By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
18 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with Rep. Rashida Tlaib and two other non-black members, signed a letter asking Biden to exonerate America’s first black Klansman.
The letter does not mention that Marcus Garvey had allied with the KKK, admired Hitler, told his followers to read Mein Kampf and declared, “what the Negro needs is a Hitler.”
It also does not mention that Garvey had himself in mind for the job, that the self-proclaimed “Provisional President of Africa” wore imaginary military uniforms and sent his thugs to beat up black civil rights leaders before being expelled in disgrace after defrauding his followers.
Or that the charges of mail fraud that 21 House Democrats want to exonerate Garvey from were brought at the urging of black civil rights leaders of the day who demanded federal intervention.
House Democrats are not the first to argue that Garvey was railroaded.
After the trial, Garvey claimed that he had been convicted because of his allegiance to the KKK. In buffoonery worthy of Candace Owens, he argued that the judge (who was actually a Christian, but who Garvey falsely claimed was Jewish) believed that “I hated and was opposed to the Jews, because of my alleged membership in or connection with the Klu Klux Klan.”
The best that can be said of the House Democrat letter is that it does not claim that the Jews had come after Garvey because of his ties to the KKK. The Messenger, the key publication of the Harlem Renaissance, acidly described Garvey as “the Black Imperial Wizard Becomes Messenger Boy of the White Klu Klux Kleagle.” Garvey argued, “between the Klu Klux Klan and the NAACP group, give me the Klan” and said, “you may call me a Klansman if you will.”
21 House Democrats also chose to stand with Garvey’s choice of the KKK over the NAACP.
The House Democrat letter describes Garvey as an early civil rights leader who challenged “racial inequality” and “founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to challenge racial inequality and inspired millions worldwide as a tireless advocate for black self-determination and economic independence.” It leaves off Garvey’s claim that “we were the first Fascists” and that, “Mussolini and Hitler copied the programme of the UNIA.”
The 21 House Democrats did not comment on whether they liked Hitler’s economic program.
Garvey (like the Nation of Islam) supported racial segregation and (also like the NOI and Malcolm X) was eager to ally with the KKK to fight the “vile efforts of the miscegenationists” who would allow black and white people to live together and marry each other.
The House Democrat letter claims that “the evidence paints an abundantly clear narrative that the charges against Mr. Garvey were not only fabricated but also targeted to criminalize, discredit, and silence him as a civil rights leader.” No less a figure than W. E. B. DuBois in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine however exposed the fraud and shredded Garvey in his articles.
“Marcus Garvey is, without doubt, the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world. He is either a lunatic or a traitor,” DuBois, one of the pivotal black figures of the age, famously wrote. “Every man who apologizes for or defends Marcus Garvey from this day forth writes himself down as unworthy of the countenance of decent Americans. As for Garvey himself, this open ally of the Ku Klux Klan should be locked up or sent home.”
A century later, a sizeable section of the Congressional Black Caucus has signed on to a letter defending Garvey proving themselves, in DuBois’ words “unworthy of the countenance of decent Americans.”
The House Democrats imply that Garvey was framed by a racist government when it was actually black civil rights leaders, including A. Phillip Randolph, who later headed MLK’s March on Washington, who accused Garvey of murder and denounced him for having “ceaselessly and assiduously sought to spread among Negroes distrust and hatred of all white people” and urged that “the Attorney General use his full influence completely to extirpate this vicious movement.”
How did Marcus Garvey go from a disgrace reviled by black civil rights leaders to a cause that black leaders now want to stand behind? Part of the answer is that while Garvey might have lost the battle, there’s no doubt that he won the war. ‘Garveyism’ or black nationalism in its various forms, which could be summed up as in The Friends of Negro Freedom letter, pushing “hatred of all white people” has come to dominate black politics from Al Sharpton to BLM to DEI.
Malcolm X’s parents had been former members of Garvey’s UNIA and the Nation of Islam traded UNIA’s fake costumed fascism for an equally absurd fake version of Islam. The Nation of Islam, like Garvey, allied with the KKK, opposed integration and became obsessed with the Jews. “I sat at the table myself with the heads of the Ku Klux Klan,” Malcolm X admitted.
Garvey’s style of buffoonery can easily be seen in Malcolm X, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Sharpton and Black Lives Matter leaders who bluster, lie and make wild promises and threats, suppress rivals, and push racialism as the answer to everything.
The fraudulent and fanatical model of Garvey’s movement that black civil rights leaders of the day denounced as “ministers without churches, physicians without patients, lawyers without clients, and publishers without readers, who are usually in search of easy money” has long since become the standard to such a degree that hardly any alternative to it even exists.
Will Biden exonerate America’s leading black klansman? Almost certainly. President Calvin Coolidge had originally agreed to commute Garvey’s sentence and deport him back to Jamaica as a small gesture of appeasement to a black electorate disappointed over his failure to intervene against lynch mobs. The move did nothing to win over black voters, who were split between the black leftists who began drawing black voters to the Democrats and black rightists who were divided between intelligent conservatives and racialist lunatics.
The racist lunatics and socialists eventually came together in a post-civil rights consensus embodied by the alliance between Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson, or even more perfectly in domestic terrorist groups like the Black Guerrilla Family, which fused Garveyism with Marxism-Leninism, and the more contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.
Over the winter, major corporations will pay tribute to Kwanzaa: a fake black nationalist holiday invented by a Garveyite who was sent to prison for torturing two women with a soldering iron.
Exonerating an aspiring black Hitler who allied with the KKK for a crime he committed against black people and a conviction carried out at the behest of black civil rights leaders would simply acknowledge that there is no more civil rights movement, and Garveyism rules the Democrats.
Garvey wrongly claimed that, “Mussolini and Hitler copied fascism from me”, but Democrats did copy Garvey’s racial nationalism, thuggism and terrorism. What does that say about them?
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
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