page_title: Marcus Garvey
section_title: Criminal charges: 1922–1923
hierarchical_section_title: Marcus Garvey / Organization of UNIA / Criminal charges: 1922–1923
caption_attribution_description: English: Marcus Garvey with Amy Jacques Garvey, 1922
context_page_description: Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. ONH was a Jamaican political activist, black nationalist, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa. Ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist, his ideas came to be known as Garveyism.
  Garvey was born to a moderately prosperous Afro-Jamaican family in Saint Ann's Bay, Colony of Jamaica and apprenticed into the print trade as a teenager. Working in Kingston, he became involved in trade unionism before living briefly in Costa Rica, Panama, and England. Returning to Jamaica, he founded UNIA in 1914. In 1916, he moved to the United States and established a UNIA branch in New York City's Harlem district. Emphasising unity between Africans and the African diaspora, he campaigned for an end to European colonial rule across Africa and 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.
context_section_description: In January 1922, Garvey was arrested and charged with mail fraud for having advertised the sale of stocks in a ship, the Orion, which the Black Star Line did not yet own. He was bailed for $2,500. Hoover and the BOI were committed to securing a conviction; they had also received complaints from a small number of the Black Star Line's stock owners, who wanted them to pursue the matter further. 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.
  After his arrest, he made plans for a tour of the western and southern states. This included a parade in Los Angeles, partly to woo back members of UNIA's California branch, which had recently splintered off to become independent.
  In June 1922, Garvey met with Edward Young Clarke, the Imperial Wizard pro tempore of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) at the Klan's offices in Atlanta. Garvey made a number of incendiary speeches in the months leading up to that meeting; in some, he thanked the whites for Jim Crow.  Garvey once stated:
  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. You may call me a Klansman if you will, but, potentially, every white man is a Klansman as far as the Negro in competition with whites socially, economically and politically is concerned, and there is no use lying.
  News of Garvey's meeting with the KKK soon spread and it was covered on the front page of many African-American newspapers, causing widespread upset. When news of the meeting was revealed, it generated much surprise and anger among African-Americans; Grant noted that it marked "the most significant turning point in his popularity". Several prominent black Americans—Chandler Owen, A. Philip Randolph, William Pickens, and Robert Bagnall—launched the "Garvey Must Go" campaign in the wake of the revelation. Many of these critics played to nativist ideas by emphasising Garvey's Jamaican identity and sometimes calling for his deportation. Pickens and several other of Garvey's critics claimed to have been threatened, and sometimes physically attacked, by Garveyites. Randolph reported receiving a severed hand in the post, accompanied by a letter from the KKK threatening him to stop criticising Garvey and to join UNIA.
  1922 also brought some successes for Garvey. He attracted the country's first black pilot, Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, to join UNIA and to perform aerial stunts to raise its profile. The group also launched its Booker T. Washington University from the UNIA-run Phyllis Wheatley Hotel on West 136th Street. He also finally succeeded in securing a UNIA delegation to the League of Nations, sending five members to represent the group to Geneva. Garvey also proposed marriage to his secretary, Jacques. She accepted, although later stated: "I did not marry for love. I did not love Garvey. I married him because I thought it was the right thing to do." They married in Baltimore in July 1922. She proposed that a book of his speeches be published; it appeared as The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, although the speeches were edited to remove more inflammatory material. That year, UNIA also launched a new newspaper, the Daily Negro Times.
  At UNIA's August 1922 convention, Garvey called for the impeachment of several senior UNIA figures, including Adrian Johnson and J. D. Gibson, and declared that the UNIA cabinet should not be elected by the organization's members, but appointed directly by him. When they refused to step down, he resigned both as head of UNIA and as Provisional President of Africa, probably in an act designed to compel their own resignations. He then began openly cri
caption: Garvey with his wife Amy Jacques in 1922
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