Garvey, Marcus

August 7, 1887
June 10, 1940

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was the founder and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest organized mass movement in black history. Hailed in his own time as a redeemer, a "black Moses," Garvey is now best remembered as champion of the back-to-Africa movement that swept the United States in the aftermath of World War I.

From Jamaica to the United States

Garvey was born in Saint Ann's Bay, on the north coast of the island of Jamaica. He left school at fourteen, worked as a printer's apprentice, and subsequently joined the protonationalist National Club, which advocated Jamaican self-rule. He participated in the printers' union strike of 1912, and following its collapse went to Central America, working in various capacities in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Panama. He spent over a year in England during 1913 and 1914, where he teamed up for a time with the pan-Negro journalist and businessman Duse Mohamed Ali, publisher of the influential African Times and Orient Review. After a short tour of Europe, he returned to England and lobbied the Colonial Office for assistance to return to Jamaica.

Garvey arrived back in Jamaica on the eve of the outbreak of World War I. He lost little time in organizing the UNIA, which he launched at a public meeting in Kingston on July 20, 1914. Content at first to offer a program of racial accommodation while professing strong patriotic support for British war aims, Garvey was a model colonial. He soon aspired to establish a Tuskegee-type industrial training school in Jamaica. In spring 1916, however, after meeting with little success and feeling shut out from political influence, he moved to the United States—ostensibly at Booker T. Washington's invitation, although he arrived after Washington died.

Garvey's arrival in America coincided with the dawn of the militant New Negro era, the ideological precursor of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Propelled by America's entry into World War I in April 1917, the New Negro movement quickly gathered momentum from the outrage African Americans felt in the aftermath of the infamous East Saint Louis race riot of July 2, 1917. African-American disillusionment with the country's failure to make good on the professed democratic character of American war aims became widespread.

Shortly after his arrival in America, Garvey embarked on a period of extensive travel and lecturing, which provided him with a firsthand sense of conditions in African-American communities. After traveling for a year he settled in Harlem, where he organized the first American branch of the UNIA in May 1917.

Radicalization

With the end of the war, Garvey's politics underwent a radical change. His principal political goal now became the redemption of Africa and its unification into a United States of Africa. To enrich and strengthen his movement, Garvey envisioned a black-owned and -run shipping line to foster economic independence, transport passengers between America, the Caribbean, and Africa, and serve as a symbol of black grandeur and enterprise.

Accordingly, the Black Star Line was launched and incorporated in 1919. The line's flagship, the SS Yarmouth, renamed the SS Frederick Douglass, made its maiden voyage to the West Indies in November 1919; two other ships were acquired in 1920. The Black Star Line would prove to be the UNIA's most powerful recruiting and propaganda tool, but it ultimately sank under the accumulated weight of financial inexperience, mismanagement, expensive repairs, Garvey's own ill-advised business decisions, and, ultimately, insufficient capital.

Meanwhile, by 1920 the UNIA had hundreds of divisions and chapters operating worldwide. It hosted elaborate annual conventions at its Liberty Hall headquarters in Harlem and published Negro World, its internationally disseminated weekly organ, which was soon banned in many parts of Africa and the Caribbean.

At the first UNIA convention in August 1920, Garvey was elected to the position of provisional president of Africa. To lay the groundwork for launching his program of African redemption, Garvey sought to establish links with Liberia. In 1920 he sent a UNIA official to scout out prospects for a colony in that country. Following the official's report, in the winter of 1921 a group of UNIA technicians was sent to Liberia.

Legal and Political Difficulties

Starting in 1921, however, the movement began to unravel under the economic strain of the Black Star Line's collapse, the failure of Garvey's Liberian program, opposition from black critics, defections caused by internal dissension, and official harassment. The most visible expression of the latter was the federal government's indictment of Garvey in early 1922 on charges of mail fraud stemming from Garvey's stock promotion of the Black Star Line, although by the time the indictment was presented the Black Star Line had already suspended all operations.

The pressure of his legal difficulties soon forced Garvey into an ill-advised effort to neutralize white opposition. In June 1922 he met secretly with the acting imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta, Edward Young Clarke. The revelation of Garvey's meeting with the KKK produced a major split within the UNIA, resulting in the ouster of the "American leader," Rev. J. W. H. Eason, at the August 1922 convention. In January 1923 Eason was assassinated in New Orleans, but his accused assailants, who were members of the local UNIA African Legion, were subsequently acquitted. After their acquittal and as part of the defense campaign in preparation for the mail fraud trial, Garvey's second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey (1896–1973), edited and published a small volume of Garvey's sayings and speeches under the title Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923).

Shortly after his trial began, Garvey unwisely undertook his own legal defense. He was found guilty on a single count of fraud and sentenced to a five-year prison term, although his three Black Star Line codefendants were acquitted. (The year following his conviction, Garvey launched a second shipping line, the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Company, but it too failed.)

Jamaica and London

Thanks to an extensive petition campaign, Garvey's sentence was commuted after he had served thirty-three months in the Atlanta federal penitentiary. Upon his release in November 1927, he was immediately deported to Jamaica and was never allowed to return to the United States. A second and expanded volume of Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey was edited and published by Amy Jacques Garvey in 1925 as part of Garvey's attempt to obtain a pardon.

Back in Jamaica, Garvey soon moved to reconstitute the UNIA under his direct control. This move precipitated a major split between the official New York parent body and the newly created Jamaican body. Although two conventions of the UNIA were held in Jamaica, Garvey was never able to reassert control over the various segments of his movement from his base in Jamaica.

Marcus Garvey

"We believe in the freedom of Africa for the Negro people of the world, and by the principle of Europe for the Europeans and Asia for the Asiatics; we also demand Africa for the Africans at home and abroad."

declaration of rights of the negro peoples of the world, drafted and adopted in new york, 1920. published in garvey, amy jacques, ed. philosophy and opinions of marcus garvey, new york, 1974.

Although he had high hopes of reforming Jamaican politics, Garvey was defeated in his 1930 bid to win a seat on the colonial legislative council. He had to content himself with a seat on the municipal council of Kingston. Disheartened and bankrupt, he abandoned Jamaica and relocated to London in 1935. A short time after he arrived in England, however, fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, producing a crisis that occasioned a massive upsurge of pro-Ethiopian solidarity throughout the black world, in which movement UNIA divisions and members were at the forefront. Garvey's loud defense of the Ethiopian emperor,

Haile Selassie, soon changed, which met with scathing public criticism, alienating many of Garvey's followers.

Throughout the thirties Garvey tried to rally his greatly diminished band of supporters through his monthly magazine, Black Man. Between 1936 and 1938 he convened a succession of annual meetings and conventions in Toronto, Canada, where he also launched a school of African philosophy as a UNIA training school. He undertook annual speaking tours of the Canadian maritime provinces and the eastern Caribbean.

Legacy

In 1939 Garvey suffered a stroke that left him partly paralyzed. The indignity of reading his own obituary notice precipitated a further stroke that led to his death on June 10, 1940. Although his last years were spent in obscurity, in the decades between the two world wars Garvey's ideology inspired millions of blacks worldwide with the vision of a redeemed and emancipated Africa. The importance of Garvey's political legacy was acknowledged by such African nationalists as Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. In 1964 Garvey was declared Jamaica's first national hero.

Although he failed to realize his immediate objectives, Garvey's message represented a call for liberation from the psychological bondage of racial subordination. Drawing on a gift for spellbinding oratory and spectacle, Garvey melded black aspirations for economic and cultural independence with the traditional American creed of success to create a new and distinctive black gospel of racial pride.

See also Garvey, Amy Ashwood; Garvey, Amy Jacques; Negro World ; Pan-Africanism; Universal Negro Improvement Association

Bibliography

Cronon, Edmund David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955.

Garvey, Amy Jacques, ed. Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923–1925). With an introduction by Robert A. Hill. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

Garvey, Marcus. Selected Writings and Speeches of Marcus Garvey, edited by Bob Blaisdell. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004.

Hill, Robert A., ed. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983–1991.

Lewis, Rupert. Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1988.

Martin, Tony. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976.

Stein, Judith. The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

Vincent, Theodore G. Black Power and the Garvey Movement, 2nd ed. Trenton, N.J., 1992.

robert a. hill (1996)
Updated bibliography