Marcus Garvey
February 26, 2019
Marcus Garvey riding in parade. Undated photogrph. (Photo by George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images)
IN HONOR of Black History Month, let’s remember Marcus Garvey (1887 -1940), a black leader American schoolchildren do not learn much about despite his enormous popularity among American blacks in the early 20th century and his significant achievements. Why is he so little honored? Garvey fought the principles of multiculturalism and radical egalitarianism. He wanted blacks to create and sustain a world of their own.
Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican-born black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement, which sought to unify and connect people of African descent worldwide. In the United States, he was a noted civil rights activist who founded the Negro World newspaper, a shipping company called Black Star Line and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a fraternal organization of black nationalists. As a group, they advocated for “separate but equal” status for persons of African ancestry, and as such they sought to establish independent black states around the world, notably in Liberia on the west coast of Africa. [Source]
He sought to repatriate many blacks to Africa (that was the purpose of the shipping line) and organized the “Buy Black” movement and the Negro Factories Corporation to encourage blacks to support each other and gain financial independence. He said to a meeting of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1921, “If you want liberty you yourselves must strike the blow. If you must be free, you must become so through your own effort … Until you produce what the white man has produced you will not be his equal.”
By 1920 the UNIA had hundreds of divisions 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. The movement’s dynamic core was Harlem, which Garvey and the UNIA helped make the cultural capital of the black world. During the 1920s the six-block radius surrounding 135th Street and Lenox Avenue contained the UNIA’s international headquarters as well as the cradle of the movement, Liberty Hall, and the offices of all major UNIA affiliated enterprises. UNIA restaurants, shops, and storefront factories spread throughout Harlem, and Garvey and many UNIA officers lived there. During the annual UNIA international conventions, the streets boasted colorful parades led by a regal Garvey, poised in an open car and wearing the plumed hat that became his indelible trademark. [Source]
Marcus Garvey Youth Parade, Harlem, 1924
Garvey was brought down by J. Edgar Hoover, who investigated him for mail fraud. He was also at odds with the Jewish-run NAACP. He didn’t fit in with the script of the revolutionary black who would move into white communities with anger and resentment. According to the History Channel:
He blamed a Jewish judge and Jewish jurors for his conviction, saying that they sought retribution against him after he had agreed to meet with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan(K.K.K.) several months prior to the trial.
Garvey believed he and the K.K.K. shared similar views on segregation, given that he sought a separate state for African Americans.
He began serving his sentence at Atlanta Prison in 1925. It’s from there that he authored his famous paper “First Message to the Negroes of the World from Atlanta Prison.”
In it, he wrote, “After my enemies are satisfied, in life or death I shall come back to you to serve even as I have served before. In life I shall be the same; in death I shall be a terror to the foes of Negro liberty. If death has power, then count on me in death to be the real Marcus Garvey I would like to be. If I may come in an earthquake, or a cyclone, or plague, or pestilence, or as God would have me, then be assured that I shall never desert you and make your enemies triumph over you.”
Ultimately, Garvey’s program was not ideal as it was based on pure nationalism and naturalism, but it was better than the Communist ideals of the NAACP.
