130 ChaPter 3
Garvey’s goal of separatism from the United States was fueled by the
changing culture of the time, which he saw as corrupt and dysfunctional. In
America, Blacks were targeted for advertisements for skin whiteners and hair
straighteners, to look more like Caucasians. They depended on racist Whites
for jobs, education, housing, and public services. Garvey, very critical of Black
behavior, thus saw his own people as gullible, misled sheep that followed cor-
rupt leaders of an enemy culture. In Garvey’s opinion, Black sickness and
disease, for instance, occurred because they ate the wrong food and lived
unhealthy lifestyles, and thus they died young. “Negroes won’t take medicine
for 10 years and expect to be well, and when they get sick... they say ‘God’s
spirit has left me.’ What spirit wouldn’t leave you? You ignorant good-for-
nothing-lot,” he complained. The only remedy was to leave the depraved
culture behind to become independent, self-aware, and emancipated—Blacks
had to leave America in order to achieve a cultural rebirth.
A major component of Garvey’s UNIA plan for independence was separa-
tion and the creation of businesses owned and operated by African-Americans.
The UNIA even had its own liner of steamships known as the Black Star Line
to connect businesses in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.
However, Garvey’s “Black nationalist” rhetoric upset U.S. government leaders,
and Garvey’s radical Pan-Africanism convinced many African-American civil
rights leaders to stay away from the UNIA. By the early 1920s, UNIA mem-
bership was in decline. Then the U.S. government indicted Garvey for tax
evasion and mail fraud for selling stock in the Black Star Line. Eventually, he
was deported to Jamaica in 1927 and the Pan-African movement faded.
Nevertheless, Garvey had managed to mobilize the Black community in a
movement that challenged American consumer culture and the economic
establishment.
Other Blacks made a much bigger impact by staying out of politics. As
New York became a focal point for White cultural life in the 1920s, Garvey
hated the involvement of Blacks in consumer culture but, in Harlem, White
consumption of Black entertainment became commonplace. Whites were
attracted to the jazz clubs, dance halls, and speakeasies of Harlem, which had
become the “capital” of Black America after the “Great Migration” brought
millions of African-American agricultural workers to northern urban centers
during the Great War. Harlem was also home to many immigrants from the
West Indies, about 150,000 between 1900 and 1930. Many of them were pro-