Marcus Garvey and His Relation to (Black) Socialism and Communism

“Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts,”Marcus Garvey, the creator, heart, and soul of the prodigiously successful Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), warned his followers in July 1925. From his jail cell in the Atlanta penitentiary—having been sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly having used the mail to defraud—he urged that the “Negro should keep shy of Communism or the Worker’s party of America.” Those groups, he judged, are “more dangerous to the Negro’s welfare than any other group at present.” Statements such as these and clashes such as the one in 1930 in which Alfred Levy, a Black communist, was killed in a dispute with Garveyites in Harlem, gave Garvey and Garveyism (his variety of Black nationalism) the reputation of having been “particularly anti-Communist.” In 1967, Harold Cruse portrayed the New Negro era after World War I as an ideological battlefield. “Garvey Nationalism, Black Socialism, Black Communism, Black trade unionism, Black civil rightsism [...] were at each other’s political throats.” “It is a fact,” Cruse reinforced this view of enmity between the Black Left and Garvey, “that [A. Philip] Randolph’s Messenger writers were implacable enemies of the Garvey movement.” This perception of Garvey as a staunch anti-Communist prevailed and was reiterated by various scholars in the following decades into the twenty-first century. Tony Martin in his study on the Garvey movement set the scene as one of strict antagonism. In spite of “continuous onslaughts from communists” (and others), Martin writes, Garvey nevertheless managed to