BLACK STAR LINE (June 1919–1 April 1922), an all-Black shipping line abbreviated as BSL. The Line was incorporated by Marcus Garvey and other members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) during the “Red Summer” of 1919, remembered for its many race riots spurred by Jim Crow and the rise of Black “New Negro” social movements, including Garvey’s UNIA-led Movement and W.E.B. duBois’ Niagara Movement. The steamship line was created to facilitate the circulation of commodities and the transportation of Black people throughout the global Black economy. Alongside Black investment and management, the Line also constituted Black captains, officers, and crew members. Its shares were valued at $5 each. Capital for the BSL largely came from the Black proletariat in the US, although it was not uncommon for the UNIA to receive investments from organizations, groups, and individuals from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Garvey personally retained stakes and control in the company until 1922, when the BSL’s activities were terminated, according to declarations made in the Negro World.
The Black Star Line included three ships: SS Yarmouth (or Frederick Douglass), SS Shady Side, and SS Kanawha (or SS Antonio Maceo). It also included one semi-fictitious ship, SS Phyllis Wheatley, actually the SS Orion, or “Africa” ship, that frequently appeared in the Negro World and other publications but was never actually purchased by the BSL corporation. The SS Yarmouth was a steam-powered ship that originally ran from Nova Scotia to Boston, ferrying both passengers and goods like coal. It was purchased in September 1919 in relatively poor condition for $165,000, and the Yarmouth made, in its lifetime, at least four voyages. Its notable routes included trips to the West Indies and Central America, where the Yarmouth stopped in Cuba, Panama, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Haiti, and the Bahamas. A documentary entitled The Promised Ship offers a localized glimpse into the Garvey Movement in Limon, Costa Rica, a small port town visited by the SS Yarmouth. According to the documentary, on these trips, the ship carried cargo like cement, whiskey (eventually confiscated by the US government, as Prohibition was in effect), and rotting coconuts. The SS Shady Side was built in 1873 and purchased in better condition than the Yarmouth for $35,000. In April 1920, the Shady Side began excursions along the Hudson River, operating recreationally in the summer. The SS Kanawha was a steam-powered luxury yacht originally owned by Henry H. Rogers, a Standard Oil executive and major developer of coal and railroad properties in West Virginia, who was known to host notable guests like Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington aboard his boat. During the First World War, the yacht served in the US Navy, and it was afterward purchased by the BSL in May 1920. The ship completed one voyage to Cuba and Jamaica in its lifetime and was then retired after a series of malfunctions.
The Black Star Line has been associated with both the strongest and weakest features of Marcus Garvey’s movement. To generalize, most of the prevailing scholarship surrounding the BSL associates the company as one of its “weakest features,” centering on its financial losses, the condition of its decaying ships, allegations of fraud, the company’s bankruptcy, the imprisonment of Garvey on the otherwise insignificant charges of mail fraud, and the outcome of his eventual deportation— which fell under a long-time coordinated effort by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover to expel Garvey from the US for ideological reasons. By such accounts, the Black Star Line failed in the end: it did not succeed in its promise to sail to Liberia, and thousands of Black investors lost their savings. Yet, if placed within a larger economic context, such a fate was typical of small enterprises experiencing the boom of the war and the subsequent bust of the Depression of 1920–1921. These frameworks also tend to operate within a narrow definition of success equated to the corporation’s ability to accumulate capital, and in doing so, neglect the Black Star Line’s larger symbolic significance in and for the project of Pan-African liberation. The internal economic dimensions of the BSL—its financial operations—were perhaps intended, strategically, to be a marginal dimension for the company. The BSL’s three physical ships primarily functioned symbolically, holding meanings other than being a poorly managed endeavor when a steamship line, in and of itself, articulated modern and national power during the postwar era.
The Black Star Line thus served as a tangible representation of Black power in the early twentieth century. Today, it might serve as a literal and metaphorical vehicle for linking the various ideologies of resistance of the Black world during the postwar period to the present. The BSL might also be understood as a reclamation of the Middle Passage— one that reversed or transformed the pain of that historical memory into a vision of liberation. This vision has been eulogized in many songs, old and new, including those by reggae artists like Burning Spear.
In the context of the period and given the state of collective Black consciousness at the turn of the century, the Black Star Line represented a production danger—not necessarily because it threatened the interests of international shipping (it did not), but because the foundation of its “business” was an ideological force perceived as a threat by heads of state and a threat to the extant racial and economic relationships of exploitation in Atlantic capitalism. For example, concerted, systematic efforts by colonial regimes in
the Caribbean to prevent the circulation of Black literature extended to Marcus Garvey’s print newspaper publication, the Negro World, at a time when its pages overflowed with advertisements for the Black Star Line.
Advertisements, like Let Us Guide Our Own Destiny articulated a call that resonated far deeper than investment in a promising enterprise. The ships that circulated, at times physically but also representationally in the pages of Marcus Garvey’s paper and in conversations throughout the West Indies and America engendered, powerfully, a material basis for Black freedom and liberation. Despite the physical condition of its ships and cargo, the Black Star Line was an investment in a different form of power: it valued, instead, the building of resistance against structures of colonialism, the status quo of capitalism, and the racial exploitation inseparable from these systems. In other words, the BSL holds the forgotten seeds of something revolutionary. Its tangible images reinforced an idea Black people worldwide had already realized: that a different basis for social organization was, and is, possible.