Marcus Garvey

Lore & Background

Marcus Garvey was born to a moderately prosperous Afro-Jamaican family in Saint Ann's Bay. He was apprenticed into the print trade as a teenager and later worked in Kingston, where he became involved in trade unionism. After living briefly in Costa Rica, Panama, and England, he returned to Jamaica and founded UNIA in 1914. In 1916, he moved to the United States and established a UNIA branch in New York City's Harlem. He launched businesses including the Negro Factories Corporation and the Negro World newspaper, and in 1919 became President of the Black Star Line shipping company, intended to link North America and Africa and facilitate African-American migration to Liberia.

In 1923, Garvey was convicted of mail fraud for selling the company's stock and imprisoned in the United States Penitentiary, Atlanta for nearly two years. He blamed Jews, claiming they were prejudiced against him because of his links to the Ku Klux Klan. After his sentence was commuted by U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, he was deported to Jamaica in 1927. He settled in Kingston with his wife Amy Jacques, established the People's Political Party in 1929, and briefly served as a city councillor. With UNIA in financial difficulty, he relocated to London in 1935, where his anti-socialist stance distanced him from many black activists. He died there in 1940; his body was returned to Jamaica for reburial in National Heroes Park, Kingston in 1964.

Reader's Guide

Marcus Garvey was a controversial figure. Some in the African diasporic community regarded him as a pretentious demagogue and were highly critical of his collaboration with white supremacists, his violent rhetoric, and his prejudice against mixed-race people and Jews. He received praise for encouraging a sense of pride and self-worth among Africans and the African diaspora amid widespread poverty, discrimination, and colonialism. In Jamaica, he was the first person formally recognized as a national hero. His ideas exerted considerable influence on movements such as Rastafari, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement. Garvey's vision of a unified Africa as a one-party state governed by himself, and his emphasis on black racial purity and separatism, divided him from prominent African-American civil rights activists like W. E. B. Du Bois, who promoted racial integration.

Did You Know?

• Garvey was born in Saint Ann's Bay, Jamaica, and was apprenticed into the print trade as a teenager.
• He declared himself Provisional President of Africa through the UNIA, though he never visited the continent.
• Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1923 for selling stock in the Black Star Line and was imprisoned for nearly two years.
• His body was returned to Jamaica for reburial in National Heroes Park, Kingston in 1964.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"First Message to the Negroes of the World from Atlanta Prison" (10 February 1925)." — Marcus Garvey "The philosophy and opinions of Marcus Garvey or Africa for the Africans (Majority Press, 1986 ed.), p. 163. ISBN 0912469242." — Marcus Garvey "Hungry men have no respect for law, authority or human life." — Marcus Garvey "We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism." — Marcus Garvey