Template:Short description Template:About Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use Jamaican English Template:Infobox person

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. Template:Postnominals (17 August 1887Template:Spaced ndash10 June 1940) was a Jamaican political activist. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) (commonly known as UNIA), through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa. Garvey was ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist. His ideas came to be known as Garveyism.

Garvey was born into 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. He later lived briefly in Costa Rica, Panama, and England. On returning to Jamaica, he founded the UNIA in 1914. In 1916, he moved to the United States and established a UNIA branch in New York City's Harlem district. Emphasising unity between Africans and the African diaspora, he campaigned for an end to European colonial rule in Africa and advocated the political unification of the continent. He envisioned a unified Africa as a one-party state, governed by himself, that would enact laws to ensure black racial purity. Although he never visited the continent, he was committed to the Back-to-Africa movement, arguing that part of the diaspora should migrate there. Garveyist ideas became increasingly popular, and the UNIA grew in membership. His black separatist views—and his relationship with white racists like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the interest of advancing their shared goal of racial separatism—caused a division between Garvey and other prominent African-American civil rights activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who promoted racial integration.

Believing that black people needed to 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 and Catholics, claiming that they were prejudiced against him because of his links to the KKK. His sentence was commuted by U.S. president Calvin Coolidge and he 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 the 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, and in 1964 his body was returned to Jamaica for reburial in Kingston's National Heroes Park.

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 is recognized as a national hero, the first person to be recognized as such.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His ideas exerted a considerable influence on such movements as Rastafari, the Nation of Islam and the Black Power Movement.

Early lifeEdit

Childhood: 1887–1904Edit

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A statue of Garvey now stands in Saint Ann's Bay, the town where he was born

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on 17 August 1887 in Saint Ann's Bay, a town in the British colony of Jamaica.Template:Sfnm In the context of colonial Jamaican society, which had a colourist social hierarchy, Garvey was considered at the lowest end, being a black child who was of full African descent.Template:Sfnm However, later genetic research nevertheless revealed that he had ancestors from the Iberian Peninsula.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Garvey's paternal great- grandfather had been born into slavery prior to its abolition in Jamaica.Template:Sfn His surname, which was of Irish origin, had been inherited from his family's former enslavers.Template:Sfn

His father, Malchus Garvey, was a stonemason;Template:Sfn his mother, Sarah Richards, was a domestic servant and the daughter of peasant farmers.Template:Sfn Malchus had had two previous wives before Sarah, having six children between them.Template:Sfn Sarah bore him four additional children, of whom Marcus was the youngest, although two died in infancy.Template:Sfn Because of his profession, Malchus' family were wealthier than many of their peasant neighbours;Template:Sfnm they were petite bourgeoise.Template:Sfn Malchus was however reckless with his money and over the course of his life lost most of the land he owned to meet payments.Template:Sfnm Malchus had a book collection and was self-educated;Template:Sfnm he also served as a deacon at a local Wesleyan church.Template:Sfnm <ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>Malchus was an intolerant and punitive father and husband;Template:Sfn he never had a close relationship with his son.Template:Sfn

Up to the age of 14, Garvey attended a local church school; further education was unaffordable for the family.Template:Sfn When not in school, Garvey worked on his maternal uncle's tenant farm.Template:Sfn He had friends, with whom he once broke the windows of a church, resulting in his arrest.Template:Sfnm Some of his friends were white, although he found that as they grew older they distanced themselves from him;Template:Sfnm he later recalled that a close childhood friend was a white girl: "We were two innocent fools who never dreamed of a race feeling and problem."Template:Sfn In 1901, Marcus was apprenticed to his godfather, a local printer.Template:Sfnm In 1904, the printer opened another branch at Port Maria, where Garvey began to work, travelling from Saint Ann's Bay each morning.Template:Sfn

Early career in Kingston: 1905–1909Edit

In 1905 he moved to Kingston, where he boarded in Smith Village, a working-class neighbourhood.Template:Sfn In the city, he secured work with the printing division of the P.A. Benjamin Manufacturing Company. He rose quickly through the company ranks, becoming their first Afro-Jamaican foreman.Template:Sfnm His sister and mother, by this point estranged from his father, moved to join him in the city.Template:Sfn In January 1907, Kingston was hit by an earthquake that reduced much of the city to rubble.Template:Sfnm He, his mother, and his sister were left to sleep in the open for several months.Template:Sfn In March 1908, his mother died.Template:Sfn While in Kingston, Garvey converted to Catholicism.Template:Sfn

Garvey became a trade unionist, vice president of the compositors' section of the Printers' Union,<ref name="alexander">Template:Cite book</ref> and took a leading role in the November 1908 print workers' strike. The strike was broken several weeks later and Garvey was sacked.Template:Sfnm Henceforth branded a troublemaker, Garvey was unable to find work in the private sector.Template:Sfnm He then found temporary employment with a government printer.Template:Sfnm As a result of these experiences, Garvey became increasingly angry at the inequalities present in Jamaican society.Template:Sfn

Garvey involved himself with the National Club, Jamaica's first nationalist organization, becoming its first assistant secretary in April 1910.Template:Sfnm The group campaigned to remove the Governor of Jamaica, Sydney Olivier, from office, and to end the migration of Indian "coolies", or indentured workers, to Jamaica, as they were seen as a source of economic competition by the established population.Template:Sfn With fellow Club member Wilfred Domingo he published a pamphlet expressing the group's ideas, The Struggling Mass.Template:Sfn In early 1910, Garvey began publishing a magazine, Garvey's Watchman—its name a reference to George William Gordon's The Watchman—although it lasted just three issues.Template:Sfnm He claimed it had a circulation of 3000, although this was likely an exaggeration.Template:Sfn Garvey also enrolled in elocution lessons with the radical journalist Joseph Robert Love, coming to regard him as a mentor.Template:Sfnm With Garvey's enhanced skill at speaking in a Standard English manner, he entered several public-speaking competitions.Template:Sfnm

Travels abroad: 1910–1914Edit

Economic hardship in Jamaica led to growing emigration from the island.Template:Sfn In mid-1910, Garvey travelled to Costa Rica, where an uncle had secured him employment as a timekeeper on a large banana plantation in the Limón Province owned by the United Fruit Company (UFC).Template:Sfnm Shortly after his arrival, the area experienced strikes and unrest in opposition to the UFC's attempts to cut its workers' wages.Template:Sfn Although as a timekeeper he was responsible for overseeing the manual workers, he became increasingly angered at how they were treated.Template:Sfn In the spring of 1911 he launched a bilingual newspaper, Nation/La Nación, which criticized the actions of the UFC and upset many of the dominant strata of Costa Rican society in Limón.Template:Sfnm His coverage of a local fire, in which he questioned the motives of the fire brigade, resulted in his being brought in for police questioning.Template:Sfn After his printing press broke, he was unable to replace the faulty part and terminated the newspaper.Template:Sfn

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In London, Garvey spent time in the Reading Room of the British Museum

Garvey then travelled through Central America, undertaking casual work as he made his way through Honduras, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.Template:Sfnm While in the port of Colón in Panama, he set up a new newspaper, La Prensa ("The Press").Template:Sfnm In 1911, he became seriously ill with a bacterial infection and decided to return to Kingston.Template:Sfnm He then decided to travel to London, the heart of the British Empire, in the hope of advancing his informal education. In the spring of 1912 he sailed to England.Template:Sfnm Renting a room along Borough High Street in South London,Template:Sfn he visited the House of Commons, where he was impressed by the politician David Lloyd George.Template:Sfn He also visited Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park and began making speeches there.Template:Sfnm There were only a few thousand black people in London at the time, and they were often viewed as exotic; most worked as labourers.Template:Sfn Garvey initially gained piecemeal work labouring in the city's docks.Template:Sfnm In August 1912, his sister Indiana joined him in London, where she worked as a domestic servant.Template:Sfn

In early 1913, he was employed as a messenger and handyman for the African Times and Orient Review, a magazine based in Fleet Street that was edited by Dusé Mohamed Ali.Template:Sfnm The magazine advocated Ethiopianism and home rule for British-ruled Egypt.Template:Sfn In 1914, Mohamed Ali began employing Garvey as a writer for the magazine.Template:Sfnm Garvey also took several evening classes in law at Birkbeck College in Bloomsbury.Template:Sfnm He planned a tour of Europe, spending time in Glasgow, Paris, Monte Carlo, Boulogne, and Madrid.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Back in London, he wrote an article on Jamaica for the Tourist magazine,Template:Sfn and spent time reading in the library of the British Museum. There he discovered Up from Slavery, a book by the African-American entrepreneur and activist Booker T. Washington.Template:Sfn Washington's book heavily influenced Garvey.Template:Sfnm Now almost financially destitute and deciding to return to Jamaica, he unsuccessfully asked both the Colonial Office and the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society to pay for his journey.Template:Sfnm After managing to save the funds for a fare, he boarded the SS Trent in June 1914 for a three-week journey across the Atlantic.Template:Sfnm En route home, Garvey talked with an Afro-Caribbean missionary who had spent time in Basutoland and taken a Basuto wife. Discovering more about colonial Africa from this man, Garvey began to envision a movement that would politically unify black people of African descent across the world.Template:Sfnm

Organization of the UNIAEdit

Forming the UNIA: 1914–1916Edit

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Garvey arrived back in Jamaica in July 1914.Template:Sfnm There, he saw his article for Tourist republished in The Gleaner.Template:Sfn He began earning money selling greeting and condolence cards that he had imported from Britain, before later switching to selling tombstones.Template:Sfn

Also in July 1914, Garvey launched the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, commonly abbreviated as UNIA.Template:Sfnm Adopting the motto of "One Aim. One God. One Destiny",Template:Sfnm it declared its commitment to "establish a brotherhood among the black race, to promote a spirit of race pride, to reclaim the fallen and to assist in civilising the backward tribes of Africa."Template:Sfn Initially, it had only a few members.Template:Sfn Many Jamaicans were critical of the group's prominent use of the term "Negro", a term that was often employed as an insult:Template:Sfn Garvey, however, embraced the term with reference to black people of African descent.Template:Sfn

Garvey became UNIA's president and travelling commissioner;Template:Sfnm it was initially based out of his hotel room in Orange Street, Kingston.Template:Sfn It portrayed itself not as a political organization but as a charitable club,Template:Sfnm focused on work to help the poor and to ultimately establish a vocational training college modelled on Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.Template:Sfnm Garvey wrote to Washington and received a brief, if encouraging reply; Washington died shortly after.Template:Sfnm UNIA officially expressed its loyalty to the British Empire, King George V, and the British effort in the ongoing First World War.Template:Sfnm In April 1915, Brigadier General L. S. Blackden lectured to the group on the war effort;Template:Sfn Garvey endorsed Blackden's calls for more Jamaicans to sign up to fight for the Empire on the Western Front.Template:Sfn The group also sponsored musical and literary evenings as well as a February 1915 elocution contest, at which Garvey took first prize.Template:Sfnm

In August 1914, Garvey attended a meeting of the Queen Street Baptist Literary and Debating Society, where he met Amy Ashwood, recently graduated from the Westwood Training College for Women.Template:Sfnm She joined UNIA and rented a better premises for them to use as their headquarters, secured using her father's credit.Template:Sfn She and Garvey embarked on a relationship, which was opposed by her parents. In 1915, they secretly became engaged.Template:Sfn When she suspended the engagement, he threatened to commit suicide, at which she resumed it.Template:Sfn

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Garvey attracted financial contributions from many prominent patrons, including the Mayor of Kingston and the Governor of Jamaica, William Manning.Template:Sfnm By appealing directly to Jamaica's white elite, Garvey had skipped the brown middle-classes, comprising those who were classified as mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons. They were generally hostile to Garvey, regarding him as a pretentious social climber and being annoyed at his claim to be part of the "cultured class" of Jamaican society.Template:Sfn Many also felt that he was unnecessarily derogatory when describing black Jamaicans, with letters of complaint being sent into the Daily Chronicle after it published one of Garvey's speeches in which he referred to many of his people as "uncouth and vulgar".Template:Sfnm One complainant, a Dr Leo Pink, related that "the Jamaican Negro can not be reformed by abuse".Template:Sfn After unsubstantiated allegations began circling that Garvey was diverting UNIA funds to pay for his own personal expenses, the group's support began to decline.Template:Sfn He became increasingly aware of how UNIA had failed to thrive in Jamaica and decided to migrate to the United States, sailing there aboard the SS Tallac in March 1916.Template:Sfn

Moving to the United States: 1916–1918Edit

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The UNIA flag, a tricolour of red, black, and green. According to Garvey, the red symbolises the blood of martyrs, the black symbolizes the skin of Africans, and the green represents the vegetation of the African land.Template:Sfnm

Arriving in the United States, Garvey initially lodged with a Jamaican expatriate family living in Harlem, a largely black area of New York City.Template:Sfnm He began lecturing in the city, hoping to make a career as a public speaker, although at his first public speech he was heckled and fell off the stage.Template:Sfn From New York City, he embarked on a U.S. speaking tour, crossing 38 states.Template:Sfnm At stopovers on his journey he listened to preachers from the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Black Baptist churches.Template:Sfn While in Alabama, he visited the Tuskegee Institute and met with its new leader, Robert Russa Moton.Template:Sfn After six months traveling across the U.S. lecturing, he returned to New York City.Template:Sfnm

In May 1917, Garvey launched a New York branch of UNIA.Template:Sfnm He declared membership open to anyone "of Negro blood and African ancestry" who could pay the 25-cents-a-month membership fee.Template:Sfn He joined many other speakers who made speeches on the street, standing on step-ladders;Template:Sfnm he often did so at Speakers' Corner on 135th Street.Template:Sfn In his speeches, he sought to reach across to both Afro-Caribbean migrants like himself and native African Americans.Template:Sfn Through this, he began to associate with Hubert Harrison, who was promoting ideas of black self-reliance and racial separatism.Template:Sfnm In June, Garvey shared a stage with Harrison at the inaugural meeting of the latter's Liberty League of Negro-Americans.Template:Sfnm Through his appearance here and at other events organized by Harrison, Garvey attracted growing public attention.Template:Sfn

After the U.S. entered the First World War in April 1917, Garvey initially signed up to fight but was ruled physically unfit to do so.Template:Sfn He later became an opponent of African-American involvement in the conflict, following Harrison in accusing it of being a "white man's war".Template:Sfn In the wake of the East St. Louis Race Riots in May to July 1917, in which white mobs targeted black people, Garvey began calling for armed self-defense.Template:Sfn He produced a pamphlet, The Conspiracy of the East St Louis Riots, which was widely distributed; proceeds from its sale went to victims of the riots.Template:Sfnm The Bureau of Investigation began monitoring him, noting that in speeches he employed more militant language than that used in print; it for instance reported his expressing the view that "for every Negro lynched by whites in the South, Negroes should lynch a white in the North."Template:Sfn

By the end of 1917, Garvey had attracted many of Harrison's key associates in his Liberty League to join UNIA.Template:Sfn Garvey also secured the support of the journalist John Edward Bruce, agreeing to step down from the group's presidency in favor of Bruce.Template:Sfn Bruce then wrote to Dusé Mohamed Ali to learn more about Garvey's past. Mohamed Ali responded with a negative assessment of Garvey, suggesting that he simply used UNIA as a money-making scheme. Bruce read this letter to a UNIA meeting and put pressure on Garvey's position.Template:Sfnm Garvey then resigned from UNIA, establishing a rival group that met at Old Fellows Temple.Template:Sfn He also launched legal proceedings against Bruce and other senior UNIA members, with the court ruling that UNIA's name and membership—now estimated at 600—belonged to Garvey, who resumed control over the organization.Template:Sfn

The growth of UNIA: 1918–1921Edit

UNIA membership grew rapidly in 1918.Template:Sfn In June that year it was incorporated,Template:Sfnm and in July a commercial arm, the African Communities' League, filed for incorporation.Template:Sfn Garvey envisioned UNIA establishing an import-and-export business, a restaurant, and a laundry.Template:Sfn He also proposed raising the funds to secure a permanent building as a base for the group.Template:Sfn In April, Garvey launched a weekly newspaper, the Negro World,Template:Sfn which Edmund David Cronon later noted remained "the personal propaganda organ of its founder".Template:Sfn Financially, the Negro World was backed by philanthropists such as Madam C. J. Walker,Template:Sfn but six months after its launch was pursuing a special appeal for donations to keep it afloat.Template:Sfn

Various journalists took Garvey to court for his failure to pay them for their contributions, a fact much publicized by rival publications;Template:Sfn at the time, there were more than 400 black-run newspapers and magazines in the U.S.Template:Sfn Unlike many of these, Garvey refused to feature adverts for skin-lightening and hair-straightening products,Template:Sfnm urging black people to "take the kinks out of your mind, instead of out of your hair".Template:Sfn By the end of its first year, the circulation of Negro World was nearing 10,000;Template:Sfn copies circulated not only in the U.S., but also in the Caribbean, Central, and South America.Template:Sfn Several British West Indian islands banned the publication.Template:Sfn

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In 1918, Garvey's UNIA began publishing the Negro World newspaper.

Garvey appointed his old friend Domingo, who had also arrived in New York City, as the newspaper's editor.Template:Sfn However, Domingo's socialist views alarmed Garvey, who feared that they would imperil UNIA.Template:Sfn Garvey had Domingo brought before UNIA's nine-person executive committee, where the latter was accused of writing editorials professing ideas at odds with UNIA's message. Domingo resigned several months later; he and Garvey henceforth became enemies.Template:Sfn In September 1918, Amy Ashwood sailed from Panama to be with Garvey, arriving in New York City in October.Template:Sfn In November, she became General Secretary of UNIA.Template:Sfn At UNIA gatherings, she was responsible for reciting black-authored poetry, as was the actress Henrietta Vinton Davis, who had also joined the movement.Template:Sfn

After the First World War ended, President Woodrow Wilson declared his intention to present a 14-point plan for world peace at the forthcoming Paris Peace Conference. Garvey joined various African Americans in forming the International League for Darker People, a group that sought to lobby Wilson and the conference to give greater respect to the wishes of people of color; their delegates nevertheless were unable to secure the travel documentation.Template:Sfn At Garvey's prompting, UNIA sent a young Haitian, Eliezer Cadet, as its delegate to the conference.Template:Sfn Despite these efforts, the political leaders who met in Paris largely ignored the perspectives of non-European peoples, instead reaffirming their support for continued European colonial rule.Template:Sfn

In the U.S., many African Americans who had served in the military refused to return to their more subservient role in society and throughout 1919 there were various racial clashes throughout the country.Template:Sfn The government feared that African Americans would be encouraged toward revolutionary behavior following the October Revolution in Russia,Template:Sfn and in this context, military intelligence ordered Major Walter Loving to investigate Garvey.Template:Sfn Loving's report concluded that Garvey was a "very able young man" who was disseminating "clever propaganda".Template:Sfn The Bureau of Investigation's J. Edgar Hoover decided that Garvey was politically subversive and should be deported from the U.S., adding his name to the list of those to be targeted in the forthcoming Palmer Raids. To ratify the deportation, the Bureau of Investigation presented Garvey's name to the Labor Department under Louis F. Post; however, Post's department refused to do so, stating that the case against Garvey was not proven.Template:Sfn

Success and obstaclesEdit

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Garvey speaking at Liberty Hall, Harlem, in 1920

UNIA grew rapidly and in just over 18 months it had branches in 25 U.S. states, as well as divisions in the West Indies, Central America, and West Africa.Template:Sfn The exact membership is not known, although Garvey—who often exaggerated numbers—claimed that by June 1919 it had two million members.Template:Sfn It remained smaller than the better established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),Template:Sfn although there was some crossover in membership of the two groups.Template:Sfn The NAACP and UNIA differed in their approach; while the NAACP was a multi-racial organization which promoted racial integration, UNIA had a black-only membership policy. The NAACP focused its attention on what it termed the "talented tenth" of the African-American population, such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers, whereas UNIA included many poorer people and Afro-Caribbean migrants in its ranks, seeking to project an image of itself as a mass organization.Template:Sfn To promote his views to a wide audience, Garvey took to shouting slogans from a megaphone as he was driven through Harlem in a Cadillac.Template:Sfn

There were tensions between UNIA and the NAACP and the latter's supporters accused Garvey of stymieing their efforts at bringing about racial integration in the U.S.Template:Sfn Garvey was dismissive of the NAACP leader W. E. B. Du Bois, and in one issue of the Negro World called him a "reactionary under [the] pay of white men".Template:Sfn Du Bois generally tried to ignore Garvey,Template:Sfn regarding him as a demagogue,Template:Sfn but at the same time wanted to learn all he could about Garvey's movement.Template:Sfn In 1921, Garvey twice reached out to Du Bois, asking him to contribute to UNIA publications, but the offer was rebuffed.Template:Sfn Their relationship became acrimonious; in 1923, Du Bois described Garvey as "a little fat black man, ugly but with intelligent eyes and big head".Template:Sfn By 1924, historian Colin Grant has suggested, the two hated each other.Template:Sfn

UNIA established a restaurant and ice cream parlor at 56 West 135th Street,Template:Sfn and also launched a millinery store selling hats.Template:Sfnm With an increased income coming in through UNIA, Garvey moved to a new residence at 238 West 131st Street;Template:Sfn in 1919, a young middle-class Jamaican migrant, Amy Jacques, became his personal secretary.Template:Sfn UNIA also obtained a partly-constructed church building at 114 West 138 Street in Harlem, which Garvey named "Liberty Hall" after its namesake in Dublin, Ireland, which had been established during the Easter Rising of 1916.Template:Sfnm The adoption of this name reflected Garvey's fascination with the Irish independence movement.Template:Sfn Liberty Hall's dedication ceremony was held in July 1919.Template:Sfnm During the hunger strike of Terence MacSwiney, Garvey supported solidarity strikes in support of MacSwineyTemplate:Sfn and made appeals to the British government on his behalf.Template:Sfn

Garvey also organized the African Legion, a group of uniformed men who would attend UNIA parades;Template:Sfn a secret service was formed from Legion members, providing Garvey with intelligence about group members.Template:Sfn The formation of the Legion further concerned the Bureau of Investigation, who sent their first full-time black agent, James Wormley Jones, to infiltrate UNIA.Template:Sfn In January 1920, Garvey incorporated the Negro Factories League,Template:Sfnm through which he opened a string of grocery stores, a restaurant, a steam laundry, and publishing house.Template:Sfnm According to Grant, a personality cult had grown up around Garvey within the UNIA movement;Template:Sfn life-size portraits of him hung in the UNIA headquarters and phonograph records of his speeches were sold to the membership.Template:Sfn

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A UNIA parade through Harlem in 1920

In August 1920, UNIA organized the First International Conference of the Negro Peoples in Harlem.Template:Sfnm This parade was attended by Gabriel Johnson, the Mayor of Monrovia in Liberia.Template:Sfnm As part of it, an estimated 25,000 people assembled in Madison Square Gardens.Template:Sfn At the conference, UNIA delegates declared Garvey to be the Provisional President of Africa, charged with heading a government-in-exile that could take power in the continent when European colonial rule ended via decolonization.Template:Sfnm Some of the West Africans attending the event were angered by this, believing it wrong that an Afro-Jamaican, rather than a native African, was taking this role.Template:Sfn

Many outside the movement ridiculed Garvey for giving himself this title.Template:Sfn The conference then elected other members of the African government-in-exile,Template:Sfnm resulting in the production of a "Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World" which condemned European colonial rule across Africa.Template:Sfnm In August 1921, UNIA held a banquet in Liberty Hall, at which Garvey gave out honors to various supporters, including such titles as the Order of the Nile and the Order of Ethiopia.Template:Sfn

UNIA established growing links with the Liberian government, hoping to secure land in the West African nation on which it could settle African-American migrants.Template:Sfn Liberia was in heavy debt, with UNIA launching a fundraising campaign to raise $2 million towards a Liberian Construction Loan.Template:Sfn In 1921, Garvey sent a UNIA team to assess the prospects of mass African-American settlement in Liberia.Template:Sfn Internally, UNIA experienced various feuds. Garvey pushed out Cyril Briggs and other members of the African Blood Brotherhood from UNIA, wanting to place growing distance between himself and black socialist groups.Template:Sfn In the Negro World, Garvey then accused Briggs—who was of mixed heritage—of being a white man posing as a black man. Briggs successfully sued Garvey for criminal libel.Template:Sfnm This was not the only time he faced this charge; in July 1919, Garvey had been arrested for comments in the Negro World about Edwin P. Kilroe, the Assistant District Attorney in the District Attorney's office of the County of New York.Template:Sfn When this case eventually came to court, the court ordered Garvey to provide a printed retraction.Template:Sfnm

Assassination attempt, marriage, and divorceEdit

In October 1919, George Tyler, a part-time vendor of the Negro World, entered the UNIA office and told Garvey that Kilroe "had sent him" and tried to assassinate Garvey. Garvey was shot at four times with a .38-calibre revolver, and received two bullets in his right leg and scalp but survived. Tyler was soon apprehended but committed suicide by leaping from the third-tier of the Harlem jail; it was never revealed why he tried to kill Garvey.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>Template:Sfn Garvey soon recovered from his wounds; five days later he gave a public speech in Philadelphia.Template:Sfn After the assassination attempt, Garvey hired a bodyguard, Marcellus Strong.Template:Sfn

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Shortly after the incident, Garvey proposed marriage to Amy Ashwood and she accepted.Template:Sfn On Christmas Day, they had a private Catholic wedding, followed by a major ceremonial celebration in Liberty Hall, attended by 3000 UNIA members.Template:Sfn Jacques was Ashwood's maid of honor.Template:Sfn After the wedding, Garvey moved into Ashwood's apartment.Template:Sfn The newlyweds embarked on a two-week honeymoon in Canada, accompanied by a small UNIA retinue, including Jacques. There, Garvey spoke at two mass meetings in Montreal and three in Toronto.Template:Sfn After their return to Harlem, the couple's marriage was soon strained. Ashwood complained of Garvey's growing closeness with Jacques.Template:Sfn Garvey was upset by his inability to control his wife, particularly her drinking and her socializing with other men.Template:Sfn She was pregnant, although the child was possibly not his; she did not inform him of this, and the pregnancy ended in miscarriage.Template:Sfn

Three months into the marriage, Garvey sought an annulment, on the basis of Ashwood's alleged adultery and the claim that she had used "fraud and concealment" to induce the marriage.Template:Sfn She launched a counter-claim for desertion, requesting $75-a-week alimony. The court rejected this sum, instead ordering Garvey to pay her $12 a week. It refused to grant him the divorce.Template:Sfn The court proceedings continued for two years.Template:Sfn Now separated, Garvey moved into a 129th Street apartment with Jacques and Henrietta Vinton Davis, an arrangement that at the time could have caused some social controversy.Template:Sfn He was later joined there by his sister Indiana and her husband, Alfred Peart.Template:Sfn Ashwood, meanwhile, went on to become a lyricist and musical director for musicals amid the Harlem Renaissance.Template:Sfn

The Black Star LineEdit

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From 56 West 135th Street, UNIA also began selling shares for a new business, the Black Star Line.Template:Sfn Seeking to challenge white domination of the maritime industry,Template:Sfn the Black Star Line based its name on the White Star Line.Template:Sfn Garvey envisioned a shipping and passenger line traveling between Africa and the Americas, which would be black-owned, black-staffed, and utilized by black patrons.Template:Sfnm He thought that the project could be launched by raising $2 million from African-American donors,Template:Sfn publicly declaring that any black person who did not buy stock in the company "will be worse than a traitor to the cause of struggling Ethiopia".Template:Sfn

Garvey incorporated the company and then set about trying to purchase a ship.Template:Sfn Many African Americans took great pride in buying company stock, seeing it as an investment in their community's future;Template:Sfn Garvey also promised that when the company began turning a profit they would receive significant financial returns on their investment.Template:Sfn To advertise this stock, he traveled to Virginia,Template:Sfn and then in September 1919 to Chicago, where he was accompanied by seven other UNIA members. In Chicago, he was arrested and fined for violating the Blue Sky Laws that banned the sale of stock in the city without a license.Template:Sfnm

With growing quantities of money coming in, a three-man auditing committee was established, which found that UNIA's funds were poorly recorded and that the company's books were not balanced.Template:Sfn This was followed by a breakdown in trust between the directors of the Black Star Line, with Garvey discharging two of them, Richard E. Warner and Edgar M. Grey, and publicly humiliating them at the next UNIA meeting.Template:Sfn People continued buying stock regardless and by September 1919, the Black Star Line company had accumulated $50,000 ($Template:Inflation in current dollar terms) by selling stock. It could thus afford a thirty-year-old tramp ship, the SS Yarmouth.Template:Sfnm The ship was formally launched in a ceremony on the Hudson River on 31 October.Template:Sfn The company had been unable to find enough trained black seamen to staff the ship, so its initial chief engineer and chief officer were white.Template:Sfn

File:Black Star Line Stock Certificate.jpg
A certificate for stock of the Black Star Line

The ship's first assignment was to sail to Cuba and then to Jamaica, before returning to New York.Template:Sfn After that first voyage, the Yarmouth was found to contain many problems and the Black Star Line had to pay $11,000 for repairs.Template:Sfn On its second voyage, again to the Caribbean, it hit bad weather shortly after departure and had to be towed back to New York by the coastguard for further repairs.Template:Sfn Garvey planned to obtain and launch a second ship by February 1920,Template:Sfn with the Black Star Line putting down a $10,000 ($Template:Inflation in current dollar terms) deposit on a paddle ship called the SS Shady Side.Template:Sfnm In July 1920, Garvey sacked both the Black Star Line's secretary, Edward D. Smith-Green, and its captain, Joshua Cockburn; the latter was accused of corruption.Template:Sfnm In early 1922, the Yarmouth was sold for scrap metal, bringing the Black Star Line less than a hundredth of its original purchase price.Template:Sfnm The worn-out steamboat Shady Side was abandoned on the mud flats at Fort Lee, New Jersey, in the fall of 1922, when the Black Star Line collapsed.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

In 1921, Garvey traveled to the Caribbean aboard a Black Star Line ship, the newly-acquired Template:SS.Template:Sfnm While in Jamaica, he criticized its inhabitants as being backward and claimed that "Negroes are the most lazy, the most careless and indifferent people in the world".Template:Sfn His comments in Jamaica earned many enemies, who criticized him on multiple fronts, including the fact he had left his destitute father to die in an almshouse.Template:Sfn Attacks back-and-forth between Garvey and his critics appeared in the letters published by The Gleaner.Template:Sfn

From Jamaica, Garvey traveled to Costa Rica, where the United Fruit Company assisted his transportation around the country, hoping to gain his favor. There, he met with President Julio Acosta.Template:Sfnm Arriving in Panama, at one of his first speeches, in Almirante, he was booed after doubling the advertised entry price; his response was to call the crowd "a bunch of ignorant and impertinent Negroes. No wonder you are where you are and for my part you can stay where you are."Template:Sfn He received a far warmer reception at Panama City,Template:Sfn after which he sailed to Kingston. From there he sought a return to the U.S., but was repeatedly denied an entry visa. This was granted only after he wrote directly to the State Department.Template:Sfnm

Criminal charges: 1922–1923Edit

In January 1922, Garvey was arrested and charged with mail fraud for having advertised the sale of stocks in a ship, Orion, which the Black Star Line did not yet own.Template:Sfnm He was bailed for $2,500.Template:Sfn Hoover and the BOI were committed to securing a conviction;Template:Sfn they had also received complaints from a small number of the Black Star Line's stock owners, who wanted them to pursue the matter further.Template:Sfn Garvey spoke out against the charges he faced, but focused on blaming not the state, but rival African-American groups, for them.Template:Sfn As well as accusing disgruntled former members of UNIA, in a Liberty Hall speech, he implied that the NAACP were behind the conspiracy to imprison him.Template:Sfn The mainstream press picked up on the charge, largely presenting Garvey as a con artist who had swindled African-American people.Template:Sfn

After his arrest, Garvey announced that the activities of the Black Star Line were being suspended.Template:Sfn He also made plans for a tour of the western and southern states.Template:Sfn This included a parade in Los Angeles, partly to woo back members of UNIA's California branch, which had recently splintered off to become independent.Template:Sfn In June 1922, Garvey met with Edward Young Clarke, the Imperial Wizard pro tempore of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) at the Klan's offices in Atlanta.Template:Sfn Garvey made a number of incendiary speeches in the months leading up to that meeting; in some, he thanked the whites for Jim Crow.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Garvey once stated:

I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together. I like honesty and fair play. You may call me a Klansman if you will, but, potentially, every white man is a Klansman as far as the Negro in competition with whites socially, economically and politically is concerned, and there is no use lying.Template:Sfn<ref name=klansman>Template:Cite book With a new introduction by Essien-Udom.</ref>

News of Garvey's meeting with the KKK soon spread and it was covered on the front page of many African-American newspapers, causing widespread upset.Template:Sfn When news of the meeting was revealed, it generated much surprise and anger among African Americans; Grant noted that it marked "the most significant turning point in his popularity".Template:Sfn Several prominent black Americans—Chandler Owen, A. Philip Randolph, William Pickens, and Robert Bagnall—launched the "Garvey Must Go" campaign in the wake of the revelation.Template:Sfn Many of these critics played to nativist ideas by emphasising Garvey's Jamaican identity and sometimes calling for his deportation.Template:Sfn Pickens and several other of Garvey's critics claimed to have been threatened, and sometimes physically attacked, by Garveyites.Template:Sfn Randolph reported receiving a severed hand in the post, accompanied by a letter from the KKK threatening him to stop criticising Garvey and to join UNIA.Template:Sfn

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1922 also brought some successes for Garvey. He attracted the country's first black pilot, Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, to join UNIA and to perform aerial stunts to raise its profile.Template:Sfn The group also launched its Booker T. Washington University from the UNIA-run Phyllis Wheatley Hotel at 3–13 West 136th Street.Template:Sfn He also finally succeeded in securing a UNIA delegation to the League of Nations, sending five members to represent the group to Geneva.Template:Sfn

Garvey also proposed marriage to his secretary, Jacques. She accepted, although later stated: "I did not marry for love. I did not love Garvey. I married him because I thought it was the right thing to do."Template:Sfn They married in Baltimore in July 1922.Template:Sfn She proposed that a book of his speeches be published; it appeared as The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, although the speeches were edited to remove more inflammatory material.Template:Sfn That year, UNIA also launched a new newspaper, the Daily Negro Times.Template:Sfnm

At UNIA's August 1922 convention, Garvey called for the impeachment of several senior UNIA figures, including Adrian Johnson and J. D. Gibson, and declared that the UNIA cabinet should not be elected by the organization's members, but appointed directly by him.Template:Sfn When they refused to step down, he resigned both as head of UNIA and as Provisional President of Africa, probably in an act designed to compel their own resignations.Template:Sfn He then began openly criticising another senior member, Reverend James Eason, and succeeded in getting him expelled from UNIA.Template:Sfn

With Eason gone, Garvey asked the rest of the cabinet to resign; they did so, at which he resumed his role as head of the organization.Template:Sfn In September, Eason launched a rival group to UNIA, the Universal Negro Alliance.Template:Sfn In January 1923, Eason was assassinated by Garveyites while in New Orleans.Template:Sfn Hoover suspected that the killing had been ordered by senior UNIA members, although Garvey publicly denied any involvement; he nevertheless launched a defense fund campaign for Eason's killers.Template:Sfn

Following the murder, eight prominent African Americans signed a public letter calling Garvey "an unscrupulous demagogue who has ceaselessly and assiduously sought to spread among Negroes distrust and hatred of all white people". They urged the Attorney-General to bring forth the criminal case against Garvey and disband UNIA.Template:Sfn Garvey was furious, publicly accusing them of "the greatest bit of treachery and wickedness that any group of Negroes could be capable of."Template:Sfn In a pamphlet attacking them he focused on their racial heritage, lambasting the eight for the reason that "nearly all [are] Octoroons and Quadroons".Template:Sfn Du Bois—who was not among the eight—then wrote an article critical of Garvey's activities in the U.S.Template:Sfn Garvey responded by calling Du Bois "a Hater of Dark People", an "unfortunate mulatto who bewails every drop of Negro blood in his veins".Template:Sfn

Trial: 1923Edit

File:Black Star Line brochure for the SS Phyllis Wheatley.jpg
The Black Star Line brochure for Phyllis Wheatley, central exhibit in the Mail Fraud case of 1921. Phyllis Wheatley did not exist; this is a doctored photograph of an ex-German ship, Orion, put up for sale by the United States Shipping Board. The Black Star Line had proposed to buy her but the transaction was never completed.Template:Sfn

Having been postponed at least three times,Template:Sfn in May 1923, the trial finally came to court, with Garvey and three other defendants accused of mail fraud.Template:Sfn The judge overseeing the proceedings was Julian Mack, although Garvey disliked his selection on the grounds that he thought Mack an NAACP sympathiser.Template:Sfn At the start of the trial, Garvey's attorney, Cornelius McDougald, urged him to plead guilty to secure a minimum sentence, but Garvey refused, dismissing McDougald and deciding to represent himself in court.Template:Sfn The trial proceeded for more than a month.Template:Sfn Throughout, Garvey struggled due to his lack of legal training.Template:Sfn In his three-hour closing address he presented himself as a selfless leader who was beset by incompetent and thieving staff who caused all the problems for UNIA and the Black Star Line.Template:Sfn On 18 June, the jurors retired to deliberate on the verdict, returning after ten hours. They found Garvey himself guilty of a scheme to defraud, but his three co-defendants not guilty.Template:Sfn

Garvey was furious with the verdict, shouting abuse in the courtroom and calling both the judge and district attorney "damned dirty Jews".Template:Sfn Imprisoned in The Tombs jail, while awaiting sentence, he continued to blame a Jewish cabal for the verdict. Before this he had never expressed antisemitic sentiment and was supportive of Zionism.Template:Sfn When it came to sentencing, Mack sentenced Garvey to five years' imprisonment and a $1000 fine.Template:Sfn

The severity of the sentence—which was harsher than those given to similar crimes at the time—may have been a response to Garvey's antisemitic outburst.Template:Sfn He felt that they and Catholic jurors had been biased because of their political objections to his meeting with the acting imperial wizard of the antisemitic and anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan the year before.<ref name="marcusgarveylife">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="marcusgarveylife" /><ref>"Marcus Garvey: Life & Lessons", UCLA African Studies Center.</ref> In 1928, Garvey told a journalist: "When they wanted to get me they had a Jewish judge try me, and a Jewish prosecutor. I would have been freed but two Jews on the jury held out against me ten hours and succeeded in convicting me, whereupon the Jewish judge gave me the maximum penalty."<ref name="marcusgarveylife" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> A decade later, however, in a New Jamaican editorial on 28 March 1933, he wrote: "The Jewish race is a noble one, and the Jew is only persecuted because he has certain qualities of progress that other people have not learnt", likened antisemitism to anti-Black persecution, and denounced Nazi racial intolerance.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

A week after the sentence, 2000 Garveyite protesters met at Liberty Hall to denounce Garvey's conviction as a miscarriage of justice.Template:Sfn However, with Garvey imprisoned, UNIA's membership began to decline,Template:Sfn and there was a growing schism between its Caribbean and African-American members.Template:Sfn From jail, Garvey continued to write letters and articles lashing out at those he blamed for the conviction, focusing much of his criticism on the NAACP.Template:Sfn

Out on bail: 1923–1925Edit

In September, appellate judge Martin Manton awarded Garvey bail for $15,000 − which UNIA was able to raise and post — while he appealed against his conviction.Template:Sfn At least temporarily a free man, Garvey toured the U.S., giving a lecture at the Tuskegee Institute.Template:Sfn In speeches given during this tour he further emphasised the need for racial segregation through migration to Africa, calling the United States "a white man's country".Template:Sfn He continued to defend his meeting with the KKK, describing them as having more "honesty of purpose towards the Negro" than the NAACP.Template:Sfn Although he previously avoided involvement with party politics, for the first time he encouraged UNIA to propose candidates in elections, often setting them against NAACP-backed candidates in areas with high black populations.Template:Sfn

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In February 1924, UNIA put forward its plans to bring 3000 African-American migrants to Liberia. The latter's president, Charles D. B. King, assured them that he would grant them land for three colonies.Template:Sfn In June, a team of UNIA technicians was sent to start work in preparing for these colonies.Template:Sfn When they arrived in Liberia, they were arrested and immediately deported. At the same time, Liberia's government issued a press release declaring that it would refuse permission for any Americans to settle in their country.Template:Sfn

Garvey blamed WEB Du Bois of the NAACP for this apparent change in the Liberian government's attitude, for the latter had spent time in the country and had links with its ruling elite; Du Bois denied the accusation.Template:Sfn Later examination suggested that, despite King's assurances to the UNIA team, the Liberian government had never seriously intended to allow African-American colonization, aware that it would harm relations with the British and French colonies on their borders, who feared the political tensions it could bring with it.Template:Sfn

UNIA faced further setbacks when John Edward Bruce died; the group organized a funeral procession ending in a ceremony at Liberty Hall.Template:Sfn In need of additional finances, Negro World dropped its longstanding ban on advertising skin lightening and hair straightening products.Template:Sfn The additional revenues allowed the Black Star Line to purchase a new ship, the SS General G W Goethals, in October 1924. It was then renamed the SS Booker T. Washington.Template:Sfnm

Imprisonment: 1925–1927Edit

In early February 1925, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the original court decision.Template:Sfn Writing for the unanimous court, judge Charles Merrill Hough opined: "It may be true that Garvey fancied himself a Moses, if not a Messiah; that he deemed himself a man with a message to deliver, and believed that he needed ships for the deliverance of his people; but with this assumed, it remains true that if his gospel consisted in part of exhortations to buy worthless stock, accompanied by deceivingly false statements as to the worth thereof, he was guilty of a scheme or artifice to defraud, if the jury found the necessary intent about his stock scheme, no matter how uplifting, philanthropic, or altruistic his larger outlook may have been. And if such scheme to defraud was accompanied by the use of the mails defined by the statute, he was guilty of an offense under Criminal Code, § 215."<ref>Cronon, E. David; Foreword by John Hope Franklin (1960). Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, The University of Wisconsin Press, p. 134.</ref><ref>"Garvey v. United States", Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, 2 February 1925, 4 F.2d 974.</ref>

File:Federal Penitentiary Atlanta 1920 postcard.jpg
A postcard depicting the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in 1920, a few years before Garvey was imprisoned there

Denial of his appeal meant the termination of the bail that had been granted following conviction. Garvey was in Detroit at the time and was arrested while aboard a train back to New York City.Template:Sfn He was taken to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and incarcerated there.Template:Sfn Imprisoned, he was made to carry out cleaning tasks.Template:Sfn On one occasion he was reprimanded for insolence towards the white prison officers.Template:Sfn There, he became increasingly ill with chronic bronchitis and lung infections.Template:Sfn Two years into his imprisonment he was hospitalized with influenza.Template:Sfn

Garvey received regular letters from UNIA members and from his wife;Template:Sfn she also visited him every three weeks.Template:Sfn With his support, she assembled another book of his collected speeches, Philosophy and Opinions; these had often been edited to remove inflammatory comments about wielding violence against white people.Template:Sfn He also wrote The Meditations of Marcus Garvey, its name an allusion to The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.Template:Sfn From prison, Garvey continued corresponding with far-right white separatist activists like Earnest Sevier Cox of the White American Society and John Powell of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America; the latter visited Garvey in prison.Template:Sfn

While Garvey was imprisoned, Ashwood launched a legal challenge against his divorce from her. Had the divorce been found void, then his marriage to Jacques would have been invalid.Template:Sfn The court ruled in favor of Garvey, recognising the legality of his divorce.Template:Sfn With Garvey absent, William Sherrill became acting head of UNIA.Template:Sfn To deal with the organization's financial problems, he re-mortgaged Liberty Hall to pay off debts and ended up selling off the SS Booker T Washington at a quarter of what UNIA had paid for it.Template:Sfn

Garvey was angry and in February 1926 wrote to the Negro World expressing his dissatisfaction with Sherrill's leadership.Template:Sfn From prison, he organized an emergency UNIA convention in Detroit, where delegates voted to depose Sherrill.Template:Sfn The latter's supporters then held a rival convention in Liberty Hall, reflecting the growing schism in the organization.Template:Sfn A subsequent court ruling determined that it was UNIA's New York branch, then controlled by Sherrill, rather than the central UNIA leadership itself, that owned Liberty Hall.Template:Sfn The financial problems continued, resulting in Liberty Hall being repeatedly re-mortgaged and then sold.Template:Sfn

The Attorney General, John Sargent, received a petition with 70,000 signatures urging for Garvey's release.Template:Sfn Sargeant warned President Calvin Coolidge that African Americans were regarding Garvey's imprisonment not as a form of justice against a man who had swindled them but as "an act of oppression of the race in their efforts in the direction of race progress".Template:Sfn Eventually, Coolidge agreed to commute the sentence so that it would expire immediately, on 18 November 1927, after Garvey had served about half of the five-year term of imprisonment. The commutation stipulated, however, that Garvey should be deported immediately.Template:Sfnm On being released, Garvey was taken by train to New Orleans, where around a thousand supporters saw him onto the SS Saramaca on 3 December.Template:Sfn The ship then stopped at Cristóbal in Panama, where supporters again greeted him, but where the authorities refused his request to disembark.Template:Sfn He then transferred to the SS Santa Maria, which took him to Kingston, Jamaica.Template:Sfn

Later yearsEdit

Return to Jamaica: 1927–1935Edit

In Kingston, Garvey was greeted by supporters.Template:Sfn UNIA members had raised $10,000 ($Template:Inflation in current dollar terms)to help him settle in Jamaica,Template:Sfn with which he bought a large house in an elite neighbourhood, which he called the "Somali Court".Template:Sfn His wife shipped over his belongings—which included 18,000 books and hundreds of antiques—before joining him.Template:Sfn In Jamaica, he continued giving speeches, including at a building in Kingston he had also named "Liberty Hall".Template:Sfn He urged Afro-Jamaicans to raise their standards of living and rally against Chinese and Syrian migrants who had moved to the island.Template:Sfn Meanwhile, the U.S. UNIA had been taken over by E. B. Knox; the latter was summoned to Jamaica for a meeting with Garvey after Laura Kofey, the leader of a group that had broken from UNIA, was killed, bringing the organization into further disrepute.Template:Sfn<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Garvey attempted to travel across Central America but found his hopes blocked by the region's various administrations, who regarded him as disruptive.Template:Sfn Instead, he travelled to England in April, where he rented a house in London's West Kensington area for four months.Template:Sfn On 6 June 1928 he spoke at the Royal Albert Hall.Template:Sfn Later that year, he and his wife visited Paris, where he had his office at the black newspaper La Dépêche Africaine headquarters<ref name=":0">Template:Cite journal</ref> and spoke at the Club du Fauborg, before traveling to Switzerland.Template:Sfn They then travelled to Canada, where Garvey was detained for one night before being barred from making speeches.Template:Sfn

Back in Kingston, UNIA obtained Edelweiss Park in Cross Roads, which it established as its new headquarters.Template:Sfn They held a conference there, opened by a parade through the city which attracted tens of thousands of onlookers.Template:Sfn At Edelweiss Park, UNIA also began putting on plays. One of these, Coronation of an African King, was written by Garvey and performed in August 1930. Its plot revolved around the crowning of Prince Cudjoe of Sudan, although it anticipated the crowning of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia later that year.Template:Sfn In Jamaica, Garvey became a de facto surrogate father to his niece, Ruth, whose father had recently died.Template:Sfn In September 1930, his first son, Marcus Garvey III, was born; three years later a second son, Julius, followed.Template:Sfn

In Kingston, Garvey was elected a city councillor and established the country's first political party, the People's Political Party (PPP), through which he intended to contest the forthcoming legislative council election.Template:Sfnm In September 1929 he addressed a crowd of 1,500 supporters, launching the PPP's manifesto, which included land reform to benefit tenant farmers, the addition of a minimum wage to the constitution, pledges to build Jamaica's first university and opera house, and a proposed law to impeach and imprison corrupt judges.Template:Sfn The latter policy led to Garvey's being charged with demeaning the judiciary and undermining public confidence in it. He pled guilty, and was sentenced to three months in a Spanish Town prison and a £100 fine.Template:Sfnm

While imprisoned, Garvey was removed from the Kingston council by other councillors. Garvey was furious and wrote an editorial against them, published in the Blackman journal.Template:Sfn This resulted in his being charged with seditious libel, for which he was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison. His conviction was then overturned on appeal.Template:Sfn He then campaigned as the PPP's candidate for the legislative assembly in Saint Andrew Parish, in which he secured 915 votes, being defeated by George Seymour-Jones.Template:Sfn

In increasingly strained finances amid the Great Depression, Garvey began working as an auctioneer, and by 1935 was supplementing this with his wife's savings.Template:Sfn He re-mortgaged his house and personal properties and in 1934 Edelweiss Park was foreclosed and auctioned off.Template:Sfn Dissatisfied with life in Jamaica, Garvey decided to move to London, sailing aboard the SS Tilapa in March 1935.Template:Sfn Once in London, he told his friend Amy Bailey that he had "left Jamaica a broken man, broken in spirit, broken in health and broken in pocket... and I will never, never, never go back."Template:Sfn

Life in London: 1935–1940Edit

In London, Garvey sought to rebuild UNIA, although found there was much competition in the city from other black activist groups.Template:Sfn He established a new UNIA headquarters in Beaumont Avenue, West Kensington and launched a new monthly journal, Black Man.Template:Sfn Garvey returned to speaking at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park.Template:Sfn When he spoke in public, he was increasingly harangued by socialists for his conservative stances.Template:Sfn He also had hopes of becoming a Member of Parliament, although this amounted to nothing.Template:Sfn

In 1935, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War broke out as Italy invaded Ethiopia. Garvey spoke out against the Italians and praised the government of Haile Selassie.Template:Sfn By October, however, he was becoming increasingly critical of Selassie, blaming his lack of preparedness for Ethiopia's failures in the war.Template:Sfn When Selassie fled his homeland and arrived in Britain, Garvey was among the black delegates who arranged to meet him at Waterloo station, but was rebuffed.Template:Sfn From that point he became more openly hostile to Selassie, describing him as a "feudal monarch who looks down upon his slaves and serfs with contempt" and "a great coward who ran away from his country to save his skin".Template:Sfn Garvey's vocal criticisms of Selassie further ostracised him from the broader black activist community—including many Garveyites—most of whom were rallying around Selassie as a symbol of Ethiopia's struggle against colonialism.Template:Sfn

In June 1937, Garvey's wife and children arrived in England, where the latter were sent to a school in Kensington Gardens.Template:Sfn Shortly after, Garvey embarked on a lecture and fundraising tour of Canada and the Caribbean, in which he attended the annual UNIA convention in Toronto.Template:Sfn In Trinidad, he openly criticised a recent oil workers' strike; this probably exacerbated tensions between him and two prominent Trinidadian Marxists then living in London, C. L. R. James and George Padmore.Template:Sfn Once he had returned to London, Garvey took up a new family home in Talgarth Road, not far from UNIA's headquarters.Template:Sfn In public debates, Garvey repeatedly clashed with Padmore, who was chair of the International African Service Bureau.Template:Sfn In the summer of 1938, Garvey returned to Toronto for the next UNIA conference.Template:Sfn

While Garvey was gone, his wife and sons returned to Jamaica. Doctors had recommended that Marcus Garvey III be moved to a warm climate to aid with his severe rheumatism; Jacques had not informed her husband of the decision.Template:Sfn When Garvey returned to London, he was furious with his wife's decision.Template:Sfn Garvey was increasingly isolated, while UNIA was running out of funds as its international membership dwindled.Template:Sfn For the first time in many years, he met up with Ashwood, who was also living in London.Template:Sfn

Death and burial: 1940Edit

In January 1940, Garvey suffered a stroke which left him largely paralysed.Template:Sfn His secretary, Daisy Whyte, took on responsibility for his care.Template:Sfn At this point, George Padmore spread rumours of Garvey's death; this led to many newspapers publishing premature obituaries in late May 1940, many of which he read.Template:Sfn According to his secretary, on the second day of reading through his pile of obituaries, Garvey suffered another massive stroke and died two weeks later at the age of 52 on 10 June 1940.Template:Sfn His body was interred in a vault in the catacombs of the chapel of St Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green, West London.Template:Sfn

Various wakes and memorials were held for Garvey, especially in New York City and Kingston.Template:Sfn In Harlem, a procession of mourners paraded to his memorial service.Template:Sfn Some Garveyites refused to believe Garvey had died, even when confronted with photographs of his body in its coffin, insisting that this was part of a conspiracy to undermine his movement.Template:Sfn Both Ashwood and Jacques presented themselves as the "widow of Marcus Garvey" and Ashwood launched legal action against Jacques in an attempt to secure control over his body.Template:Sfn

The writer Richard Hart later noted that within a decade of his death "a veritable cult" had begun to grow around Garvey's memory in Jamaica.Template:Sfn By the 1950s, Jamaican politicians of varied ideological backgrounds were invoking his name.Template:Sfn Leslie Alexander, a Kingston real estate agent, proposed the removal of Garvey's body and its return to Jamaica.Template:Sfn Alexander's campaign was successful and in 1964 Garvey's remains were exhumed and returned to Jamaica. The body lay in state at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kingston and thousands of visitors came for a viewing.Template:Sfn

His body was then reburied in King George VI Memorial Park on 22 November 1964 with pomp and ceremony befitting a national hero; numerous foreign diplomats attended.Template:Sfnm The monument, designed by G. C. Hodges, consists of a tomb at the center of a raised platform in the shape of a black star, a symbol often used by Garvey. Behind it, a peaked and angled wall houses a bust, by Alvin T. Marriot, of Garvey, which was added to the park in 1956 (before his reinterment) and relocated after the construction of the monument.<ref name="garvey">Monument to the Rt. Excellent Marcus Garvey" Template:Webarchive, Georgia Brown, The Jamaica National Heritage Trust, 2006. Retrieved 3 January 2018.</ref>

IdeologyEdit

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Ideologically, Garvey was a black nationalist.Template:Sfnm Generally referring to dark-skinned peoples of African descent as "Negroes", he and the UNIA insisted that that term should be capitalized, thus affording dignity and respect to those whom it described.Template:Sfn His ideas were influenced by a range of sources. According to Grant, while he was living in London, Garvey displayed "an amazing capacity to absorb political tracts, theories of social engineering, African history and the Western Enlightenment."Template:Sfn Garvey was exposed to the ideas about race that were prevalent at the time;Template:Sfn his ideas on race were also heavily informed by the writings of Edward Wilmot BlydenTemplate:Sfn and by his work in London with Dusé Mohamed Ali.<ref name="Egypt and Egyptology in the Pan-Afr">Template:Cite journal</ref>

During the late 1910s and 1920s, Garvey was also influenced by the ideas of the Irish independence movement, to which he was sympathetic.Template:Sfn He saw strong parallels between the subjugation of Ireland and the global subjugation of black people,Template:Sfn and identified strongly with the Irish independence leader Éamon de Valera.Template:Sfn In 1922, he sent a message to Valera stating that "We believe Ireland should be free even as Africa shall be free for the Negroes of the world. Keep up the fight for a free Ireland."Template:Sfnm

For Garvey, Ireland's Sinn Féin and the Irish independence movement served as blueprints for his own black nationalist cause.Template:Sfn In July 1919, he stated that "the time has come for the Negro race to offer up its martyrs upon the altar of liberty even as the Irish [had] given a long list from Robert Emmet to Roger Casement."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He also expressed admiration for the Indian independence movement, which was seeking independence from British rule in India, describing Mahatma Gandhi as "one of the noblest characters of the day".Template:Sfn

Views on Colourism/Complexionism within the Black CommunityEdit

Garvey believed that darker-skinned Black people were often marginalized, and he sought to challenge systems that favoured lighter-skinned individuals in leadership and social status.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His philosophy was rooted in racial pride and self-reliance, encouraging Black people to celebrate their African features and reject Eurocentric beauty standards.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

His views sometimes led to tensions with figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, who was of mixed heritage and whom Garvey accused of catering to elite, lighter-skinned Black Americans.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> However, Garvey’s primary mission was to unite people of African descent globally, rather than to divide them based on skin tone.

Race and racial separatismEdit

"Race first" was the adage which was widely used in Garveyism.Template:Sfn In Garvey's view, "no race in the world is so just as to give others, for the asking, a square deal in things economic, political and social", but rather each racial group will favor its own interests,Template:Sfn rejecting the "melting pot" notion of much 20th century American nationalism.Template:Sfn He was hostile to the efforts of the progressive movement to agitate for social and political rights for African Americans, arguing that this was ineffective and that laws would never change the underlying racial prejudice of European Americans.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

He argued that the European-American population of the U.S. would never tolerate the social integration which was being advocated by activists like Du Bois because he believed that campaigns for such integration would lead to anti-black riots and lynchings.Template:Sfn He openly conceded that the U.S. was a white man's country and thus, he did not think that African Americans should expect equal treatment within it. Thus, he opposed attempts to socially and economically integrate the different races which lived within the country.Template:Sfn Garveyism promoted the view that whites had no duty to help blacks achieve racial equality, maintaining the view that the latter needed to advance themselves on their own initiative.Template:Sfn He advocated racial separatism,Template:Sfnm but he did not believe in black supremacy.Template:Sfn He also rallied against Eurocentric beauty standards among blacks, seeing them as impediments to black self-respect.Template:Sfn

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In the U.S., ideas about the need for black racial purity became central to Garvey's thought.Template:Sfn He vehemently denounced miscegenation,Template:Sfn believing that mixed-race individuals were "torn by dual allegiances" and they would often ally themselves "with the more powerful race", thus, they would become "traitors to the [black] race".Template:Sfn Garvey argued that mixed-race people would be bred out of existence.Template:Sfn Cronon believed that Garvey exhibited "antipathy and distrust of anybody but the darkest-skinned Negroes";Template:Sfn the hostility towards black people whose African blood was not considered "pure" was a sentiment which Garvey shared with Blyden.Template:Sfn

This view caused great friction between Garvey and Du Bois,Template:Sfn with the former accusing Du Bois and the NAACP of promoting "amalgamation or general miscegenation".Template:Sfn He rallied against what he called the "race destroying doctrine" of those African Americans who were promulgating racial integration in the U.S., instead, he maintained the view that his UNIA stood for "the pride and purity of race. We believe that the white race should uphold its racial pride and perpetuate itself, and we also believe that the black race should do likewise. We believe that there is room enough in the world for the various race groups to grow and develop by themselves without seeking to destroy the Creator's plan by the constant introduction of mongrel types."Template:Sfn Arguing that Garvey "imitated white supremacist ideas at random", the scholar John L. Graves commented that "racism permeated nearly every iota of his ideology", with Garveyism representing "a gospel of hate for whites".Template:Sfn

Garvey's belief in racial separatism, his advocacy of the migration of African Americans to Africa, and his opposition to miscegenation endeared him to the KKK, which supported many of the same policies.<ref>Template:Cite thesis</ref>Template:Sfn Garvey was willing to collaborate with the KKK in order to achieve his aims, and it was willing to work with him because his approach effectively acknowledged its belief that the U.S. should only be a country for white people and campaigns for advanced rights for African Americans who are living within the U.S. should be abandoned.Template:Sfn Garvey called for collaboration between black and white separatists, stating that they shared common goals: "the purification of the races, their autonomous separation and the unbridled freedom of self-development and self-expression. Those who are against this are enemies of both races, and rebels against morality, nature and God."Template:Sfn In his view, the KKK and other far-right white groups were "better friends" of black people "than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together" because they were honest about their desires and intentions.Template:Sfn

Pan-AfricanismEdit

Template:See also Garvey was a Pan-Africanist,Template:Sfnm and an African nationalist.Template:Sfn In Jamaica, he and his supporters were heavily influenced by the pan-Africanist teachings of Dr Love and Alexander Bedward.<ref>Edward White (5 October 2016), "Rise Up", The Paris Review. Retrieved 30 July 2020.</ref> In the wake of the First World War, Garvey called for the formation of "a United Africa for the Africans of the World".Template:Sfn The UNIA promoted the view that Africa was the natural homeland of the African diaspora.Template:Sfn While he was imprisoned, he penned an editorial for the Negro World titled "African Fundamentalism", in which he called for "the founding of a racial empire whose only natural, spiritual and political aims shall be God and Africa, at home and abroad."Template:Sfn

Garvey supported the Back-to-Africa movement, which had been influenced by Edward Wilmot Blyden, who migrated to Liberia in 1850.<ref name="auto">"Spirit of Garvey Lives on Even Now", The Voice, February 2020, p. 12.</ref> However, Garvey did not believe that all African Americans should migrate to Africa. Instead, he believed that an elite group, namely those African Americans who were of the purest African blood, should do so. The rest of the African-American population, he believed, should remain in the United States, where it would become extinct within fifty years.Template:Sfn

A proponent of the Back-to-Africa movement, Garvey called for a vanguard of educated and skilled African Americans to travel to West Africa, a journey which would be facilitated by his Black Star Line.Template:Sfn Garvey stated that "The majority of us may remain here, but we must send our scientists, our mechanics and our artisans and let them build railroads, let them build the great educational and other institutions necessary", after which other members of the African diaspora could join them.Template:Sfn He was aware that the majority of African Americans would not want to move to Africa until it had the more modern comforts that they had become accustomed to in the U.S.Template:Sfn Through the UNIA, he discussed plans for a migration to Liberia, but these plans came to nothing and his hope to move African Americans to West Africa ultimately failed.Template:Sfn

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In the 1920s, Garvey referred to his desire for a "big black republic" in Africa.Template:Sfn Garvey's envisioned Africa was to be a one-party state in which the president could have "absolute authority" to appoint "all of his lieutenants from cabinet ministers, governors of States and Territories, administrators and judges to minor offices".Template:Sfn According to the scholar of African-American studies Wilson S. Moses, the future African state which Garvey envisioned was "authoritarian, elitist, collectivist, racist, and capitalistic",Template:Sfn suggesting that it would have resembled the later Haitian government of François Duvalier.Template:Sfn Garvey told the historian J. A. Rogers that he and his followers were "the first fascists", adding that "Mussolini copied Fascism from me, but the Negro reactionaries sabotaged it".Template:Sfnm

Garvey never visited Africa himself,Template:Sfnm and he did not speak any African language.Template:Sfn He knew very little about the continent's varied customs, languages, religions, and traditional social structures,Template:Sfn and his critics frequently believed that his views of the continent were based on romanticism and ignorance.Template:Sfn It has been suggested that the European colonial authorities would not have given Garvey permission to visit colonies where he would be calling for decolonization.<ref name="auto"/>

For instance, the Jamaican writer and poet Claude McKay noted that Garvey "talks of Africa as if it were a little island in the Caribbean Sea."Template:Sfn Garvey believed in negative stereotypes about Africa which portrayed it as a backward continent that was in need of the civilizing influence of Western, Christian states.Template:Sfn Among his stated aims, he wanted "to assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa" and he also wanted "to promote a conscientious Christian worship among" them.Template:Sfn His belief that Africans would ultimately be liberated by the efforts of the African diaspora which was living outside the continent has been considered condescending.Template:Sfn

Moses stated that instead of being based on respect for indigenous African cultures, Garvey's views of an ideal united Africa were based on an "imperial model" of the kind which was promoted by western powers.Template:Sfn When he extolled the glories of Africa, Garvey cited the ancient Egyptians and Ethiopians who had built empires and monumental architectural structures, which he cited as evidence of civilization, rather than the smaller-scale societies which lived on other parts of the continent.Template:Sfn In doing so, he followed the lead of white academics of that era, who were similarly ignorant of most of African history and who focused nearly exclusively on ancient Egypt. Moses thought that Garvey "had more affinity for the pomp and tinsel of European imperialism than he did for black African tribal life".Template:Sfn Similarly, the writer Richard Hart noted that Garvey was "much attracted by the glamour of the British nobility", an attraction which was reflected when he honored prominent supporters by giving them such British-derived titles as "Lords", "Ladies", and "Knights".Template:Sfn Garvey's head was not turned, however, by the scholarly authority of Harvard University professor George Reisner whose opinion Garvey challenged on the pages of The Negro World.<ref name="Egypt and Egyptology in the Pan-Afr"/>

Economic viewsEdit

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Garvey believed in economic independence for the African diaspora and through the UNIA, he attempted to achieve it by forming ventures like the Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation.Template:Sfnm In Garvey's opinion, "without commerce and industry, a people perish economically. The Negro is perishing because he has no economic system".Template:Sfn In his view, European-American employers would always favor European-American employees, so to gain more security, African Americans needed to form their own businesses.Template:Sfn In his words, "the Negro[...] must become independent of white capital and white employers if he wants salvation."Template:Sfn He believed that financial independence for the African-American community would ensure greater protection from discrimination,Template:Sfn and provide the foundation for social justice.Template:Sfn

Economically, Garvey supported capitalism,Template:Sfnm stating that "capitalism is necessary to the progress of the world, and those who unreasonably and wantonly oppose it or fight against it are enemies of human advancement."Template:Sfn In the U.S., Garvey promoted a capitalistic ethos for the economic development of the African-American community,Template:Sfn advocating black capitalism.Template:Sfn His emphasis on capitalist ventures meant, according to Grant, that Garvey "was making a straight pitch to the petit-bourgeois capitalist instinct of the majority of black folk."Template:Sfn

He admired Booker T. Washington's economic endeavours but criticized his focus on individualism: Garvey believed that African-American interests would best be advanced if businesses included collective decision-making and group profit-sharing.Template:Sfn His advocacy of capitalistic wealth distribution was a more equitable view of capitalism than the view of capitalism which was then prevalent in the U.S.;Template:Sfn he believed that some restrictions should be imposed on individuals and businesses in order to prevent them from acquiring too much wealth, in his view, no individual should be allowed to control more than one million dollars and no company should be allowed to control more than five million dollars.Template:Sfn While he was living in Harlem, he envisioned the formation of a global network of black people who would trade among themselves, believing that his Black Star Line would contribute to the achievement of this aim.Template:Sfn

There is no evidence to support the view that Garvey was ever sympathetic to socialism.Template:Sfn While he was living in the U.S., he strongly opposed attempts to recruit African Americans into the trade union movement by socialist and communist groups,Template:Sfn and he urged African Americans not to support the Communist Party.Template:Sfn This led to heavy scrutiny from communist group leaders and figureheads such as Grace Campbell, among others. He believed that the communist movement did not serve the interests of African Americans because it was a white person's creation.Template:Sfn He stated that communism was "a dangerous theory of economic or political reformation because it seeks to put government in the hands of an ignorant white mass who have not been able to destroy their natural prejudices towards Negroes and other non-white people. While it may be a good thing for them, it will be a bad thing for the Negroes who will fall under the government of the most ignorant, prejudiced class of the white race."Template:Sfn In response, the Communist International characterised Garveyism as a reactionary bourgeois philosophy.Template:Sfn

Black ChristianityEdit

Template:Quote box Grant noted that "Garveyism would always remain a secular movement with a strong under-tow of religion".Template:Sfn Garvey envisioned a form of Christianity which would specifically be designed for black African people,Template:Sfn a sort of black religion.Template:Sfn Reflecting his own view of religion, he wanted this black-centric Christianity to be as close to Catholicism as possible.Template:Sfn

Even so, he attended the foundation ceremony of the African Orthodox Church in Chicago in 1921.Template:Sfn According to Graves, this Church preached "the orthodox Christian tradition with emphasis on racism",Template:Sfn and Cronon suggested that Garvey promoted "racist ideas about religion".Template:Sfn

Garvey emphasised the idea of black people worshipping a God who was also depicted as black.Template:Sfn In his words, "If the white man has the idea of a white God, let him worship his God as he desires. Since the white people have seen their God through white spectacles, we have only now started out to see our God through our own spectacles[...] we shall worship Him through the spectacles of Ethiopia."Template:Sfn He called for black people to worship images of Jesus of Nazareth and the Virgin Mary that depicted these figures as black Africans.Template:Sfn In doing so, he did not make use of pre-existing forms of black-dominated religions. Garvey had little experience with them, because he had attended a white-run Wesleyan congregation when he was a child, and later, he converted to Catholicism.Template:Sfn

Personality and personal lifeEdit

File:Marcus Garvey (1922).jpg
Garvey in a military uniform as the "Provisional President of Africa" during a parade on the opening day of the annual Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World at Lenox Avenue in Harlem, New York City, 1922

Physically, Garvey was short and stocky.Template:Sfnm He suffered from asthma,Template:Sfn and was prone to lung infections;Template:Sfn and throughout his adult life, he was affected by bouts of pneumonia.Template:Sfn Tony Martin called Garvey a "restless young man",Template:Sfn while Grant thought that Garvey had a "naïve but determined personality" in his early years.Template:Sfn Grant noted that Garvey "possessed a single-mindedness of purpose that left no room for the kind of spectacular failure that was always a possibility."Template:Sfn

He was an eloquent orator,Template:Sfnm with Cronon suggesting that his "peculiar gift of oratory" stemmed from "a combination of bombast and stirring heroics".Template:Sfn Grant described Garvey's public speeches as "strange and eclectic – part evangelical […] partly formal King's English, and part lilting Caribbean speechifying".Template:Sfn Garvey enjoyed arguing with people,Template:Sfn and he wanted to be seen as a learned man;Template:Sfn he read widely, particularly in history.Template:Sfn

Cronon suggested that "Garvey's florid style of writing and speaking, his fondness for appearing in a richly colored cap and gown, and his use of the honorary degree initials "D.C.L." after his name were crude attempts to compensate" for his lack of formal academic qualifications.Template:Sfn Grant thought that Garvey was an "extraordinary salesman who'd developed a philosophy where punters weren't just buying into a business but were placing a down payment on future black redemption."Template:Sfn Even his enemies acknowledged that he was a skilled organiser and promoter.Template:Sfn

For Grant, Garvey was "a man of grand, purposeful gestures".Template:Sfn He thought that the black nationalist leader was an "ascetic" who had "conservative tastes".Template:Sfn Garvey was a teetotaller who believed that alcohol consumption was morally reprehensible;Template:Sfn he collected antique ceramics and enjoyed going around antique shops and flea markets and searching for items to add to his collection.Template:Sfn He placed value on courtesy and respect, discouraging his supporters from being loutish.Template:Sfn

Garvey enjoyed dressing up in military costumes,Template:Sfn and he also adored regal pomp and ceremony;Template:Sfn he believed that pageantry would stir the black masses out of their apathy, despite the accusations of buffoonery which were made by members of the African-American intelligentsia.Template:Sfn Grant noted that Garvey had a "tendency to overstate his achievements",Template:Sfn but Cronon thought that Garvey tended to surround himself with sycophants rather than more competent advisors.Template:Sfn In 1947, the Jamaican historian J. A. Rogers included Garvey in his book, the World's Great Men of Colour, where he noted that "had [Garvey] ever come to power, he would have been another Robespierre", resorting to violence and terror to enforce his ideas.Template:Sfn

Garvey was a Catholic.Template:Sfn In 1919, he married Amy Ashwood in a Catholic ceremony,Template:Sfn but they separated after three months.Template:Sfn The New York court did not grant Garvey a divorce, but later, he obtained a divorce in Jackson County, Missouri.Template:Sfn Ashwood contested the legitimacy of this divorce, and for the rest of her life, she claimed that she was Garvey's legitimate spouse.Template:Sfn He married secondly to Amy Jacques Garvey, and they had two sons. His first son, Marcus Garvey III (1930 – 8 December 2020), became an electrical engineer and served as the seventh president-general of the UNIA-ACL.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His second son, Julius Garvey, (born 1933) became a cardiovascular surgeon.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Reception and legacyEdit

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A polarizing figure,Template:Sfn Garvey was both revered and reviled.Template:Sfn Grant noted that views on him largely divided between two camps, one camp portrayed him as a charlatan and the other camp portrayed him as a saint;Template:Sfn similarly, Cronon noted that Garvey was varyingly perceived as a "strident demagogue or a dedicated prophet, a martyred visionary or a fabulous con man".Template:Sfn Martin noted that by the time Garvey returned to Jamaica in the 1920s, he was "just about the best known Black man in the whole world".Template:Sfn The size and scope of the UNIA has also attracted attention; Mark Christian described Garvey as the leader of "the largest Black mass movement in modern history",Template:Sfn and John Henrik Clarke termed it "the first Black mass protest crusade in the history of the United States".Template:Sfn Garvey's ideas influenced many black people who never became paying members of the UNIA,Template:Sfn with Graves noting that "more than anything else, Garvey gave Negroes self-assertion and self-reliance."Template:Sfn

In Jamaica, Garvey is considered a national hero.Template:Sfnm In 1969, Jamaica's government posthumously conferred the Order of the National Hero upon him.<ref name=JIS>"Marcus Mosiah Garvey", Jamaica Information Service. Retrieved 22 September 2020.</ref> The scholar of African-American studies Molefi Kete Asante included Garvey on his 2002 list of 100 Greatest African Americans,Template:Sfn and in 2008, the American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates described Garvey as the "patron saint" of the black nationalist movement.Template:Sfn Grant thought that Garvey, along with Du Bois, deserved to be seen as the "father of Pan-Africanism",Template:Sfn and the Nigerian historian B. Steiner Ifekwe called Garvey "one of the greatest Pan-African leaders of the time".Template:Sfn Garvey has received praise from people who believe that he was a "race patriot",Template:Sfn and many African Americans believe that he encouraged black people to develop a sense of self-respect and pride.Template:Sfnm While he was living in the U.S., Garvey was frequently referred to—sometimes sarcastically—as the "Negro Moses", implying that like the eponymous Old Testament figure, he would lead his people out of the oppressive situation which they were living in.Template:Sfn

In 1955, Cronon stated that while Garvey "achieved little in the way of permanent improvement" for black people, he "awakened fires of Negro nationalism that have yet to be extinguished".Template:Sfn In Cronon's view, Garvey was important because he gave African-descended peoples a new feeling of collective pride and a sense of individual worth.Template:Sfn Hart believed that Garvey's importance lay in the fact that he stirred millions of people who were otherwise apathetic into action. In this way, Hart believed that Garvey had helped lay the groundwork for the U.S. civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s, even though that movement's call for racial integration and equality within the U.S. ran contrary to Garvey's belief in racial separation and his advocacy of migration to Africa.Template:Sfn

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Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, wrote in his autobiography that of all the works of literature which he had studied, the book that inspired him more than any other book was The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, or Africa for the Africans.<ref name="auto1">"Spirit of Garvey Lives on Even Now", The Voice, February 2020, p. 13.</ref> Nkrumah went on to name Ghana's national shipping line the "Black Star Line", and there is a Black Star Square in Accra, and the Ghanaian flag also contains a black star. Ghana's national football team is also nicknamed the Black Stars.<ref name="auto1"/>

While he was living in the U.S., Garvey faced strong opposition from many prominent figures in the African-American community as well as from leading progressive and left-wing organisations.Template:Sfn He was also unpopular within elite sections of the African-American community, in part perhaps out of envy of his successes in attracting the support of the black masses, and in part out of concern that he was leading their community astray.Template:Sfn Critics regarded him as an idealist,Template:Sfn and he was sometimes regarded as "an egotist, a zealot, a charlatan and a buffoon".Template:Sfn Garvey obtained a reputation for failing to pay his debts,Template:Sfn and his detractors accused him of dishonesty.Template:Sfn

Critics like Du Bois often mocked Garvey for his outfits and the grandiose titles which he gave to himself;Template:Sfn in their view, he was embarrassingly pretentious.Template:Sfn According to Grant, many members of the established African-American middle-class were "perplexed and embarrassed" by Garvey, who thought that the African-American working class should turn to their leadership rather than his.Template:Sfn Concerns were also raised about his violent language because the people who raised them believed that it was inciting many Garveyites to carry out violent acts against Garvey's critics.Template:Sfn

During his lifetime, some African Americans wondered if he really understood the racial issues which were present in U.S. society because he was a foreigner,Template:Sfn and later African-American leaders frequently held the view that Garvey had failed to adequately address anti-black racism in his thought.Template:Sfn Grant noted that in the years after Garvey's death, his life was primarily presented by his political opponents.Template:Sfn Writing for The Black Scholar in 1972, the scholar of African-American studies Wilson S. Moses expressed concern about the "uncritical adulation" of Garvey within African-American political circles. In Moses' opinion, this adulation led to "red baiting" and "divisive rhetoric" about being "Blacker-than-thou".Template:Sfn Moses argued that it was wrong for people to regard Garvey as a "man of the people" because he had a petty bourgeoise background and as a result, he had "enjoyed cultural, economic, and educational advantages which few of his black contemporaries" had enjoyed.Template:Sfn

File:Full and unconditional pardons=pardon-warrant-7-19-jan-2025 1.pdf
Posthumous pardon granted by President Joe Biden on 19 January 2025

US President Joe Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon to Garvey on 19 January 2025.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Influence on political movementsEdit

In the late 1920s, Garvey had some ties to the French black movement, especially the group of the Comité de Défense de la Race Noire and the editor of its journal, Maurice Satineau. As the group was somewhat divided between a larger group of colonial reformists and a smaller group of representants of the Négritude, there was strong concern by moderate members about Garvey as they were afraid of his radical nationalist approach, resulting in a cut of the ties.<ref name=":0" />

In the Colony of Jamaica, Garvey was largely forgotten in the years after his death, but interest in him was revived by the Rastafari religious movement.Template:Sfn Jacques wrote a book about her late husband, Garvey and Garveyism, and after finding that no publishers were interested in it she self-published the volume in 1963.Template:Sfn In 1962, when Jamaica became independent, the government hailed Garvey as a hero. In 1969, he was posthumously conferred with the Order of the National Hero by the Jamaican government.<ref name=JIS /> In 1975 the reggae artist Burning Spear released the album Marcus Garvey.Template:Sfn

Interest in Garvey's ideas would also be revived in the 1960s through the growth of independent states across Africa and the emergence of the Black Power movement in the United States.Template:Sfn Mark Christian suggested that Garveyism gave an important psychological boost to African leaders campaigning for independence from European colonial rule,Template:Sfn while Claudius Fergus proposed that it played an important role in encouraging Africans to see the African diaspora as an "integral constituent of their own political destiny."Template:Sfn

In his autobiography, Kwame Nkrumah, the prominent Pan-Africanist activist who became Ghana's first president, acknowledged Garvey's influence on him.Template:Sfn The flag that Ghana adopted when it became independent adopted the colours of UNIA (See: Pan-African colours).Template:Sfn In November 1964, Garvey's body was removed from West Kensal Green Cemetery and taken to Jamaica. There, it lay in state in Kingston's Catholic Cathedral before a motorcade took it to King George VI Memorial Park, where it was re-buried.Template:Sfn

File:Martin Luther King, Jr..jpg
Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964

During a trip to Jamaica, Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King visited Garvey's shrine on 20 June 1965 and laid a wreath.<ref>"Martin Luther King Jr. visits Jamaica" Template:Webarchive, Jamaica Gleaner, 20 June 1965.</ref> In a speech he told the audience that Garvey "was the first man of color to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny on a mass scale and level. And he was the first man to make the Negro feel that he was somebody."<ref>Salley, Columbus, "The Black 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential African-Americans, Past and Present", Citadel Press, 1999, p. 82.</ref> The Vietnamese Communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh said that Garvey and Korean nationalists shaped his political outlook during his stay in America.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Thandeka K. Chapman believed that Garveyism contributed to the formation of the multicultural education movement during the 1960s.Template:Sfn Chapman believed that both "Garveyism and multicultural education share the desire to see students of color learning and achieving academic success",Template:Sfn and both allotted significant attention to generating racial pride.Template:Sfn

Influence on religious movementsEdit

Garvey never regarded himself as a religious visionary but he was perceived as such by some of his followers.Template:Sfn Various Bedwardites for example regarded him as the reincarnation of Moses.Template:Sfn The Moorish Science Temple of America regarded Garvey as a prophet akin to John the Baptist in relation to their prophet Noble Drew Ali, whom they regarded as a Jesus figure.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Garvey's ideas were a significant influence on the Nation of Islam, a religious group for African Americans established in the U.S. in 1930.Template:Sfnm

Garvey and Garveyism was a key influence on Rastafari, a new religious movement that appeared in 1930 Jamaica.Template:Sfnm According to the scholar of religion Maboula Soumahoro, Rastafari "emerged from the socio-political ferment inaugurated by Marcus Garvey",Template:Sfn while for the sociologist Ernest Cashmore, Garvey was the "most important" precursor of the Rastafari movement.Template:Sfn Rastafari does not promote all of the views that Garvey espoused, nevertheless, it shares many of them.Template:Sfn Garvey knew of the Rastas from his time in Jamaica during the 1930s but his view of them, according to the scholar Barry Chevannes, "bordered on scorn".Template:Sfn

According to Chevannes, Garvey would have regarded the Rastas' belief in the divinity of Haile Selassie as blasphemy.Template:Sfn Many Rastas regard Garvey as a prophet,Template:Sfnm believing that he prophesied the crowning of Haile Selassie in a manner which was similar to how John the Baptist prophesied the coming of Jesus Christ.Template:Sfn Many legends and tales are told about him within Jamaica's Rasta community.Template:Sfn Many attribute him with supernatural attributes, for instance there is a tale told about him—and also independently told about the pioneering Rasta Leonard Howell—that Garvey miraculously knew that his bath had been poisoned and refused to get into it.Template:Sfn Other stories among Jamaica's Rastas hold that Garvey never really died and remained alive, perhaps living in Africa.Template:Sfn Some Rastas also organise meetings, known as Nyabinghi Issemblies, to mark Garvey's birthday.Template:Sfn

MemorialsEdit

Garvey's birthplace, 32 Market Street, St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, has a marker signifying it as a site of importance in the nation's history.<ref>32 Market Street, Jamaica National Heritage Trust. 16 March 2013.</ref> His likeness was on the 20-dollar coin and 25-cent coin of the Jamaican dollar.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In 2012 the Jamaican government declared 17 August as Marcus Garvey Day. The Governor General's proclamation stated "from here on every year this time, all of us here in Jamaica will be called to mind to remember this outstanding National Hero and what he has done for us as a people, and our children will call this to mind also on this day" and went on to say "to proclaim and make known that the 17th Day of August in each year shall be designated as Marcus Garvey Day and shall so be observed."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

The Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York City, is home to Marcus Garvey Village, whose construction was completed in 1976.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> This building complex is home to the first energy storage microgrid at an affordable housing property in the country. It will use the energy storage system to cut electricity costs, improve grid reliability, and provide backup power during extended outages.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

In the 1980s, Garvey's two sons launched a campaign requesting that the U.S. government issue a pardon for their father. In this they had the support of Harlem-based U.S. congressman Charles Rangel.Template:Sfn In 2006, Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller tasked various Jamaican lawyers with investigating how they could assist this campaign.Template:Sfn The Obama administration declined to pardon Garvey in 2011, writing that its policy was not to consider requests for posthumous pardons.<ref>Walker, Karyl (21 August 2011), "No Pardon for Garvey", Jamaica Observer. Template:Webarchive.</ref>

President Joe Biden posthumously pardoned Marcus Garvey on January 19, 2025, his final full day in office. This action was the culmination of a decades-long campaign by Garvey's family, historians, and civil rights advocates to exonerate him. The pardon was supported by members of Congress, including the Congressional Black Caucus, who emphasized that the charges against Garvey were fabricated to discredit and silence him as a civil rights leader. President Biden's decision was seen as a significant step in acknowledging and rectifying historical injustices faced by Black leaders. <ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

There have been several proposals to make a biopic of Garvey's life. Those mentioned in connection with the role of Garvey have included the Jamaican-born actor Kevin Navayne<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and the British-born actor of Jamaican descent Delroy Lindo.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Marcus Garvey appears in Jason Overstreet's The Strivers' Row Spy,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> a 2016 historical novel about the Harlem Renaissance. The novel also includes as characters W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Adam Clayton Powell, among other historically significant figures.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

The 2021 documentary film African Redemption: The Life and Legacy of Marcus Garvey, directed by Roy T. Anderson, was made with the collaboration of Julius Garvey.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In 2023, the short film Mosiah became the first narrative film released about Marcus Garvey. The film was shot and directed by Jirard. The script was co-written by the lead actor, Samuel Lee Fudge and Jirard.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Garvey is briefly portrayed in composer Michael R. Jackson's Tony Award Best Musical A Strange Loop.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

See alsoEdit

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ReferencesEdit

FootnotesEdit

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SourcesEdit

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Further readingEdit

Works by GarveyEdit

  • The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Edited by Amy Jacques Garvey. 412 pages. Majority Press; Centennial edition, 1 November 1986. Template:ISBN. Avery edition. Template:ISBN.
  • Message to the People: The Course of African Philosophy by Marcus Garvey. Edited by Tony Martin. Foreword by Hon. Charles L. James, president-general, Universal Negro Improvement Association. 212 pages. Majority Press, 1 March 1986. Template:ISBN.
  • The Poetical Works of Marcus Garvey. Compiled and edited by Tony Martin. 123 pages. Majority Press, 1 June 1983. Template:ISBN.
  • Hill, Robert A., editor. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Vols. I–VII, IX. University of California Press, c. 1983– (ongoing). 1146 pages. University of California Press, 1 May 1991. Template:ISBN. (Volume 1: {{#invoke:doi|main}}, Template:ISBN)
  • Hill, Robert A., editor. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers: Africa for the Africans 1921–1922. 740 pages. University of California Press, 1 February 1996. Template:ISBN.

Books and ArticlesEdit

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  • Hill, Robert A., editor. Marcus Garvey, Life and Lessons: A Centennial Companion to the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
  • Hill, Robert A. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Vols. I–VII, IX. University of California Press, c. 1983– (ongoing).
  • James, Winston. Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America. London: Verso, 1998.
  • Kearse, Gregory S. "Prince Hall's Charge of 1792: An Assertion of African Heritage." Heredom, Vol. 20. Washington, D.C. Scottish Rite Research Society, 2012, p. 275.
  • Kornweibel Jr., Theodore. Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy 1919–1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
  • Lemelle, Sidney, and Robin D. G. Kelley. Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora. London: Verso, 1994.
  • Lewis, Rupert, and Maureen Warner-Lewis. Garvey: Africa, Europe, The Americas. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1986, 1994.
  • Manoedi, M. Mokete. Garvey and Africa. New York: New York Age Press, 1922, 20 pages.
  • Martin, Tony. Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts, and the Harlem Renaissance. Dover, Mass.: Majority Press, 1983.
  • Martin, Tony. African Fundamentalism: A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey's Harlem Renaissance. Dover, Mass.: Majority Press, 1983, 1991.
  • Martin, Tony. The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond. Dover, Mass.: Majority Press, 1983.
  • Martin, Tony. The Poetical Works of Marcus Garvey. Dover, Mass.: Majority Press, 1983.
  • Smith-Irvin, Jeannette. Marcus Garvey's Footsoldiers of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1989.
  • Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African-Americans, 1917–1936. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
  • Stein, Judith. The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
  • Tolbert, Emory J. The UNIA and Black Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Center of Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1980.
  • Vincent, Theodore. Black Power and the Garvey Movement. Berkeley, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1971.

External linksEdit

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