Garvey, Marcus (1887–1940)

MARCUS GARVEY WAS born at St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, the youngest of 11 children. Garvey left school at age 14 and moved to Kingston to work in a print shop. In Kingston, he learned firsthand about the dismal lot of his country's working class, his peers. He became a nationalist and reformer. When the members of the printers' union went on strike for the first time in 1907, he struck with them. He also edited The Watchman.

Garvey had ambitions; what he lacked was resources. He went to Central and South America, collecting information about discrimination against black people and seeking funding for his ambitions. Garvey traveled in the Panama Canal Zone to Ecuador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, and Honduras. Everywhere, Garvey encountered his struggling expatriate West Indian countrymen. Still in need of resources, in 1912 Garvey went to England. He met Duse Mohammed Ali and got a job on Ali's African Times and Oriental Review. He began studying about colonial exploitation in Africa. He read Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, which advocated black self-help and accommodation to the dominant white society.

When he returned to Jamaica, after his government ignored his pleas for help for overseas West Indians, he established a training school based on his reading of Washington and the model of the Tuskegee Institute. He began planning the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). His school attracted the attention of Washington, who invited Garvey to America. Garvey arrived late, after Washington had died. By then the American black leadership was split. Black veterans returning from World War I were unwilling to give way without resistance to the racists in white American society. Already Washington's accommodationist views were unacceptable to many black Americans. Refusing to accept second-class status as Washington had, new black leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois took pride in themselves and argued that they deserved to be treated as all other citizens, regardless of the racism of the white power structure.

Settling in Harlem, New York City, Garvey began developing his movement. Garvey incorporated accommodation and equal rights as the two elements of his unique third-way black nationalist self-help organization. He advocated a return of African Americans to Africa as a means of restraining European colonialism. As part of his Back to Africa movement, Garvey organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) under the auspices of the African Communities League. The first UNIA convention, in New York in 1920, featured a parade down Lenox Avenue in Harlem and an evening address by Garvey to 25,000 people. He told of his plans to establish a nation-state in Africa. The UNIA grew quickly. Garvey published The[Page 662]Negro World and spoke on a national tour. Quickly, the UNIA had more than 1,100 branches in 40 countries. Most branches were in the United States, but some were in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa.

The success of the UNIA brought millions of supporters and the resources for a migration to Africa. But the UNIA overextended itself and soon encountered financial difficulties. Among the other businesses was the Black Star Line. Initially three ships, the line was Garvey's dream method of transporting several millions to Liberia and Tanzania. The dream crumbled in 1922 when the United States charged Garvey with mail fraud in the sale of stock, Garvey's desperate measure to save his financially troubled transatlantic line. Garvey also established the African Communities League and the Negro Factories Corporation, and tried to get the League of Nations to give the UNIA former German colonies newly in play due to Germany's defeat in World War I. Garvey was convicted of fraud, sentenced to five years, imprisoned, and was effectively finished. In 1927, after commutation of his sentence, he was deported to Jamaica by President Calvin Coolidge.

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