Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a compelling orator, organizer and Black nationalist, advocated economic independence and Black internationalism as an answer to the Black man's plight. Marcus Garvey was born on August 17, 1887 on the north coast of British-controlled Jamaica. He was the last of 11 children. Having to quit school at the age of fourteen, Garvey went to work as a printer's apprentice in Kingston Jamaica. At 14 years old, Garvey became a printer's apprentice. In 1907 , though a part of management, he got involved in trade unionism, where led a strike among the printer for higher wages. Garvey's uncompromising negotiations with management on the behalf of workers led to his being fired and ostracized by Kingston's private printing companies.
It was this early training that kindled in him a passion for political activism and subsequently led Garvey to published his first newspaper, The Watchman, as a forum for his emerging political views about oppression within society. Concerned about the injustices perpetrated against his race, Garvey left Jamaica between the years 1910 and 1912 to Central and South America in search of better opportunities. He briefly lived in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Columbia, and Venezuela. While in Costa Rica he worked as a timekeeper on a banana plantation. He began work as a newspaper editor for a daily newspaper called La Nacionale in 1911, writing about the exploitation of migrant workers in the plantations. Later that year, he moved to Colón, Panama, where he edited a biweekly newspaper. However in every city and every country, Garvey was sickened by the exploitation of his own people.
He moved to England in 1912 to study briefly at Birkbeck College (University of London) taking classes in law and philosophy. During his stay he met Africans for the first time. It was while in England, at the Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner, that he began to speak publicly about the condition of Africans. An important encounter for Garvey while in London was meeting Duse Mohammed Ali, editor of the African Times and Orient Review which advocated Pan-African nationalism. The magazine also advocated Ethiopianism and home rule for British-ruled Egypt. Mohamed Ali began employing Garvey, who wrote several articles on Jamaica for the magazine. Garvey also spent a lot of time reading in the library of the British Museum.
Concerned about the injustices perpetrated against his race, Marcus Garvey went to Central and South America in search of better opportunities. However in every city and every country, Garvey was sickened by the exploitation of his own people. It was in a library where he came upon a copy of Booker T. Washington's autobiography, "Up From Slavery", and was moved by his philosophy of self-help. Marcus Garvey returned to Jamaica in 1914 and founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914. The UNIA's goals were to promote racial unity through education, encourage racial pride, establish worldwide commercial activity and develop Africa. Garvey's two basic tenets of philosophy were African Nationalism and Black self assertion.
The UNIA's first project was the establishment of a trades school, patterned after the Tuskegee Institute. However it failed to materialize and Garvey sought help from the United States at the invitation of Washington. Unfortunately, Washington died prior to Garvey's arrival. In 1916, he moved to the United States and established a UNIA branch in New York City's Harlem district. Emphasizing unity between Africans and the African diaspora, he campaigned for an end to European colonial rule across Africa and advocated the political unification of the continent. He told African-Americans they had the same opportunities and potential as any other group of people in the world. He wanted to promote a separatist philosophy of social, political, and economic freedom for Black people. Garvey envisioned a unified Africa as a one-party state, governed by himself, that would enact laws to ensure Black racial purity.
Garveyist ideas became increasingly popular and the UNIA grew in membership. Believing that Black people needed to be financially independent from White-dominated societies, Garvey launched various businesses in the U.S. On August 17th 1918, Garvey began publishing the widely distributed newspaper "Negro World" to convey his message. Soon, his speaking engagements took on an angry tone. He questioned how the United States could call itself a democracy when across the country people of color were still oppressed. His speeches were attracting a lot of people who shared his views. They were called "Garveyites". These devotees came primarily from among the less-educated, lower-class masses. Permeated by a strong sense of "self-help," they banded together behind the Prophet of Africanism. And Garvey made every possible effort to practice what he preached.
Garvey urged Black Americans to be proud of their race and return to Africa, their ancestral homeland, which attracted thousands of supporters. He did not call for a widespread exodus of Blacks out of the Americas and into Africa but did see the continent as a source of heritage, culture, and pride. His wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, always maintained that "the term 'back-to-Africa' was used and promoted by newspapers—Negro newspapers mostly—to ridicule Garvey. There was no back-to-Africa movement, except in a spiritual sense." This observation was basically true, despite the fact that Africa was pivotal to all of Garvey's doctrine and propaganda. His vision was of an Africa gradually liberated from the chains of colonial domination, with its nations ultimately involved as stable, dignified partners with the rest of the global community. Garvey believed in founding a nation to serve as a central homeland.
During 1919, to facilitate the so-called "back-to-Africa" movement that he advocated, he became President of the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company, designed to forge a link between North America and Africa and facilitate Black migration to Liberia. Garvey also unsuccessfully tried to persuade the government of Liberia in west Africa to grant land on which Black people from America could settle. That same year, Garvey started the "Negroes Factories Association", to encourage economic independence. The businesses, comprised of groceries, restaurants, steam laundries, a men's and women's garment-manufacturing division, and the Phyllis Wheatley Hotel. They would manufacture marketable commodities in every big industrial center in the Western hemisphere and Africa. By the early 1920s, this corporation and its linked businesses employed at least 1,000 Black Americans in the U.S alone.
The rising “Black Moses” claimed a following of about 4 million members by August of 1920, though the exact number of association members was never clear. On August 1, 1920, at Liberty Hall in Harlem, Garvey assembled the first National Convention of his Universal Negro Improvement Association. That month, the International Convention of the UNIA was held. With delegates from all over the world attending, 25,000 people filled Madison Square Garden to hear Garvey speak. These two events took place 18 months after W.E.B. Du Bois convened his first Pan-African Congress at the Grand Hotel, Paris. Garvey's call for racial solidarity and economic independence caused him to be painted as a Black supremacist by both the White and Black press of his day.
In addition, he was viewed by the establishment Black leadership as a threat to the push for integration with Whites. Over the next couple of years, Garvey’s movement was able to attract an enormous number of followers. Reasons for this included the cultural revolution of the Harlem Renaissance, the large number of West Indians who immigrated to New York, and the appeal of the slogan “One Aim, One God, One Destiny,” to African American veterans of World War I. Garvey spoke of a “new Negro,” proud of being Black. His newspaper, "Negro World", told of the exploits of heroes of the race and of the splendors of African culture. He preached racial pride, for instance, encouraging parents to give their daughters Black dolls to play with. He taught that Blacks would be respected only when they were economically strong, and he preached an independent Black economy within the framework of White capitalism. A formidable public speaker, Garvey spoke across America promoting a separatist philosophy of social, political, and economic freedom for African Americans.
Marcus Garvey wanted his fellow Blacks to understand that White people's distrainment of them should not be a surprise. To Garvey, after all, Blacks were not poor and wretched because Whites hated them. On the contrary, Whites hated them because they were poor and wretched. Thus, for Garvey, the only program that made any sense at all was one that lifted the Black race toward dignity, self-respect, and racial pride, by having them establish wealth, culture, achievement, civilization, and an Africa-centered, national sovereignty all their own. He led a thrust to revitalize what he believed to be Africa's glorious past, and he endorsed Blacks to recapture that lost magnificence of empire, wealth, and achievement. "Resurrect it!" Garvey proclaimed. "Without commerce and industry, a people perish economically. The Negro is perishing because he has no economic system, no commerce, no industry".
Garvey worked to develop a program to improve the conditions of ethnic Africans “at home and abroad” under UNIA auspices. Ideologically, Garvey was a Black nationalist. Generally referring to dark-skinned peoples of African descent as "Negroes", he and the UNIA insisted that that term should be capitalized, thus affording dignity and respect to those whom it described. Garvey believed that darker-skinned Black people were often marginalized, and he sought to challenge systems that favored lighter-skinned individuals in leadership and social status. Garvey promoted the view that Whites had no duty to help Blacks achieve racial equality, maintaining the view that the latter needed to advance themselves on their own initiative. His philosophy was rooted in racial pride and self-reliance, encouraging Black people to reject Eurocentric beauty standards. Despite the unrelenting campaign against him, the Prophet of Africanism maintained that he was not an advocate of Black supremacy, but was an exponent of Black race uplift and improvement.
The UNIA held its second International Convention in 1921 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Also represented at the convention were organizations such as the Universal Black Cross Nurses, the Black Eagle Flying Corps, and the Universal African Legion. The national level of support in Jamaica helped Garvey to become one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century on the island. At the age of 32 in 1919, Garvey married his first wife, Amy Ashwood. He separated from her four months later. In 1922, Marcus Garvey met and married his second wife, the Jamaican-born Amy Jacques. Mrs. Garvey did not obtain her legitimacy just from the status of her husband as she was a powerful Pan-Africanist and Black Nationalist journalist. Amy became the Secretary General of the UNIA, and from 1924 to 1927, Mrs. Garvey was the associate editor of "The Negro World", where she wrote a column titled "Our Women and What They Think". In 1923, she edited The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey - Africa for the Africans, Volume One, and in 1925, the second volume.
Garvey shady business methods, brought him bitter enemies among the established African American leaders. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader, W.E.B. Du Bois called Garvey, "the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America." Garvey felt Du Bois was an agent of the White elite, and accused the NAACP of promoting "amalgamation or general miscegenation". Labor leader Asa Philip Randolph of the Pullman Porters and Du Bois, found his separatist philosophy ill-conceived. But, W.E.B Du Bois wasn't the worst adversary of Garvey. Garvey's popularity in the United States among African American communities had attracted government attention. The racist F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover had a fixation on ruining Garvey for his radical ideas. Hoover felt threatened by the Black leader, fearing he was inciting Black people across the country to stand up in militant defiance. Hoover saw Garvey as a terrible threat to the American way and referred to Garvey as a "notorious negro agitator".
Garvey praised U.S. President Warren G. Harding when the latter spoke out "against miscegenation and against every suggestion of social equality." He even approved of the Ku Klux Klan because it sought to separate the races. His 1922 meeting, in Atlanta, Georgia, with Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader Edward Young Clarke, was an opportunity that Garvey took to explain the common ground shared by the UNIA and the KKK, regarding those same issues. Despite the subsequent fiery criticism and the loss of support, Garvey held to his racialist ideology. He respected the "honesty of purpose" shown by whites like President Harding, KKK members, Anglo-Saxon Clubs members, and racist Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo. To Garvey, such forthrightness was better than the "farce, hypocrisy, and lie" characteristic of those whites who needed to sustain at least the masquerade of a just society.
In 1922, J. Edgar Hoover began investigating Garvey on charges of mail fraud in connection with a brochure for the Black Star Line. Garvey and three other U.N.I.A. officials were arrested for mail fraud through use of the federal mail system, in connection with the sale of stock in the Black Star Line, which had now failed. It was revealed that, contrary to representations, the corporation did not actually possess the ship pictured in the company's stock brochure. The Black Star Line did own and operate several ships over the course of its history and was in the process of negotiating for the disputed ship at the time. Of all those charged in connection with the enterprise, only Garvey was found guilty of using the mail service to defraud. His supporters declared the trial perverse.
The next year Garvey was convicted and sentenced to prison for five years. After years of appeal and the support of many friends, he began serving his sentence in 1925, in the United States Penitentiary, Atlanta for nearly two years. In 1927, his five year sentence was commuted and he was deported to Jamaica by President Calvin Coolidge. He never again set foot in the United States. The Black Star Line never carried a single passenger across the ocean to Africa. Garvey continued his political activism and the work of U.N.I.A. in Jamaica. In 1928, Garvey traveled to Geneva, Switzerland to present the Petition of the Negro Race. This petition outlined the worldwide abuse of Africans to the League of Nations. Settling in Kingston with his wife Amy Jacques, Garvey, in 1929, established the People's Political Party (PPP), Jamaica’s first modern political party, which focused on workers’ rights, education, and aid to the poor.
With the U.N.I.A in increasing financial difficulty, he relocated to London in 1935, where his anti-socialist stance distanced him from many of the city's Black activists. Before leaving Jamaica, Garvey gave a speech in which he called upon his fellow "Afro-West Indians" to unite in order to make "history for the race". Many of the members of his early Garveyism or Garveyite movement would become part of the later established Nation of Islam in the U.S. Garvey believed a pan-African state was needed to provide stability and wealth to Africa. During these last five years, Garvey remained active and in touch with events in war-torn Ethiopia (then known as Abyssinia) and in the West Indies. He died in London on June 10, 1940. In 1964, his body was returned to Jamaica where he was declared the country's first national hero. Garvey's legacy endures as a symbol of Black pride and nationalism, particularly resonating with Caribbean communities and their diasporas, and his ideas remain influential in discussions of race and identity today.
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Career:
▶ founds UNIA in Jamaica, July 1914
▶ forms branch in New York City, in Harlem, May 1916 (January 1918?)
▶ incorporates movement in New York state, June 1918
▶ starts Negro World newspaper, August 1918
▶ starts Black Star Line shipping company, 1919
▶ starts Negro Factories Corp., 1920
▶ announces Liberian Colonization Plan, 1920
▶ sends first delegation to Monrovia, Liberia, 1921
▶ makes organizational tour of Caribbean and Central America, 1921
▶ arrested and indicted on Mail Fraud Charges, 1922
▶ meets with Acting Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, causing backlash of opposition from other Black leaders, 1922
▶ second UNIA delegation sent to Liberia, 1923
▶ starts Black Cross Navigation and Trading Co. to replace defunct Black Star Line
▶ UNIA purchases Smallwood-Corey School ("Liberty University") in Claremont, Virginia
▶ becomes proprietor of Edelweiss Park, a social center for blacks in Kingston
▶ tries to establish political career in Jamaica
▶ begins publishing the Black Man, 1929
▶ bankrupt, announces move to London, 1934
▶ teaches School of Arican Philosophy to UNIA leaders in Toronto, 1937
▶ dies on June 10, 1940
▶ James Stewart elected UNIA president, August 1940
▶ headquarters of UNIA moved to Cleveland, Ohio