"ONE WOULD HAVE TO PENETRATE AND LIBERATE THESE DOCUMENTS": ROBERT A. HILL IN THE ARCHIVES

Small Axe 5 (March 1999)

I first encountered Robert A. Hill in May of 2012, my last year as an undergrad at UCLA. The British historian of the Middle East, Roger Owen, was giving a lecture on his forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life and Hill sat in the front row. Owen was being feted for a lifetime of achievement in Islamic Studies. After Owen’s talk, Hill raised his hand and asked him how he, as a son of the British Empire, could give such a talk with no mention of empire. Owen scrambled for a response. A few days later, in the history department’s packed conference room, Perry Anderson was giving a talk on “hegemony.” Again, Hill asked Anderson, a son of the British Empire, how he could give such a talk without mentioning empire. Anderson, a man of many, sometimes arcane words, was at a loss as to how to respond. I think he said something to the effect of “my talk wasn’t about empire…” Needless to say, I was instantly filled with respect and appreciation for Hill, who would retire from his post as Professor of History at UCLA a few weeks later.  

Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1943, Hill was the editor and chief of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project at UCLA’s African Studies Center, producing 12 edited volumes of Garvey’s papers. He also remains the literary executor of C.L.R James’ estate. You will notice Hill’s imprint if you have ever perused James’ papers at Columbia University or read any of James’ posthumously published works, most recently in a series published by Duke University Press. 

  
The anthropologist David Scott worked for Hill’s Garvey project as a graduate student.¹ Years later, in the fifth issue of Small Axe, Scott interviewed Hill, part of a series of long interviews Scott would conduct with Caribbean intellectuals. In his preface to the interview, Scott offered an assessment of Hill's oeuvre. "Hill," he wrote, “is not the author of books. He is not, primarily, what has come in our modernity to be known as an author… In our densely individualistic public culture, the author-function (authoriality) has come to assume a distinctive privilege. Perhaps it is a much overrated one. In consequence the place of the archive and the function of the archaeologist have been little understood, and have been less appreciated.” In response to condescending methodological criticisms raised by Eric Foner in a review of the first two Garvey Papers volumes in the New York Times, Hill described his own role simply: “my role as editor has been to establish reliable, authenticated texts of documents associated with the Garvey phenomenon, through methods of historical recovery and the application of the apparatus of scholarly editing.”² Hill’s work, in his own estimation and in the admiring words of Scott, is much greater than himself. It speaks to a collective memory and history. And it is invaluable.   

Before embarking on the act of archeology, archive-making, and historical recovery that would become the Garvey papers, Hill was involved in the heated politics and culture of radical Pan-Africanism between the Caribbean and Canada.³ He was managing editor of the weekly Abeng, and confidant and interlocutor of James, Walter Rodney, Alfie Roberts and others. Hill’s recovery of Garvey begins in 1970, at Cornell. The remarkable and humbling story of how the Garvey papers came to be and the meticulous work Hill put into them, speaks to those of us who work on people and events below and beyond the nation-state and its collections.

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Jonathan B. Fenderson and Candace Katungi, "'Committed to Institution Building': James Turner and the History of Africana Studies at Cornell University, an Interview," Journal of African American Studies 16:1 (March 2012).

[Robert Hill]: I came to America in the spring of 1970, and I went to New York and my first lecture was at Roosevelt University in Chicago. My second stop was at Cornell University, and the day I arrive at Cornell is the day after they had bombed and burned down the Africana Center.And this place is in great tension.It was a very sad thing to happen. I don't think they ever found who set the fire and bombed the building, but it destroyed the papers of a lot of the people in the faculty — their notes, their files, they all just went up in flames.

And the Africana Studies Center, which was headed by James Turner, had now to be relocated— and it's cold, master— and they moved it into what was still an unfinished dormitory building on the north end of the campus. And when I arrived, people were still moving into this unfinished dorm. And let's say that was like, maybe, a Thursday. The students were going to civilize the place by having a féte on the Saturday night, to have a dance. And I was in my room, on one of these floors, and I was reading Garvey's Philosophy and Opinions. And in the last section of volume 2 is the discussion of his Liberia Colonization Programme. And in big bold letters at the end of a lengthy document, Garvey says— because it's mainly documents and his commentary interspersed— Garvey says,"my analysis of this question, namely the betrayal of the Liberian Government, is in the form of a lengthy document, but I've not been allowed to release this document, because the prison authorities refuse to allow the document to be released". That Saturday night I thought, this means that, if Garvey is right, the prison, the federal prison in Atlanta, has a document that they censored, and what else could they have? And that was my first inkling that, here in America, were places where one would have to penetrate and liberate these documents. And I knew that I was coming to Atlanta— I hadn't yet come to Atlanta, I still had a number of places to speak at — and then I was going to the institute. And I knew from what I had learned, that they had a library. And I called through and asked Vincent Harding if he could get the librarian at the library to make a phone call to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary to inquire whether they have this document. And I then basically, you know, I filed the idea away.

And when I got to Atlanta, lo and behold, I am met by the librarian, and he says to me, ''We have found the document. "I didn't know what he was talking about. He says, "They have the document!" And I said, "Excuse me?" And he said, "Remember that document that you asked Vincent Harding . . I said, "They have it?!" He said, "They have quite a bit more—there are like four thick files on Garvey!" I couldn't believe it. I thought, my gosh, we have struck it, we've struck the gold. That was my first real break through here in the United States.

[David Scott]: Back up a little now for me, Bobby, to your MSc thesis, reading Garvey, writing your MSc thesis, when you're going back and forth with Rupert Lewis to the West India Reference Library. At that point you have no sense of a world of Garvey documents out there that one might get hold of?

RH: No. It's purely speculation, that if we can do this for Jamaica, shouldn't we in principle be able to do it for other countries? That is, if other countries contain material—and I didn't know where material existed—but I just said, what we're doing ought to be replicable.

DS: So that moment at Cornell University is, in a certain sense, the birth of the Garvey project?

RH: Yes. Oh very much so.That's when I saw that there was a way of reading Garvey, for the traces between the lines as it were, not for the overt ideological content of Garvey's ideas so much, but for the formation of Garveyism as a social process and as an epistemic phenomenon—so that if you read it carefully and could listen to it with sensitivity you could recapture the echoes of the sound. And so my whole way of reading Garvey took the form of a reconnaissance, from which I subsequently built up a map of the territory inhabited by Garvey and Garveyites.

DS: When do you leave the Institute of the Black World, and where do you go from there?

 RH: I left the institute in 1972, and I was invited to Northwestern University by Lerone Bennett, who was then chairman of the Department of African-American Studies. By then it was very clear that the institute simply could not afford to continue to support a research staff, because by '72 the institute was now independent. The resources, you know, to pay salaries and upkeep. So,Stephen Henderson moved out. But it was a decision taken collectively, that each of us would continue to constitute the institute, but we would decentralize ourselves. Vincent Harding would stay in Atlanta. Stephen Henderson took a position as director of Black Studies at Howard University. Bill Strickland took a position at the University of Massachusetts. I took a position at Northwestern. So that we all became decentralized, but we would return regularly for meetings in Atlanta. Vincent, I guess the following year, felt that he needed to get away from the day-to-day administration, in order to complete his own historical project, which is what There is a River became. And he took a year in Barbados at the Centre for Multicultural Studies in Barbados. Vincent's mother, you know, is from Barbados. And I think he used that as his affiliation. Then he came back, spent some time, and then moved out again, because the manuscript wasn't finished. And a brother from California, who had been a summer research intern, Howard Dodson, was invited back to Atlanta to become acting director. And Howard is now the chief of the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library in New York.

DS: When you get to Northwestern in '72 had you by then decided that what you wanted to do was construct a project around Garvey?

RH: Yes, yes, very definitely. And this is how it happened. The morning I arrived at the institute in Atlanta, somebody showed me the New York Times, and in the New York Times is an article, a report, by Charlene Hunter—later of PBS fame, of the McNeil-Lehrer Report—she was then a reporter on the staff of the New York Times. The morning I got there, they instantly showed me this report that a huge cache of Garvey papers had been found in New York in an old abandoned building. And immediately everyone was excited, and they said, well, they're going to have to get them, because the people who had found them were holding onto them, and there was some gangsterism involved, and a shootout was reported. But it was said to be an entire truckload of papers that was found. The group that found it was called "The Community Thing" headed by one Mrs Simms, Bernice Simms. The man who today is the publisher of the Amsterdam News was then a political appointee of Mayor John Lindsay, and he was, I think, in charge of some programme involved with Lindsay's Department of Housing. And this man had given Mrs Simms permission to use this abandoned building to set up an anti-drug community storefront type thing. And when they go into this abandoned building on Lennox Avenue, they're clearing out, going through and trying to ready the place, they see a big safe, they see filing cabinets, they see boxes, and they start to pore [over] them, opening up these file cabinets, and lo and behold, these are the papers of the remains of Garvey's Harlem organization. But, as often happens, the people involved in various drug programmes, are themselves former addicts. Mrs Simms and her co-leader split and they draw guns and say, “We are taking this stuff." And they send away for a truck. The truck comes. And they load the truck up with as much as they can, and they drive off. And what Charlene Hunter's report says is that they are holed up somewhere with these papers, publishers are sending the word that they're interested, they're asking a lot of money for these papers.

Now, the Institute of the Black World had a very tight network with black scholars in New York, and all over the country. And Vincent Harding, who is also born in New York and knows the New York scene very well, had had by now good experience with raising grants from foundations. Vincent, John Henrik Clarke and a number of key individuals, literally locate these gangsters, and they say that they're willing to turn over the papers for $25,000. Well, that money was raised in the quickest time I've ever seen, and there were alot of clandestine meetings with these individuals. And the money was paid over, and the papers were delivered— not all of them; I think most of them, however.

[The papers were] now in the Schomburg, and the head of the Schomburg then was Mrs Hudson, Jean Hudson — Who's a very good friend of John Henrik Clarke, and who, by the way, was, some people consider, a paramour of Langston Hughes, they were very tight. But it's the old Schomburg building, not the new Schomburg. The old Schomburg at 135th Street.

Hill's unwavering pursuit for documents. "Marcus Garvey's Speech to the U.N.I.A. on the Occasion of Gandhi's Arrest, March 1922," South Asia Bulletin 5:2 (Fall 1985). 

The institute now puts me forward as their representative, but also they offer me to the Schomburg, to organize and sort through this vast quantity of papers. When I come back to the country in January of '71, the university that had gotten me the visa, that the American ambassador had declined to issue, and held out from issuing, was Dartmouth College, up in New Hampshire. So although my base was in Atlanta, I was teaching as an adjunct faculty at Dartmouth, and commuting three days a week to New York, and working in the Schomburg upon the third floor in a kind of high security area, sorting and trying to make sense of this mass of material. And I did that for almost two years.Those papers are now on microfilm, five reels of them. I remember I used to work very late at night, because I could only spend three days a week in New York. And I was worried too, walking back and forth. John Henrik Clarke, who lived at 137th Street and Seventh Avenue, he very graciously offered me a room. So I lived with John and Eugenia Clarke part of the week, and I walked from 135th Street at night over to John's at 137th. But I often wondered, you know, considering there had been so much bad feeling between Mrs Simms, because she felt she had been done out of what was rightly hers, these people who had hijacked her and the papers had gotten $25,000 out of it, and she had wanted to use the papers to create a Marcus Garvey Centre in Mount Morris Park. And I often felt, late at night, coming across 135th Street, I'm really a target, you know. I could be such a target for anyone who wanted to interfere with the work that was going on with organizing those papers.But it was on one of those late night strolls over to John Henrik Clarke, that I remembered the conversation with Rupert in the car, coming from Marescaux Road, just by the Wolmer's School, when I said, if we could do this for Jamaica, it is replicable. And I saw that in fact I was actually doing this.

By then, our friend Bill Elkins in London, had published a number of interesting essays in Science and Society which pointed to a considerable amount of newspaper material and Colonial and Foreign Office material at the Public Record Office [PRO]. So I decided that in my next leg of the journey I'd turn my face toward Europe. And after I got appointed to the faculty at Northwestern, I left in April, left Dartmouth and New York in April, and headed to London, and I scoured the archives in London, Brussels, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Lisbon, Geneva, Berlin, Potsdam, between April and September '72. And the excavation work of that summer of '72, plus what I found in the federal penitentiary records, plus the material in the Schomburg, and then what I now unearthed in the National Archives [Washington, DC], became really the building blocks of this archive. I was doing that thing that Rupert and I had talked about.

The thing that the work in Europe revealed to me, however, and I think I was the first person to do this, [is that] when you're doing research in archival documents, the content of the documents is important, but just as important is how they were formed, as it were, the stratification of the deposits. And so it's very important to follow what we would eventually call the 'paper trail'. Every mark, every bit of writing on the document, has to be deconstructed into a context.

Now, at the PRO, they had a system where they stamp in the register of, say, the Foreign Office or the Colonial Office documents—they had a purple stamp—and this was what it said: "Destroyed under Statute". Boom! So there was no longer anything in existence. They had weeded this material. Now, second—bear that in mind — there are documents that should be in the Public Record Office, that are not there because they were destroyed under statute, and then a dispatch would describe enclosures or attachments, but they wouldn't be there, they'd be missing. And that was very maddening, because sometimes all you'd have was a kind of transmittal, a pre-transmittal, saying, we're sending along this report, and then the report isn't there.

What I began to sense was that only a fraction of this material ended up in the metropole. That, in the colony in question, material was collected, processed, it would be presented to the colonial secretary, who in turn would write a draft of a dispatch, get the governor's approval, sign it and send along one or two interesting enclosures. But this material in theory should still have survived, because it never got to the metropole. And I confirmed this in Brussels, in Paris, etcetera. So what I saw was that the European archives were only the tip of a much larger iceberg, that what was in Europe was a kind of summary, and deep below it you should now look to the individual colony to recover the stuff. Once again, the conversation with Rupert came to mind: we should be able to replicate this for each of the countries where Garvey's [movement] was in existence.

DS: Now, when you go to Europe, in '72, on this search, you already have a sense that you are looking for Garvey documents. But you are not working with a model of an archival methodology, or are you?

RH: No, I don't have any model. There's no parent collection. 

DS: So it is as you find documents that you are yourself producing the methodology, producing a principle of archival research.

RH: Exactly. And learning, as I go along, to pay attention to those fleeting references — document numbers, file numbers—and studying how they match up, and how they come together.

DS: In effect, you're learning to read documents.

RH: Yes, yes, as an artifact. The document is an artifact which exists independently of what is reported in it. Its formation, in other words—just like a social formation, a textual formation— that's what I'm always listening for…

David Scott, "The Archaeology of Black Memory: An Interview with Robert A. Hill," Small Axe 5 (March 1999): pp. 80-150. Read the rest of Scott’s wide-ranging interview with Hill, here.

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¹. David Scott, “Introduction: On the Archaeologies of Black Memory,” Small Axe 26 (2008), v. Scott reflects at length on his earlier interview with Hill in this essay.

². Robert A. Hill, “Editing the Garvey Papers,” New York Times (March 4, 1984), BR28.

³. For more details on Hill’s political and intellectual work in the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada, see, of course, the rest of his interview with David Scott, and: “Our Man in Mona: A Conversation between Robert A. Hill and Annie Paul,” https://anniepaul.net/our-man-in-mona-an-interview-by-robert-a-hill-with-annie-paul/; and David Austin, “The Black Jacobins: A Revolutionary Study of Revolution, and of a Caribbean Revolution,” in Charles Forsdick, Christian Høgsbjerg, eds., The Black Jacobins Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).