Marcus Garvey speaks at Liberty Hall
One hundred years ago today … Marcus Garvey spoke to the weekly meeting of Universal Negro Improvement Association at Liberty Hall on West 138th St.
Marcus Garvey at Liberty Hall, 1920. Wikimedia Commons.
United Negro Improvement Association donation envelope. Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Alexander Gumby Collection.
According to David Levering Lewis, The LIberty Hall audience would have been a more “younger, angrier poorer, and darker than the typical card-carrying members of the NAACP or the National Urban League” (W.E.B. Dubois, 55).
This Sunday, Garvey’s address included reference to the troubles of The Black Star Line, the cooperatively-owned shipping company that was a centerpiece of Garvey’s Afrocentric, pan-Africanism. According to his biographer Colin Grant, Garvey reported that “It had “been a week of brain against brain and the Black Star Line [has] survived’ “ (228). The problems stemmed from a complex deal involving the Black Star Line’s flagship, The Yarmouth (which Lewis reports had been rechristened The Frederick Douglas) and a ship ment of whiskey that was supposed to be out of US waters before … prohibition.of course.
1920 was a momentous year for Garvey and UNIA; we’ll be seeing more of them in the coming months, and especially in August.