The Poston family : a history of Black Radicalism (Episode 9 of 14); Black power origins

The Postons. Many know Ted Poston of today through his columns in The New York Post and his appearances on radio and television news shows but few remember his role in left wing circles of the New Deal. Nor are many aware that three of his older brothers were important Garveyites. Ted was the baby of 11 Poston children. His brothers, Robert, Ulysses and Arthur, were a 1922 leading officers in the UN IA and Robert, the Association Secretary General, was known as the closest associate and confidante of Marcus Garvey. During Garvey's imprisonment in 1923, Robert was part of a triumvirate having control of the organization. To Garveyites, Robert Poston was revered as their toast master general. At Garvey speaking engagements Poston was usually the man to introduce the leader, and audiences came to know that when Robert Poston mounted the speaking platform, the affair would soon reach its high pitch of excitement. In the opinion of younger brother Ted, Robert was the most important and gifted member of the clan. Of the many Postons, Robert, Ulysses and Ted each have had their distinctive contribution

to black militancy and will be treated here in turn. Critics of Garveyism interpreted Robert Poston's flowering speeches as unreflective worship of Garvey demagogy. The critics rarely gave Garvey credit for thinking or acting on their own. In the case of the Garveyites in the Poston clan, their commitment to the movement could well be traced to a family tradition of militant individualism. The patriarch, father Ephraim Poston, had been president of Kentucky State College for Negroes and had braved the wrath of the State Board of Education to publicize in the Louisville Courier-Journal the details of misplaced funds which were to have been used for his college. Honesty cost him his job. Robert had been influenced in choosing Garvey's nationalism by bitter experiences while a student at Princeton. University President Woodrow Wilson instituted segregation policies and entrance restrictions on race, and an angered Poston quit school before graduating. It was some 40 years

before another Negro enrolled at Princeton, and um... I'm not sure whether a Negro ever has enrolled in Princeton since Poston left. As a Garvey lieutenant Robert Poston's statements indeed showed adoration and respect of his leader. But there was more than simple worship to Robert Poston's Garveyism. For instance on the DuBois-Garvey feud, Poston provided a diplomatic viewpoint which mitigated the venomous Garvey tirades. To Poston the fighting was quite unfortunate, and he felt it should be said, to the credit of Dr. DuBois, that he was not responsible for his position. "As a literary man, as a lover and maker of books, he is great. I often look upon it as a tragedy and a crime that this man should be trotted out from the holy sanctum of books into the wild rush of the mob to assume any leadership. Dr. DuBois is not rugged

enough for the task. His very soul rebels against the thought. I firmly believe he has accepted leadership because some few misguided people have thrust it upon him and will not take it off him. But this has been done, and the genial doctor sometimes feels called upon to justify himself before that public which expects it of him by attacking Marcus Garvey, when to do this is to rebel against his own conscience." It was in 1919 that Robert and Ulysses pooled their resources to found a militant weekly in Detroit: The Contender. And through their paper and community activities they became involved in Garveyism. In 1920, they left the Midwest for New York and work with The Negro World. Later, they would be editors of Garvey's short-lived daily The Negro Times. Robert became the third highest ranking Garveyite. Another brother Arthur was Minister of Industries, and Ulysses held various offices in addition to his journalistic work.

And meanwhile back home in Kentucky young Ted was just entering high school when World War 1 ended and never got involved in Garveyism. Robert received some personal notoriety, aside from his movement, when he married the Negro sculptor Augusta Savage who was not much interested in Garveyism and content to let her husband declare family politics. The UNIA convention of 1922 was the scene of a major division among Garveyites, a division which split the Poston family. Accusations of fiscal mismanagement and criticism of Garvey's apologetic remarks about the Ku Klux Klan had created a faction of association members determined to curb the powers of President General Garvey. Robert stuck with the leader while Ulysses and Arthur chose to do battle and lost their positions in the hierarchy, but not without a fight. Ulysses remained on for some months with The Negro World in which he had published a word of advice to Garvey that "In your mad rush to serve your race, in your mad rush to

serve humanity, pause long enough to study yourself introspectively. Remember Napoleon was ambitious to serve his people." In 1924 Robert Poston headed a commission of Garveyites, sent on a diplomatic trip to Liberia, to negotiate a possible emigration of American Negroes. Conservative Liberian officials were fearful of a Garveyite takeover of their country and rebuffed the mission. Shortly after the group departed for home the Liberian head of the UNIA was executed, reason unknown. This was but a minor tragedy related to the Liberian trip. Robert Poston fell ill while en route to America, contracted complications of pneumonia and died at sea March 16th, 1924 at the age of 33. Word reached New York at the time of a mass meeting of Harlem Garveyites And when the announcement was read many wept and a glorious

tribute was arranged for the funeral. In the late 1920s, Ulysses Poston distinguished himself as a leading Black spokesman for the Democratic Party. He had been a supporter of Democrats since his days in Detroit. Detached as Garveyites were from American social norms, it was often easy for them to adopt politics different from traditional Negro Republicanism. In 1928, through friendship with Jim Farley, Ulysses agreed to start a Democratic Party sponsored paper in Harlem which was named in a bit of nostalgia The Contender. The immediate aim of the paper was to promote Al Smith for the presidency. Fresh out of Tennessee A&I, young brother Ted came to New York to aid in putting out the paper. In fact, Ted did most of the editing, Ulysses busying himself in making political speeches and writing editorials urging Negros to take notice of the potential benefits to them in the pro-labor trend of northern urban Democrats.

Among Negro papers, The Contender in 1928 was virtually alone in arguing for labor unity through the Democratic Party. Garvey's Negro World and The California Eagle broke tradition of Republicanism to endorse Smith over Hoover, but gave as their reasons: Hoover's racist comments about Congolese Africans, and Hoover's role in aiding the Firestone Rubber Company to secure imperialist contracts for Liberian rubber. In 1929, The Contender figured heavily in the re-election of New York mayor Jimmy Walker and other Democrats in the city, and in the campaign of 1930 and '32 Ulysses traveled throughout the East and the Midwest promoting the new Labor coalition. When other papers began to endorse Democrats, there was little need for the strictly political Contender and it folded after the 1932 elections. Ulysses then retired from active politics to devote himself to real estate, his vocation until his death in the

late 1950s. It was one of the many little coincidences of black militancy that the offices of The Contender on 7th Avenue had formerly been used by Cyril Briggs in publishing The Crusader Monthly of the radical Marxist African Blood Brotherhood. Young Brother Ted carried the family fortunes in politics from the 1930s on. His major interest lay not in journalism but in poetry and prose, which he submitted regularly to the Pittsburgh Courier and Amsterdam News. Short story contributions to The New Republic brought him recognition in the world of the white Left. He was offered a chance in 1932 to be one of twenty-six Negroes to go to the Soviet Union to make a feature length film on American racism. Langston Hughes, Henry Lee Moon and Poston were to write the script. When the troupe assembled in Russia, Ted was found to be the second darkest Negro there, so it was decided that he should be an actor and play the hero.

He was to have the honor of dying gloriously at the hands of a lynch mob. The half dozen or so Negro communists in the group objected to his getting the leading role. "What has Ted Poston ever done for the struggle to get the honor of being lynched?" asked one of the Communists. The question became academic, however. Stalin decided he might need American support in a fight with Hitler, and the movie production was stopped, lest it offend the rulers of racist America. Poston was one of four in the troupe who signed a written denunciation of Stalin's action. The strongly worded statement called the Soviet action not only a sellout of American Negroes but of all the "dark or exploited colonial peoples." Upon his return to America, Poston became an ardent New Deal'er and a traveling Labor reporter. His union experiences were made the basis of some of his New Republic short story fiction. The trials and tribulations of rank and file Laborites

were experienced personally when he helped to lead a successful strike of the New York Amsterdam News. The strike destroyed a myth that Negroes would not strike a Negro paper and indirectly helped to raise wage standards in the Negro press in general. Poston's support for the New Deal was rewarded during World War Two with a government position as Racial Advisor to Elmer Davis in the Office of War Information. According to Roi Ottley, "The most picturesque member of the Black cabinet was the noisy flamboyant Ted Poston." As a government public relations man, Poston had the job of stimulating support of Negroes for the war effort. There were objections to his optimistic accounts of Afro-American unity with the cause. Some militant Blacks considered his publicity noisy flamboyant whitewash of Negro dissatisfaction over discrimination in defense plants and mistreatment of Black troops in a segregated armed forces. Poston's position during the war

was a difficult one. Most factions of the New Deal and the Left were in agreement that defeating Hitlerism came first, then internal problems later, and by the 1940s, Poston was more a man of the New Deal than of the ghetto. The objections came from the ghetto. Many an average Black man could see little difference between Dixie fascism and the European variety. Poston had evidence upon which to draw a distinction. He had experienced, firsthand, the growth of [nasy R.] He spent much of 1933 in Germany arriving there after the filmmaking affair in Russia. As for Ted Poston of the New York Post, he first joined the paper as a reporter during the War. Later he was made a feature columnist, ran a notable series on Harlem in 1956, and today is an important member of the editorial staff. At present he is somewhat removed from the intricacies of Black radicalism. In his off hours from the paper he can usually be found at the residence of his old

friend from the Russian movie days Henry Lee Moon, who along with Poston, had been among the four signatories to that protest letter to Stalin. Two doors from the Moon residence lives a third of the old foursome, Thurston Lewis.