Disney returned to Kansas City in October 1919, where he worked as an apprentice artist at the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio. There, he drew commercial illustrations for advertising, theater programs and catalogs. He also befriended fellow artist Ub Iwerks.
The October 1919 report by Dr. George Edmund Haynes was a call to national action, was published in The New York Times and other major newspapers. Haynes noted that lynchings were a national problem. As President Wilson had noted in a 1918 speech: from 1889–1918, more than 3,000 people had been lynched; 2,472 were black men, and 50 were black women. Haynes said that states had shown themselves "unable or unwilling" to put a stop to lynchings, and seldom prosecuted the murderers. The fact that white men had been lynched in the North as well, he argued, demonstrated the national nature of the overall problem: "It is idle to suppose that murder can be confined to one section of the country or to one race."
In October 1919, George Tyler, a part-time vendor of the Negro World, entered the UNIA office and tried to assassinate Garvey. The latter received two bullets in his legs but survived. Tyler was soon apprehended but died in an escape attempt from jail; it was never revealed why he tried to kill Garvey. Garvey soon recovered from his wounds; five days later he gave a public speech in Philadelphia.[178] After the assassination attempt, Garvey hired a bodyguard, Marcellus Strong.