Marcus Garvey
Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was a Jamaican political activist. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa. 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 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. His ideas exerted a considerable influence on such movements as Rastafari, the Nation of Islam and the Black Power Movement.
Early life
Childhood: 1887–1904
Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on 17 August 1887 in Saint Ann's Bay, a town in the British colony of Jamaica. 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. However, later genetic research nevertheless revealed that he had ancestors from the Iberian Peninsula. Garvey's paternal great- grandfather had been born into slavery prior to its abolition in Jamaica. His surname, which was of Irish origin, had been inherited from his family's former enslavers.His father, Malchus Garvey, was a stonemason; his mother, Sarah Richards, was a domestic servant and the daughter of peasant farmers. Malchus had had two previous wives before Sarah, having six children between them. Sarah and he had four additional children, of whom Marcus was the youngest, although two died in infancy. Because of his profession, Malchus' family were wealthier than many of their peasant neighbours; they were petite bourgeoise. Malchus was however reckless with his money and over the course of his life lost most of the land he owned to meet payments. Malchus had a book collection and was self-educated; he also served as a deacon at a local Wesleyan church. Malchus was an intolerant and punitive father and husband; he never had a close relationship with his son.
Up to the age of 14, Garvey attended a local church school; further education was unaffordable for the family. When not in school, Garvey worked on his maternal uncle's tenant farm. He had friends, with whom he once broke the windows of a church, resulting in his arrest. Some of his friends were white, although he found that as they grew older they distanced themselves from him; 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." In 1901, Marcus was apprenticed to his godfather, a local printer. In 1904, the printer opened another branch at Port Maria, where Garvey began to work, travelling from Saint Ann's Bay each morning.
Early career in Kingston: 1905–1909
In 1905 he moved to Kingston, where he boarded in Smith Village, a working-class neighbourhood. 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. His sister and mother, by this point estranged from his father, moved to join him in the city. In January 1907, Kingston was hit by an earthquake that reduced much of the city to rubble. He, his mother, and his sister were left to sleep in the open for several months. In March 1908, his mother died. While in Kingston, Garvey converted to Catholicism.Garvey became a trade unionist, vice president of the compositors' section of the Printers' Union, and took a leading role in the November 1908 print workers' strike. The strike was broken several weeks later and Garvey was sacked. Henceforth branded a troublemaker, Garvey was unable to find work in the private sector. He then found temporary employment with a government printer. As a result of these experiences, Garvey became increasingly angry at the inequalities present in Jamaican society.
Garvey involved himself with the National Club, Jamaica's first nationalist organization, becoming its first assistant secretary in April 1910. 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. With fellow Club member Wilfred Domingo he published a pamphlet expressing the group's ideas, The Struggling Mass. 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. He claimed it had a circulation of 3000, although this was likely an exaggeration. Garvey also enrolled in elocution lessons with the radical journalist Joseph Robert Love, coming to regard him as a mentor. With Garvey's enhanced skill at speaking in a Standard English manner, he entered several public-speaking competitions.
Travels abroad: 1910–1914
Economic hardship in Jamaica led to growing emigration from the island. 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. Shortly after his arrival, the area experienced strikes and unrest in opposition to the UFC's attempts to cut its workers' wages. Although as a timekeeper he was responsible for overseeing the manual workers, he became increasingly angered at how they were treated. 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. 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. After his printing press broke, he was unable to replace the faulty part and terminated the newspaper.Garvey then travelled through Central America, undertaking casual work as he made his way through Honduras, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. While in the port of Colón in Panama, he set up a new newspaper, La Prensa. In 1911, he became seriously ill with a bacterial infection and decided to return to Kingston. 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. Renting a room along Borough High Street in South London, he visited the House of Commons, where he was impressed by the politician David Lloyd George. He also visited Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park and began making speeches there. There were only a few thousand black people in London at the time, and they were often viewed as exotic; most worked as labourers. Garvey initially gained piecemeal work labouring in the city's docks. In August 1912, his sister Indiana joined him in London, where she worked as a domestic servant.
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. The magazine advocated Ethiopianism and home rule for British-ruled Egypt. In 1914, Mohamed Ali began employing Garvey as a writer for the magazine. Garvey also took several evening classes in law at Birkbeck College in Bloomsbury. He planned a tour of Europe, spending time in Glasgow, Paris, Monte Carlo, Boulogne, and Madrid.
Back in London, he wrote an article on Jamaica for the Tourist magazine, 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. Washington's book heavily influenced Garvey. 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. 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. 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.