Marcus Garvey

Activist

• Born: August 17, 1887
• Birthplace: St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica
• Died: June 10, 1940
• Place of death: London, England

Activist

As founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Garvey made a major contribution to the course of African American history. The UNIA tried to create for people of African descent in the United States and abroad various means for enhancing their sense of self-respect and capacity for social and material improvement. Although the slogan “Back to Africa” is frequently associated with his movement, “black nationalism” might be a more appropriate term.

Areas of achievement: Business; Civil rights; Social issues

Early Life

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., was one of eleven children born to Marcus Mosiah Garvey and Sarah Jane Richards; only one other child survived. Garvey’s father was a mason, and his mother worked part-time in the fields, part-time as a domestic servant. At the age of fourteen, Garvey went to Jamaica’s capital city, Kingston, where he started work in a printing firm and rose to the rank of master printer. Involvement in union politics led to conflicts with his employers and his decision to leave Jamaica. In 1914, while Garvey was temporarily back in Jamaica, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, which would later be better known as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). His cofounder was Amy Ashwood, who later became his first wife.

The UNIA’s goals included fostering fellowship among African Americans, “civilizing” African tribes, and establishing agencies to support the rights of people of African descent worldwide. Its motto was “One God, one aim, one destiny.”

In 1916, Garvey came to the United States after spending several years in Central America and England. In England, he had collaborated with the Sudanese-Egyptian editor of The African Times and Orient Review. Although he contributed a 1913 article on African Americans in the West Indies, he began to look beyond Jamaica to embrace black people on all continents, a cause that later was associated with the “Back to Africa” movement.

Life’s Work

Garvey’s biographers often attribute his dedication to the UNIA to his admiration for Booker T. Washington, whose autobiography,Up from Slavery (1901), and whose work as the first head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama influenced him greatly. He was in touch with Washington by 1915, a year before his arrival in the United States. Garvey’s first U.S. lecture tour brought him into contact with several prominent African American leaders of the time, including W. E. B. Du Bois. His ties with Du Bois, however, were short-lived. By the mid-1920’s, the two black nationalist leaders had parted ways and even developed a mutual enmity. Garvey’s view of how the goals of the UNIA could be achieved shifted in this period. While his early emphasis had been on improving educational opportunities, he began to discuss the need to found all-black business and industrial enterprises.

In 1918, Garvey began publication of a weekly newspaper titled The Negro World, which became the mouthpiece of the UNIA. In 1919, as he was beginning to rise to prominence, Garvey launched an ambitious but ill-fated plan to foster closer economic ties between Africa and the West. He conceived of the Black Star Line (BSL), an oceanic steamship line owned and operated by African American investors. Its goal was to obtain a substantial portion of what its founders predicted would be a growing market in Africa for goods from the Western Hemisphere, as well as the market in the Americas for African exports. Shortly after it began operations, however, the BSL ran into legal trouble connected with the marketing of its shares. Although some supporters claimed that the prosecution was racially and politically motivated, Garvey was convicted of fraud in 1923 and sentenced to five years in prison. After serving part of his term, Garvey had his sentence commuted by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927.

After his release, Garvey returned to Jamaica, where he continued to devote himself to the UNIA. Soon, he was able to set up branch offices of the UNIA in various Jamaican towns. In 1928, he returned to Europe, where he met representatives of a number of African movements, including the West African Students Union.

Garvey founded another newspaper, The Blackman, in 1929, the same year he organized the Sixth International UNIA Convention. The event drew more than ten thousand supporters, including activists from around the world. The pomp and circumstance of this convention lent a new aura to Garvey’s style of leadership. Garvey appeared clad in flowing robes wearing a plumed hat, while officials of the UNIA wore military-style uniforms and carried swords.

In 1931, Garvey launched the Edelweiss Amusement Company (named after Edelweiss Park, his headquarters location in Jamaica), a philanthropic foundation to provide support for African American artists in marketing their artwork internationally.

Garvey is most commonly associated with the Back to Africa movement. While this movement is typically thought to involve African American migration to the African “homeland,” Garvey’s efforts were more closely related to a broader pan-African movement championed by a number of Africans after the near-collapse of Europe’s African colonies in World War I. Speeches by UNIA vice president William Sherrill suggested that the UNIA was drawing attention to Africa in order to help native Africans improve their lives and gain opportunities. Although UNIA rhetoric included references to possible support for uprisings against whites in Africa, Garvey indicated that he felt that economic and technical assistance was the real key to “modernism” in Africa. For example, he was involved in efforts to attract African Americans to investment schemes that could help Africans establish businesses and export goods to America.

Most of Garvey’s projects focused on Liberia, which, after severing ties with the original American Colonization Society, was struggling to establish a political and socioeconomic system based on the United States. The UNIA tried to raise a five-million-dollar private loan to help Liberia free itself from white capitalist ventures (eventually dominated by the rubber industry and the Firestone Company). Garvey even proclaimed that the UNIA was prepared to set up its headquarters in the Liberian capital of Monrovia. The ambitious ventures—including a plan for a Liberian black business school launched by Cyril Critchlow, one of the directors of the troubled Black Star Line—proved to be beyond the UNIA’s practical capacities.

Between the time he left the United States in 1927 and 1935, Garvey resided in his native Jamaica, where he directed UNIA operations from headquarters in Kingston. During this period, he actively participated in Jamaican politics. He founded the People’s Political Party in 1929 and ran several successful campaigns under a banner supporting the cause of the working class, women, and the poor.

Garvey spent his final years in England, where he had established ties with leaders of other black nationalist groups. He died there in 1940.

Significance

Garvey was an icon of black nationalism throughout his career and even after his death. The UNIA remained active into the 1950’s, and Garvey’s name was frequently invoked in rallies in the United States and abroad. His reputation was greatest among Caribbean islanders and their diaspora communities in other countries.

Bibliography

Cronon, E. David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. 2d ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. First published in 1960, this scholarly study was long regarded as the most influential work on Garvey.

Grant, Colin. Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Detailed, readable biography exploring the interior life of the black nationalist leader.

Hill, Robert A., ed. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Association Papers. 10 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Definitive collection of primary documents about Garvey and his movement. Contains most of Garvey’s own letters, newspaper editorials, and speeches.

Martin, Tony. Marcus Garvey, Hero: A First Biography. Dover, Mass.: Majority Press, 1983. Less detailed than Judith Stein’s closely documented study, this biography is a very readable, more personal, account of Garvey’s life.

Stein, Judith. The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Comprehensive scholarly biography of Garvey covering the main stages of his career, including his ties with the international pan-African movement.