MARCUS GARVEY

Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey

Introduction

Hailed as the “Black Moses” by his followers, Marcus Garvey was the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, arguably the most significant black nationalist organization in the history of the United States. Larger than the civil rights movement of its day, Garvey's call for unity across the “black diaspora” and an end to colonialism inspired activists beyond the borders of the United States to the Caribbean, Canada, and Africa (Hill, 1987).

Born in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, from full-blooded Negroes of Koromantee stock, Garvey's family were among former slaves, peasants, and laborers who comprised the lowest rung of Jamaica's three-tiered race-class system. Leaving school at the age of 14, he moved to Kingston and became an apprentice in the printing industry. In Jamaica's capital city, Garvey witnessed the abysmal conditions of the West Indian masses and the abrogation of Negro rights under British colonial rule. Appalled, Garvey became active in protest politics. He joined Jamaica's pro-independence National Club; he participated in the Printers' strike of 1907; and he made an attempt to launch his own dissident newspaper, The Watchman. A year of travel through South and Central America affirmed for Garvey the common misery of all dark-skinned people living in societies governed by whites. There, he tried again to stir the consciousness of black workers with a militant press, working with political associates in Costa Rica on the paper La Nacionale and in Panama on La Prensa (Lewis, 1987).

Discussion and Analysis

In 1912, Garvey went to England where he worked as an apprentice for the African Times and Orient Review, a journal founded by the Sudanese Egyptian entrepreneur, Duse Mohamed Ali and the well-known Pan-Africanist scholar, Casely Hayford. The paper served as a forum for African and Asian activists devoted to protecting the interests of the colored races against the aggressive policies of Western imperialism. Surrounded by intellectuals actively engaged in researching Africa's past, by dockworkers who provided vivid descriptions of Africa's geography and its current problems under colonial rule, and by activists seeking to influence Western governments in the interest of the colonized, Garvey came to share the Pan-African vision, that the “dark continent” would one day become the center of a black renaissance (Cronon, 1955).

Yet, it is ironic, and perhaps an early sign of his political iconoclasm, that when Garvey's vision finally took an organizational form, it was not based on the principles of racial egalitarianism that were central to early Pan-African thought. Rather, Garvey was drawn to the more pragmatic, segregationist philosophy of the African American conservative, Booker T. Washington. After reading Up From Slavery, Washington's autobiography, Garvey was convinced that the establishment of economic self-help programs was the necessary core of a movement to unite all people of African ancestry and to establish a country and government of their own. He returned to Jamaica in 1914 and with a new wife, Amy Ashwood, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL), modeled after the Tuskegee Institute, Washington's industrial training ...