A Colonial WikiLeaks? The Migrated Archives and the Caribbean Pt.3
April 25th, 2012
Originally Posted on NACLA.org
As mentioned in prior articles, April 18th marked the public release of the first batch of the secret colonial documents known as the "migrated archives." Robert Hill, Professor of Afro-American and Caribbean History at UCLA, who has been deeply involved in the "migrated archives" since their discovery, shares his insights into the release of the archives and what it entails for the Caribbean history.
Professor Hill is editor of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro
Improvement Association Papers Project, and is also internationally
recognized as a leading authority on the life of Garvey and the history
of the Garvey movement. He is also the Literary Executor of C.L.R.
James, the Marxist historian and Pan-African political activist.
Interestingly, Professor Hill’s work with the migrated archives is
not the first time that he has come across secret or forgotten
documents. In 1970, he learned from a New York Times story that
a community organization in Harlem had been given a derelict building
to start a drug rehabilitation center. In this building, the staff found
cabinets, safes, and boxes that turned out to contain the entire
documentary record of the central division of Marcus Garvey’s Universal
Negro Improvement Association.
"They were going to throw them away!" Hill exclaimed.
The community organization that discovered the Garvey papers eventually
fell apart, but a struggle over the papers began in earnest. The
struggle became so serious that the organization's director was even
held up at gunpoint, with the papers being sold by the addicts to the
highest bidder. Eventually a group led by the historian John Henrik
Clarke arranged for the purchase of the entire batch of papers, and
brought them to the New York Public Library. Professor Hill has been archiving Garvey papers at UCLA's James S.
Coleman African Studies Center since 1977. He has published those papers
in 11 books so far, with the latest volume being The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910-1920.
You have had a very interesting experience in regards to
your presence in the discovery of classified or forgotten documents.
It’s amazing that the discovery of the migrated archives is not the
first time you have encountered this kind of thing. Can you please
elaborate how the discovery of the migrated archives fits into your
previous areas of research?
Well, in a way, within Caribbean historiography, it comes as a big
shock to stumble upon these police, or confidential and secret,
documents. In the historiography of popular movements in Europe its
standard, it’s not at all a big surprise because European historians
have always understood the huge significance of police records for
studying the poor, clandestine political repression carried out from the
18th century in European society.
Now we, as a former colonial people, we throw up movements of
resistance, call them what you will, popular movements, resistance
movements, anti colonial movements – and then in the case of Marcus
Garvey, we discover, because the Garvey movement operated here in the
United States in a major way – the institutions and the agencies of
government monitored these movements very carefully, and there is a
tremendous paper trail within the archives of the United States
government, the Canadian government; and also European governments. This
is a paper trail that enables us to write the history of the Garvey
movement, which without those archives we could never have really
undertaken.
You might say it was the preservation of these records which really
places some kind of order, some kind of intellectual order on the
material. On the one hand we have to be careful of course, not to get
trapped into some kind of interpretative paradigm, but nonetheless, the
records of the U.S. state department, the FBI, the Department of
Justice, the Office of Naval Intelligence, even the Post Office, those
records are what allowed us to construct a history of the Garvey
movement. So I’ve spent probably 35 years systematically going through
the records as they became declassified, of the U.S. government dealing
with Garvey, and the European governments dealing with Garvey in Africa
and the Caribbean. So when the word of these migrated archives came up, I
instantly recognized their value – in a very concrete way if you let me
explain.
When I was working on Garvey, I asked the archivist of the Jamaica
archives, where the colonial secretariats files related to Garvey were
located. He said, "they’re not open, they’re not accessible to you." I
asked what I would have to do to appeal that? He said I would have to
write a letter to the Chief Justice of Jamaica, which I did. And I made
an argument (this is now in the early 1970’s) explaining why these files
were important and why they should be made accessible. Now, follow me,
he informed me that the Chief Justice had approved my request, but he
himself did not have the secret and confidential files on Garvey. To get
them, he had to go to Spanish town in Kingston to the building where
these confidential files were housed.
Now here is what Professor Anthony Badger (the man in charge of the
migrated archives) wrote to me when I asked him about the time span of
the migrated archives for Jamaica. He said that they begin in the late
1920’s—you see the convergence? They had already removed the files on
Garvey out of Jamaica when I had asked for them.
What I am hoping is that I will now find the missing files of the
1930’s and will then be able to link them back to the ones from the
1920’s that we have. In other words, it’s the same work we’re doing—only
now we have to go to England to get these files, they’re not in Jamaica
in the way that the files of the 1920’s were. Now why did they choose
to take away those starting in the late 1920’s? Now I can’t tell you, I
don’t know. They had to have some kind of cut-off point, they must have
just said that let’s just take 1929 as our base year and anything going
forward. So we will see in September, when I go to England. I will know
very quickly whether these are the files connecting back to the ones
from the 1920’s that I saw.
So, the point I’m making is that, whether it is the FBI, the state
department or the colonial secretariat’s records of the 1920’s in
Jamaica, it’s all just one continuing story, one continuing saga. I had
been extremely frustrated for years at not being able to find the
colonial secretary’s files for the 30’s, but now since that time—I’ve
gone on to do work on the back to Africa movement of the 1950’s which
led to a tremendous political explosion in Jamaica in 1959 and 1960—what
I’m now hoping is that these files, which go up to August 1962, will
have files that I have tried my very hardest to find, and couldn’t find
in Jamaica, I’m hoping to find them amongst these migrated archives.
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