The first directors of the Black Star Line were Marcus Garvey, Edgar M. Grey, Richard E. Warner, George Tobias, Jeremiah Certain, Henrietta Vinton Davis, and Janie Jenkins.

[3] The Black Star Line surprised all its critics when, only three months after being incorporated, the first of four ships, Yarmouth was bought with the intention of renaming it Frederick Douglass.

Yarmouth was a collier in the First World War, and was in poor condition when the Black Star Line bought her.

After having been renamed Antonio Maceo by the Black Star Line, it blew a boiler and killed a man.

[6] Besides oversold and poorly conditioned ships, the Black Star Line was beset by mismanagement and infiltration by agents of J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner to the Federal Bureau of Investigation), including the first African-American agent hired by the bureau, James Wormley Jones, who became an intimate of Garvey, and other agents who − according to historian Winston James − sabotaged it by throwing foreign matter into the fuel, damaging the engines.

The prosecution stated that the brochure of the Black Star Line contained a picture of a ship that the BSL did not own.

The Black Star Line was suspended by Garvey in February 1922, following his arrest on mail fraud charges.

[10] The line was reconstituted as the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Company thereafter, which purchased a new ship, the SS General G W Goethals, in October 1924.