About Marcus Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was a Jamaican political activist. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa. Ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist, Garvey's ideas are known as Garveyism. Garvey was born to a moderately prosperous Afro-Jamaican family in Saint Ann's Bay and was apprenticed into the print trade as a teenager. Working in Kingston, he became involved in trade unionism before living briefly in Costa Rica, Panama, and England. On returning to Jamaica, he founded UNIA in 1914. In 1916, he relocated to the United States and founded a UNIA branch in New York City's Harlem. Emphasising unity within the African diaspora, he campaigned to end European colonial rule in Africa and supported the continent's unification. He envisioned a unified Africa as a one-party state, led by himself, that would pass laws to promote black racial purity. Although he never visited Africa, he remained committed to the Back-to-Africa movement, arguing that part of the diaspora should migrate there. Garveyist ideas gained increasing popularity, and UNIA's membership expanded. As a black separatist, he established links with white racists such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) who shared his racial separatist views. This created a divide between Garvey and prominent African-American civil rights activists like W. E. B. Du Bois, who promoted racial integration. Believing that black people should be financially independent from white-dominated societies, Garvey launched various businesses in the U.S., including the Negro Factories Corporation and Negro World newspaper. In 1919, he became President of the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company, designed to forge a link between 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 was imprisoned in the United States Penitentiary, Atlanta for nearly two years. Garvey blamed Jews, claiming that they were prejudiced against him because of his links to the KKK. After his sentence was commuted by U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, Garvey was deported to Jamaica in 1927. Settling in Kingston with his wife Amy Jacques, Garvey established the People's Political Party in 1929, briefly serving as a city councillor. With UNIA in increasing financial difficulty, he relocated to London in 1935, where his anti-socialist stance distanced him from many of the city's black activists. He died there in 1940. In 1964 his body was returned to Jamaica for reburial in National Heroes Park, Kingston. 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 recognised as a national hero. His ideas exerted a considerable influence on such movements as Rastafari, the Nation of Islam and the Black Power Movement.