Black Star Line
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The Black Star Line was a shipping line incorporated by Marcus Garvey, who organized the UNIA (United Negro Improvement Association). The Black Star Line derived its name from the White Star Line, a line whose success Garvey felt he could duplicate, which would become a standard of his Back-to-Africa movement. It was one among many businesses which the UNIA originated such as the Universal Printing House, Negro Factories Corporation, and the widely distributed and highly successful Negro World newspaper. The Black Star Line and its successor, the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Company, operated between 1919 and 1922. The Black Star Line stands today as a major symbol for Garvey followers and African Americans in search of a way to get back to their homeland. The shipping line was supposed to involve the transportation of goods and eventually African Americans throughout the African global economy.
The Black Star Line started in Delaware on June 23, 1919. Having a maximum 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 did surprise all its critics when, only three months after being incorporated, the first of four ships, the SS Yarmouth was purchased with the intention of it being rechristened the "Frederick Douglass." The Yarmouth was a coal boat during the First World War, and was in poor condition when purchased by the Black Star Line. Once reconditioned, the Yarmouth proceeded to sail for three years between the U.S. and the West Indies as the first Black Star Line ship with an all-black crew and a black captain. Later Joshua Cockburn, the captain of the Yarmouth, was accused of receiving a "kick back from the purchase price".
The SS Yarmouth wasn't the only ship to be purchased in poor condition and to be completely oversold. Garvey spent another $200,000 for more ships. One, the SS Shadyside, sailed the "cruise to nowhere" 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 well-maintained yacht had also served in the first World War. Renamed by the Black Star Line the S.S. Antonio Maceo, it blew a boiler and killed a man off the Virginia coast on its first voyage 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). The first commission for the Yarmouth was to haul whiskey from the U.S. to Cuba before Prohibition. Although the ship made it in record time, it did not have docking arrangements, so it lost money sitting in the docks of Cuba while longshoremen had a strike. A cargo-load of coconuts rotted in the hull of a ship on another voyage because Garvey insisted on having the ships make ceremonial stops at politically important ports.
The Black Star Line ceased sailing in February of 1922. It is regarded as a considerable accomplishment for African Americans of the time, up to today, despite the thievery by employees, engineers who overcharged, and the Bureau of Investigation's deliberate acts of infiltration and sabotage. It has been commemorated in song by blues singers Hazel Meyers and Rosa Henderson, reggae singer Burning Spear, and the musical group Brand Nubian (on their 1993 album In God We Trust).
