Found guilty of mail fraud and sentenced to five years imprisonment, Marcus Garvey was sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in April, 1925. The Communist Party, which had a complicated, but conflictual relationship with the U.N.I.A., released this statement.

‘Marcus Garvey’s Imprisonment a Capitalist Plot: Statement of the Workers (Communist) Party’ from the Daily Worker. Vol. 2 No. 87. April 23, 1925.

NEGRO WORKERS OF AMERICA! WHITE WORKERS OF AMERICA! COMRADES!

The Workers (Communist) Party of America calls your attention to the persecutions which the United States government is indicting upon a large mass organization of Negroes, the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

For four years the United States government has been persistently trying to destroy this Negro organization.

The persecution began in 1921 with a series of arrests and prosecutions of the organizers of the association.

IN 1923 the police agents of the government suppressed the annual convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association by methods terrorization, including the arrest of the president of the organization who was held in prison without bail during the period of the proposed convention.

Again in August 1924 the government tried to disrupt and disperse the “Congress of the Negro Peoples of the World” in New York City by means of arresting the president of the Universal Negro Improvement Association which had called the congress, and by direct efforts of federal officers to terrorize the delegates on the floor of the congress.

An effort is now being made in the courts to take away from the organization its New York meeting place, “Liberty Hall,” as a further inducement to it to disband.

THE president of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Marcus Garvey, is in the federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Georgia, with a five-year sentence and the prospect of deportation as an “undesirable alien” at the end of that term. The federal court of appeals and the United States supreme court dispensed with their usual custom of long-drawn-out delay and acted with unheard-of speed in condemning this Negro leader where those courts would have been only too gentle in finding loop-holes for a big criminal of the ruling class and the so-called “superior race.”

Defend Negro Right to Organize.

THE Workers (Communist) Party calls upon all class conscious workers, both white workers and the Negro workers everywhere, to join together in protests and demonstrations against the persecution of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and against the imprisonment of Marcus Garvey. We demand Garvey’s immediate release from the capitalist prison, and the stopping of all persecutions against the organization.

In fighting against the imprisonment of Marcus Garvey, the Workers (Communist) Party does not endorse the leadership of Mr. Garvey. Many times we have directed the severest criticisms against his leadership, and we intend to continue to do so. Ever since the memorable convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1920 Mr. Garvey has steadily “progressed backward” by seeking more and more each year to evade the vital issues of the wrongs of the Negro people. The Workers (Communist) Party has been obliged to point out that Garvey refused to fight for the Negroes’ rights in the labor unions, altho he was instructed by the 1920 convention of the Negro organization to do so.

WE have severely criticized Mr. Garvey for refusing to fight against the peonage of the Negro agricultural laborers and the Negro “share-croppers” and tenant farmers in the southern states. The splendid spirit of international solidarity of the American Negroes with their oppressed brothers of Africa and other lands, has become in Mr. Garvey’s hands a miserable excuse for shirking the struggle of the Negro masses for emancipation in the United States, or, in effect, anywhere.

By appealing to white capitalist Negro-baiters for money support on the ground that he would teach the Negro masses not to aspire to social and political equality in the United States, Garvey has degraded the dignity of the great Negro people and injured their cause. In the convention of the U.N.I.A. of August, 1924, Garvey persuaded the convention to refuse to make a stand against the ku klux klan, which habitually murders, tortures and terrorizes the Negro people. The Workers (Communist) Party does not endorse the leadership of Marcus Garvey, but severely condemns it.

BUT the imprisonment of Marcus Garvey is a political question having nothing to do with the personal deficiencies of the man. The brutal manner in which this Negro leader was treated upon the occasion of his arrest, the flouting of his “legal” rights both while on trial and while under bond, as well as the fact of his imprisonment, are intended as an insult and an injury to the 12,000,000 Negro workers and farmers of America. This is a direct attack by a capitalist government against the Negro masses whom the government fears and hates. It must be made a lesson to the Negro people, that the capitalist government which suppresses their efforts at organization is the bitterest enemy of the Negro people and of the working class.

A GOVERNMENT which exists, for the purpose of robbing the masses of the products of their toil, a government run by thieves for the benefit of a thieving class and even headed at present by the thieves of Teapot Dome, cannot persuade us that it has become the protector of the masses front robbery. If Garvey has swindled his people it is for his people to judge, and not for the capitalist government which is the enemy of the Negro people.

The real reason for the arrest of the president of the Negro association is the crude belief that this will cause the organization to fall to pieces.

Importance of Organization of Negroes.

THE Workers (Communist) Party takes this occasion to point out to white workers as well as Negro workers the importance of organization of the Negro masses of this country. The Negro population is com posed almost entirely of wage workers, agricultural workers and the most severely exploited class of farmers, often landless. In addition to the ordinary forms of exploitation and persecution under which the white workers and farmers suffer, the Negroes have to endure the terrible burden of race persecution by which the capitalist class intensifies its class exploitation of the Negroes and also succeeds in dividing and weakening the exploited classes.

IN America and internationally, in the world-struggle against capitalist-imperialism, the Negro movement is destined to play a tremendous part. The epoch of the world revolution which opened with the Russian revolution, is also the epoch of the rise of the darker races, and the two form one inseparable whole. A movement among the Negro workers and farmers of the United States must be considered, not only in the light of the class struggle within this country, but also in connection with the anti-imperialist struggles of the millions of West Indian Negroes and the 150,000,000 natives of Africa, and the awakening of the 400,000,000 of China and the 320,000,000 of India.

THE widespread awakening of interest among American Negroes in international questions, as shown in the desire to take part in the strengthening of the African Negro republic of Liberia and the winning of independence for the natives of Africa generally, is a guarantee of this historical trend.

This newly awakened interest of American Negroes in international affairs, which found. confused but earnest expression among the rank and file of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, was one of the causes of the government’s brutal attack upon the Negro organization. The diplomatic ministers of the Unit- ed States, Great Britain and France brot about the outlawing of the Universal Negro Improvement Association from African soil. The president of the Liberian republic has publicly admitted that “obligations to the great powers” had something to do with the exclusion of the Negro association from all activities in Liberia. A concession for rubber lands, claimed by the Negro association, was withdrawn and given to a big American corporation, (the Firestone Tire Co.), thru the machinations of an American diplomatic minister at the same moment that the United States government made its final assault to break up the Negro association. Here we see the sharp fangs of American imperialism determined to enter and ravage the African continent just as it ravages Haiti, Porto Rico, the Virgin Islands, etc.

THE Workers (Communist) Party, composed of Negro workers as well as white workers, and standing for the solidarity and emancipation of the working class on terms of equality of all races, cannot stand idly by while the capitalist dictatorship attempts to destroy a mass organization of the exploited Negro people. We cannot consent that the Negro should be denied the right of organization.

The Workers (Communist) Party calls upon the workers, both Negro and white, to protest against the persecution of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

We demand the immediate and unconditional release of Marcus Garvey. We demand that Marcus Garvey shall not be deported.

We demand an end to the looting of the treasury of the Universal Negro Improvement Association by the courts of law.

We demand that “Liberty Hall” shall not be taken away from the Negro association.

We demand that the bloody hand of American imperialism shall not strangle the African peoples.

We demand that the full and free intercourse of American Negroes with their brothers of the African continent shall not be interfered with.

We call upon the Negro workers and the white workers to hold mass meetings and demonstrations together to voice their protest against the persecution of Negro workers.

We call for a united front of white workers and Negro workers as a guarantee and a promise of the solidarity of the working class, both black and white, which will bring the emancipation of the exploited classes and races of the world.

Central Executive Committee, Workers (Communist) Party of America.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1925/1925-ny/v02b-n087-NYE-apr-23-1925-DW-LOC.pdf