June 18, 1923: Marcus Garvey is convicted of mail fraud in federal court in New York. At the time, he was regarded as the most famous black person in the world. Were he not, he probably wouldn't even have been arrested.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was born on August 17, 1887 in Saint Ann's Bay, Jamaica. Jamaica was a British colony from 1655 to 1962. Garvey was born into a moderately prosperous Afro-Jamaican family, and was apprenticed into the print trade as a teenager. Working in the colonial capital (now the national capital) of Kingston, he became involved in trade unionism.
He later lived briefly in Costa Rica, Panama, and England. On returning to Jamaica, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (usually abbreviated to "UNIA") on July 15, 1914. In 1916, he moved to the United States, and established a UNIA branch in New York City's Harlem, which was completing its process of changing from a German and Italian neighborhood to a black one.
Emphasizing unity between Africans and the African diaspora, Garvey campaigned for an end to European colonial rule in Africa, and advocated the political unification of the continent. He envisioned a unified Africa as a one-party state, governed by himself, that would enact laws to ensure black racial purity.
Although he never visited the continent, he was committed to the Back-to-Africa movement, arguing that part of the diaspora should migrate there. Garveyist ideas became increasingly popular, and the UNIA grew in membership.
His black separatist views led him to build a relationship with white racists, like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), in the interest of advancing their shared goal of racial separatism. He appreciated that they didn't hide their racism, saying:
I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together. I like honesty and fair play.
This caused a division between Garvey and other prominent African-American civil rights activists, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who promoted racial integration. Labor leader A. Philip Randolph, early in his career, publicly criticized Garvey.
Believing that black people needed to be financially independent from white-dominated societies, Garvey launched various businesses in the U.S., including the Negro Factories Corporation and a newspaper, the Negro World. In 1919, he became President of the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company, designed to forge a link between North America and Africa and facilitate African-American migration to the African nation of Liberia, which was founded by former slaves.
In October 1919, George Tyler, a part-time vendor of the Negro World, entered the UNIA office, and fired 4 shots with a .38-caliber revolver. Garvey received 2 bullets, in his right leg and his scalp, but he survived. Tyler was soon apprehended, but committed suicide by leaping from the third-tier of the Harlem jail. Garvey soon recovered from his wounds, and gave a public speech in Philadelphia 5 days later.
In January 1922, Garvey was arrested and charged with mail fraud, for having advertised the sale of stocks in a ship, Orion, which the Black Star Line did not yet own. Garvey spoke out against the charges he faced, but focused on blaming not the state, but rival African-American groups, for them. As well as accusing disgruntled former members of UNIA, in a Liberty Hall speech, he implied that the NAACP were behind the conspiracy to imprison him. The mainstream press picked up on the charge, largely presenting Garvey as a con artist who had swindled African-American people.
Having been postponed at least three times, in May 1923, the trial finally came to court, with Garvey and 3 other defendants accused of mail fraud. Garvey's attorney, Cornelius McDougald, urged him to plead guilty to secure a minimum sentence, but Garvey refused, dismissing McDougald, and deciding to represent himself in court.
Garvey struggled due to his lack of legal training. In his three-hour closing address, he presented himself as a selfless leader, who was beset by incompetent and thieving staff, who caused all the problems for UNIA and the Black Star Line. On June 18, the jurors retired to deliberate on the verdict, returning after 10 hours. They found Garvey himself guilty of a scheme to defraud, but found his 3 co-defendants not guilty.
Garvey was furious with the verdict, shouting abuse in the courtroom and calling both the Judge and the District Attorney "damned dirty Jews." (Judge Julian Mack was Jewish, but D.A. Joab Banton was not.) This was different: He had previously been supportive of Zionism, and had never previous expressed anti-Semitic views.
(By 1933, he was again supportive, writing, "The Jewish race is a noble one, and the Jew is only persecuted because he has certain qualities of progress that other people have not learnt." He even denounced the Nazis.)
Garvey remained free on appeal. At least temporarily a free man, Garvey toured the U.S., giving a lecture at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In speeches given during this tour, he further emphasized the need for racial segregation through migration to Africa, calling the United States "a white man's country."
In February 1925, his appeal was denied, and he was taken to the federal prison in Atlanta, to begin a 5-year sentence. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence, on the condition that he be deported. He returned to Jamaica, but was not well-received there, and left in 1935, moving to London, where he told a friend that he had "left Jamaica a broken man, broken in spirit, broken in health and broken in pocket... and I will never, never, never go back."
For the next 5 years, he continued to speak out for pan-Africanism, but ran afoul of other black civil rights groups, including when he criticized Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia following Italy's invasion of that nation in 1935. Well overweight, his health was not good. In 1940, he suffered a series of strokes, the last of them ending his life on June 10, at the age of 52.
He was survived by his 2nd wife, Amy Jacques, who had written for his various publications, and lived until 1973. They had 2 sons, both born in Jamaica. Marcus Jacques Garvey, known as Marcus Garvey Jr., was born in 1930, became a lawyer, founded the African Nationalist Union in 1968, served as President of the UNIA from 1992 to 2004, and lived until 2020. Dr. Julius Garvey, born in 1933, became a thoracic surgeon and a hospital administrator. As of June 18, 2022, he is still alive.
In 1926, George Weston succeeded Garvey in a UNIA Convention Election, becoming the second elected President-General of the UNIA, Inc. Many Garvey supporters were angered, and split off into rival entities such as the "Garvey Clubs" and other organizations, based on members' differing interpretation of the original aims and objects of the UNIA. Officially, the UNIA, Inc. is still operating.
Like many other radical figures, once dead and no longer able to disappoint his followers, Garvey has become a hero to black groups. He is a national hero in his native Jamaica, founding President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana looked to him as a role model, and Martin Luther King laid a wreath on Garvey's grave in Kingston in 1965.
On 4 occasions growing up, I was hospitalized at the Hospital for Joint Diseases at 123rd Street and Madison Avenue in New York's Harlem. (There is still a medical facility there, but much of the building has been converted into apartments.) Across Madison Avenue, there was a park, originally named Mount Morris Park, named for Founding Father Robert Morris. In 1973, it was renamed Marcus Garvey Park.
UPDATE: On his last full day in office, January 19, 2025, President Joe Biden pardoned Garvey for his mail fraud conviction.
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June 18, 1923 was a Monday. These baseball games were played that day:
* The New York Yankees lost to the Detroit Tigers, 10-3 at the original Yankee Stadium, which had opened 2 months earlier. Ken Holloway outpitched Waite Hoyt. Babe Ruth went 1-for-4 with an RBI. 3rd baseman Joe Dugan went 4-for-4. Ty Cobb, by this point also the Tigers' manager, went 2-for-5 with a home run.
* The New York Giants beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 4-1 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Frankie Frisch went 3-for-4 with a walk and an RBI.
* The Brooklyn Robins (as the Dodgers were known from 1914 to 1931, while Wilbert Robinson was managing them) lost to the Cincinnati Reds, 6-3 at Redland Field (later renamed Crosley Field) in Cincinnati. Zack Wheat went 1-for-4.
* The St. Louis Browns swept a doubleheader from the Boston Red Sox, 6-2 and 9-0 at Fenway Park in Boston. Elam Vangilder pitched a 3-hit shutout in the 2nd game. George Sisler, the Browns' best player, missed the entire season due to sinus issues.
* The Chicago White Sox beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 6-5 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Eddie Collins went 2-for-5 with 2 RBIs.
* The Washington Senators beat the Cleveland Indians, 4-3 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. Jim O'Neill singled Bucky Harris home with the winning run in the bottom of the 13th inning. Tris Speaker went 0-for-5 with a walk, but had an RBI with a groundout. Walter Johnson of the Senators and Stan Coveleski of the Indians both went the distance.
* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Boston Braves, 8-3 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.
* And the Chicago Cubs beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 9-3 at Cubs Park (later renamed Wrigley Field) in Chicago.
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