A theater can be the gateway to a world of fantasy, but it can also introduce us to a reality that, although largely forgotten, still shapes our lives.
This is happening at the Goodman Theatre, where a fascinating new play by Charles Smith, “The Black Star Line,” opening Monday, tells the story of the real-life figure Marcus Garvey. Civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois called him a “little, fat, black, ugly man with a big head.” The U.S. government convicted him of fraud. But in six brief years Garvey–a Jamaican immigrant, self-taught, too poor when he arrived in the United States to ride on the streetcar, but endowed with the voice and convictions of an inspired orator–became the leader of one of the biggest mass movements in American history.
At its height in the early 1920s, his United Negro Improvement Association had 2 million members. Dressed in a glorious military uniform of his own devising, a helmet of many colored plumes atop his head, Garvey led 50,000 followers down the streets of Harlem, and spoke of kicking European colonizers out of Africa and creating a “Sovereign Negro Nation” where any person of African descent could find refuge.
It was to carry his people back to Africa that he founded the Black Star Line of steamships. Although three ships were purchased, the money to repair and crew them was lacking. No Garveyites ever reached the African homeland he eloquently described.
Only a few years later, Garvey was disgraced and imprisoned, his movement largely forgotten. His name, like so many black names of importance, has been omitted from schoolbooks. But his heartening vision of literacy and pride–and his bitter doctrine that to prosper, blacks must separate themselves from white society–have both found their echoes in movements of the present day.
Because Garvey is a supremely contradictory figure whose ideas are still political dynamite, many questions yet remain. Are his beliefs valid today? Is integration with the white race something to strive for or, as Garvey thought, to shun? Does a black homeland in Africa still make sense? Six views are presented below. The first three are those of the author, the director and the star of “The Black Star Line.” The rest are the comments of eminent black Chicago-area authors and historians.
Charles Smith, playwright
I sat down to write this play as a historical piece, and then I realized all these issues are alive today, unresolved. The effects of integration (which Garvey believed could not succeed) have not been all positive. I grew up at 46th and King Drive. It was a vibrant, stable neighborhood 30 years ago. Elders were respected. I did an apprenticeship with the pharmacist who lived two houses down, who sponsored me in college. Integration meant that the professional people moved out. In their wake came violent poverty.
Garvey was right, I think, that there will never be total integration. The black man’s skin color prevents him from assimilating as other groups have done. I used to wear dreadlocks, but had to cut them because I could not bear the discrimination. In Nassau I went to board a cruise ship I was traveling on. The guard at the gangplank shoved me in the chest, snatched my boarding pass, and said, “How did you get this?”
The director of “Black Star Line,” Tazewell Thompson, was staying at a Chicago hotel during rehearsals. When he went to check out, the woman at the desk saw that the Goodman was to pay the bill and thought it was a scam. “We’re getting to the bottom of this,” she said, and wouldn’t accept his credit card either. The negative assumptions are always there.
Because of all this, if Garvey had succeeded and established a black homeland, an Israel for Negroes, I’d be the first one there. But blacks cannot return. Their entire continent has been carved up like a pie and redistributed by Europeans. The native nations are so nationalistic. Garvey wanted to honor the black race, and to say, “We are one. Descended from the same people. Let us recognize that union.”
Tazewell Thompson, director
The Return to Africa Movement indicates a level of despair. Garvey felt that blacks never would be accepted in white society, that their achievements would never be recognized. He was the first to try to instill pride and a sense of ancestry, to say, “You are descended from great people.”
Garvey was a visionary, fiercely determined. He was also paranoiac, selfish, pompous, vain. His powers as an orator you can judge from the performance. The speech at the end of Act One of “Black Star Line” and the one when he is in prison, beginning, “If I die here. . .” are Garvey’s actual words.
To know why Garvey’s movement grew as it did, you have to understand the timing. In 1918, 1919, black soldiers were returning from World War I. They had put their lives on the line, they purchased $250 million worth of war bonds, and they were in despair at finding no one wanted to live next to them, no one would give them a job. It was also a time of terrible race riots, the “Red Summer” of 1919. In Chicago also, 40 blacks lost their lives.
Garvey was making a political statement about the power of blacks when he and his followers appeared in military uniform. His message was racial empowerment, racial identity. If his homeland were established, I would love to visit it, but the emotional pull for me, my home, is Harlem, where I discovered who I was, my people, my culture, and where I stretched out as an individual.
Todd Anthony-Jackson, actor
I had to suspend my judgment to play Marcus Garvey. You can’t disagree with the views of your character–to do that would have crippled the acting process. But I admire his desperate love for black people, his drive to give them a chance to challenge their potential. If his homeland existed, I would go. I would go anywhere a man can feel big, rich, empowered. But the point is not the country, it’s the need to feel of worth. Although I’ve had a measure of success, I’m black, and nothing has distanced me from that need, which Garvey perceived and tried to fulfill.
Julie Saville, historian, University of Chicago
Garvey’s movement was not only the largest in U.S. history, it covered the colonial world. There were Garvey supporters in Cuba, West Africa, the Caribbean, Central America. His newspaper had Spanish and French sections. He had a vision of community that spanned continents.
A new thing was that he focused on urban American wage earners. He had been a printer in Jamaica, and two things he brought from that experience were the value of literacy and possession of a skill. There is a tragedy to be written here, of a man trying to compete in the emerging capitalist structure of huge corporations and industrialization, on the level of crafts.
He saw that wealth was power, which explains his uncritical admiration of captains of industry like Andrew Carnegie. It’s hard to understand the symbolism of “The Black Star Line” if you don’t know his fascination with corporate business. I don’t think the point was actually for people to go anyplace. It was meant to create a sense of pride and focus attention on African civilization, to bring together symbolically the scattered remnants of a people.
Leon Forrest, novelist and professor of African-American studies, Northwestern University
The whole thrust of Afro-centrism permeates every dialogue about issues affecting black people in this culture. The energy behind Garvey is the same energy that’s behind the Million Man March. The trouble with creating a powerful separatist identity is that it washes over into an idea of a group’s supremacy, which is anti-humanistic and dangerous. This is the trouble with (Louis) Farrakhan. The Black Muslims borrowed a great deal from Garvey, particularly the idea of creating economic power through black enterprises. The positive side of Garvey’s message is that black people needed to hear about their own humanity and cultural contributions.
In the media then and now you get “This is a good guy,” or “this is a bad guy,” but if somebody has a need, they’ll look to whoever comes closest to meeting it. That was true of Garvey, and it’s true of the Muslims, who were willing to acknowledge and accept blacks in prisons, blacks in the underclass. Tens of thousands of people who aren’t part of Farrakhan’s group heeded the angry call of the Million Man March. African-Americans are in an alarming condition and look for help wherever they find it.
As to Garvey’s Black Star Line, I wouldn’t be interested in sailing home on any boat to Africa. I’m solid in my own sense of being an African-American. In our desperate search for a core identity there is a longing for an answer that is both cultural and spiritual. But that’s when we get into romanticizing Africa, and God! Africa’s got so many problems. My connection to Africa is through the South. In my case you can’t go from Chicago to the Gold Coast without passing through Greenville (S.C.).
The more this society fails us, the more we reach for these things. Garvey probably played down the complexity of African-Americans’ allegiances. He probably didn’t understand how American we are–and if he did, it didn’t suit his purposes.
Cyrus Colter, attorney, novelist, the first black to hold an endowed chair at Northwestern University. Colter, 86, remembers seeing Garvey as he toured Indiana in the 1920s.
My father was the NAACP representative in Noblesville, Ind., and although he didn’t think Garvey was perfect, he didn’t deserve the hell he was getting from W.E.B. DuBois. Our family didn’t feel about him as we did about Booker T. Washington. When Washington died, although I was only 6, my father was all broken up. I remember the gloom that hung over the dinner table that day. But Garvey was a wonderful speaker and my auntie wanted to go.
This was a Sunday afternoon. It was an atmosphere like a church picnic, festive, and people were lining the streets. His men were hanging off streetcars and in the buses. You could tell his followers because they had this uniform they all wore. We were pushing around in the crowd and I remember my aunt saying, “Oh, that’s him, Cyrus!” He was riding in the back of a big black car, dressed like a general in a fine uniform, with a big-deal hat, all plumes, on his head.
Perhaps it is fitting that Garvey be remembered not for his words, but for the mood he inspired. Garvey, like the fine uniform of an army that never fought, his steamship line that never sailed, the homeland he never was able to reach, was nevertheless the genuine embodiment and symbol of a heartfelt knowledge. The onlookers who were all dressed up, and would have no place to go for decades to come, listened to Garvey’s words about heritage, pride and greatness, and, to put it simply, remembered who they were. All Garvey’s goals went unmet but his greatest one: to inspire in his onlookers a sense of their own capacities and power.
———-
THE FACTS
`Black Star Line’
When: Preview Sunday; runs Monday through Feb. 17
Where: Goodman Theater, 200 S. Columbus Drive
Tickets: $25 – $38
Call: 312 – 443-3800
