the UNIA was just as strongly committed to upholding the racial “integrity” of black people as the Klan was to preserving the “purity of the white race.”

 

But Garvey, otherwise an astute student of U. S. history, misread the visceral reaction of African Americans to the initials “KKK,” which were synonymous with decades of unpunished lynchings, burnings, and mobbings.

 

In so doing, he inadvertently bound his enemies, white and black, into “a solid, raucous, and unforgiving mass,” according David Levering Lewis in The Fight for Equality and the American Century: 1919 through 1963, the second volume of his Pulitzer Prize-winning two-part biography of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, a NAACP leader who spearheaded a competing, but decidedly moderate and small, pan-African initiative.

 

In an infamous 1924 editorial in the NAACP organ, The Crisis, entitled “A Lunatic or a Traitor,” the rabidly anti-Garvey Du Bois insisted, “this open ally of the Ku Klux Klan should be locked up or sent home.”

For its own reasons, the U. S. government did both, convicting Garvey of mail fraud, imprisoning him in Atlanta—ironically, the same city where he’d met with the Klan leader—and finally deporting him to his native Jamaica in 1927. Neither Garvey nor the UNIA ever recovered from this blow.

 

While powerful forces had worked for years to undermine Garvey’s broad appeal, it is doubtful that their victory would have been as swift or certain had not his association with the Klan provided them with an opening wedge to damage his credibility among African Americans.

 

In Garvey’s Tradition

 

Which might help to explain the crucial difference in the approach of Ramon A. Martinez, a Detroit black nationalist who otherwise shared most of Garvey’s beliefs. Martinez headed the Negro Nationalist Society of America, one of countless black groups that have all but vanished from the historical record.

 

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1890, Martinez emigrated to the U. S. in 1904. Though speaking only Spanish upon his arrival, he won an oratorical contest a medal two years later. In 1922, he earned a law degree from the University of Puerto Rico and moved to Detroit in 1926. By 1933, he lived at 5207 Vinewood Ave.

 

While he made his living practicing law, his avocation was the politics of black nationalism. While documentation on his political history is still lacking, it is all but certain that Martinez was affiliated with, or at the very least influenced by, the UNIA or one the many off shoots that sprouted up after Garvey’s deportation.

 

Both the lucidity and substance of his arguments place him solidly in the Garvey tradition.

 

“Negro Nationalism,” he announced in an extensive interview published in the Detroit Free Press on March 12, 1933, “is a new school of thought in American race relations. It is based on the principle of territorial separation of the races as the only rational solution of the American Negro problem.”

 

“The situation of the Negro in America,” he explained in a classic black nationalist formulation, “is that of a nation within a nation….”

 

“Two courses are open,” Martinez advised. “One is complete and absolute amalgamation of blood through legitimization of racial intermarriage….” Echoing the Garvey-Clarke concord, he opined: “Everybody knows how the majority of white people stand on that question and, speaking for the Negro Nationalists, I can say that our position is exactly the same…. We do not wish to be [racially] obliterated”

 

“The other course open is colonization of the Negro in a land he can call his own, where he can build a free state from the basis of American civilization as he knows it,” Martinez offered. “The colonization solution frankly recognizes the fact that robins do not fly with ducks nor sheep flock with horses.”

 

“We want to maintain our race intact,” he continued. Employing inspirational language similar to Garvey’s, he asserted: “We feel that we have in it talents of all kinds—men and women capable of organizing and administering a commonwealth of our own. We have statesmen, lawyers, judges, doctors, pharmacists, dentists, optometrists, writers, ministers, engineers, musicians, merchants, bankers, farmers, teachers and skilled and unskilled laborers.

 

“We have served, by observation and participation, an apprenticeship in the art and science of self government during our sojourn in America,” Martinez said.

 

Original Idea?

 

He ventured what his interviewer apparently thought was an original idea: The voluntary emigration of African Americans to a proposed “Republic of Greater Liberia” in West Africa.

 

This new state would be composed of territories then colonized by Britain and France, along with Liberia. The latter was founded in the mid-19th century at the initiative of white slave-owners who wanted to siphon off nettlesome free blacks and dispose of potentially dangerous enslaved blacks. Along with Ethiopia, it was one of only two nominally independent African nations at that time.

 

The Free Press’s chronicle of Martinez’s detailed plan included brilliant color illustrations of its proposed “great seal,” flag, and symbol—a proud lion—accompanying a photo of a sedate, bespectacled Martinez, wearing a Charlie Chaplin-like mustache.

 

Martinez hoped that the West would embrace his proposal as a way of settling Europe’s World War I debt with America.

 

However, Martinez was not the father of the idea. It appears that it was first proposed by segregationist Mississippi state senator T. C. McCallum in 1922—only months before Garvey’s meeting with Clarke. In a resolution to the state legislature, he called upon it to memorialize the President and Congress to secure, by treaty, purchase, or other negotiation, a portion of Africa where African Americans could move toward independence under U. S. tutelage.

 

This could be done, he argued, in exchange for the European war debt—precisely what Martinez later proposed. About the same time, Maryland Sen. Joseph I. France put forth a similar proposal, but this one involving the Germany’s former colonies in East Africa.

 

Garvey supported both plans. Indeed, despite the damage caused by his meeting with Clarke, Garvey continued to associate with white supremacists during his exile in Jamaica and London, including John Powell of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs and propagandist Earnest Sevier Cox.

 

Learning a Lesson from History.

 

Six years after Martinez’s interview, another racist Mississippian took up the call: Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo, one of America’s most notorious segregationists, who introduced the Greater Liberia Act into the U. S. Senate in April 1939.

 

He, too, received the strong backing of Garvey and splinters of the once-powerful UNIA.

 

Marking a crucial break in the black nationalist-white supremacists courtship, Ramon Martinez eschewed such support. In 1944, he spurned the attempt of Gerald L. K. Smith, head of the racist America First Party, to identify himself with Martinez’s colonization project.

 

Martinez could well have been recalling Garvey’s experience of two decades before when he declared that, if Smith were successful, it would give his movement “the kiss of death,” The Detroit News reported on Aug. 8, 1944.

 

Speaking as if he were reciting a lesson well learned, Martinez noted: “But most assuredly any plan of voluntary African colonization for American Negro migrants will become unpopular with Negroes and alienate their co-operation and support if it is sponsored by any reputed Negro-hating and fascist-minded individual or organization.”

 

[Note: This article was made possible thru the pioneering research of Bonotchi Montgomery, the kind encouragement of Kwesi Ohene Aquil, the expert assistance of Barbara Woolf-Packard at the Detroit Free Press and Vivian Baulch at The Detroit News, and the generous advice of Garvey scholars Robert A. Hill and Tony Martin.]

 

Best Efforts, Inc (BEI) offers OurStory, a black history lecture series. For background on BEI and/or a description of lecture programs, write besteffortsinc@yahoo.com.

 

4/16/2002

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