Stand at the corner of Auburn Avenue and Jessie Hill Jr. Drive, and wait for the wind to blow.
Admire the blue letters “Jesus Saves,” hanging like a benediction above Big Bethel AME Church. Steady your eyes and try to see him in the whirlwinds. It’s been raining lately in Atlanta, so maybe you will find him in the song of the storm. Let’s stand in the sun and gaze up and down “the sweetest Negro street in the world”: Auburn Avenue.
Wonder what was said as they waited here, Black men and women wrapped in Sunday cloth and anticipation, standing before Big Bethel. The steeple like a fist raised to the heavens, its history pressed between bricks like prayers too sacred for paper.
It was March 25, 1917. They say he stood at the pulpit that day and roared, not a preacher in sermon, but a storm made flesh.
Marcus Garvey, dressed in a wool suit, his hands gripping the pulpit like the helm of a great ship about to sail, told Black Atlantans they were not property, not problems, not patients waiting to be healed by white hands — no! “A people,” he stormed. “A nation. A future.”
Big Bethel vibrated with the kind of silence that comes before revelation. Imagine a baby crying. Someone hushing them. In the back, a man clutched the flyer into his palm. A broadside had called it a mass meeting, a spiritual emergency. The flyer named him “The Great West Indian Negro Leader.” But what mattered that night wasn’t his title, it was his timing. “Africa for the Africans,” Garvey roared, “at home and abroad!” And the people didn’t just applaud, they rose. Because something in them had risen too.
Let the land still whisper, echoing from a century ago, that somewhere in those pews someone turned to a neighbor and said, “We heard something tonight.”
Then five years passed.
A telegram arrived. Simple. From Edward Young Clarke. A request for a meeting. And on June 25, 1922, Marcus Garvey returned to Atlanta — not to speak, but to listen. Just one year earlier, Clarke, the acting imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, had announced the purchase of a new headquarters: the Imperial Palace, located at what once was 2292 Peachtree St. A marble mansion for white terror. Today, the Cathedral of Christ the King stands at the site, 2699 Peachtree Road, offering irony instead of reconciliation.
Read More: Beneath Our Feet: Where MARTA Runs Lives Were Once Sold in Atlanta
What happened next defies logic, but not history. The two men met for two hours. “We outlined the aims and objects of the Klan,” Clarke later said. “We believe America is a white man’s country. And we believe the Negro should have a country of his own in Africa.” Garvey, in return, extended an invitation to Clarke to speak at a future United Negro Improvement Association convention.
At Liberty Hall in Harlem, Garvey later explained the meeting. “Not because I wanted to be a member of the Klan,” he told his supporters, “but because I wanted to know the truth about the Klan’s attitude toward the race I represent.” He didn’t flinch from describing the Klan as “the invisible government of the United States,” insisting it represented “the spirit, the feeling, the attitude of every white man in America.” His tone wasn’t one of reverence — but of realism. “You cannot blame any group of men… for organizing in their interest,” he said. “The Klan is honest. They say, ‘You shall not pass.’ At least I know where I stand.”
To Garvey, the Klan’s clarity was preferable to the hollow promises of liberal paternalism. “I prefer and have a higher regard for the man who intends to take my life, who will warn me … rather than the man who pretends to be my friend and ushers me into eternity.”
But not everyone heard strategy in those words. Some heard surrender. The backlash came with fire.
A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, editors of The Messenger magazine, published their demand: “Garvey Must Go.” They called him “a menace … a race traitor.” Pamphlets spread. Letters hit the desks of Justice Department officials. One UNIA supporter received a severed hand in the mail — a message in flesh: Stop him. The speculation that Garvey would “sell the race” to the Klan grew louder, even though no such deal ever took place.
Atlanta, the same city that had once crowded into Big Bethel to hear him speak, fell silent when he fell from grace. Was it disbelief? Fatigue? Or fear, that naming the fracture would deepen it?
W.E.B. Du Bois named it plainly. “Marcus Garvey is, without doubt, the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world,” he wrote in the NAACP’s official publication, The Crisis. Their rivalry had hardened into ideology. Garvey believed in Black sovereignty; Du Bois, in Black integration. But even Du Bois, in private, conceded more than he printed. “He speaks not just to ignorance, but to despair,” he wrote. “And despair listens louder than reason.”
A few years after the Klan meeting, Garvey returned to Atlanta.
This time, there was no pulpit. No invite from the grand wizard of the Klan. In February 1925, he entered the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, convicted of mail fraud related to the Black Star Line, the ambitious shipping company founded to carry the dreams of Black liberation across the Atlantic. A movement was now reduced to trial exhibits. A vision, chained to a single charge.
Inside those red brick walls, Garvey wrote in his first message from Atlanta: “All I have I have given to you. I have sacrificed my home and my loving wife for you. If I die in Atlanta my work shall live, in the physical or spiritual to see the day of Africa’s glory. Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you.”
He served nearly four years. Then was deported. The Atlanta Federal Penitentiary still stands. Drive past it now on McDonough Boulevard. No apology. No plaque. No memory. Just iron and brick and time.
Read More: Beneath Our Feet: Gentrifying Neighborhoods Hold Stories of 24 Murdered Black Women
We will stand there, now. Let your eyes linger on the windows, wonder which one was his. Did he remember the mass at Big Bethel? Did he picture ships on the horizon? Did he still believe?
And we do. Because belief is memory. And memory needs belief. Otherwise, it drifts.
So let’s walk. Come sit on the steps of Big Bethel. Let the heat rise from the street and the silence gather. Then go up to Peachtree and place your hand on the stones outside the Cathedral of Christ the King, not to find answers, but to anchor in the affirming.
Marcus Garvey was here. Not just in the speeches and the scandals, but in the contradictions. His legacy isn’t clean. But it is real.
And maybe, just maybe, he still is here in the whirlwinds. In the song of the storm.
