GARVEY, MARCUS (17 August 1887–10 June 1940), visionary Black leader of the early twentieth century who first organized the American Black Nationalist movement. Garvey and his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), also constituted one of the first global Black social movements, encompassing both Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Garvey rose to prominence in Harlem, New York, after the First World War—against the backdrop of colonialism, the consolidation of Jim Crow, and an emergent collective consciousness among Afro-descendants. At the root of Garvey’s movement was an idea about Black self-determination that was grounded in the notion of economic liberation—a contested concept criticized by some of Garvey’s contemporaries, including Black radicals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Cyril Briggs, who negatively characterized the movement as a pro-capitalist approach tinged with imperialist undertones. Nonetheless, by 1927, the UNIA had established branches in at least forty-one countries. Its manifestations were highly visible, including, but not limited to, the Universal African Black Cross Nurses, the African Legion (an unarmed paramilitary group), the Negro World newspaper, and the Pan-African shipping line, Black Star Line.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was born in 1887 in Saint Ann’s Bay, a small town on the northern coast of Jamaica. His paternal great-grandfather had been born into slavery before abolition in the British Empire. The surname Garvey is Irish, inherited from the family’s former enslavers. Marcus’ father, Malchus Garvey, was a professional mason who built tombs, among other things. His mother, Sarah Jane Richards, raised crops and cooked for a White family. Richards, who sometimes referred to her son as “Moses,” strongly influenced Garvey.
Under Jamaica’s colonial education system, Garvey was forced to leave school at age fourteen, just after completing the sixth, or “standard,” grade. He became a printer’s apprentice, quickly earning the status of master (or “journeyman”) printer. In 1910, Garvey was elected Assistant Secretary of the National Club of Jamaica and, together with fellow Club member Wilfred Domingo, published the pamphlet The Struggling Mass alongside his first magazine, Garvey’s Watchman. That same year, Garvey, now twenty-three years old, journeyed throughout Central America, undertaking casual work as he went, notably at a United Fruit Company banana plantation in Limón, Costa Rica, alongside other primarily Black workers.
Such first-hand experiences intimately connected Garvey to the working and wage conditions of Black people from Ecuador to Venezuela in occupations ranging from plantation work to shipping to construction projects like the Panama Canal. These deeply impacted the relatively young Garvey: despite serving as the literal power behind a global economy, these workers were powerless. In the spring of 1911, Garvey launched a bilingual newspaper, The Nation (La Nación), which criticized the actions of the United Fruit Company against its workers and greatly upset dominant class relations in Costa Rica.
After three years, Garvey left Latin and Central America for England to attend classes at Birkbeck College, University of London. There, he encountered influential books like Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. After the completion of his studies, in July of 1914, Garvey returned to Jamaica and launched the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and African Communities League (ACL) under the motto “One God. One aim. One destiny.” Although these initiatives were relatively short-lived and unsuccessful in Jamaica, they pushed Garvey across the ocean and north to the United States.
In 1916 Garvey settled in Harlem, finding work as a printer. Meanwhile, he worked on his oration, learning from the inflection and timbre of popular revivalist and evangelical figures like Billy Sunday. After embarking on a year-long speaking tour, ostensibly to raise money for a vocational school in Jamaica to be modeled after Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, and in the wake of the First World War and the East Saint Louis Race Riots, Garvey’s politics shifted away from the struggle of Black people in the West Indies to encompass a more global preoccupation. In his own words, “White people are taking advantage of Black men today because Black men all over the world are disunited.” Increasingly radical in his thinking, Garvey called for armed self-defense. In 1917, with 35¢, a photograph, and a pledge to support the beginnings of Garvey’s new nation-building program, the UNIA was (re)opened—this time enticing membership in the form of a title and uniform—from around the globe.
With the rise of the organization came greater scrutiny. In 1919, Edwin
P. Kilroe, then Assistant District Attorney of New York, began an investigation into the activities of the UNIA. Although the investigation resulted in no evidence worthy of legal prosecution, it is said to have led to Garvey's visit from George Tyler, a seller of Negro World, on behalf of Kilroe. Pulling out a .38-caliber revolver, Tyler fired four rounds at Garvey, wounding him in the right leg and scalp. And yet, Garvey survived. This near-death, allegedly a government-sanctioned assassination attempt fueled a media sensation that further drove Garvey’s growing notoriety and solidified his status as a mythical folk Moses reincarnate.
As the anticolonial movement reached new heights, J. Edgar Hoover of the Department of Justice’s “anti-racial division” of the Bureau of Investigation placed the “notorious negro agitator” under federal surveillance. As part of this effort, the Bureau hired the first full-time Black agent, James Wormley Jones.
By 1921, the Bureau and other federal agencies increasingly threatened the UNIA organization, which was directed to report on all of Garvey’s activities. Even some of Garvey’s closest friends—including Herbert Bowlin, owner of the Berry & Ross Doll Company—worked as agents for the Bureau. In January 1922 Garvey and three UNIA officers were arrested on the meager charge of federal mail fraud related to the selling of stock in a ship that Garvey's Black Star Line did not yet own. Despite constant surveillance and the confiscation of thousands of documents, it is remarkable that “mail fraud” was the only means by which the Bureau could manage to prosecute Garvey. On January 12, 1922, Garvey was indicted by a federal grand jury.
In July 1922, still temporarily free on bail, Garvey held a controversial meeting with Edward Young Clarke, the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan at the time. While Garvey claimed that he preferred the overt racism of the KKK to the covert racism of “all other groups of hypocritical Whites put together” and believed this meeting to be in the public’s diplomatic interest, the event demonized Garvey among many Blacks. Further, it solidified the tensions between Garvey and other prominent Black intellectuals and leaders of the New Negro Movement, including Philip Rudolf of The Messenger, Cyril Briggs of The Crusader and the African Blood Brotherhood, and W.E.B. Du Bois of The Crisis and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Amid these high tensions, Garvey’s hand-picked second-in-command, Reverend James Eason, who was expected to serve as a key prosecution witness in Garvey’s federal trial, was shot and killed.
The four-week federal trial of Marcus Garvey began on May 18, 1923. Overcome by suspicion, paranoia, and unwillingness to plead guilty, Garvey fired his only attorney, announcing that he would represent and defend himself. Ultimately, while his three co-defendants were acquitted, Garvey was convicted and given a maximum sentence of five years. Garvey’s indictment hung on his use of the US mail system to defraud just one man, Benny Dancy, for $25. In his closing statement, Garvey declared, “I want no mercy, only justice—justice—justice. I would not betray my struggling race. If I did, I should be thrown into the nethermost parts of hell.”
In February 1925, after nearly two years of appeals, Garvey was escorted to the Atlanta federal penitentiary with personal assets amounting to $40 and a few hundred shares of worthless stock. Around this point, Garvey became heavily influenced by the pervasive anti-semitic ideology of his time. It is well known that he felt he had been tried unfairly by the judge, prosecutor, and two members of the jury who happened to be Jewish. This resentment likely manifested in his later statements identifying with the fascist ideologies and nationalist tactics of Hitler and Mussolini.
In prison, Garvey’s health declined: his lungs were weak, and he suffered from heart disease, bronchitis, and asthma. Fearful that an untimely death might amplify Garvey’s martyrdom and further spur the growth of Black empowerment movements, on November 18, 1927—after two years and nine months of imprisonment—President Calvin Coolidge commuted Garvey’s sentence and ordered him to be deported to Jamaica.
On the day of his deportation, Garvey was placed on the S.S. Saramacca, a ship owned by the United Fruit Company, the very same multinational corporation he had criticized as a young activist. Once in Kingston, Garvey and his wife, the pioneering Black journalist Amy Jacques, who had become associate editor of the Negro World and unofficial representative of UNIA affairs after Garvey’s 1922 arrest, had two sons. Garvey tried to reestablish his career and enterprises in Jamaica, but none of them were very successful. His bankruptcy was the direct result of the US government’s case, which had stripped him of all assets and property, including personal investments.
In 1935, Garvey relocated to London, where he secured more speaking engagements and published a monthly paper. Still, his reputation remained problematic, carrying with it a fading echo of a movement that continued to live on without its primary figure. In January 1940, Garvey suffered a stroke, a cerebral hemorrhage, that left him partially paralyzed. A rival Pan-Africanist, the Trinidadian journalist and author George Padmore, is thought to have spread rumors of Garvey’s death. Within several months, premature obituaries had been printed and circulated in newspapers worldwide. In May 1940 Garvey read several of these and suffered a second stroke. He died shortly after that in London at the age of fifty-two, on June 10, 1940. He was buried in Saint Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in London. In 1964 his remains were exhumed and returned to Jamaica, where they were reinterred beneath the Marcus Garvey Memorial in National Heroes Park, Kingston.
As if in defiance of his later difficulties, the spirit of Marcus Garvey lives on. Since the 1930s, his life and work have profoundly influenced Jamaican Rastafarians, who associate him with the biblical figure John the Baptist, in that he predicted the coming of a Black king, or Christ-like figure, in Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. Rastafarians have maintained Garvey’s contemporary legacy, preserving critical aspects of his life and political ideology in their traditions and songs and contributing to the timelessness of folk legend or mythic being. Also in the 1930s, Elijah Mohamed, the American father of a growing Nation of Islam, essentially gave Garvey’s ideology an Islamic orientation. The notion of Black self-reliance, “doing for self,” that thrived in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States articulates an undeniable and intimate connection to Garvey’s concepts, which were rooted in an African fundamentalism, a philosophy of Black racial unity and pride—a pride in selfhood (“Black is Beautiful”)—that materialized in dreams of a nation for Black people, a religion for Black people, and an economic base for Black people. Malcolm X’s parents were Garveyites. Thus, without Garvey, there might be no Nation of Islam, Black Nationalism, or Black Power movement.
Across the Atlantic, after the Second World War, Garvey instilled in emerging African leaders and activists the vision of freedom from colonial rule. From Kenya to South Africa, Ghana to Congo, his work inspired belief in Black unity, pride, and self-sufficiency. Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister and President of independent Ghana (formally known as the Gold Coast) was directly inspired by The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey: Africa for the Africans, compiled by Amy Jacques Garvey. Ultimately, within Garvey and his movement was an essential message of Black liberation that embodied Black pride and the dream of a united Africa, the dream of ending White supremacy, and the dream of abolition with revolution in mind.