African Traditional Herbal Research Clinic ... - Blackherbals.com

African Traditional Herbal Research Clinic
Volume 7, Issue 9 NEWSLETTER August 2012
FEATURED ARTICLES
Marcus Garvey and the Black Star Line
By Makafui Apeku
January 29, 2011
WHAT WAS THE MOTIVE BEHIND THE
BLACK STAR LINE?
At the end of this centennial year for Marcus Garvey,
Jamaica would have conceded three important event
that are significant to his cultural legacy for black
majority political and economic power.
The Black Star Line was a shipping company
established by Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA
(Universal Negro Improvement Association). The
shipping line was supposed to facilitate the movement
of goods and African Americans throughout the
African global economy. It derived its name from the
White Star Line, a line whose success Garvey felt he
could emanate, which would become a standard of his
Back-to-Africa movement. It was one among many
businesses which the UNIA originated.
The Black Star Line and the Black Cross Navigation
and Trading Company, function between 1919 and
1922. It stands today as a major symbol for Garvey
followers and African Americans in search of a way to
get back to their homeland.
The Black Star Line started in Delaware on June 23,
1919. Having a majority capitalization of $500,000, BSL
stocks were sold at UNIA conventions at five dollars
each. The company's losses were estimated to be between
$630,000 and $1.25 million.
The Black Star Line surprised all its critics and opponent
when, three months after being in operation, the first of
four ships, the SS Yarmouth was bought with the
intention of it being rechristened the Frederick Douglass.
The Yarmouth was a coal ship during the First World
War, and was in bad structure when it was bought by the
Black Star shipping company. Once reconditioned, the
Yarmouth sail for three years between the U.S. and the
West Indies as the first Black Star Line ship with black
crew and a black captain. Later Joshua Cockburn, the
captain was accused of bribery and corruption.
The SS Yarmouth was not the only ship bought in bad
structure and so compleyely expensive. Marcus Garvey
spent extra $200,000 for more ships. The SS Shadyside,
sailed on the Hudson River one summer and sank, the
next fall because of a leak many thought to be sabotage.
Another was a steam yacht once owned by Henry
Huttleston Rogers. Booker T. Washington had been an
honored guest aboard the ship when it was owned by his
friend and confidant, Rogers, and was known as the
Kanawha. However, Rogers had died in 1909, and the
once maintained yacht had also served in the first World
War. Renamed by the Black Star Line the SS Antonio
Maceo, blew up and and killed a man off the Virginia
coast on its first sailing from New York to Cuba, and had
to be towed back to New York.
Besides oversold, poorly conditioned ships, Black Star
Line was beset by corruption of management and
infiltration by agents of J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau of
Investigation (the forerunner to the FBI), who –
according to historian Winston James – sabotaged it by
throwing foreign matter into the fuel, damaging the
engines.[1] The first commission for the Yarmouth was
to haul whiskey from the U.S. to Cuba before Prohibition.
Continued on page 9
-8- Traditional African Clinic August 2012