Caribbean labour politics in the age of Garvey,1918–1938

Dislocation and discontent in the wartime Caribbean

The post-emancipation Caribbean was shaped by the broad currents of world price fluctuations, economic reorganisation and labour migration, all of which amounted to new and refined methods of worker marginalisation, coercion and exploitation. As the older British sugar islands entered into a period of decline, workers faced diminishing resources for peasant production, competition from waves of indentured workers from Asia and evaporating opportunities for employment. They responded by migrating en masse to the burgeoning sugar plantations of Cuba, to the construction sites of the Panama Canal Zone, to the banana farms of the United Fruit Company stretching through Central America, and to the urban centres of the US. Worker efforts to vote with their feet, their willingness to oscillate from labour centre to labour centre in search of better wages, had the paradoxical consequence of creating a massive regional pool of cheap, expendable labour that undercut wages and allowed employers the latitude to utilise draconian and coercive measures of discipline to sustain a pliant workforce. Efforts at worker organisation were crushed. ‘Agitators’ were quickly removed. In the fields and work sites of Central America, West Indian labourers were introduced to the insidious indignities of Jim Crow segregation carried south by American multinational corporations and administrators of the Canal Zone. ¹²

At the outset of the first world war, West Indians patriotically enlisted for duty. Sixteen thousand black troops were raised in all, including five battalions recruited from Panama and Costa Rica. In Jamaica, the newly formed Universal Negro Improvement Association organised a farewell meeting to honour members of the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR), at which Marcus Garvey ‘impressed on the men … the duty of every true son of the Empire to rally to the cause of the Motherland [Britain]’. ¹³ Rather than plaudits, however, members of the BWIR were greeted overseas with a relentless stream of racist invective and personal humiliations. Disembarking at Alexandria, Egypt, in 1916, Corporal Samuel A. Haynes and his regiment arrived at their base camp YMCA ‘under the strains of Rule Britannia’, only to be ‘immediately confronted by a number of British soldiers and asked, “Who gave you niggers authority to sing that! Clear out of this building – only British soldiers admitted here.”’ West Indian soldiers received separate and unequal living quarters, were provided with inadequate kitchen, transportation and hospital facilities, and were asked to perform menial tasks around camp otherwise reserved for labour battalions. As ‘aboriginal troops’, they were kept from the European theatre and mostly held from combat duty; classified as ‘Natives’ by the War Office, they were deemed ineligible for a six-pence a day raise in 1918. In December of that year, as troops remained stationed in Taranto, Italy, members of the Ninth Battalion rose in revolt against their officers, resulting in the disarmament and demobilisation of West Indian soldiers, mass imprisonments and the execution of one soldier. Members of the BWIR returned from the war deeply disillusioned about their place in the Empire, and receptive to the doctrines of racial consciousness and solidarity that had begun to circulate around the greater Caribbean. ¹⁴

The experiences of West Indian soldiers abroad fed into a larger narrative of anger and frustration at home. Wartime inflation more than doubled the prices of basic foodstuffs, antagonising workers who accused white merchants of profiteering and who blamed white employers for failing to raise wages to meet the rising cost of living. ¹⁵ Mounting black resentment was further inflamed by shocking reports of cruelty inflicted on black men and women during race riots in both the United States and Britain. In July, days before riots erupted in Belize, British Honduras, the Belize Independent published a report from England describing race riots in Liverpool and Cardiff, Wales, during which ‘infuriated crowds hunted every negro from pillar to post, wrecked and fired their lodging houses’, and stalked the streets armed with revolvers, razors and knives. Similarly, massive labour resistance in Trinidad, which began in November 1919, was preceded by reports of gangs of white soldiers and sailors ‘savagely attacking, beating and stabbing every negro they could find’ in the streets of Liverpool, including a Trinidadian, Charles Wootten. ¹⁶ ‘There are serious indications from many directions that Trinidad, and perhaps the British West Indies generally, are on a social volcano … which is liable to burst into eruption at almost any time’, reported Henry A. Baker, the American Consul at Port of Spain, to Washington. As returning black soldiers mixed with disgruntled black workers, sharing their sense of outrage, rumours travelled among frightened members of the oligarchy that the entire white population would be wiped out, massacred and swept out to sea. ¹⁷

Garveyism and postwar labour radicalism

No vehicle was more influential in sustaining the narrative of mounting black frustrations, and in giving them structure and form, than Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, a weekly newspaper established in 1918. By this time, Garvey had relocated to New York, where his reconstituted UNIA was beginning to find its voice as a mass-based, diasporic projection of Harlem’s anti-war, anti-racist and anti-colonial intellectual ferment. Attracting large numbers of West Indians in its early years, Garveyism was swiftly carried to the greater Caribbean by black sailors, UNIA organisers and local Garveyites, who had founded divisions of the UNIA in the region by late 1918 and early 1919. ¹⁸ Efforts by government agents to suppress the spread of the movement by banning the Negro World not only proved ineffective, but had a galvanising effect. ¹⁹ The move by the Legislative Council of the Windward Islands to ban the paper in Grenada was resisted by an impassioned campaign led by T. Albert Marryshow, managing editor of the local West Indian. The Governor of British Honduras, Sir Eyre Hutson, listed his predecessor’s suppression of the Negro World as one of the contributing causes of the riots that erupted in Belize in July 1919. ²⁰ By May 1920, Hutson had given up. ‘It is almost impossible, in this Colony, to search persons and their luggage, particularly every coloured person arriving in the Colony from [Mexico and Guatemala], or even from the United States’, he conceded. Rather than pursue a ‘futile’ ban, Hutson proposed informing the local UNIA that government officials were themselves subscribing to the Negro World; that they, like thousands of readers stretching throughout the region, were receiving copies of the paper, and studying its directives carefully. ²¹

There was reason for white authorities to be alarmed. The message broadcast by the Negro World from 1918 until the end of 1920 was strident, audacious and clearly intended to inflame the passions of members, readers and sympathisers. Declaring an approaching ‘war of the races’, Garvey called on Negroes scattered around the world to capitalise on the disarray produced by the war, to organise under a common banner, and to prepare to ‘give [their] blood to make a free and independent African republic’. In the US and the Caribbean, this meant responding to race riots by ‘match[ing] fire with hell fire’ and threatening to turn ‘the oppressed worm upon the oppressor’ if the Negro continued to be denied ‘a fair chance in life economically and politically’. It meant responding to ‘wage slave[ry]’ with racial organisation, and with Negro unionisation and labour radicalism in the pursuit of racial goals. ²² For Garvey, there could be ‘no compromise until Africa is free’. This was particularly true in the majority-black Caribbean islands, which Garvey described as British ‘powder houses’, waiting to explode if whites were ‘to start anything’. ‘Let the pale-faced British governors suppress the Negro World’, taunted George Tobias, the treasurer of the UNIA’s steamship company, the Black Star Line. ‘The time will come when they will have to run for their very lives with shoes in their hands to find refuge in the Caribbean sea.’ ²³

On 2 May 1919, an estimated 1,200–1,500 longshoremen working for the Panama Canal and Panama Railroad Company, nearly all West Indians, went on strike at Cristobal Dock, demanding an increase in wages. Prominent in the agitation were several important Garveyites, all founding members of Panama’s first UNIA division, established in December 1918. ²⁴ Over the next year, a series of riots and labour disturbances, big and small, and all with connections to Garveyist propaganda and organising, rocked the region. In Belize, massive coordinated riots, led by returned members of the British West Indies Regiment, were linked to ‘noxious literature’ published by the Negro World and by the Garveyist Belize Independent. ²⁵ In Trinidad, where a dockworkers’ strike in Port of Spain mushroomed into a general unrest that reached neighbouring Tobago, Garveyist strike leaders distributed UNIA literature and spurred on workers with speeches that ‘almost read like extracts’ of the Negro World, as one investigator put it. ²⁶ In the Windward Islands of St. Vincent, St. Lucia and Grenada, months of agitation by local Garveyites erupted in a strike of labourers and policemen in St. Lucia that threatened to spread into a general strike before the situation was calmed by the arrival of a British warship. ²⁷ That same month, a massive strike – involving as many as 16,000 workers – was called in the Panama Canal Zone, this time led by Garveyites and supported directly by Marcus Garvey, who cabled $500 for the cause. ²⁸

One measure of the UNIA’s influence in these confrontations was the extent to which workers, rioters and ex-soldiers articulated their grievances in the language of racial solidarity. In Belize, the Riot Commission concluded that simmering tensions had been inflamed by the steady infusion of Garveyist propaganda, leading participants in the disturbance to the conclusion ‘that British Honduras is the black man’s country and that white men are interlopers’. During the demonstrations, protesters set upon white men they encountered in the streets, and were heard singing, ‘We are going to kill the white sons of bitches tonight … This is the black man’s night!’ ²⁹ The strike of the black dock workers in Port of Spain, Trinidad, beginning in mid-November 1919, was preceded by ‘wild and persistent rumors about the blacks rising in a body against the whites’, fuelled by smuggled copies of the Negro World. It sparked a wave of anti-white uprisings that quickly engulfed the island. ³⁰ The Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA), which organised the dock workers’ strike, was directed by several of the island’s leading Garveyites, and during the strike TWA meetings often became de facto UNIA rallies. ³¹ According to witnesses, at one meeting James Braithwaite, the TWA’s secretary and local UNIA officer, repeated nearly verbatim the argument that Garvey had been making in the pages of the Negro World. ‘You are a powerful race and our power was proved in the gigantic struggle for British liberty’, Braithwaite thundered. ‘You don’t think it is a shame for the intelligent negro to remain sleeping and waiting for amelioration? No, we must fight. If we can die for the white man against his German brother we can die better for ourselves.’ ³²

Garveyist participation in labour agitation in the Panama Canal Zone provides a useful illustration of the ways in which UNIA activists situated class-based politics within what they viewed as the more useful framework of international race relations. Carla Burnett has effectively contrasted the language of non-Garveyist and Garveyist organisers during the labour agitation of 1919–1920 and noted the ways in which Garveyists refashioned the struggle as one between whites and blacks (rather than capital and labour), sold union activity as a demonstration of loyalty to the race, and emphasised the broader project of pan-African organisation and unity. ³³ The canal workers’ strike of 1920 was viewed by several of its participants as part of the UNIA’s international assault on the ramparts of white supremacy. This attitude was encouraged by the arrival in Panama, in December 1919, of UNIA organisers Henrietta Vinton Davis and Cyril Henry, on the maiden voyage of the Black Star Line. Davis and Henry spent the months leading up to the strike addressing huge crowds, and touring Panama organising local UNIA divisions. When the strike began, on the morning of 24 February, they cast their lot with the strikers and Henry urgently cabled Garvey for help. If some union leaders viewed the strike through a prism of local grievances, it soon became clear that Garveyites considered themselves to be engaged in the first stages of the ‘all out race war’ that Garvey had been prophesying. When William Stoute, de facto leader of the union movement in Panama, ordered his workers back to work after the logistics of the stoppage had turned against the union, leading local Garveyite Eduardo V. Morales begged the workers to ‘stay out and die’ if they had to. ‘We are not fighting any government nor for any government, we are fighting for the uplift and the betterment of ourselves’, Morales argued. ‘I say … it is a racial cause and if we divide ourselves we are going to fall, so let us keep off the streets, keep in our homes, and show Gov. [Clarence] Harding we can stay out three months more.’ ³⁴

Retreat from radicalism

The wave of radicalism that swept the greater Caribbean in 1919 and 1920 was – like most such moments of dislocation and possibility – fleeting. In Panama, striking labourers were either fired from their jobs and replaced by less recalcitrant workers, or welcomed back to work at reduced rates of pay. In Trinidad, dock workers won an historic victory, earning a 25 per cent increase in wages and official recognition of the TWA, but labourers across the colony were hit with a wave of repression, including a sweeping ban on ‘seditious’ literature that curtailed the freedom of Trinidadian activists to spread or promote Garveyist materials. Across the region, with some adjustments, equilibrium was restored. For a brief moment, as Nigel Bolland has suggested, Marcus Garvey and his followers ‘succeeded in bridging the gaps between nationalists and internationalists, black workers, businessmen and professionals, and in articulating a powerful appeal to racial pride and self-sufficiency’. Now, as the status quo returned, natural fault lines began to re-emerge among West Indian subjects. Legislatures assisted this process by matching their crackdown on proletarian and radical activism with concessions to moderates and to light-skinned and upwardly mobile black elites. Except for brief periods of instability in British Guiana and Jamaica, in 1924, the region settled into a decade and a half of relative calm. ³⁵

As episodes of strident activism disappeared in the Caribbean, Garvey – facing similar reactionary forces in the US – began his own ‘retreat from radicalism’, as Robert A. Hill has termed it. For Garvey, even as he basked in the glory of his triumphant International Convention, mounting economic and political pressures were coalescing in a dangerous spiral. Determined to arrest the alarming financial decline of the Black Star Line and resuscitate the UNIA’s most ambitious and well-known business venture, Garvey organised a fundraising tour of the West Indies and Central America, ignoring the threat that he would be denied re-entry by nervous federal officials if he left the United States. ³⁶ Garvey was not blind to the risks; to the contrary, the dilemma posed by the tour abroad presented in stark terms the gathering political threat to the UNIA. Faced with the likely destruction of his movement if he continued on the same course, Garvey recalibrated. From the beginning convinced that the future of the Negro race depended on a free and liberated Africa, disdaining the engagement of organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the ‘white man’s politics’ as a ‘waste [of] time’, Garvey now began to couch his programme of African redemption in carefully crafted declarations of non-interference with constituted authority outside of the Motherland. ‘I have not come … to stir up strife among the races, nor to preach revolution, because I am not an anarchist nor a socialist, even though they try to picture me as one of these’, he told an audience in Chicago on 1 February 1921, three weeks before departing for the West Indies. Blaming the ‘concocted lies’ of reporters, noting the presence of special agents in the crowd and declaring that he had ‘no fear of jail’, Garvey assured, ‘We are not going to worry Uncle Sam nor any other nation for that matter; we are going to build up in Africa a government of our own, big enough and strong enough to protect Africa and Negroes everywhere.’ ³⁷

Garvey’s tour through the Caribbean and Central America – with stops in Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Costa Rica, British Honduras and Guatemala – was framed in similarly non-confrontational terms. In Kingston, Garvey told his audience, ‘I have not come to Jamaica to stir up any revolution or race strife’, and encouraged them to pursue constitutional means to demand their rights. In Colón, Garvey observed that he was ‘not here to criticize Panama nor any Government whatsoever’. In Costa Rica, Garvey met amicably with the President, Julio Acosta, and told United Fruit workers that ‘they should not fight the United Fruit Company, that the work given them by the United Fruit Company meant their bread and butter’. An ecstatic G. P. Chittendon, Manager of the UFC’s Costa Rica Division, reported after one meeting that ‘Garvey was the most conservative man’ in attendance. ³⁸ The suspicion earned from his early years of stridency, compounded by his steadfast articulation of racial consciousness and pride, would stalk Garvey for the rest of his life. Yet the moderation of the UNIA’s approach was noticed by that vast majority of legislators in the greater Caribbean. The Governor of British Guiana, Sir Wilfred Collet, observed in 1922:

I consider that in its inception [the Negro World] was a gigantic folly and appealed to the worst sentiments of the negro race; but so far as I have seen copies of this publication I have found nothing that is likely to do any more harm in this Colony than other publications.

He added: ‘the general tone of the [UNIA] is different from what it was three years ago’. After 1920, with the notable exception of Trinidad, government officials ceased their campaign against the distribution of the Negro World. ³⁹

Though Robert A. Hill has argued that Garvey’s ‘personal shift from radical propaganda toward conservative diplomacy’ embodied the ‘political evaporation of Garveyism’, ⁴⁰ the history of Garveyism in the greater Caribbean suggests precisely the opposite. As in the US and Africa, the movement was sustained because of the willingness of both Garvey and his followers to adapt to changing opportunities, to effectively gauge local needs, to act with political sensitivity rather than ideological dogmatism. As elsewhere, the Garveyist ‘retreat’ in the Caribbean offered a space for followers to continue their diasporic project of mobilisation, preparation and African redemption, a cautious platform upon which to pursue their ambitious global aspirations. Eager to sustain their long-term, unambiguously anti-colonial vision, Garveyists prevented their political evaporation by conceding the short-term advantages of white supremacy. As a result, Garveyism moved away from its brief and anomalous period of radicalism to frame the emergent dominant strain of black politics during the interwar era. Tony Martin points out:

At a time when most Black people in the area were denied the right to vote, and in an age mostly predating mass political parties, the UNIA often performed the function of quasi-political party as well as mutual aid organisation. It was a major, sometimes the major, organised group looking after the interests of the mass of Black people.

For West Indians scattered throughout the greater Caribbean, the pan-African discourse projected by Garveyism, along with the organisational space carved by the Universal Negro Improvement Association, both reflected the outer limits of dissent and pushed them. Without understanding the cautious work of race-conscious activism during this period, it is impossible to understand the labour rebellions that followed. ⁴¹

The UNIA remained remarkably resilient in the migrant communities of the Hispanic Caribbean. By the mid-1920s, more than fifty divisions had been organised in Cuba, joined by nearly same number of divisions and chapters in Panama and the Canal Zone, twenty-three divisions in Costa Rica, and three dozen more stretched across Colombia (6), Brazil (1), Guatemala (5), the Dominican Republic (6), Mexico (4), Nicaragua (5), Honduras (7), Puerto Rico (1), Ecuador (1) and Venezuela (1). ⁴² Throughout the decade, Garveyites in the Hispanic Caribbean remained devoted and enthusiastic contributors to the Negro World’s weekly ‘News and Views of UNIA Divisions’ feature, and provided steady and generous support to the African Redemption Fund, and later – as Garvey faced prosecution – the Marcus Garvey Defense Fund.

Broadly speaking, divisions in the Hispanic Caribbean flourished as mutual aid organisations, social clubs and relief networks for their largely West Indian constituencies. Projecting a moderate face of political non-interference, local Garveyites accepted the limited opportunities available for strident advocacy and instead devoted their efforts to serving the needs of the community. In Cuba, constrained by a law banning racially organised political parties, Garveyites ‘foregrounded the mutual aid dimensions of their activities’, while pledging not to ‘meddle in the political affairs of the country’. This type of caution, combined with the Garveyist emphasis on self-help and education, encouraged in some places the drift towards a middle-class politics of ‘respectability’ and conservative reform. In British Honduras, where the local UNIA developed along lines similar to its Central American counterparts, Anne Macpherson has charted the uncomfortably cosy relationship established between colonial authorities and the local division of the Universal Black Cross Nurses, which thrived under the leadership of Vivian Seay until the 1950s. ⁴³

Yet even as they adopted this conciliatory front, Garveyites joined their brethren in America and Africa in projecting their work forward and abroad, imagining local activism against the backdrop of global, anti-colonial mobilisation. In August 1925, officers of the UNIA division in Ancón, Panama City, addressed a letter to the British Envoy to Panama expressing confidence in both him and the King. Yet two months later, at a meeting of the same division, the headlining speaker pointed to mounting political pressures in India, in Morocco and in China as proof of ‘the rising voice of LIBERTY throughout the world’, and a signal that the redemption of Africa was ‘just beyond the hill’. From this perspective, argued the leader of a local division, the UNIA need not ‘spill one drop of blood’ in the short term, or be ‘as brutal to his white brothers as they are to him’; rather, they must organise, train themselves, ‘prepare for the next cataclysm’ when Negroes might seize the day. At the unveiling of the charter for the Bluefields division in Nicaragua, a speaker confidently explained that Europe had ‘reached the zenith and is now on the decline’, and that out of the debris Africa would rise. Aiding this effort, both at home and abroad, was the UNIA. The head of a Panamanian division told an agent that the organisation ‘had its agents all over Africa at the present time, including the enormous territories covered by East and West Africa’ – an assertion repeatedly made by the Negro World and, as it has turned out, mostly true. ⁴⁴

This expectation of a rising tide of anti-colonial activism, joined by an appeal to racial consciousness and organisation, framed the work of Garveyist organisers in the West Indies as well. J. R. Ralph Casimir, the leading figure in the Dominica UNIA, celebrated the Negro World for providing an honest channel to world news and to news of Africa. Having ‘heard the cry of India for the Indians, Egypt for the Egyptians, China for the Chinese’, Negroes must declare ‘Africa for the Africans’. According to a Garveyite in the Virgin Islands, ‘[a] similarity of suffering among the darker races is creating a similarity of sentiment among their members in regard to the future relations with the white race’. The UNIA was facilitating this effort by spreading news of white atrocities and anti-white resistance across the African diaspora, creating an expansive and united community of interest. In Jamaica, the American Consul noted that the idea of a ‘Negro Republic’ and ‘an alliance with Hindus working for independence from British rule, with Japan and China and with the Russian Bolsheviki’ was being discussed with a ‘certain amount of seriousness’. In the early 1930s, Garvey’s Kingston-based journal, the Blackman, had a regular feature entitled ‘The truth about the Indian situation’. ⁴⁵

Against this canvas of anti-colonial solidarity, Garveyists in the West Indies collaborated in the development of a distinct form of regional labour activism. In the wake of the 1919–1920 labour rebellions, organisers of the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association – joined by organisers of like-minded associations in Grenada, British Guiana, Barbados and Jamaica – adopted a reformist stance that emphasised more moderate economic and political goals, sought alliances with the British Labour Party in the metropole, and pursued change through the vehicle of constitutional reform. This move towards moderation was not unproblematic. Led by a group of middle-class activists dedicated to the tactics of bourgeois advocacy and suspicious of the more ill-tempered and unpredictable devices of working-class resistance, these organisations have been accused of leaving ‘the majority of working people unenfranchised and without an organisation that was really their own’. ⁴⁶ Yet these concessions cannot be understood in a vacuum. After 1920, labour organisations in the Caribbean joined the UNIA in scaling back their stridency and their demands as a precondition for their existence. In Trinidad, amidst the hail of repressive legislative measures following the disturbances of 1919, the TWA persevered as the lone body representing the Trinidad workforce during the 1920s. In this act of survival, it ensured a training ground for the more militant labour leaders that followed. As interwar Caribbean labour politics swung from rebellious to cautious to rebellious once again, it is hard to disaggregate orientation from opportunity. ⁴⁷

Nor can the simple calculus of class interest explain interwar Caribbean labour politics. Labour movements in the 1920s and early 1930s remained viable by cultivating a Garveyist platform that encouraged broad and popular appeals to racial solidarity and dignity, and which contextualised cautious reformism in the language of African redemption. Nearly every notable labour leader of the period had a past or current relationship with the UNIA, and labour organisations and UNIA divisions shared offices, membership and meeting spaces. ⁴⁸ As if to cement the relationship, during his return to Jamaica, from 1927 to 1935, Garvey threw himself into reformist labour politics, establishing his journal, Blackman, as an advocate for workers’ rights, creating a bold and labour-friendly platform for his People’s Political Party, and participating in the creation of the Jamaica Workers and Labourers Association, to which Garvey was elected chairman. ⁴⁹ By combining a thrilling vision of racial emancipation with a situational commitment to limited mechanisms of reform, middle-class labour leaders sought to strike an uneasy balance that might bring workers into the fold.

A new insurgency 1935–1939

By the mid-1930s, amidst the mounting pressures of the Great Depression, the winds of opportunity once again shifted course, and a new and more radical type of labour politics started to challenge, and then surpass, the politics of the 1920s. Collapsing world markets precipitated a rise in unemployment and poverty, a situation exacerbated by the mass return of migrant workers to the islands. The crisis fell upon a crumbling infrastructure marked by deplorable working facilities, inadequate housing, and appalling conditions of health and sanitation. ⁵⁰ As circumstances worsened, a rising generation of activists grew increasingly frustrated with labour reformism, and began experimenting with more strident methods of protest. As they developed their fresh and radical appeal to class-based insurgency, this generation reinvigorated the Garveyist tradition of race-based labour activism that had become an indelible part of the region’s political culture. Yet, older Garveyists, and particularly Marcus Garvey himself, found themselves unable to adapt to the changing circumstances, to the new moment of possibility. The labour rebellions of 1935–1939 bore the imprint of Garveyism even as organisational Garveyism was receding from the spotlight. ⁵¹

Once again, mass organisation was facilitated by the ‘Ethiopian Tent’. Worker insurgency was sparked by the pan-African enthusiasm and mobilisation that grew out of the Italian-Ethiopian War, which formally commenced in October 1935 after a build-up of nearly a year. It is hard to overestimate the impact of the war on the popular consciousness of the West Indies. Petitions, including several from local UNIA divisions, flooded the Colonial Office, demanding that Britain do more to protect Ethiopia from the widely expected Italian invasion, expressing frustration with European complacency, and requesting permission – in light of this complacency – to mobilise their own regiments of volunteers to help defend Ethiopian independence. ⁵² Officials noted with concern the escalating rhetoric at pro-Ethiopian meetings, and the large crowds gathering around cable stations waiting for news while ‘known local agitators’ worked them up into a state of excitement. When strikes and riots began to break out across the archipelago, beginning in St. Kitts in January 1935, it became clear that the passions inflamed by the conflict in Africa would have real consequences. After bloody riots erupted in St. Vincent, the Governor expressed frustration that his black subjects were determined to ignore ‘geography and ethnology’ in viewing the war in Ethiopia as a nationalist cause. ‘To them the Emperor [Haile] Selassie … is regarded as a national hero who is making a valiant stand against the unprovoked attack of a white race’, he reported. It mattered little that Italy, and not Britain, had declared war on the African nation. ‘What has stirred them profoundly’, he noted, ‘is that a white race has gone to war with a black race’. ⁵³

The leaders of this insurgency, and several of its participants, had grown up in the Garvey movement. ⁵⁴ As in 1919–1920, they framed worker grievances and trade union politics in the language of pan-African solidarity. In Barbados, the labour leader Clement Payne joined labour issues to discourses on race relations, Garveyism, black cultural pride and the international consequences of the Italo-Ethiopian conflict. At a protest outside Government House in Bridgetown, Payne’s lieutenant, Ulric McDonald Grant, combined a critique of the island’s ‘capitalist element’ with a broader condemnation of the ‘white man’ and his disdain for ‘poor negroes’. He enlarged a call for worker organisation to an appeal for the mass organisation of black West Indians, urging the crowd to ‘remember your mother country which is Africa’, and offering praise to Marcus Garvey. ⁵⁵ As labour disturbances spread from St. Kitts and St. Vincent to British Guiana and St. Lucia, to Trinidad and Barbados, to Jamaica and the Bahamas, officials were faced with the uncomfortable reality of an ‘ever growing antagonism towards the white race’. During a wave of strikes in British Guiana, a group of several hundred black men armed themselves with cutlasses and marched through the countryside, reportedly shouting ‘Bad Abyssinia [Ethiopia] – all you white bitches got no business here – our country – you go back where you come from’. In Trinidad, the Governor reported rumours of Marcus Garvey’s imminent arrival during the labour disturbances of 1937. ⁵⁶ If workers challenged employers on the grounds of pressing economic grievances and want, they were galvanised by the lesson, crystallised in their minds by the Ethiopian crisis, that battles between capital and labour, between fascism and democracy, were legible in the context of the great conflict between whites and non-whites that continued to underlie the geopolitical order. ⁵⁷ In this climate, observed the Secretary of State for the Colonies, William Ormsby-Gore, conditions of ‘unemployment, underpay [and] undernourishment’ threatened ‘a colour clash spreading throughout the West Indies’. Fearing this contagion, legislators privately discussed ways to ‘disguise’ the racial outlines of the conflicts in public reports. ⁵⁸

A liminal figure in this new wave of labour rebellions was Tubal Uriah ‘Buzz’ Butler, who emerged as the de facto leader of the strikes and disturbances that rocked Trinidad in 1937. Disillusioned by what he viewed as a disconnect between the reformist tactics of the TWA and the deteriorating situation for Trinidad’s oil workers, Butler organised the British Empire Workers’ and Citizens’ Home Rule Party (or the Home Rule Party), quickly mobilising a strong base of support among the workers in the island’s southern oil fields, and establishing an informal alliance with similarly disaffected and radicalised activists in the north. ⁵⁹ In the months leading up to the oil workers’ strike in June 1937, Butler travelled between the oil fields and urban centres of southern Trinidad, electrifying black Trinidadians in a series of speeches and meetings that colourfully repackaged well-worn tropes of Garveyist mobilisation in the context of growing labour unrest. Warning that ‘British Ethiopians and all coloured folks in Trinidad’ were being ‘set aside for slow but sure extermination’, Butler called on non-white workers and citizens to unite, to prepare to shed blood in defence of their homes, their livelihoods and their liberty. Like earlier Garveyists, Butler declared himself a loyal subject of the Empire, but argued that a vast international conspiracy was afoot, represented by the emergence of a ‘Fascist-Imperialist-Capitalist’ cabal that had led Britain into collaboration with Benito Mussolini and now conspired to return black workers to a state of slavery. Pledging his organisation to the pursuit of a ‘brighter British Day’, couching his labour demands in the language of messianic prophecy, racial awakening and pan-African consciousness, Butler embraced the Janus-face of Garveyist reformism and recast it in the language of ‘open rebellion’ and ‘Industrial war’. ⁶⁰ As a tribute to Garveyism, Butler opened his meetings with a recitation of ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’, a hymn popularised by its use at the opening of UNIA meetings. To close, Butler selected recognisable labour songs such as ‘Arise Ye Toilers of our Nation’. ⁶¹ In the space between the two hymns, a torch was being passed.

Conclusion

From London, where he lived out his remaining years in increasingly miserable exile, Marcus Garvey cast a tragic shadow over the events. The zeitgeist had passed him by; he seemed unwilling, or unable, to acknowledge the magnitude of what was happening in the Caribbean. By the beginning of July 1937, the worker rebellion had been violently suppressed in Trinidad, but tensions simmered, and workers, employers and authorities nervously awaited the report of the Forster Commission, which would recommend a new framework for the island’s industrial relations. The International African Service Bureau (IASB), led by a group of young black radicals in London, including Trinidadians C. L. R. James and George Padmore, had seized on the cause, demanding that labour conditions and worker rights in the West Indies be harmonised with British standards, and that the West Indies be granted representative government to ensure an end of the domination of workers by an ‘alien people’. In August 1937, as Garvey was holding court at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, he was confronted by James and Padmore, and challenged to speak on behalf of the Trinidadian workers. Antagonised by his rivals, Garvey replied that the workers had been ‘misled’, that they should follow the lead of his reformist ally, Captain A. A. Cipriani and not ‘agitators’ from London, the IASB, who were unnecessarily trying to keep trouble going. Why, asked Garvey in a follow-up interview with the conservative Trinidad Guardian, should Trinidadian workers ‘risk their employment for the sake of these agitators in London who have nothing to lose’, and who were concerned more with ‘industrial strife’ than ‘industrial peace’. The resulting front-page article caused a sensation in Trinidad, and was an embarrassment for local Garveyites. An aghast E. M. Mitchell, President of the UNIA division in Port of Spain, tried to minimise the damage by suggesting that Garvey’s ‘unjustified [and] serious blunder’ was a result of ‘misinformation and ignorance of local conditions’. ⁶²

In October, during a tour of the West Indies, Garvey was allowed to land in Trinidad under strict restrictions. ⁶³ He visited the southern industrial region, met with a number of ‘negro organizations’ in Port of Spain, and delivered two addresses of a ‘non-political but inspirational’ character. Among the more militant, unaware of the constraints with which Garvey was burdened and fixed to a view of the UNIA leader as a fierce and courageous race leader, there was deep disillusionment. The Garvey of that story had passed from the scene, even as his legacy continued to be woven into the fabric of Caribbean political culture. At the Globe Theatre, Captain Cipriani introduced Garvey by declaring him ‘one of the greatest leaders in present-day history’. By this time, such accolades were a bit far-fetched. But Cipriani reached at a greater truth when he remarked, ‘it is not the man or the individual, it is the work and the word that will stand through the long ages that are yet to be’. Cheers rose to the rafters. ⁶⁴

Garveyism nurtured a platform of race-first, worker-oriented, anti-colonial politics that remained at the cutting edge of West Indian activism and dissent for nearly two decades following the first world war. It did so by effectively articulating the needs and grievances of West Indian blacks, and by remaining sensitive to the shifting currents of political possibility in which such needs and grievances might be approached. Marcus Garvey’s legacy was established not only in the radical fires of postwar labour rebellion, but also in his ability to sustain a vibrant culture of organisation and political engagement suited to the reactionary era that followed. By the mid-1930s, his mind had hardened. Whereas new organisations like the IASB, and rising Caribbean radicals like Butler, understood the emerging possibilities of labour radicalism, Garvey proved unable to so adapt. The legacy of Garveyism remained in the continued engagement of its sons and daughters in the struggle against world white domination. Philosophical renderings of ‘Africa for the Africans’ and racial nationalism would continue to inspire black activists. Yet the politics of Garveyism – its vibrant connection to mass organisation – had ended. The Age of Garvey had passed.