Universal Negro Improvement Association

SIGNIFICANCE: The Universal Negro Improvement Association, an organization dedicated to supporting African American racial pride, did much to advance the growth of Black nationalism.

In March 1916, a young Black Jamaican, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, arrived in New York City. He had come to the United States in the hope of securing financial help for the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which he had founded in Jamaica two years earlier. After delivering his first public speech in Harlem in May, Garvey began a long speaking tour that took him through thirty-eight states. In May 1917, he returned to Harlem and—with the help of his secretary and future wife, Amy Ashwood—organized the first American chapter of the UNIA. Though hardly noticed at the time, the establishment of this organization was a significant first step in the growth of Black nationalism in the United States. Within a few years, the UNIA would claim millions of members and hundreds of branches throughout the United States, the Caribbean region, and Africa, and Garvey would be one of the most famous Black people in the world.

The Beginnings of the UNIA

Garvey was born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, in 1887. He claimed to be of African descent. His father was a descendant of enslaved Maroons, or Jamaicans, who successfully revolted against their British enslavers in 1739. During his early years, Garvey gradually became aware that his color was considered by some in his society to be a badge of inferiority. Jamaica, unlike the United States, placed mulattoes in a higher caste as a buffer against the unlettered Black masses. This reality caused a sense of racial isolation and yet pride to grow in the young Black man. By his twentieth birthday, Garvey had started a program to change the lives of Black Jamaicans. While working as a foreman in a printing shop in 1907, he joined a labor strike as a leader. The strike, quickly broken by the shop owners, caused Garvey to lose faith in reform through labor unions. In 1910, he started publishing a newspaper, Garvey’s Watchman, and helped form a political organization, the National Club. These efforts, which were not particularly fruitful, gave impetus to Garvey’s visit to Central America, where he observed the wretched conditions Black people in Costa Rica and Panama experienced.

Garvey’s travels led him to London, the center of the British Empire. There the young man met Dusé Mohamed Ali, an Egyptian scholar, who increased the young Jamaican’s knowledge and awareness of Africa. During his stay in England, Garvey also became acquainted with the plight of African Americans through reading Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1900). Washington’s autobiography raised questions in Garvey’s mind: “I asked, where is the Black man’s Government? Where is his King and his Kingdom? Where is his president, his country and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared, I will help to make them.”

Returning to Jamaica in 1914, Garvey created a self-help organization for Black people to which he gave the imposing title, the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League. This new organization, renamed the Universal Negro Improvement Association, based its philosophy on the need to unite “all people of Negro or African parentage.” The goals of the UNIA were to increase racial pride, to aid Black people throughout the world, and “to establish a central nation for the race.” Garvey, elected the first president of UNIA, realized that Black people would have to achieve these goals without assistance from White people. This self-help concept, similar to the philosophy (but not the practice) of Booker T. Washington, led Garvey to propose a Black trade school in Kingston, Jamaica, similar to Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. The idea did not attract wide support and Garvey was temporarily frustrated.

In 1915, Garvey decided to come to the United States in order to seek aid for his Jamaica-based organization. Although he had corresponded with Washington, the Black leader had died before Garvey arrived in the United States in 1916. Garvey went directly to Harlem, which in the early twentieth century was becoming a center of Black culture.

The lives of African Americans were rapidly changing in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Metropolitan areas in the North were experiencing mass migrations of African Americans from the South, known as the Great Northern Migration. In New York City, for example, the Black population increased from 91,709 in 1910 to 152,467 in 1920. African Americans were attracted by the promise of jobs and by the possibility of escaping the rigid system of segregation in the South.

African Americans found, however, that they could not escape racism simply by moving. Many Northern White Americans also believed in the racial inferiority of African Americans and opposed Black competitors for their jobs. The new immigrants, like their foreign-born counterparts, were crowded into the northern ghettos without proper housing or the possibility of escape. Racial violence broke out in several northern cities. The North proved not to be a utopia for African Americans.

These harsh realities aided Garvey in establishing the UNIA in New York. The population of Harlem was not attracted to the accommodationist philosophy of Washington or the middle-class goals of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Indeed, urban African Americans were wary of all prophets, even Garvey; but the young Jamaican was able to obtain support from the Jamaican immigrants in Harlem, who felt isolated, and he established a branch of UNIA there in 1917. At first, the organization encountered difficulties. Local politicians tried to gain control of it, and Garvey had to fight to save its autonomy. The original branch of the UNIA was dissolved, and a charter was obtained from the state of New York, which prevented other groups from using the organization’s name. By 1918, under Garvey’s exciting leadership, the New York chapter of the UNIA boasted 3,500 members. By 1919, Garvey optimistically claimed two million members for his organization throughout the world and 200,000 subscribers for his weekly newspaper, The Negro World.

The Black Star Line and the Collapse of the UNIA

In an effort to promote the economic welfare of Black Americans under the auspices of the UNIA, Garvey established in 1919 two joint stock companies—the Black Star Line, an international commercial shipping company, and the Negro Factories Corporation, which was to “build and operate factories . . . to manufacture every marketable commodity.” Stock in these companies was sold only to Black investors. The Black Star Line was to establish commerce with Africa and transport willing emigrants “back to Africa.” Although both companies were financial failures, they gave many Black people a feeling of dignity. As a result of his promotional efforts on behalf of the Black Star Line, the federal government, prodded by rival Black leaders, had Garvey indicted for fraudulent use of the mails in 1922. He was tried, found guilty, and sent to prison in 1923. Although his second wife, Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey, worked to hold the UNIA together, it declined rapidly. In 1927, Garvey was released from prison and deported as an "undesirable alien." He returned to Jamaica and then went to London and Paris and tried to resurrect the UNIA, but with little success. He died in poverty in London in 1940. Though a faulty businessman, Garvey was a master propagandist and popular leader who made an important contribution to race consciousness among African Americans. Garvey's body was later exhumed and returned to Jamaica, where he was regarded as a national hero.

Ten days after his death, James R. Stewart succeeded Harvey as president and moved the organization’s Parent Body from New York to Cleveland, Ohio. In the 1950s, an international headquarters was established in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the UNIA began publishing a monthly newspaper called Garvey's Voice. The organization continued to operate through the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Cronon, Edmund David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. 2nd ed., U of Wisconsin P, 2001.

Garvey, Marcus. Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Edited by Amy Jacques Garvey, Atheneum, 1992.

"Hon. Marcus Mosiah Garvey Biography." UNIA-ACL, unia-aclgovernment.com/history/hon-marcus-mosiah-garvey-biograph. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

"People & Events: Universal Negro Improvement Association." American Experience, PBS, WGBH, www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/garvey-unia. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

"UNIA Timeline." UNIA-ACL, unia-aclgovernment.com/100-years-of-marcus-mosiah-garvey. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.