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