Stuff You Should Know - Marcus Garvey: Black Moses

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

One of the more controversial black leaders, Marcus Garvey divided black and white Americans with his assertion of black pride, and sowed division in the black community as well. Yet, possibly no one has had more global impact on black lives than him.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And here's Jerry and this is Stuff You Should Know.

And over there, the ghost of Marcus Garvey. Yes. Who, if you are, say, not black and you, or you are black and you weren't raised to know your black history, you may still be familiar with that name if you're even tangentially interested in reggae music because he pops up a lot, a lot. There's a great Burning Spear song called Marcus Garvey that Sinead O'Connor covered. It's not that good. And then there's also a great, well, he just hit not only him, but also like his teachings pop up a lot in reggae, like in the Peter Tosh song, African. It's 100% based on the ideas of Marcus Garvey as we'll see. So he had a big impact on Rastafarianism. Yes. So as we'll talk about later, he's basically

considered a prophet of Rastafarianism, like he basically is thought of among Rastafari as predicting the rise of Rastafarianism 10 years before it happened. So very prophetic. And he did a lot of stuff, a huge amount of stuff. And in fact, Chuck, what I didn't realize, because I'd heard of him before because I do like Peter Tosh and Burning Spear, but I had no idea that you could put him up as possibly the most impactful black activist in world history. He's up there in the top three easily. Yeah. I was reading an essay by one professor that said when he starts his teachings on Garvey, he said he tries to get the student's attention by saying this man started a movement that dwarfed the civil rights movement in number.

And students are like, huh? Who? And he's a very polarizing figure. So depending on who you talk to, I mean, everyone will agree that he was a great orator and rallyer of people. But depending on who you talk to, you might find both black and white historians say that he was a PT-Barnamesque charlatan and a bit pompous and full of himself. And other people might say, no, he was the real deal. And he was a great leader of men and very forward thinking progressive views on women at a time where especially black women were not thought of as much beyond domestic workers. Right. I noticed that about him too. Yeah. And he propped them up and he was a T-totaler. He didn't believe in alcohol. He was a lot of things. Yeah. I saw it put very succinctly. He

was complicated. He had a lot of views that even if you agreed with his general outlook, you'd probably view as abhorrent. And you said he was polarizing. He wasn't just polarizing between like the black community and the white community in America, in South America and the Caribbean and Africa. He was polarizing within the black community as well. He made enemies out of a lot of people, including some really prominent black thinkers and eventual civil rights leaders. And one of the reasons why, if you're stepping back as like a person living decades and decades after Marcus Garvey lived and there was this transition between blacks under enslavement in America and then like black people transitioning into free citizens and having to go through the

Jim Crow gauntlet and eventually get to civil rights, living decades and decades after that, it's really easy to see the black community in America at the turn of the last century or the last last century or up to the 20s or 30s times we're talking about as like this homogenous group that all basically subscribed and thought about the same things. But Marcus Garvey is a really great instruction in the fact that there's, that's just such a, you can't paint any one group of people with one brush and Marcus Garvey represents that and that he was very conservative and he represented a conservative way of thinking and a philosophy of how black Americans could move forward in a conservative way and that put him at odds with like progressive

thinkers like W.E.B Du Bois who had different ideas for how black people could rise up and raise themselves in America as well. So it's good, there's just so much wrapped up in his story that I think it's just gonna be difficult to get it all into one episode. Yeah, and I guess we should say off the bat that the main lightning ride and his, his style of radicalism and why he went up against a lot of leaders in the black community was while they were saying like, hey, we need to find a way to work within the politics of white America and we need to have white America assist us with these things so we can pick ourselves up by the bootstraps. He was saying, no, no, no, no, no. We should go back to Africa and we need our own space

and we shouldn't try to fit into white America and white society. And this was a radical thing to then we'll talk about all this in detail, but to do something like, hey, I'd like to meet with a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta, because we have similar views on going back to Africa and the back to Africa movement. And that did not sit well within a lot of people in the black community for obvious reasons. But he was a radical thinker and just, you know, every time I thought they should make a movie about him, like we are always saying, I finally found one where they are making a movie. Oh, that's good. Who's playing them? Do you know? I believe it's the guy that was in Black Panther and us. I can't remember his name. Oh, yeah, sure. Oh, he'd be

great. I think he would. And because Garvey was a sort of a large fellow. And I think that it's going to focus on something we'll talk about later in the episode, which were the years that who is, why am I completely blanking on the worst American in history? Hoover. Okay, yeah, J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover's, you know, planting of spies within his own organization. So I think it focuses on those years. I can't wait to see it because that was a pretty insidious set of years for Marcus Garvey for sure. Did I call Hoover the worst American? He's one of them. He's up there with Kissinger and I could go on. Every time we do an episode where Hoover pops up, it's just like, and here's this awful thing he did. Yeah. I wish we could just paddle him once in a while.

Sure. Just bring him back and give him a spanking. And I know it's not cool, but we're talking about J. Edgar Hoover here. Okay. Should we just start with sort of the nuts and bolts of who he was and where he was born and raised and all that good stuff? Totes. He came from Jamaica and he lived in Jamaica while it was still under British colonial rule. It was under colonial rule for 307 years and he was born relatively toward the end of it, but still full squarely in it. He was born to Marcus Garvey Sr., who was a stone mason, and his mom, Sarah Jane Richards, who was a household servant. He was born in St. Ann's Bay Jamaica, which sounds like an idyllic place in 1887. Although he wasn't born to wealthy parents,

he was educated at a colonial school and he knew how to read and he was kind of bitten by the reading bug from a very early age and that helped develop him starting pretty young. Yeah. And the fact that he was Jamaican is one thing that turned a lot of African-Americans off. Like some of the African-American leaders would point out later in life. It was just Jamaican guy even. What does he know about the American experience? Because it's not like he moved to the United States when he was five years old or something like that. He was born and raised Jamaican. Right. I don't think he moved to the U.S. until he was in his late 20s, maybe. Yeah. So that was sort of a bit of a knock against him in the eyes of some African-American

leaders at the time. But he was one of many kids, but the only one who survived into adulthood and moved to Kingston at 14. And he would get a job in a print shop there, which is, I guess he learned the trade pretty well because this was the kind of work that he did off and on over the years to support himself working in different print shops. He always considered himself a journalist, I read. Yeah. He started his own paper. Yeah. Many of them in magazines. And he was a very sharp dude as demonstrated by that first print shop job because he started out with no experience whatsoever. And within two years,

he was the foreman of the printing shop. So he was a quick learner. And at some point, he decided to start traveling abroad. And during some formative years, he ended up in Costa Rica. Because apparently Costa Rica, Panama, these were places that people in the Americas kind of freely traveled to and moved to. And from what I can tell at the time, much the same way that Europeans move around the EU today. Yeah, he had family there. Yeah. So he moves to Costa Rica. Yeah, he had at least an uncle there, right? I think so, yeah. And he got a job on a banana plantation as a timekeeper. And while he was carrying out this work, like basically making sure people were moving as fast as possible to keep everything

nice and efficient, he was witnessing and learning at the same time that these banana plantations owned by American and European corporate interests were having a direct, deeply negative impact on individual Black, Caribbean, West Indian people's lives, Central American people's lives too. He was in Costa Rica. He just traced a line directly between that. It was a very eye-opening experience. And so he founded a paper there in Costa Rica and started basically railing against the evils of this stuff and made a pretty bad name for himself among the authorities there quickly. And that's where his uncle stepped in. It was like, you need to get out of Costa Rica right now. Yeah. And he did. He went to London,

one of a few different times he would live in London throughout his life. And this was in 1912. I don't think we actually said that he was born in 1887. So I think I did. This really frames where kind of the time period that he was learning all this stuff. He studied law and philosophy at Burbett College under the University of London. And again, started working for a newspaper there. And this is where he started to sort of learn about pan-Africanism a little bit more because the newspaper was one that just sort of championed that idea. And that is just sort of the notion of bringing together people of African descent from all over the world under one cultural identity. And there's a lot to it,

but that's sort of a simplified way to say it. Yeah. Like a lot of times you hear it referred to as the African diaspora. Black Africans who moved from Africa, who were forcibly removed from Africa to become enslaved in the Caribbean, in America, in Canada even. And that over time, these people just grew more and more separate. Pan-Africanism was an idea of bringing them back together at the very least intellectually, emotionally as a nation among other nations, but spread out. Or as Garvey would later really kind of take up this idea, like you were saying earlier, of actually moving everybody back to Africa and being like, okay, Africa is black. You guys, you're America. You guys can have your white continents. This is the black continent,

but we're co-ruling the world with you. That's just how it is. That was his ultimate dream. And that was kind of what Pan-Africanism envisioned in Garvey's eyes at least. Yeah. And that would become sort of the basis of his entire movement as far as like just a cultural idea. So then he goes back to Jamaica. He got married to a woman named Amy Ashwood. It was a pretty rough marriage. They were separated just after a few months. I think in his mind, legally divorced a few years later, but she always held onto the notion that they were never like the divorce was not legal. And so she went to her grave saying that she was like the true wife of Marcus Garvey. But it got pretty ugly. They accused one another of infidelity. He accused

her of being an alcoholic. And like I said, as a T-totaler, it was something that he did not believe in at all. But I think it's just something about him and his ideas that regardless of this sort of nasty divorce, she stayed and worked with his group. He founded, along with her, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League of the World. But the Universal Negro Improvement Association, UNIA, is the one that really stuck and is even still around today. And she stayed. And even, as we'll see later, tried to protect him when there was a attempt on his life taken. Yeah. And probably did save his life from what I read by putting herself in between him and his assassin's bullets. So yeah, she definitely did a lot of the early

work that he became very well known for. Because once he started to take off, his name and his ideas, Garveyism is what it's called, just shot off like a rocket. And she was there for most of the groundwork of it. And then they split up shortly after that. So I could see how she'd be a little bitter about that. Yeah. And then in short order, he kind of gave her something else to be unhappy about. And that was he married Amy Jax, spelled like Jacques, who was a Kingston native and was his personal secretary, but also was Amy Ashwood's close friend and maid of honor at their wedding. Yeah. Awkward. So I think that's one reason why Amy Ashwood was a little upset about the whole thing in addition to doing a lot of the groundwork that he later got, you know, so much credit for

and still does today. Yeah. But he has an Amy Jax marriage lasted, I believe, until his death, correct? Until 1940? Yeah. I mean, they married in 1919. And I didn't see anywhere that they ever split up. No, I think that they did. And they had two sons, Marcus, Mosiah, Garvey, the third, and Julius Winston Garvey. And Amy Jax was very accomplished in her own right. She came from an aristocratic Kingston family. I think her father or grandfather was mayor of Kingston. And she was very well educated, very well read, very intelligent. And as we'll see, she helped continue Marcus Garvey's work while he was otherwise occupied for a while in the 20s. Yeah. And that, you know, that led to a little bit of, I watch this really good documentary from PBS, PBS Experience, those

are always really good. Yes. And apparently, that caused a little bit of internal strife within Unia was when they eventually found it, I think it was pretty much their most popular newspaper, the Negro world. He had a page dedicated to women and she ran that page. And she, you know, she ran it like somebody should run their own page in a newspaper and apparently caused a little bit of strife within the organization because as much as he was, had these progressive ideas about women and, you know, propping them up, not everyone at the time, even within Unia, had those same ideas. I think he tried to sort of spread that message. But, you know, there were some, there were some men in the organization still that were a little bit like, who is this lady,

you know? Yeah, sure. Good thing that's over and done with. Yeah, right? Solved. You want to take a break and then come back and talk a little more about Unia? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was

born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer,

I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So we're talking about Unia, the United Negro Improvement Association, which was the brainchild of Marcus Garvey and something he attempted first in Kingston, I believe in 1916, something like that, maybe 1915. And it did not quite take off. He had been inspired by Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. And in fact, he was kind of like the intellectual and probably cultural air to Booker T. Washington's ideas because Washington was a conservative. He believed in black self-enterprise, black self-sufficiency, and that black Americans working hard and creating a

life of their own amidst white Americans would show white Americans that blacks weren't inferior. They just wouldn't be able to ignore it anymore. And then thus white Americans, black Americans would treat one another equally. And the issue of bringing black America out of enslavement and from under Jim Crow would be solved once and for all. That was the very conservative view of Booker T. Washington. And that inspired Marcus Garvey so much that he started corresponding with Booker T. And he was invited to America by Washington, but he arrived about a year after Washington died. Never got to meet him, but he was deeply inspired by him and in a lot of ways carried on his work. Yeah. So he was a little bit late. And his intention was definitely to meet

with Washington, but this was 1916 when he moved to New York. So it's not like it is today. You can't just catch a flight up there real quick if someone's not doing too well health-wise. So he missed his opportunity there. But he had those same ideas and he basically would ask himself, and this is a quote, where's the black man's government? And he came to the conclusion that there was none. They had no representation, basically. And so he went on to say, I will help make them. And that was his aim with UNIA. And like he said, it did not go over too well in Jamaica. But when he got to the U.S., it really, really started to spread pretty quickly. I think the first U.S. chapter was in 1917. They only had 17 members in a basement in Harlem. But he would

eventually go on to buy a building in Harlem that hosted like 6,000 people at a time. And at the peak of his movement, he would claim that there were six million members. It's tough to give a direct count. People in history say that he had a knack for just sort of, and this is the PT Barnum side, sort of over-inflating everything. So they say it probably wasn't six million, but I definitely saw, you know, it numbered in the millions worldwide, like over the course of the movement. Yeah, because to say that his message resonated with people is the understatement of the year. He came along at a time, he came to New York at a time where in America, there was a real discord and unhappiness and uneasiness going on with black Americans, a number of whom who had

just returned from fighting in World War I for America. They thought it would be a big turning point. Yes, huge. And like rightfully so, like they served for their country and were rewarded with more racism than ever, including race riots and massacres at the hands of, you know, white neighbors who, you know, we talked about the Tulsa massacre and plenty of others in several of our episodes. This is the time that this was going on. And so I think I have the impression that black Americans were getting more despondent after losing hope so suddenly and violently and also more upset at that idea. And so Marcus Garvey came along also at a time where the scientific community was saying like, oh, by the way, if you're black, you're genetically inferior to white people. Sorry,

that's just science. And Marcus Garvey came along and said, you know what, these people could not be wronger. But the one thing about Garvey was, and this is what kind of separated him from some of his peers that were highly educated and sort of a little more of the, like the initial back to Africa movement was started by the first African American millionaire. So a lot of times these people had money and they were sort of in a higher financial class, but he really championed the working class. That's where he came up. And his whole thing was, you know, the women that were working as domestics, which his mother did, and I think that had a big impact on his views of progressive ideas toward women. But then the men, you know, they were, they were working class men

and he said that their official seal for Unia should be a wash tub, a frying pan, a bale hook, and a mop. Right. So these, these were the people he was speaking to. Yep. So and so ultimately he created this, this idea, this concept that's referred to as Garveyism in it, in a nutshell is basically taking America's, you know, faith and the ability to succeed through hard work and enterprise and ingenuity and, you know, self-respect and combined it with the yearning of Black Americans, Black Caribbean, Black Africans to be treated as equals, to live free from oppression and mix those two things together. And that's what Garveyism was. And again, it rang all over the world. And one of the ways that it kind of drew people in is he created almost like a shadow culture in Harlem

at the, at, at Unia, where like you would go to these meetings. He had like nightly meetings, right? But they were also like, you know, larger, bigger, almost conferences. And then there were huge conferences, but the smaller conferences might be like a day long thing where like the whole family comes and you have meals there and you see like a vaudeville show there and there's like a fashion show. And like that you split off into like breakout sessions to use horrific corporate buzz speak, where you would learn like a trade or maybe be like drilled in military techniques, or you would learn nursing and then be sent off to aid in natural disasters. Like you would learn stuff that the rest of society had shut you out from. This is where you could go learn it and,

you know, lift yourself up and in turn lift the whole culture up as everyone collectively was doing this. Yeah, it was, it's, the idea was really cool, I think, in that you wouldn't just go to a meeting. And while there were for short debates and Marcus Garvey just speaking about things, I think he wanted to make it more interesting and inclusive. And that's why they would have concerts and fashion shows and stuff like that. The Black Cross nurses was a big part of this progressive idea for black women that he had. And obviously, it's with a lot of the, as you'll see the naming conventions for things he did, it was a play on something that white people had done. So they had the Red Cross, he started the Black Cross nurses. And they were a large organization

that did like so much good work. And there was a lot of pride within that movement of the Black Cross nurses. They had, you know, their own slogans, they had their own songs that they wrote. He had his very famous phrase, up you mighty race. And it was, you know, I think he nailed it on the head. It wasn't just, it was a culture within a culture almost, like he was starting into the years that he was doing this in 1920s, I think just makes it all that more impressive what he was able to do. Absolutely. And another thing that he's credited with is, if not, I don't know if he invented it, but he certainly popularized the, what's called the Pan-African flag. Usually it's a three bars or three stripes. Good looking flag. Yep, red, green and black.

I love those colors together. In high school, when I go by the stores, something about those colors being together just like spoke to me. I was like, man, that's really a nice color combo. You'd be like, could I pull it off? No, I can't go there, but it was, I just always like those colors together. I always loved looking into those stores. So with the Pan-African flag, it's also called the African liberation flag. And it's also the colors of Kwanzaa that would later be founded in 1966. The red represented blood, the blood that was, that united everybody of African ancestry, but also blood that had been spilled through enslavement, war, colonization. The black represented black people as a whole nation. And the green was for the natural wealth

of Africa. And that was a really big, important point that I think Garvey tried to educate black Caribbean's, black Americans, and even black Africans, but probably to a lesser extent about that was like, this is our homeland and it's probably the most naturally wealthy continent on earth. And we're all being treated like second-class human beings. And yet this is our homeland. What are we doing here? We have to right this wrong, basically. And I think that was also like a big driver for why they were saying, we all need to go back to Africa and basically just say thank you for caring for this land. It's ours again now. Right. He authored the paper, Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,

which was ratified with 20,000 people in attendance at Madison Square Garden in 1920, which is an amazing accomplishment in and of itself. And this is where he was bestowed the title of provisional president of Africa. And I don't think we've said yet one of the cool things about Marcus Garvey was the way he would dress. And he would outfit himself in this sort of military regalia with these hats with ostrich plumes, big ostrich plumes. And he was a big guy. So it was, you know, this imposing figure comes in wearing this huge ostrich plume. Like this was a part of sort of the PT Barnum side, which was to come into a room and grab everyone's attention and to make a statement and, you know, try and ignore me, basically,

was what he put forward with how he carried himself. Right. Right. But at the same time, it also made him a really easy target of ridicule among his rivals in the black cultural leadership. Because, I mean, WB Du Bois wasn't wearing a ostrich plume. No, I mean, a lot of them called him a buffoon and said it was an embarrassment that he would dress up like that. But he was rocking his style. He totally was. And I'm with you. I respect that style as well. But again, it did make him a target. And so did things like being named the provisional president of Africa, the UNIA convention in Madison Square Gardens. These were things that like people could like pick on him for. But his idea was so strong because it was appealing to, while he was a

polarizing figure, his ideas were unifying. They could take all different kinds of, you know, black concepts and black thoughts and black thinkers and black leaders and bring them all together and basically say, yes, despite our differences, we are all in agreement. This is a great way to lift people up. We might not agree with going back to Africa or not, but like, yes, we can come together as a culture and lift ourselves up that like his ideas were unifying while he himself was polarizing. Should we go ahead and talk a little bit about the origins of the back to Africa movement? Yeah, let's do that. All right. So this goes back. He is not, he's far from the first person to have this idea. And like I mentioned earlier, one of the first

people was the first African American millionaire. His name was Paul Cuffy or Cuffy, C-U-F-F-E-E. He was a mixed race Massachusetts sea captain. And his father was an enslaved African. And he had this idea that in fact did so. He actually returned at least several dozen African Americans to Africa and to Sierra Leone. And this was in 1815. And then later, and I think we should totally do a whole podcast on Liberia. Yeah, because the more I read about it, just the more interesting it is. But in 1816, the American Colonization Society, which you know, Andrew Jackson and James Monroe were members, they worked with West African leaders to basically say less established colony, it would eventually be Liberia. And over the course of about 40 years, I saw anywhere from 10 to 20,000

free black Americans moved back to Africa. Yes. And lived in this new country that was granted to them, Liberia. And so like you could totally get, you know, crusty, musty old racists like 19th century, Andrew Jackson and his cronies being like, yeah, let's set up a country in Africa and send black people back there. But this also appealed to, like you said, I mean, 12,000 free black Americans said, I'm out of here. So there was definitely, there was definitely, again, there was, it's so strange to look at, but there was agreement between racist white people and some black people who were like, we just don't even want to be around you anymore. Let's just live separately. While there was also a very, I would say a much stronger

thread in the black community is like, I'm a 10th generation American, even though a lot of those ancestors of mine were enslaved, I was still born and raised in America. So were my parents and my grandparents. I really don't have any connection to Africa, aside from my further back ancestors having been enslaved there and brought over here. I don't really have any interest in going back to Africa. Can I support the idea of rising up as a black community, as a culture, without having to go back to Africa? And Garvey was like, not really. No, we need to go to Africa. The races should not be intermingled. And that makes him a very polarizing figure, not just among the black community, among the white community as well. Yeah. And I think Liberia definitely

deserves its own episode because I was reading into, and it was just really interesting, sort of the ups and downs and what happens when you have 20,000 African Americans moving to Africa with their cultural identity that's somewhat confused and melding with the locals there because it was just really interesting to see what happened over the years, like through the mid 2000s in Liberia. So I'm going to put that one on the list. Okay. It is officially on the list. On the list. You made the sound and everything. I did. Should we take another break before we talk about the black star line and then some troubles? Yeah, things get really interesting here after the break. So stick around.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God, seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you,

it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So you mentioned the black star line. And if you're listening, you might think, oh, doesn't Josh mean the white star line? No, he didn't. Because this is the naming convention

that I talked about. The white star lines was the, I mean, it was the Titanic, right? Was part of the white star lines. Yeah, Kunard. And so Garvey said, you know what, we need our own industry, we need our own business, we need our own shipping, we need to be able to get people to Africa. So I'm going to start the black star line in 1919, which was a steamship shipping company to facilitate shipping goods around the African diaspora. And to literally transport, I mean, the ideal was to transport black Americans back to Africa. Sadly, they never made it back to Africa on those ships. There were a host of problems, including the fact that the ships that he ended up buying were almost all in pretty bad state of repair, like former World War One ships.

So, you know, he was working with the money that he had, which he raised selling $5 shares at a time at meetings, and then getting into trouble selling them through the mail. Yeah, so with that $5 share, that was a big deal because that was a low enough price, about $81 in 2021 money. Thank you, West Egg, that a working class black family could afford to buy a share in the black star line. And they were buying a share in like this actual enterprise that had the legs to knit black people around the world together economically and physically, like ferry everybody around and around. And again, like you said, ultimately help everyone move back to Africa. But this was even at a time that the average weekly wage earned by the vast majority of

black Americans in northern cities was less than $5 a week. So it wasn't an easy $5 share to buy, but you can imagine how many families that were in Unia that scraped together the money or saved up for it to buy a share in the black star line. And nothing I've read seems like the black star line was ever meant to be anything but what it was stated to be. It's just that things went south because one of the things Marcus Garvey wasn't by all accounts is a shrewd businessman. He was not abyss with by any stretch of the imagination. And that from what I understand is ultimately what brought along the black star lines downfall. Yeah. I mean, there was mismanagement. I read one story where when they were doing some, you know, because they were trying to make money with this

like, you know, as a shipping company too. So where a huge shipment of coconuts had gone rotten because he insisted on making these sort of high profile political stops along the route. Whereas the, I guess the sea captains were saying, and these, these were completely operated by African Americans, captained and crewed by African Americans. And they were like, we need to, you know, if you want these coconuts to be sold and to actually profit in this company, we need to go straight there. And he insisted on stopping at different places along the way. And he would, you know, things like that would happen kind of time and time again, it seems like. And, you know, like I said, these ships were in disrepair. The first one he bought

was the Yarmouth, I think rechristened the Frederick Douglass. And it was a 30 year old ship. One was called this shady side unit buying two more. It eventually sank from a leak because of a storm damage from an ice storm. But, you know, they had some successes. I think I saw in the end, it ended up in modern dollars being like a 20 million dollar outfit. It just didn't succeed financially. But, you know, it, that's, that's a lot of dough. So it wasn't like something he went into lightly, you know. No. And it was, I mean, that just goes to show you what an enormous enterprise it was that, that making 20 million dollars couldn't even allow them to break even. Yeah. In addition to the Black Star line, he also helped found the Negro Factories Corporation,

which created grocery stores, restaurant, moving vans, publishing house, obviously. And all sorts of other black owned businesses that not only were run directly from the Negro Factories Corporation, but also were just affiliated with it. And so part of the trouble that, that Marcus Garvey ran into was, and that demonstrates he wasn't a very good businessman, is he was shuffling money from one enterprise to another to keep them all afloat. And some were doing better than others. From what I understand, like the grocery store was doing really well, but say the restaurant wasn't. So he had to move money from the grocery store, the restaurant, and then maybe from the restaurant to the Black Star line. And there was nothing that,

that was so monumentally successful, it could keep everything else going. And so even knowing that, like the Black Star line was in serious financial trouble, he would stop on those coconut runs to try to sell shares. That's one of the reasons why he was stopping was, you know, rustle up membership in Unia, and membership in Unia subscriptions to the Negro world and appearances by him also kind of came with pitches for buying shares in the Black Star line. And that's ultimately what got him in trouble. He was continuing to sell shares in an enterprise that he may or may not have thought was in jeopardy. And the feds who'd been trying to get him for years at this point finally said, I think we can get them now. Yeah, what they got him for ultimately was

mail fraud. And what I saw was it was specifically the fact that he was sending mailers for donations, or not donations, but investment opportunities that featured ships that they did not yet own. So there was one ship in particular that he was trying to buy, but the deal wasn't closed, but it was prominently featured. And they said, wait a minute, this is mail fraud. You can't, you're misrepresenting the company essentially by having a ship on there that you don't have yet. And we've got you. And he ended up serving how many years? Just a few, right? He was sentenced to five, but I believe he served two. Right. And his sentence was commuted and he was deported back to Jamaica.

Yeah. We're still going to talk about other stuff before this, but that's he ultimately ended up back in Jamaica. But when you were just talking a second ago, I think one of the things that is pretty clear was that he was a, he wasn't the best businessman, but he was also a victim of being overly ambitious because he had health problems through his whole life. He had pneumonia quite a few times and I think he had asthma and I think he had a feeling maybe that he was not long for this world. So that's why he said, let's start theaters and let's start grocery stores and let's start restaurants and let's start a shipping line. I think he was overly ambitious and tried to move a little too fast, maybe, whereas if he might have slowed down and put his

efforts into fewer things, he might have been a little bit more successful. Yeah. But also imagine being like, okay, we really need to make up for lost time. And then feeling like your time on earth was going to be shortened. I mean, yeah. Yeah. No, not at all. But so he did his time in Atlanta Federal Pen, which is at the end of Grant Park now, which is one of the scariest buildings you can ever drive past. It's so imposing. Oh my goodness. And like you said, he thought his time in this world was going to be fairly short and he actually wrote a letter from prison saying that he basically expected to die in prison and if he did die, then he was going to come back. He said, look for me in the

whirlwind. He's going to bring with him the souls of all the dead Africans who died enslaved and basically right all the wrongs, if you know what I mean. That was the name of the PBS documentary, by the way. Yeah. I like our title more, Black Moses. I think that's such an amazing name for him. It's so awesome. Yeah, it's good. But so he didn't die in prison. He got out, like you said, Calvin Coolidge under tremendous pressure from Unia members and his wife, Amy Jax, finally said, okay, fine, he can come out, but he's going to Jamaica and that's where he went. And when he went to prison, I mean,

that was just not a good look. Like this guy who was leading the movement to prop up and raise up the black community going to prison, it just made him an even easier target, not just among the black community, but also among like white observers now too. Like, look, you went to jail. Like, this is your leader. Come on, give me a break. But we haven't really kind of explained it enough. And there's a whole other podcast we could do just on this, but suffice to say, he was very much the victim of government harassment. Again, at the hands of J. Edgar Hoover, who somebody said once that he became so fixated on Garvey, it became basically a vendetta. He just wanted to get rid of Marcus Garvey and tried for years to do it. And the government sabotaged

black starline fuel, fuel supplies, so the ships would break down. Like he was harassed. He had like every reason to feel persecuted. And then finally put in prison on a pretty weak charge to begin with because of his ideas and because he represented a threat to, you know, white dominance in America and elsewhere. Yeah. In 1919, Hoover hired, and by the way, I thought you were going to quote me a second ago when you said someone once said about Hoover, I thought you were going to say that he was the worst American. It's like, wow, I'm already being quoted. That would have been the most boss referential joke you've ever pulled off. So in 1919, Hoover hired the bureau's first black agent, James Wormley Jones. And you might

think, oh, great, he's being progressive. No, no, no. He hired him specifically to be a mole and infiltrate Garvey's movement. And I think he was the one that actually poisoned the fuel lines. And he had other moles that he would install within the organization. And it wasn't just, I mean, it's bad enough if you're doing that just to keep tabs and report back. But he sent people in there to agitate and to cause disruption. And I remember reading one story where there was something about letters being sent back and forth between different Unia offices in different cities, like pretty far apart. And that they were agitating one another. And with these letters, and it turned out that none, they were all written by Hoover,

or, you know, Hoover's cronies. Yeah, that's a playbook that little putz would be using for decades to come. He did that to the Black Panthers. He tried to do it to the civil rights leaders. Like, yeah, that was not like he would just, he wouldn't put moles in just to like listen and report back. He was like, he put them in there to destroy them from within, which is just, you know, reprehensible. Oh man, what a snake. Yeah. And also, don't write in, I know what the word putz means and I meant it with J. We should mention the attempt on his life that we kind of referenced earlier. This was back in 1919 in October. He had, by this time, this was kind of, I guess, Hoover was sort of already getting involved. But the New York DA, Edwin K., I'm sorry, Edwin P.

Kilrow started investigating UNIA at first. In October of 1919, a man named George Tyler showed up, basically kicked in the door downstairs and demanded to speak with Garvey. Garvey came out to see what was going on. He opened fire. You mentioned that Amy Ashwood got between him and the bullets, but Garvey was hit three times, I think once in the scalp and twice in the legs. And the rumor was, and this is, you know, I think what Garvey believed was that Tyler was sent by the DA. That was never proven. There were also people that said, no, this was a guy who was, had restaurant dealings with him that was angry about how that business went down. So I don't think we'll ever know for sure what happened, but there was an assassination attempt. So

like I was saying before, when he went to prison, it was not a proud day for UNIA, and UNIA membership started to drop off fairly precipitously. Yeah. Amy Jax's wife was trying to keep things going, publishing his letters, giving speeches on his behalf, lobbying Calvin Coolidge to let him out of prison. But it's just like the death blow was kind of struck. Although that's not to say there's still UNIA today, and Marcus Garvey's views and Garveyism and a lot of his teachings and writings and thoughts are still very much espoused and followed. Thank you, Peter Tosh. Right. And not just in the reggae world, but he basically spent the rest of his life, and his life was relatively short. He died at age 52 in 1940. He moved back to Jamaica where he

was deported. He decided to move back to London. I could not find what kind of connection he had to London to live there twice, but that's where he lived out the rest of his days. I mean, maybe because he's schooled there. Maybe, but he, well, no, I knew he had an actual connection to London. I meant like on an emotional level, like what drew him back to London a second time, but he died there. And he died just kind of like a bit of an outcast. And one of the things that really didn't help, he was kind of losing a lot of followers and adherents because he went to prison. And then later on, he criticized Halle Selassie after he was deposed by Mussolini. And he also looked up to Mussolini for being a strong authoritarian leader. But the thing that really

kind of like sealed this fate among the Black cultural leaders is what you mentioned earlier, the bonkers meeting between him and the leader of the KKK, right? Yeah. I mean, talk about a radical idea for him just to sit down with a leader of the Klan in Atlanta and exchange views of agreement on the fact that they each thought that Black Americans should belong to Africa. To say that did not sit well within the leaders of the Black community is a pretty big understatement. Yeah. So that was, I mean, that was probably the biggest thing of Marcus Garvey's downfall. But because of that, his image like really kind of, he died as an outcast in London. And he, over the years though, like he was, he seems to have been first picked

up and rehabilitated by the Rastafarians who said like, hey, no, this guy, this guy had some amazing ideas. This guy was speaking truth. Like his teachings were important and they kind of picked up his image and dusted him off and rehabilitated him. And people have kind of taken like a closer look at him again and been like, yes, this guy was one of the most important Black activists in the history of the world. Yeah. I saw, I think in the PBS documentary, they put it like this, that he, in the early 1900s, provided a template for everybody that came after basically, whether it was Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr., the Rastafarianism, the nation of Islam. Like there were so many organizations and people that sort of used his

life and his cultural ideas as that template that it's hard to believe that this is something and we say this all the time, of course, especially about Black history, but I don't think, I ever heard the words Marcus Garvey in a high school or college history class. Not unless Peter Tosh was teaching. Oh man, I miss, we had this great radio station called Album 88 Atlanta, the George State radio station that every Sunday morning, they had just like the best reggae show ever. Yes. And it wasn't, you know, they weren't like, oh, let's play Redemption Song by Bob Marley. Great song. But it's where you could hear, God, all the early, all the early ska and like Lee Perry and the Upsetters. Oh man,

it's so good. And now when we go to the lake on Sunday mornings, we just dial up a good like 50s and 60s ska playlist in honor of what once was at Georgia State. I think you can still stream it online, but it was a big deal when they shut it down basically and said, let's have two NPR stations in Atlanta playing the exact same thing at the same time. It was a terrible, terrible decision that I hope one day they reverse because I hope 88 was so good. That was the more fire show, by the way. Yeah. And that boy, that just opened my eyes to so much good reggae when I was in college and there was a lot of bad reggae. And then there was like, that was Saturday, I guess you said, that was Saturday around noon. And before that in the

mornings, they would have a Saturday morning cartoon music show where they play like strawberry shortcake songs and like just like the most random stuff that they would get off the kids records, but it was great. And then the night before that, I don't know if you remember Adam Baum, do you remember him? The DJ? Yes. Like the soul, like, oh my goodness, like album 88 had it going on. Dot dash that was like trance and all that. And then the reeling in the years was sort of, you know, for the old white folks. I don't remember that. But it was really good deep cuts of classic rock. So that it's not like, here's Boston's more than a feeling. It's like, here's this deep cut from Stephen Still's second solo album.

Right, exactly. Yeah. That was that was album 88, man. Man, R.I.P. album 88. R.I.P. Dare we do one on Rastafarianism at some point? Absolutely. Because that's on my list. It's just, it's a tough one, I think. Yeah, I think so too. But with it, I mean, it's suffice to say that Marcus Garvey was a prophet of Rastafarianism because he predicted the rise of Halia Salasi, who became the god of Rastafarianism. And we'll talk more about that in a different app. How about that? It's good stuff. I look forward, I believe it's Amazon is making the Marcus Garvey movie. But definitely see if you can find the PBS experience, American experience, I think it is.

Yeah. On Marcus Garvey, it's good stuff. And the guy who's going to play Marcus Garvey, that was Winston Duke. You were right, the dude from us. Yeah. And Black Panther too. Well, if you want to know more about Winston Duke, go check him out on IMDB. But if you want to know more about Marcus Garvey, yeah, like you said, check out the American experience on him. But there's so much stuff and great articles and interesting scholarship to read about Marcus Garvey and his legacy. So go check it out because it's pretty interesting. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this short and sweet because this was a longer episode. So this is perfect. Smart. When we did the episode on the church choir that didn't explode,

we felt bad because we could not find Reverend Kimples wife's first name. And wouldn't you know it? The stuff you should know, Army comes through for us. Yeah. Hey guys, love the show. Been listening for years. I heard the episode on the church choir that didn't explode. And you said you couldn't find Reverend Kimples wife and her first name. And I was excited because I knew that the 1950 census had just been released on April 1st. So I guess in our defense, we recorded that before April 1st, right? Absolutely. I went and searched and they were listed in the census. Walter's wife's name. Can we get a drum roll here? Is Eunice J. Climple. We probably could have guessed in the 1950s. Eunice was probably a top five name.

Yeah. Or Evelyn. In Beatrice, Nebraska for sure. Yeah. I'm pretty sure it's them, right county, right profession. And the only Walter Climple, yeah, I mean Climple without an eel. That's got to be it. Keep up the good work. And that was from a couple of people sent in. But this was from Sue. Thanks a lot, Sue. Yeah, I did notice a couple of people wrote in. So it's pretty sharp. The 1950 census has just come out and Sue sat bolt upright in bed and said, I got a look. Thank you. Love it. And that makes Sue an official research assistant. Unpaid. Exactly. Unpaid is right. So if you want to be like Sue and send us some unpaid research, we're, we'd love that. That'd be great. Especially if it's accurate. You can put it in an email and

send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.