Marcus Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was a Jamaican political activist born on 17 August 1887 and died on 10 June 1940. He created the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) and served as its first President-General. Through this organization, he claimed the title of Provisional President of Africa. His political philosophy, rooted in black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, became known as Garveyism. Garvey grew up in Saint Ann's Bay, Jamaica, in a moderately well-off Afro-Jamaican household. As a teenager, he learned the printing trade through an apprenticeship. After working in Kingston, he became active in trade unions and spent time in Costa Rica, Panama, and England. Returning to Jamaica, he founded the UNIA in 1914. Two years later, he moved to the United States and started a UNIA branch in Harlem, New York City. He pushed for unity among people of African descent worldwide, campaigned to end European colonial rule in Africa, and supported the idea of a unified continent. He imagined this unified Africa as a one-party state under his own leadership, with laws promoting black racial purity. Though he never set foot in Africa, he backed the Back-to-Africa movement, urging some members of the diaspora to relocate there. Garvey’s ideas gained traction, and UNIA membership grew. As a black separatist, he formed alliances with white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, who shared his views on racial separation. This caused a rift between Garvey and prominent African-American civil rights leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who favored racial integration. Believing black people needed economic independence from white-dominated societies, Garvey launched several U.S. businesses, including the Negro Factories Corporation and the newspaper *Negro World*. In 1919, he became president of the Black Star Line, a shipping and passenger company meant to connect North America with Africa and help African-Americans migrate to Liberia. In 1923, Garvey was convicted of mail fraud for selling stock in the Black Star Line and spent nearly two years in the Atlanta federal penitentiary. He blamed Jews for his conviction, claiming they were biased against him due to his ties to the KKK. President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence, and Garvey was deported to Jamaica in 1927. Settling in Kingston with his wife Amy Jacques, he founded the People’s Political Party in 1929 and briefly served as a city councillor. As the UNIA faced growing financial troubles, he moved to London in 1935. There, his anti-socialist stance alienated him from many black activists in the city. He died in London in 1940. In 1964, his body was returned to Jamaica and reburied in National Heroes Park in Kingston. Garvey was a divisive figure. Some in the African diaspora saw him as a pretentious demagogue and criticized his collaboration with white supremacists, his violent rhetoric, and his prejudice against mixed-race people and Jews. Others praised him for fostering pride and self-worth among Africans and the diaspora during times of widespread poverty, discrimination, and colonialism. In Jamaica, he became the first person officially recognized as a national hero. His ideas strongly influenced movements such as Rastafari, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement. **Early life**

**Childhood: 1887–1904**

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on 17 August 1887 in Saint Ann’s Bay, a town in the British colony of Jamaica. In Jamaica’s colorist social hierarchy, Garvey was at the bottom as a black child of full African descent. Later genetic testing of his Y chromosome, however, revealed distant ancestors from the Iberian Peninsula. His paternal great-grandfather was born into slavery before Jamaica’s abolition. His surname, of Irish origin, came from the family that had enslaved his ancestors. His father, Malchus Garvey, worked as a stonemason; his mother, Sarah Richards, was a domestic servant and the daughter of peasant farmers. Malchus had been married twice before Sarah and had six children from those unions. Together, Sarah and Malchus had four more children, with Marcus as the youngest; two died in infancy. Because of Malchus’s trade, the family was wealthier than many peasant neighbors—they were petite bourgeoisie. But Malchus was careless with money and over time lost most of his land to pay debts. He owned a book collection and was self-educated, and he served as a deacon at a local Wesleyan church. He was also intolerant and harsh as a father and husband, and never had a close bond with his son. Garvey attended a local church school until age 14; further schooling was too expensive. Outside of school, he worked on his maternal uncle’s tenant farm. He had friends, and once broke a church’s windows with them, leading to his arrest. Some of his friends were white, but as they grew older, they drifted away from him. He later recalled a close childhood friend who was a white girl: “We were two innocent fools who never dreamed of a race feeling and problem.” In 1901, Garvey became an apprentice to his godfather, a local printer. In 1904, the printer opened another branch in Port Maria, where Garvey began working, commuting each morning from Saint Ann’s Bay. **Early career in Kingston: 1905–1909**

In 1905, Garvey moved to Kingston and boarded in Smith Village, a working-class neighborhood. He found work in the printing division of the P.A. Benjamin Manufacturing Company and rose quickly, becoming their first Afro-Jamaican foreman.