Marcus Garvey was a prominent black nationalist and leader in the early 20th century. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 to advocate for black pride, economic empowerment, and African independence from European colonial rule. The UNIA established branches across the Americas and Africa, publishing the widely disseminated Negro World newspaper. At its peak in the early 1920s, the UNIA had hundreds of chapters worldwide. However, Garvey was later imprisoned in the U.S. for mail fraud related to his Black Star Line shipping company and ultimately deported back to Jamaica in 1927.

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The Marcus Garvey and
Universal Negro
Improvement Association
Papers Project
A Research Project of the James S.
Coleman African Studies Center
 Introduction
 American Series
Source page / portal of entry:  African Series
http://www.international.ucla.edu/africa/mgpp/  Caribbean Series
 Marcus Garvey: Life & Lessons
 Photo Gallery
 Sound Library
 Project Information
Introduction  Ordering Information
Introduction
Marcus Garvey: An Overview
Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) form a critical link
in black America's centuries-long struggle for freedom, justice, and equality. As the leader of
the largest organized mass movement in black history and progenitor of the modern "black is
beautiful" ideal, Garvey is now best remembered as a champion of the back-to-Africa
movement. In his own time he was hailed as a redeemer, a "Black Moses." Though he failed to
realize all his objectives, his movement still represents a liberation from the psychological
bondage of racial inferiority.
Garvey was born on 17 August 1887 in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica. He left school at 14, worked as
a printer, joined Jamaican nationalist organizations, toured Central America, and spent time in
London. Content at first with accommodation, on his return to Jamaica, he aspired to open a
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Tuskegee-type industrial training school. In 1916 he came to America at Booker T.
Washington's invitation, but arrived just after Washington died.
Garvey arrived in America at the dawn of the "New Negro" era. Black discontent, punctuated
by East St. Louis's bloody race riots in 1917 and intensified by postwar disillusionment, peaked
in 1919's Red Summer. Shortly after arriving, Garvey embarked upon a period of travel and
lecturing. When he settled in New York City, he organized a chapter of the UNIA, which he
had earlier founded in Jamaica as a fraternal organization. Drawing on a gift for oratory, he
melded Jamaican peasant aspirations for economic and cultural independence with the
American gospel of success to create a new gospel of racial pride. "Garveyism" eventually
evolved into a religion of success, inspiring millions of black people worldwide who sought
relief from racism and colonialism.
To enrich and strengthen his movement, Garvey envisioned a great shipping line to foster black
trade, to transport passengers between America, the Caribbean, and Africa, and to serve as a
symbol of black grandeur and enterprise. The UNIA incorporated the Black Star Line in 1919.
The line's flagship, the S.S. Yarmouth, made its maiden voyage in November and two other
ships joined the line in 1920. The Black Star Line became a powerful recruiting tool for the
UNIA, but it was ultimately sunk by expensive repairs, discontented crews, and top-level
mismanagement and corruption.
By 1920 the UNIA had hundreds of chapters worldwide; it hosted elaborate international
conventions and published the Negro World, a widely disseminated weekly that was soon
banned in many parts of Africa and the Caribbean. Over the next few years, however, the
movement began to unravel under the strains of internal dissension, opposition from black
critics, and government harassment. In 1922 the federal government indicted Garvey on mail
fraud charges stemming from Black Star Line promotional claims and he suspended all BSL
operations. (Two years later, the UNIA created another line, the Black Cross Navigation and
Trading Co., but it, too, failed.) Garvey was sentenced to prison. The government later
commuted his sentence, only to deport him back to Jamaica in November 1927. He never
returned to America.
In Jamaica Garvey reconstituted the UNIA and held conventions there and in Canada, but the
heart of his movement stumbled on in America without him. While he dabbled in local politics,
he remained a keen observer of world events, writing voluminously in his own papers. His final
move was to London, in 1935. He settled there shortly before Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia
and his public criticisms of Haile Selassie's behavior after the invasion alienated many of his
own remaining followers. In his last years he slid into such obscurity that he suffered the final
indignity of reading his own obituaries a month before his 10 June 1940 death.
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Marcus Garvey and the UNIA
Marcus Garvey and the UNIA
Historians of Africa and the Caribbean are coming to regard Garvey as a pivotal figure in the
awakening of modern nationalist movements opposed to European colonial domination. At a
conference celebrating Garvey's centenary held in Jamaica in 1987, Horace Campbell
emphasized this very point:
The UNIA . . . was the most dynamic mass movement across territorial borders among the
African peoples [during] this century. Now, one hundred years after the birth of Garvey and
seven decades after the founding of the UNIA, it is still possible to say that Garveyism
occupies a central place in the struggle for democracy, dignity and social transformation.
(Rupert Lewis and Patrick Bryan, eds., Garvey: His Work and Impact [Mona, Jamaica:
Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1988], p. 171)
No single black movement has represented a greater enigma to scholars than Garvey's
irredentist "African Redemption." While many ideas that Garvey espoused---black pride,
economic development, African independence---were not original, the way in which he
expressed them, his incomparable ability to get people to listen, made him different. This talent
was recognized early by a West African newspaper:
There are many who have said these self same things, but none have said them with such vigor,
with such directness and with such persuasiveness as Marcus Garvey. (Gold Coast Leader, 29
May 1926)
Historians familiar with Garvey's career generally regard him as the preeminent symbol of the
insurgent wave of black nationalism that developed in the period following World War I.
Although born in Jamaica, Garvey achieved his greatest success in the United States. He did so
despite the criticism of many African-American leaders and the covert opposition of the United
States Department of Justice and its Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI). As a
young man, Garvey had preached accommodation and disavowed political protest, advocating
loyalty to the established colonial government. His views, however, underwent a radical
transformation shortly after he arrived in the United States in 1916. The emergence of the
radical New Negro movement, which supplied the cultural and political matrix of the
celebrated Harlem Renaissance, to a large extent paralleled Garvey and his post-World War I
"African Redemption" movement.
Garvey established the first American branch of the UNIA in 1917--1918 in the midst of the
mass migration of blacks from the Caribbean and the American South to cities of the North. It
was also a time of political awakening in Africa and the Caribbean, to which Garvey
vigorously encouraged the export of his movement. In the era of global black awakening
following World War I, Garvey emerged as the best known, the most controversial, and, for
many, the most attractive of a new generation of New Negro leaders. Representative Charles B.
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Rangel of New York has noted that "Garvey was one of the first to say that instead of blackness
being a stigma, it should be a source of pride" (New York Times, 5 April 1987).
Black expectations aroused by participation in World War I were dashed by the racial violence
of the wartime and postwar years, and the disappointment evident in many black communities
throughout the U.S., Africa, and the Caribbean allowed Garvey to draw dozens of local leaders
to his side. Their ideas were not always strictly compatible with Garvey's, but their sympathy
with his themes of "African redemption" and black self-support was instrumental in gathering
support for the movement from a vast cross-section of African-American society. Similarly,
Garvey's message was adopted by a broad cross-section of educated and semi-literate Africans
and West Indians hungry for alternatives to white rule and oppression.
The post--World War I years were thus a time when a growing number of Africans and West
Indians were ready for change. In most colonial territories, Africans, like African Americans,
were disappointed when expected postwar changes failed to materialize. The Garveyist
message was spread by sailors, migrant laborers, and travelling UNIA agents, as well as by
copies of its newspaper, the Negro World, passed from hand to hand.
In the Caribbean, what has been termed the "Garvey phenomenon" resulted from an encounter
between the highly developed tradition of racial consciousness in the African-American
community, and the West Indian aspiration toward independence. It was the Caribbean ideal of
self-government that provided Garvey with his vocabulary of racial independence. Moreover,
Garvey combined the social and political aspirations of the Caribbean people with the popular
American gospel of success, which he converted in turn into his gospel of racial pride.
Garveyism thus appeared in the Caribbean as a doctrine proposing solutions to the twin
problems of racial subordination and colonial domination.
By the early 1920s the UNIA could count branches in almost every Caribbean, circum-
Caribbean, and sub-Saharan African country. The Negro World was read by thousands of eager
followers across the African continent and throughout the Caribbean archipelago. Though
Caribbean and African Garveyism may not have coalesced into a single movement, its diverse
followers adapted the larger framework to fit their own local needs and cultures. It is precisely
this that makes Garvey and the UNIA so relevant in the study of the process of decolonization
in Africa and the Caribbean. As if in confirmation of the success with which Garveyism
implanted itself in various social settings, when Garvey himself proposed to visit Africa and the
Caribbean in 1923, nervous European colonial governors joined in recommending that his entry
into their territories be banned. Many modern Caribbean nationalist leaders have acknowledged
the importance of Garveyism in their own careers, including T. Albert Marryshow of Grenada;
Alexander Bustamante, St. William Grant, J. A. G. Smith, and Norman Washington Manley of
Jamaica; and Captain Arthur Cipriani, Uriah Butler, George Padmore, and C. L. R. James of
Trinidad.
Before the Garvey and UNIA Papers project was established, the only attempt to edit Garvey's
speeches and writings was the Philosophy & Opinions of Marcus Garvey, a propagandistic
apologia compiled in two successive volumes in the early 1920s by his second wife, Amy
Jacques Garvey. As Lawrence Levine notes, "It is always unwise to rely too exclusively upon a
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collection edited by the subject, especially in the light of recent indications that the Garveys
altered a number of speeches and articles to conform with his later views" (Levine, op. cit.).
While the Philosophy & Opinions volumes served to plead Garvey's legal case, they also
created a politically distorted picture of the UNIA, an image that for a long time severely
handicapped research.
In this context, the Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers provides a full, objective account of the
movement and its leader, as it chronicles how the movement achieved a global dimension by
awakening the political consciousness of African and Caribbean peoples to the goals of racial
self-determination and national independence.
Fact Sheet on Marcus Garvey
Fact sheet on Marcus Garvey
Full Name:
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr.
Parents:
 Malcus ("Marcus") Mosiah Garvey, a mason
 Sarah Jane Richards, a domestic servant and produce grower
Born:
17 August 1887, at St. Ann's Bay, north coast of Jamaica
Died:
10 June 1940, London, England
Buried:
Marcus Garvey Memorial, National Heroes' Park, Kingston, Jamaica
Citizenship:
 British colonial subject
 applied for American citizenship in 1921
Education:
 Standard 6, Church of England school, Jamaica
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 audited courses, Birkbeck College, London, 1914
Employment:
 printer
 journalist
 publisher
Marriages:
 Amy Ashwood (1897--1969), co-founder of the UNIA in Jamaica, journalist, feminist,
playwright, business manager of UNIA offices in Harlem, 1919 (married to Garvey 1919-
-1922)
 Amy Jacques (1896--1973), legal assistant in Jamaica before migrating to U.S., where
she became business manager and personal secretary to Garvey in 1920, associate editor
of the Negro World 1924--1927, and Garvey's unofficial representative during his
incarceration in 1925--1927, becomes main propagandist of the Garvey movement with
Philosophy and Opinions, published in 2 volumes, 1923, 1925 (married to Garvey 1922--
1940)
Children:
 Marcus Garvey Jr. (1931--)
 Julius Winston Garvey (1933--)
 both by Amy Jacques; both born in Jamaica, now U.S. residents
Countries of residence:
 Jamaica, 1887--1910
 Panama, 1910
 Costa Rica, 1911
 Jamaica, 1912
 England, 1912--1914
 Jamaica, 1914--1916
 United States, 1916--1927
 Jamaica, 1927--1935
 United Kingdom, 1935--1940
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Career:
 founds UNIA in Jamaica, July 1914
 forms branch in New York City, May 1916 (January 1918?)
 incorporates movement in New York state, June 1918
 starts Negro World newspaper, August 1918
 starts Black Star Line shipping company, 1919
 starts Negro Factories Corp., 1920
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 announces Liberian Colonization Plan, 1920
 sends first delegation to Monrovia, Liberia, 1921
 makes organizational tour of Caribbean and Central America, 1921
 arrested and indicted on Mail Fraud Charges, 1922
 meets with Acting Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, causing backlash of opposition
from other black leaders, 1922
 second UNIA delegation sent to Liberia, 1923
 starts Black Cross Navigation and Trading Co. to replace defunct Black Star Line;
 UNIA purchases Smallwood-Corey School ("Liberty University") in Claremont, Virginia
 tours Europe, 1928
 becomes proprietor of Edelweiss Park, a social center for blacks in Kingston
 tries to establish political career in Jamaica
 begins publishing the Blackman, 1929
 begins publishing the New Jamaican
 begins publishing the Black Man, 1933
 bankrupt, announces move to London, 1934
 teaches School of Arican Philosophy to UNIA leaders in Toronto, 1937
 cerebral hemorrhage, January 1940
 dies 10 June 1940
 James Stewart elected UNIA president, August 1940
 headquarters of UNIA moved to Cleveland, Ohio
Mail Fraud Trial:
 Begins May 1923
 convicted June 1923
 appeal denied February 1925
Imprisonment:
February 1925--November 1927, federal penitentiary, Atlanta, Georgia
Deportation:
December 1927
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