THE NEGRO WEB

-What if Garvey had started the Internet?


Marcus Garvey, whose birthday comes up in just about three months time (August 17), was born some thirty years after the legendary Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, of whom the 153rd anniversary of his birth will be marked on July 10 this year. They died within three years of each other, Garvey in 1940 and Tesla in January, 1943.

There are other parallels between these two seemingly disparate figures. Both were outsiders who managed, through sheer force of personality and prodigious gifts, to make a significant impact on the social landscape of early 20th Century America; Garvey, through his oratory and the spread of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Tesla, through his development of alternating current (AC) power generation, radio (He was acknowledged, only after a Supreme Court ruling, as the ‘real father of radio’) and later – ideas deemed even more fanciful at the time, but commonplace today.

Both also had to face the skepticism and even outright hostility of the American financial and political power structure, and both died in a markedly diminished stature than at their lofty peaks.

No evidence -at least none of which this writer is aware – exists to confirm the hypothesis of such a meeting. Indeed, it seems likely, that Tesla, who developed a heightened germophobia in later years, and who would always carefully limit his circle of ‘friends’ may have avoided or shunned Garvey if the latter had even made such an overture. Then again, he may not, and may have seen the “Negro With A Hat” as an intriguing curiosity.

It is almost certain that Tesla would have been aware of Garvey and his African nationalist crusade. No less a figure than J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI had dubbed Garvey “one of the most dangerous individuals in America.” At its peak, the UNIA numbered some …..adherents across the US and was frequently the subject of newspaper articles. Garvey’s own news organ, The Negro World, was said to have a circulation of … As an ethnic Serb born in Croatia, Tesla would certainly have been no stranger to nationalist struggle.

For his part, Garvey was almost certainly aware of Tesla’s groundbreaking work in wireless electrical transmission, as well as his more mundane, but no less important development of AC power generation. Garvey arrived in new York at the height of the black intellectual movement, and by 1918, was the most influential black man in America, albeit not universally revered.



One of Tesla’s pet projects was the wireless generation of electrical power, and it was for this purpose that the massive Wardenclyffe tower was built with backing from the infamous J.P. Morgan. However, when Tesla – whose vision encompassed free electricity underwritten by municipal and other taxes - had no answer for Morgan’s question “where do we put the meter?” then Morgan cancelled further support and effectively shut Tesla out of the circle of investors whom he led in the city.

All this took place in the first decade of the 1900s, and the tower and site were shut down by 1907, long before Garvey came to the US. But again, its almost certain he would have read of Tesla’s work and seen the immense value of such a utility. If Garvey’s own enterprises had been allowed to remain untrammeled, could he have perhaps been an unlikely ally to Tesla in revitalizing the project, a project which if successful, would have been used to transmit pictures and other information – a World Wide Web, so to speak, long before the web came into being in the 1980s ( indeed, visions of such server-client networks were being espoused from the early 1940s). We’ll never know, but the questions in and of themselves are tantalizing.

Whether or not a meeting took place or could even have conceivably taken place between the two is beside the point, at least for the purposes of this article. In these two great, flawed yet Protean figures, we have a model for a new axis of collaboration – not an “evil axis” a la Ronald Reagan in his 80s heyday, but certainly an axis with the potential to radically shift the world’s financial and - just as important – socio-cultural order, not for mere aggrandizement, but for genuine collective development. As evidenced in the recent meltdown and ongoing recession, the process ahs already been initiated and the opportunity for writing a new chapter in history awaits.
Truly, the past is prologue










Michael A. Edwards is a writer/editor with extensive experience covering entertainment, cultural and social topics. He currently runs several blogs of his own and contributes to several others. He is writing both a book and a stage/screen play around the idea of a possible collaboration between Marcus Garvey and Nikola Tesla as well as a novel on the life and times of musical genius Don Drummond