How did a Jamaican-born Pan-African leader work with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s? Awkwardly. Call him a lot of things, but the dude was pragmatic. Enlisting the Klan allowed him to recruit more followers and interest in his back-to-Africa notion, cut red-tape, and maybe tap into a new source of funding. That was the plan on paper, at least. While the talk from mainstream Black leaders was all about integration, Garvey took a sharp turn in the opposite direction. Burning all his bridges with Black leaders in the US, he decided that the only viable option for true freedom was for every Black person to leave the US altogether, embracing the ultimate form of segregation. And who wanted Black people gone more than the KKK? His logic was so far out of the box that you would need binoculars to actually see the box. His followers didn’t call him Sir President of Africa for nothing.
It’s hard to tell if his plan ever could have worked. While he could talk his way into the good graces of racist hillbillies, he never did figure out the logistics his schemes required. His life was littered with Wile E. Coyote-esque disasters. His entrepreneurial endeavors culminated in a mail fraud trial and jail time in the 20s. His defense went south when he acted as his own attorney and rambled on for three hours. Remember his cargo company? The rum shipment his ship was in charge of stewarding out of the US (in order to beat the Prohibition deadline in 1920) was about as successful as the Titanic. The ship didn’t sink – though he certainly did lose a vessel or two – the crew just drank in it while still in port in US waters, the drunken staff too stewed to cast off. The rest of the rum was confiscated.