In Which Marcus Garvey is a Proud Fascist #
I know admittedly little about the black leader Marcus Garvey, but I found this quote — from Paul Devlin’s review of Negro With a Hat — striking:
Garvey is quoted as having said: “We were the first Fascists. … When we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown, [and] Mussolini copied our Fascism.” Garvey’s “we” was his Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.), an organization that spread like brush fire from Harlem to black communities across the United States, the Caribbean and Central America, acquiring hundreds of thousands of members. The quotation about Fascism, in the context of Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, sheds light on the befuddlement of both Du Bois and J. Edgar Hoover, neither of whom knew quite what to make of the anti-union, non-Socialist, non-Bolshevik, non-Democrat, non-Republican organizer and orator with (in Grant’s words) a “haunting and melodious voice.”