Marcus Garvey was at the height of his power in the early 1920s. His Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) had between two and four million members worldwide. He spoke passionately and persuasively about Black pride, nationalism, and economic independence from the White world. To help promote his agenda, Garvey established the Black Star Line in June 1919 as “a powerful agency for good.” The company ultimately acquired three ships: the Frederick Douglass, the Shady Side, and the Antonio Maceo. They were all old, ill-repaired vessels that the Black Star Line paid too much for. The Black Star Line hemorrhaged money and never made a profit as a result. But its all-Black crews received warm welcomes from locals in the Caribbean and Latin America.
All this was enough to catch the attention of the United States government. J. Edgar Hoover of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) was especially interested. To them, Marcus Garvey was a con artist and dangerous agitator. Agents infiltrated Garvey’s organizations and worked to disgrace the “Black Moses.” They succeeded when Marcus Garvey was arrested and convicted on mail fraud charges in 1923 and ultimately deported in 1927.
“The best way to appreciate the nature and objectives of an enemy is to observe him in action.”
In 1919, a young J. Edgar Hoover was second-in-command at the Bureau of Investigation. In the wake of the Russian Revolution and the rise of communism abroad, the BOI was largely concerned with identifying and dealing with communist infiltrators and sympathizers. All aliens were considered suspect at this time. Hoover initially saw Marcus Garvey as an “undesirable alien” and began extensively documenting his activities.
In a memo to a special agent on October 11, 1919, Hoover wrote:
I am transmitting herewith a communication which has come to my attention from the Panama Canal, Washington office, relative to the activities of Marcus Garvey. Garvey is a West-Indian negro and in addition to his activities in endeavoring to establish the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation he has also been particularly active among the radical elements in New York City in agitating the negro movement. Unfortunately, however, he has not as yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an undesirable alien, from the point of view of deportation. 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 propaganda and for this reason I am transmitting the communication to you for your appropriate attention.
The following is a brief statement of Marcus Garvey and his activities:
- Subject a native of the West Indies and one of the most prominent negro agitators in New York;
- He is a founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League;
- He is the promulgator of the Black Star Line and is the managing editor of the Negro World;
- He is an exceptionally fine orator, creating much excitement among the negroes through his steamship proposition;
- In his paper the “Negro World” the Soviet Russian Rule is upheld and there is open advocation of Bolshevism.
Respectfully,
J. E. Hoover
The BOI ultimately determined that Marcus Garvey was not a communist sympathizer. Its surveillance on him continued, however, as it sought to gather evidence on “Negro Agitation” or “Negro Radicalism.” The BOI left no stone unturned in its investigation. It worked with British Military Intelligence and the US Diplomatic Service to gather information on Garvey’s activities worldwide. The US Postal Censorship Committee read his correspondence regularly. Everything Marcus Garvey and the UNIA did was seemingly known to the Bureau of Investigation.
In a report to J. Edgar Hoover, one BOI agent noted that Garvey was:
…without doubt one of the worst inciters in the United States today among the negroes, who, I believe, would do almost anything for him. If there should be any race trouble in New York at any time there is no doubt that Garvey is sowing the seeds now for it.
So the surveillance on Garvey continued. As Hoover wrote in his 1958 book, Masters Of Deceit: The Story Of Communism In America And How To Fight It, “The best way to appreciate the nature and objectives of an enemy is to observe him in action.” That’s exactly what the BOI did with Garvey and the UNIA.
Infiltration and Sabotage
The Black Star Line’s ships — although old and in poor shape when they bought them — seemed to suffer mechanical issues with alarming frequency. Garvey began to suspect that saboteurs were to blame. He wrote in an open letter:
[A]II the troubles we have had on our ships, has been caused because men were paid to make this trouble by certain organizations calling themselves Negro Advancement Associations … They paid men to dismantle our machinery and otherwise damage it, so as to bring about the downfall of the movement.
Garvey had antagonistic relationships with other Black leaders, notably W.E.B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph. They largely saw the “Black Moses” as a self-aggrandizing demagogue who bordered on buffoonery. Randolph once wrote that Garvey had “neither the brains nor the capital to run a steamship line, much less build an empire.” DuBois wrote a lengthy piece examining the Black Star Line’s finances and business practices. He accused Marcus Garvey of “using the mails in furtherance of a scheme to defraud and conspiring to do so.”
However, most of the infiltrators and saboteurs appear to have been Bureau of Investigation agents. Some took shipboard positions in the Black Star Line and damaged the engines by throwing foreign matter into the fuel. Others worked closer to Garvey and his business dealings. Dr. Arthur Ulysses Craig, the first Black electrical engineer in the United States, helped Captain Joshua Cockburn inspect the SS Yarmouth before the Black Star Line bought it. James Wormley Jones — the first African American BOI (later FBI) agent — became a close confidant of Marcus Garvey himself.
Ultimately, charges of mail fraud came about when the Black Star Line began advertising a ship it didn’t own: the SS Phyllis Wheatley.
Mail Fraud
The 6,026 GRT cargo liner had originally been christened as the SS Prinz Oskar and a part of the Hamburg America Line. When World War I erupted, the ship made for the neutral port of Philadelphia and was laid up there until being seized by the United States in April 1917. It was subsequently renamed the SS Orion.
The Black Star Line had been trying to buy SS Orion for a while, but didn’t yet own her. Nevertheless she appeared as the SS Phyllis Wheatley on an advertisement. This false advertising officially constituted mail fraud. As a result, Marcus Garvey and three other Black Star Line officials were indicted based on evidence provided by the BOI.
In his trial, Garvey defended the UNIA and its purpose:
[T]he Universal Negro Improvement Association is endeavoring to assist you in solving the Negro problem by helping the Negro to become enterprising, independent politically, and by having a country of his own. If you follow
me down the ages you will see within a hundred years you are going to have
a terrible race problem in America, when you will have increased and the
country will become over-populated. It will be a fight for existence between
two opposite races, the weak will have to go down in defeat before the strong.
Do you know when you want bread and the other fellow wants it, when there
is only one loaf – what is going to happen? Enmity and pressure is going to spring up and a fight will ensue. That is why the Universal Negro Improvement Association has started this proposition to redeem Africa and build up a country of our own, so as not to molest you in the country your fathers founded hundreds of years ago.
In the end, Marcus Garvey was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. While incarcerated at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, the United States government received a petition with 70,000 signatures asking for Garvey’s release. Ultimately, President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence, but deported him back to Jamaica in 1927. Although Garvey resumed his work with the UNIA, he never again reached his previous levels of power and influence. He died in London on June 10, 1940.
Legacy
The Black Star Line was succeeded by the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Company. In 1924, it purchased the cargo liner General G. W. Goethals (the former Hamburg America liner Grunewald) and renamed it the SS Booker T. Washington. The ship was sold in 1926 to pay for mooring fees, and ultimately scrapped at Ardrossan, Scotland in 1937.
On January 19, 2025, President Joe Biden posthumously pardoned Marcus Garvey. This came after over 100 years of work and advocacy. Amy Jacques (Garvey’s wife) had first started the attempt in 1923, with renewed interest in recent decades.
Although the Black Star Line fell short of Marcus Garvey’s lofty vision and beset by a number of issues, it was nevertheless a bold attempt to try something new. It was a business venture meant to help unite Black people across the world. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, Garvey “was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions to Negroes and make the Negro feel he was somebody.” The Black Star Line might have been a financial failure, but it should be remembered for its grand global vision.
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