Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

with a Negro World was five years at hard labor, and in
French Dahomey it was life imprisonment. It was suppressed
in such places as Trinidad, British Guiana, Barbados,
etc., in the West Indies and all French, Portuguese,
Belgian, and some of the British colonies of Africa."
In the continental U.S. the Garvey Movement was
met with varying degrees of repression (Malcolm X's
father, we should recall, was assassinated by the KKK
because he was an organizer for the U.N.I.A.) But overall
U.S. imperialism moved against this surprising upsurge
with some care. After several of Garvey's former
lieutenants were suborned by the U.S. Government, the
imperialists had Garvey arrested for alleged mail fraud.
This tactic of posing Garvey as a common criminal
was conceived by none other than J. Edgar Hoover, who at
that time was a rising F.B.I. official. In an Oct. 11, 1919
memorandum Hoover noted that Garvey was: "Agitating
the negro movement. Unfortunately, however, he has not
as yet violated any federal law. It occurs to me, however,
from the attached clipping that there might be some proceeding
against him for fraud in connection with his Black
Star Line.. . "(43) Eventually Garvey was convicted, imprisoned
in Atlanta Federal Prison and late; deported in
1927. The door, however, had been opened.
What was most apparent was that the old, conservative,
imperialist-sponsored Afrikan leadership had been
shoved aside and left behind by this outbreak. They could
no longer even pretend to lead or control the Afrikan people.
It is significant that even the liberal, Civil Rights integrationists
had been overshadowed by the new militant
nationalism.
This was a time of rich ideological struggle and
transformation in the Afrikan Nation. That, however, is
not the precise focus of our investigation. What we are
looking at is the neo-colonial relationship between the forming
petit-bourgeois Civil Rights leadership and U.S. imperialism.
We are analyzing how in a time of mass unrest
and the beginnings of rebellion among Afrikans, U.S. imperialism
helped promote a neo-colonial Afrikan leadership
that in outward form was integrationist, protestoriented,
radical and even "socialist."
not only by Coretta King and other Afrikan notables, but
by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and AFL-CIO President
George Meany. It's hard for activists today to view him as
anything but another of the faceless Uncle Toms.
This greatly underestimates his historic role. To
grasp how useful he was to the U.S. Empire we have to see
that the young A. Philip Randolph was a radical star in the
Afrikan community. He was an angry, provocative
troublemaker with an image as bold as a James Forman or
a Cesar Chavez. Randolph published the first socialist
Afrikan journal aimed at workers, promoting Afrikan
unionism. The Messenger carried the motto "The Only
Radical Negro Magazine In America," and had 45,000
readers. He was arrested and briefly held by Federal
authorities for speaking out against World War I. The
New York State Legislature's investigative committee called
him "the most dangerous Negro in America." Randolph
did his work inside the Afrikan struggle, as a radical
mass leader (not as a conservative-talking conciliator sitting
in a fancy office somewhere).
His long tenure as the lone recognized Afrikan
leader on a "national level" in the AFL-CIO was so striking
that it led the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to query in
an article why:
"The absence of Negro trade-union leadership.
85% of Negroes are working people. Some 2,000,000 are
in trade unions, but in 50 years we have produced only one
national leader - A. Philip Randolph." (44) This is a
question whose answer will become apparent to us.
At the beginning of Randolph's political career,
this ambitious young intellectual was taken in and helped
by the U.N.I.A. Garvey appointed him as head of the
U.N.I.A. delegation to the League of Nations conference
at the end of World War I (Randolph was denied a U.S.
passport and was unable to go). When Randolph and his
close associate Chandler Owen needed assistance for the
The political attack against the Garvey Movement
within the Afrikan Nation was most aggressively spearheaded
by a young Afrikan "socialist" and labor
organiier, Asa Philip Randolph (who used only his first initial
"A."). Since those years of the early 1920s Randolph,
even then one of the leading Afrikan radical intellectuals,
would grow in stature and influence. A. Philip Randolph
became the organizer, and then the President, of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He would become
for decades the most important Afrikan union leader,
eventually rising to be the only Afrikan member of the
AFL-CIO Executive Council. As the leader of the historic
1941 March On Washington Movement, he was credited
with forcing the Federal Government to desegregate industry.
To most today Randolph is at best a dim name
somehow associated with dusty kvents in the past. In 1969
he had an 80th birthday dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel in New York, where he was personally congratulated 114 in Chicago Historical Society.
A. Philip Randolph (1889-). president and general organizer of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Photo of early 1930s; original