Marcus Garvey Meets the KKK
On 25 June 1922 Black activist Marcus Garvey found common cause with the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
In the 30 years to 1918 some 2,552 Black people were murdered by lynch mobs in the United States. Most of these killings took place in the South, home of the Invisible Empire, otherwise known as the Ku Klux Klan.
The KKK, born in the aftermath of Confederate defeat in the American Civil War, was largely moribund before the end of the 19th century; but D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation romanticised and resurrected it. Lynch mob culture was Klannish to its core.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) campaigned for a Republican bill to outlaw the practice, despite opposition from southern Democrats. The Klan regarded them as their chief opponent, the NAACP proudly reported.
But the Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey, who led the rival Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), took a different approach. On 25 June 1922 he met with Edward Young Clarke, the Klan’s acting Imperial Wizard, in Atlanta.
Garvey was a great speaker and a greater visionary. The UNIA named him the provisional president of Africa, head of a government in exile for the world’s community of Black men and women – those still suffering under European colonial rule in Africa, those still suffering under white supremacist rule in the American diaspora.
Integration was a sham, he thought. He dreamed of an Africa for Africans. There was, then, a logic to the Atlanta meeting. Clarke, Garvey wrote, ‘believes America to be a white man’s country, and also states that the Negro should have a country of his own in Africa’. Garvey was shocked to discover that others did not understand his point. ‘Marcus Garvey is, without doubt, the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world’, an editorial in the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis ran. ‘He is either a lunatic
or a traitor.’
Garvey died a broken man in London in 1940, aged just 52. Despite his mistakes, his legacy is immense. ‘Before Garvey’, the historian C.L.R. James later said, ‘the great millions of Africans and people of African descent simply did not exist in the political consciousness of the world’
