History is something else!
True facts.
In June of 1922, Marcus Garvey traveled to Atlanta to meet with Imperial Kleagle
5 Edward Young Clarke of the Ku Klux Klan. Garvey had sought to strengthen his Universal Negro Improvement Association’s (UNIA) influence in the South, but the Klan’s widespread power made any inroads difficult to achieve. Realizing the bargaining power he had in the situation, Clarke agreed to let Garvey to sell stock in the variety of businesses his organization had started - Universal Printing House, Negro Factories Corporation, Black Star Line – under the guarantee that Garvey would also work to weaken organizations like that NAACP that were fighting for civil rights and integration.
6 Why would Garvey agree to help fight those that were trying to improve the social status of his fellow African-Americans? And why would he make that agreement with an organization that robbed, beat, raped, and murdered the people he sought to liberate? Likewise, what would motivate Clarke to risk undermining the social hegemony his race held in the southern states by giving more power to the UNIA? From Garvey’s account of the meeting (no such account exists from Clarke’s perspective), the two did little more than mutually reinforce their similar, already-held racial ideologies. As Garvey recounts, “I asked [Clarke] whether he was interpreting the spirit of just a few people who make up his organization or not, and he said ‘no; we are interpreting the spirit of every true white American; but we are honest enough to say certain things that others do not care to say.’”
7 Later in the speech, Garvey describes a moment in the meeting when he asks how the Klan feels about blacks who want to be President, followed by the same questions as regards a senator or congressman, and once again, what percentage of white Americans the opinions of the Klan represent. The question-and-answer here seems to be merely for rhetorical effect, and after Garvey notes that once again Clarke claimed to speak for all whites, he states: “Mr. Clark [sic] did not tell me anything new; he told me what I discovered seven years ago. He told me the thing that caused me to have organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association four and a half years ago.”
8 That “thing” was a deep belief that humans are inherently racist. In the second volume of
Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, first published three years after his meeting with Clarke, he writes that racial “self-preservation […] naturally is the first law of nature [….] What must the Negro do in the face of such a
universal attitude but to align all his forces in the direction of protecting himself from the threatened disaster of race domination and ultimate extermination? [my emphasis]”
9
c'mon son that is not what I got from reading that.
