The Red, the Black, and the Green

0:00This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. This is a rebroadcast of an episode reported a few years ago by Christopher Johnson. It has really interesting history. It's about flags. It's everything I love in a story. So if you haven't heard it before, definitely listen to it. And if you have listened to it before, listen again, because I guarantee you don't remember the details. But if you want to hear a completely brand new episode of 99 % Invisible about lifeboats on the Titanic? You can right now if you subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXM.com slash podcast plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice.

0:41Non-subscribers will hear that very same story next week, so everything will be made available to all. But if you subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus, you can hear episodes of 99 % Invisible one week early and ad-free. And subscribing goes a long way to support the work that we do here. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXM.com slash podcasts plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. Okay, on with the show.

1:13A quick heads up, this episode has some offensive language. Don't shoot! Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up! Don't shoot! After Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd last year, tens of thousands of people all over the world took to the streets to protest police violence against Black people. Whose lives matter? Black lives matter! And if you look at images from these marches, you'll probably start to notice a common color scheme. Lots of red, black, and green. 99BI producer Christopher Johnson. You'll see those colors everywhere. Red, black, and green picket signs and banners.

1:52Red, black, and green hoodies and hats. And red, black, and green flags. Sometimes it's good to see that red, black, and green flag, particularly when there's times of strife and people are outraged and angry. And they started to come to that realization that we're not getting anywhere with the begging. Moria Makumal has several of these flags in different sizes, including a huge one that he likes to fly outside of his house. He says that wherever there are protests or demonstrations against threats to Black life, the red, black, and green will be there. When people are ready for more than what they've been getting, and they're ready to, you know, challenge the system, then you'll see the red, black, and green flags come out.

2:32And not just at demonstrations. This tricolor scheme has been used on T-shirts, on high-top chucks, and in works of art that have sold for millions of dollars. The flag was invented to unite Black people all over the world who were living under racial repression. And when it first came into existence, the flag posed some bold questions about where Black people owed their loyalty, to the nations where their lives were demeaned and threatened, or to a new nation, one they'd built entirely for themselves. And for hundreds of thousands of Black folks, the red, black, and green symbolized the answer.

3:10The flag has been in use since 1918, but I'm going to start a couple decades before that with the story of a super racist song about flags. In the beginning of the 20th century, there was vaudeville, there was minstrelsy in America, and there was this tradition of coon songs. Can I say that word, Christopher? This is writer and historian Colin Grant. He's talking about an old style of American music that's named after a racial slur. Kuhn songs were exactly what they sound like. The lyrics were deeply racist, based on gross stereotypes about Black life and speech patterns, usually sung over ragtime piano.

3:51And in 1900, one of the biggest songs of the genre came out. There was a very famous Kuhn song called Every Race Has a Flag But the Kuhn. And it was a song that lampooned Black people for not having their own flag. And lampooned them for the idea that they should have their own flag. Two white composers wrote the song, and I got somebody to play the sheet music for me. Here's what it sounds like.

4:25In the lyrics, the head of a Black social club gets up to speak. And he says he's just come back from a Labor Day parade where he saw all these different races proudly waving their national flags. Ireland has her harp and shamrock. England floats her lion bold. Even China waves a dragon. Germany and eagle gold. And then he comes to the U.S. And what won't Yankees do for the old red, white, and blue? The lyrics seem to drive at the idea that the Stars and Stripes didn't belong to black people. that they need something else to represent them. The song went on to propose a flag for Black people that's crammed with all these racist stereotypes.

5:05Every Race Has a Flag was performed by more than 100 touring vaudeville acts and was part of the vaudeville circuit for more than three decades. It was huge, which isn't surprising given the era. The U.S. wasn't even two generations out of slavery. Jim Crow and Separate But Equal were in full effect, lynching and other terrorist violence surged. Black Americans were getting the message from all sides, including popular music, that they weren't respected or safe or really even considered fully American. Now, as gross as the song was, the lyrics hinted at something that did resonate for Black folks.

5:44That actually a flag was something that enabled people to be welded together. That idea was one which many Black people understood. And in particular, a Jamaican-born labor organizer and journalist named Marcus Garvey.

6:02In the early 1900s, Garvey bounced around Central and South America trying to start some advocacy newspapers fighting for working Black people. But he wasn't having much luck. Garvey wanted more work opportunities and some adventure. He was also curious to see how Black people like himself were living in other parts of the British Empire. So in 1912, he set off across the Atlantic. Young Marcus Garvey, in his mid-twenties, he went to England at that time for someone in the British colonies. London is where you would go to try to establish yourself, to say, I have arrived, I'm going to partake of this splendid imperial enterprise which the British had ruled over for centuries.

6:51He's going to go to the heart of empire. In London, Garvey landed a gig in a newspaper that carried stories about Black life throughout the diaspora. He also got a pass to the British Museum, which had a large library. Garvey began reading ideas totally new to him, ideas that came to be known as Pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanism is concerned with the unity and liberation of Africa and people of African heritage. I like to think of it as a mighty river with many streams and currents. Hakim Adi, a professor of African and Black diaspora history, says the source of that river is the transatlantic slave trade.

7:37Slavery forced together millions of people from across the African continent. Adi believes Pan-Africanism started there, more than 400 years ago. It developed as those people with different languages and cultures began to understand their shared conditions and then align to change them. By the early 20th century, Black intellectuals had done a lot of thinking and writing about global, Africa-centered Black identity. Ideas about repatriation, ideas about the importance of independent states like Haiti, like Ethiopia, like Liberia, ideas about colonialism and what needed to be done to reform it, and ideas about the glories of historic African civilization.

8:20So it's in this sort of context that Garvey and his work develop. One big part of this development was the way Garvey thought about Africa. As a kid, he'd been taught that Africans were primitive and backwards, with no history to speak of. What he'd read in London told him the opposite was true. Garvey realized that Africa could be the center of racial pride for all of Black humanity. Along with this pan-African thought, Garvey was also heavily influenced by writings about Black self-sufficiency, the call to build a Black world that was economically, politically, and culturally independent from white society.

8:58Garvey combined these ideas with his newfound Afrocentrism, and a political philosophy started to emerge. It had been just two years since Marcus Garvey had arrived in London. He'd left Jamaica hoping to find work and for a chance to see more of the world. But what he found in the heart of the British Empire, the seat of a massive colonial power, was the way, he thought, to free the entire Black world. Garvey became convinced that Black people in Africa and throughout the diaspora share a common identity. They also shared a responsibility to advance the race and to protect it. And the safest place for them was one built solely by Black hands.

9:39The idea that you had to forge a nation of your own, that you couldn't trust the man to look after yourself. And when I say the man, I mean the imperial powers. We're not going to further the likes of someone like Marcus Garvey or the black people over whom they ruled. And Garvey recognized through reading that actually he could conjure an alternative to the reality in which he found himself. He could change the narrative.

10:09Garvey sailed back to the Caribbean in 1914. This was still several years before he'd make the red, black and green flag that he intended to stand for all of black humanity. But he was already thinking about how to build the kind of nation that such a flag would represent. On the ship going back from England to Jamaica, he famously said to himself, where is the black man's army? Where is the black man's military chief? He looked about it and he saw none. All he saw was subjugation. And he said to himself, he was going to build the army and he was going to establish a new African empire. Garvey put his Pan-African thinking to work almost as soon as he landed in Jamaica.

10:53He formed an organization called the UNIA, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Its primary objective was to establish a universal confraternity among the race. Here's how Garvey described the UNIA many years later. Hello, citizens of Africa. I greet you in the name of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, an organization that seeks to unite into one solid body the 400 million Negroes of the world for the purpose of bettering our industrial, commercial, educational, social, and political conditions. But the UNIA got off to a so-so start. Garvey once again found himself strapped for cash.

11:34So to raise money and build a following, he left Jamaica again. This time, he headed to Harlem. And that's where Marcus Garvey really took off as a race leader. America is the seat of wealth, is the seat of promise, is the seat of any person who has some ambition that wants to have a bigger canvas to realize his ambition. So he was a young man in his mid to late 20s. He came with a hope and a prayer, with not two farthings to rub together. When Garvey arrived in 1916, Harlem was going through some major changes of its own. The Black population there had been surging for about a dozen years. Folks were coming from other parts of New York City, from down south, and like Garvey, from the Caribbean.

12:25It was the beginning of the so-called New Negro era, or the Negro Renaissance, In art and politics, Black Harlemites from throughout the diaspora argued furiously over what it meant to be Black. Garvey jumped headlong into the debate. He'd stand on one of Harlem's famous soapboxes and address a crowd with his nascent pan-Africanist ideas. But not everybody was feeling young Marcus Garvey, including the era's most famous Black intellectual. The premier man, the premier leader at that time was W.E.B. Du Bois. and his organization, the NAACP, had captured the imagination of Black people. At the time, Du Bois was ascendant.

13:10W.E.B. Du Bois felt that full civil rights were the keys to Black freedom in a country that was hostile to their survival and peace. He believed in America as a viable nation for Black folks. It would take real struggle, but there was a path for Black people to be whole and safe under the stars and stripes. Marcus Garvey saw things totally differently. He came to believe that the fundamental problem for black people in the West was the West itself. There was no way the U.S. or Great Britain or any other Western power was going to let black people be truly free. We are not going to be a race without a country.

13:47God never intended it. And we are not going to view God's confidence in us as men. Garvey believed that black people were, as he put it, a mighty race. and that the only way for them to realize their full potential and to survive the anti-blackness of the West was to come together and build a separate black world. Babylon did it. France under Napoleon did it. America under George Washington did it. Africa with 400 million black people can do it. If you cannot do what other men have done, what other nations have done, what other races have done, then you have better die. The more time Garvey spent in the U.S., the firmer that position became.

14:26In the South, he'd witnessed firsthand the struggles of rural black America living under Jim Crow. He'd come from Jamaican society, where class often outweighed race privilege. But in the U.S., he noticed that was flipped, a dynamic which inspired Garvey to center his message on blackness. He believed that actually race should come before class, that you only became powerful by uniting together, by having a powerful voice through sheer numbers. Therefore, we should cleave together as Black people and place primacy on race. Then something happened that put the difference between Du Bois and Garvey in sharp relief and gave Garvey an opportunity to really articulate the Pan-Africanist vision that he'd been developing since his days at the British Museum.

15:22America is called to art. The first volunteers are cheered, thousands of them and millions more to follow. When Woodrow Wilson brought America into the First World War under the idea that they were going to make the world safe for democracy, Garvey would stand on his soapbox and say, that's all very well, Woodrow Wilson, but how about making Georgia safer the black man first? The U.S. entered World War I in April 1917. That summer, there was large-scale racial violence in several cities. Some of the worst was in East St. Louis. A labor dispute turned into an all-out assault on the city's black residents.

16:05Whites set fire to black neighborhoods. White snipers shot and killed black people in the streets. There were mob beatings and lynchings. The suddenness and the sheer shock of the violence of East St. Louis changed everybody. And yet Woodrow Wilson was going to take America into the war because America was this great savior without recognizing that many of the transgressions that were going to be challenged in Europe also existed on home soil. Sometimes Garvey would respond to racist violence with calls for revenge or armed self-defense. Du Bois and the NAACP stood firmly against this approach.

16:46The two men also disagreed on whether or not black men should enlist to fight in Europe, given the racial climate in the U.S. So whereas Du Bois said we must forget our differences between ourselves as black people and the white men, we must put our shoulder to the wheel and fight the common enemy. Garvey was saying the very opposite. Garvey was saying, no, do not go off and fight the white man's war for him. because come the end of the war, things will revert to the way that they'd been before. And that's exactly what happened. As those soldiers came back and some of them were even lynched in their uniforms, there were many people who saw that Garvey had been right.

17:29The idea that World War I would make things better for Black people didn't pan out. In fact, as the war ended, cities and towns across the U.S. exploded in an unprecedented wave of anti-Black violence. It had been 50 years since Black Americans were declared full citizens of the U.S. Black people had invested in the democratic process. And now they'd gone overseas and fought and died under the stars and stripes. And yet, the country's deadly racial caste system stayed firmly in place, just as Marcus Garvey had predicted. And I think that made him seem, in the eyes of many Black people, a kind of prophet, a seer, someone who could see into the future, but also someone who was fearless.

18:15I mean, he was fearless. And that was very empowering. People wanted to align themselves with him. They saw that he was a winner. Garvey had been adding up events in cities like East St. Louis. He saw what was happening to Black soldiers and civilians alike. If the question was, to whom do Black people owe their loyalty? Garvey's answer was clear. Black people owe their loyalty first to other Black people. He recognized that, in his mind anyway, that Black people were Africans in exile in America. And there was going to be no place for them. There was no future for them in America. But Marcus Garvey had a plan.

18:56They had to get out. And they had to establish their own place. and that place was going to be Africa. Garvey believed that every single black person on the planet was an African and that the continent was their birthright. He said Africa should be free of colonial rule so that black people themselves can develop their own societies there. For 250 years, we have struggled under the burden and rigors of slavery. We were maimed, we were brutalized, we were ravaged in every way. We are men. We have hopes, we have passions, we have feelings, we have desires just like any other race. And so Garvey would be calling for Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad.

19:38The cry is raised all over the world of Canada for the Canadians of America, for the Americans of England, for the English of France, for the French of Germany, for the Germans. Do we take it unreasonably that we, the blacks of the world, should raise the cry of Africa for the Africans?

19:53Garvey had long understood that he needed cohesion in order to achieve his dream of an independent black world. The campaign for a homeland would fail if black people didn't see themselves as a single global race. How are you going to cleave those people of that race together? What can you do to reimagine a society where whiteness is not the thing that defines you? You're not in opposition to whiteness. You are just black. You are just your own people. Ironically, part of the answer came from white people. Garvey drew on what he'd seen years earlier in London. He was inspired by how the British used symbols to flex their strength and to unite people across their vast empire.

20:43He saw the great buildings of power. He saw these great columns with these admirals on top of them. He saw the way that the British celebrated their history through symbols of conquest, through symbols of authority. I think he really understood the power of symbols to enliven people, to conjure this notion that you are part of something greater than yourself. Garvey had taken note of all the trappings of nationhood. He was very influenced by the idea that the show of power came through things like the idea of planting yourself under a flag, of saying that you belong to a group. He recognized that that's what imperial powers did.

21:28Marcus Garvey filtered all of that inspiration through his Black nationalist prism, and out came a flag, a banner that would stand for the entire black world. Oh, yes, the cause is grand, the cause is glory. Surely we shall not turn back. Oh, Ceylon, Ceylon, Ceylon, almighty ship, stay Ceylon, Ceylon, until the flag of the red, the black, and the green is purchased upon the hills of Africa. Garvey designed the Pan-African flag as a rectangle with three horizontal bars, red on top, then black, and green at the bottom. According to the UNIA, the red stands for the blood spilled in the fight to protect and defend Africa.

22:08Green represents Africa itself, its lushness, and the motherland that Garveyites saw as their birthright. And black stands for the people of the continent and the diaspora. Garvey introduced the Pan-African banner in 1918, and it quickly became the symbol of his rapidly growing international movement. And that success came partly from the sheer potency of Garvey's message, which he spread throughout the Americas during these exhausting speaking tours. Plus, the UNIA's newspaper circulated Garveyism all over the world. And then there was Garvey's single biggest recruiting tool, the UNIA's commercial and passenger steamships called the Black Star Line.

22:49Garvey wanted a fleet that would sail between ports in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The Black Star Line would be 100 % Black-owned and operated. In a world where public transportation was often segregated and Black people were routinely limited to the lowest classes of travel, the Black Star Line promised comfort, respect, safety, and speed to its Black passengers. 5 ,000 Black folks showed up to watch the first Black Star Line ship leave its East Harlem port in 1919. According to at least one observer, the crowd was delirious with excitement. The Black Star Line never got as big as Garvey had envisioned, but it inspired pride and hope in Black people around the world.

23:36There was even a song about the ships, recorded while they were still active.

23:50Each and every one of those Black Star Line vessels hoisted the red, black and green colors from its masts. And when those ships came into harbour with the UNI flags flapping, there was the most extraordinary excitement because that was a manifestation of something that they thought to be impossible. board. So the flags on board the ships acted to promote the growth and the huge ambition and reach of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. But for the flags and the ships, there would be no mass movement. They needed those symbols in order for the movement to grow. Without those flags, there would be no Marcus Garvey in our memory.

24:41Garvey to me is the, I call him the standard bearer of success under duress, who was blessed to do far more with less. Moria Makamau is the official historian of the UNIA. Make sure you also call him the outrunner and the outdoer and out of this world. Third rock from the sun bar none, as far as I'm concerned. By the end of the decade, Garvey's movement was massive. Two million people had joined the UNIA. It would eventually become the largest organization in Black history, and its members proudly flew the Pan-African banner. Yeah, you would see a lot of houses with red, black, and green flags on the outside, as well as mass meetings in local cities all around the globe.

25:21They would have red, black, and green flags whenever they had meetings, red, black, and green buttons as well on the lapel. And even some of the ministers would have their robes with red, black, and green when they were preaching the gospel of Garveyism. In 1920, the UNIA held its convention in New York City. It was a sprawling, month-long affair attended by tens of thousands of people. And there, the UNIA officially declared red, black, and green the colors of the Negro race. Then those colors were put on spectacular display when the UNIA held a massive parade meant to conjure a state procession.

25:59The flag was part of this medley of symbols that Garvey used to project to the world black unity, strength and greatness. Primarily, Marcus Garvey was a showman. And in 1920, Marcus Garvey put on the greatest show on earth. And he had the uniform of authority, his Victorian military regalia with his bicornette helmet and his plumes in his helmet. There were huge choirs of a hundred and more on the streets walking with him. There were uniformed guards with their sabres rattling. There were placards saying, our time has come, down with lynching. There were bands playing. There was a spirit of carnival.