Black M. P.?

A Negro has never been a member of either house of Britain's Parliament. Last week the world's most flamboyant black man, famed Marcus Garvey, set out to be the first of his race to gain that distinction. An M. P. seemed a small prize to the fat little Jamaican who swept into Manhattan's Harlem during the War, proposed to ferry the whole Negro population of the U. S. back to Africa, plumped for a Black Christ, made himself Provisional President of the African Republic, Imperial Potentate of the Valley of the Nile, Emperor Marcus I of Ethiopia, Admiral of the Black Star Line, President General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Commander of the Nobles of the Sublime Order of the Nile and Knight of the Distinguished Service Order of Ethiopia. On the side he sold stock in his Black Star Line and for that the U. S. Government tried and convicted him in June 1923, for using the mails to defraud. Outside the court one Negro woman fell on her knees. Another walked up to her, slapped her hard. "Get yourself up from there, you crazy lunatic. That big fat bum ain't wuth praying for. He done beat me out of my life's savings." When Garvey got out of jail, he was shipped back to his native Jamaica as an undesirable alien. Every time he got himself elected to something in Jamaica, he somehow got himself jailed for something else. Harlem Negroes took his Universal Negro Improvement Association away from him by default and he founded another. When that went bankrupt, he started a third. His Jamaica newspaper, The Blackman, and his Edelweiss* Amusement Corp. (vaudeville, cinemas and an amusement park) did better, until last year when they, too, went broke, but not before Marcus Garvey had been jailed again for seditious libel in The Blackman. When he grew tired of the small arena of Jamaica politics and planned to go back to the U. S., Harlem Negroes hastily dug up more evidence of fraud and gave it to the police. From Jamaica he tried to run a lottery among U. S. Negroes but the U. S. banned the tickets from the mails. Marcus Garvey knew he was a leader but followers were getting harder and harder to find. Some one pointed out the British Parliament to him. He was a British subject and automatically eligible for election. Last week he announced that he will move to England to contest a seat.

*German for "nobly white."

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