Negro with a Hat
Negro with a hat is the dramatic story of the man hailed as the ‘black Moses’. Born in poverty in rural Jamaica, Garvey was a man of contradictions: A self educated, poetry writing aesthete and naked propagandist, and admirer of Lenin and an ascetic dandy. He was champion of the Harlem renaissance, publishing Claude McKay and Langston Hughes in this newspaper the Negro World. Above all, he was a shrewd promoter whose use of pageantry evoked a lost African civilization and articulated the submerged thoughts of a deposed but awakening people.
With skills, wit and compassion, Colin Grant chronicles Garvey’s extraordinary life, the failed business adventures, his misguided negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan, the two wives (both named Amy) and the premature obituaries that contributed to his lonely, tragic death. This is a fascinating cautionary tale; both timeless and universal in its appeal.
