Garvey, Marcus 1887–1940

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on August 17, 1887 in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica in 1914, after four years of travel in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe. In 1916 Garvey immigrated to the United States, where he quickly reconstituted the UNIA, with new headquarters in Harlem, New York. By the mid-1920s the UNIA had expanded to more than forty countries and almost forty U.S. states, making it the largest Pan-African movement of all time.

As a youth, Garvey excelled in the printing trade and became Jamaica’s youngest foreman printer. He studied oratory, became a pioneer trade-union leader, dabbled in journalism, and served on the executive committee of the National Club, an early Jamaican anticolonial organization. He also became an avid reader, with a special interest in Pan-African history. His travels, beginning in 1910, brought him face to face with the universal suffering of Africans. He published newspapers and became a community agitator in Costa Rica and Panama. In London he worked and wrote for the Africa Times and Orient Review, the leading Pan-African journal of the period.

His decision to found a race-uplift organization received its final impetus after he read Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up From Slavery, in 1914. Washington was the principal of the most African-American educational institution, Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He was politically conservative but a strong advocate of racial uplift and self-reliance, both of which appealed to Garvey. Inspired by the harsh observations of his travels and the promise inherent in Washington’s success, Garvey famously asked, in his Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, “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,” Garvey said, “and then I declared, ‘I will help to make them.’”

The question of race dominated the UNIA from its beginnings. The initial objects sought “To establish a Universal Confraternity among the race; To promote the spirit of race pride and love; To reclaim the fallen of the race” [and] “To establish Commissionaries or Agencies in the principal countries of the world for the protection of all Negroes, irrespective of nationality.” The centrality of race was reflected in the UNIA’s slogan, “Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad,” and in its motto, “One God, One Aim, One Destiny.” Its main guiding principles were “race first,” self-reliance, and nationhood (political self-determination). Only people of African descent could join the organization, and it mostly eschewed financial help from outside the race. The UNIA was organized around branches called “divisions” and “chapters.” There were around 1,200 branches worldwide with more than 700 of them in the United States. Branches existed in Central America and the Caribbean, Canada, South America, Africa, Europe and Australia. The New York City branch had an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 members. Louisiana, with more than seventy (possibly more than eighty) branches, had a heavier UNIA presence than anywhere else in the world. Estimates of world membership range from one million to more than ten million. Financing came mostly from members and the UNIA’s business ventures.

By 1918 Garvey had made his decision to remain in the United States, and the UNIA thereafter underwent a rapid expansion. It spawned the Negro World (1918), the most widely circulated African newspaper in the world, the Black Star Line Shipping Corporation, and the Negro Factories Corporation, which owned a number of small businesses. It also acquired schools and bought huge amounts of real estate. The Negro World employed some of the best journalistic talent in African America, including Thomas Fortune, John Edward Bruce, and Amy Jacques Garvey, Garvey’s second wife. It provided wide coverage of African American and Pan-African affairs and doubled as a major literary journal in the era of the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1920 Garvey attracted 25,000 people to his First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. Success, however, brought entanglements with a variety of adversaries, including European governments, integrationist organizations such as the NAACP (which was largely led and financed by whites), the Communist International (which espoused “class first” over “race first”) and dishonest or disaffected elements within the UNIA. The U.S. government, ever protective of its status quo against any manifestations of radicalism, began plotting his deportation from at least 1919. They infiltrated the UNIA and brought Garvey into court on a variety of charges, culminating in a conviction for alleged mail fraud in connection with the eventual failure of the Black Star Line. Garvey served almost three years of a five-year sentence until President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence late in 1927. Immediate deportation to Jamaica followed.

After returning to Jamaica, Garvey published newspapers, founded the Peoples Political Party, was elected to the principal local government body (the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation Council), and was imprisoned by the British authorities. Garvey spent his last five years (1935–1940) in London, where he continued to lead his now-reduced organization.

Garvey’s emphasis on race was due to a careful analysis of the situation around him. “The world has made being black a crime,” he said, “and I have felt it in common with men who suffer like me, and instead of making it a crime I hope to make it a virtue” (Martin 1986 [1976]). He was born into a world of pseudo-scientific racism. Nineteenth-century thinkers such as American Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), American German Georg Hegel (1770– 1831) and Englishman James Anthony Froude (1818– 1894) all espoused notions of African inferiority, and they were all challenged by Pan-African intellectuals. As early as 1829 African-American David Walker (1785–1830) lambasted Jefferson’s allegations of African genetic inferiority in the seminal David Walker’s Appeal. In 1889, two years after Garvey’s birth, his Trinidadian compatriot John Jacob Thomas (1841–1889) challenged Froude’s views in his polemic Froudacity. Haitian Anténor Firmin (1850-1911) challenged Frenchman Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobi-neau’s (1816–1882) white supremacist treatise Essai surl’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the inequality of the human race) in his 1885 response On the Equality of Human Races.

Garvey was aware of the widely disseminated pseudo-scientific racist ideas. He read such Pan-African challengers to these views as Edward Blyden (1832– 1912) of Liberia and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) of the United States. He said in 1923, “White philosophers, Darwin, Locke, Newton and the rest … forgot that the monkey would change to a man, his tail would drop off and he would demand his share.”

Every aspect of the UNIA was therefore ultimately designed to demonstrate that Africans could—self-reliantly and through the power of organization—help themselves to a position of equality with other races. Garveyites sought to uplift the race through an activist literature and through revisionist historical writing. In the process, they helped usher in the period of literary and cultural flowering known as the Harlem Renaissance. Garvey personally took issue with American anthropologists Franz Boas (1858–1942) and Clark Wissler (1870–1947) for their inconsistent definitions of race. “The custom of these anthropologists,” Garvey lamented in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, is “whenever a black man … accomplishes anything of importance, he is no longer a negro.”

Garveyites portrayed God as black, even while acknowledging that God was a spirit without color. They tried to employ their own and to provide insurance against sickness and death. They hoped to establish a beachhead in Liberia, from where the task of rehabilitating the race might be expedited. Garveyites accepted past miscegenation as an unfortunate fait accompli induced by slavery, and they welcomed racially mixed persons who acknowledged their African ancestry. They nevertheless frowned on new miscegenation, which they saw as an acknowledgement of inferiority.

Garvey’s ideology of “race first” was, in essence, a reformulation of the perennial ideas of black nationalism that have infused other Pan-African mass movements. His influence was transmitted directly to Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, the Rastafarian movement, and nationalist movements of the African diaspora. He died on June 10, 1940, in London.

SEE ALSO African Diaspora; American Colonization Society and the Founding of Liberia; Boas, Franz; Firmin, Anténor; Pan-Africanism; Walker, David; Washington, Booker T.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Garvey, Amy Jacques, ed. 1986 (1925). The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Or, Africa for the Africans. Dover, MA: Majority Press.

Garvey, Marcus. 1986. Message to the People: The Course of African Philosophy. Edited by Tony Martin. Dover, MA: The Majority Press.

Hill, Robert A., ed. 1983–1990. Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. 7 vols. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Martin, Tony. Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts, and the Harlem Renaissance. Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1983.

———, ed. 1983. The Poetical Works of Marcus Garvey. Dover, MA: Majority Press.

_____. 1986 (1976). Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Dover, MA: Majority Press.

———, ed. 1991. African Fundamentalism: A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey’s Harlem Renaissance. Dover, MA: Majority Press.

Tony Martin