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29 December 2008
Marcus Garvey: Another Path
Black nationalist enunciates a separatist path
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
By: Wilson Jeremiah Moses
Wilson Jeremiah Moses is Ferree Professor of History at the Pennsylvania State University and author of the scholarly article “Marcus Garvey: A Reappraisal.” His books include The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925.
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), a major black nationalist of the early 20th century, was born in Jamaica but spent his most successful years in the United States. An enthusiastic capitalist, he believed that African Americans and other black persons around the world should make a united effort to form institutions that could concentrate wealth and power in their own hands. To this end he formed, among other organizations, the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). After reading Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, Garvey asked himself: “Where is the black man’s government? Where is his king and kingdom? Where is his president, his country, his ambassadors, his army, his navy, and his men of big affairs? I could not find them. I decided, I will help to make them.”
Garvey was born in the parish of St. Ann, Jamaica, where in his early teens he was apprenticed to his godfather, a printer named Alfred Burrowes. Garvey’s father was a bookish man, as was Burrowes, and the youthful Marcus received early exposure to the world of letters. Migrating to Kingston, Garvey displayed highly refined talents as a typesetter and developed an interest in journalism.
After being blacklisted for attempting to organize workers, he left Jamaica to visit Latin America, and he later spent two years in England. During these years, he studied informally at the University of London and worked for the Sudanese-Egyptian black nationalist, Duse Mohammed Ali, founder of The African Times and Orient Review.
Garvey was determined to spread his program of black empowerment in the United States. Arriving in 1915, Garvey argued that African Americans could command respect by building their economic power. To that end, he strove to establish a network of black-owned businesses: grocery stores, laundries, and others capable of thriving independently of the white economy. While these and other initial attempts to organize the masses met with little success, Garvey’s perseverance earned him increasing fame; by the end of the First World War, his name was widely known among black Americans.
Garvey was a master at manipulating the media and at staging dramatic public events. He founded his own newspaper, Negro World, which was distributed widely throughout the United States and in some Latin American countries. He held colorful annual conventions in New York City, where men and women marched under a banner of red, black, and green. This flag, along with other tricolored emblems, remains popular among African Americans to the present day. The striking military regalia sometimes worn by Garveyites demonstrated the nationalistic and militaristic nationalist movement strove to convey.
There is a legend that once a Congolese leader in a remote African village was asked if he knew anything about the United States. His response was said to be, “I know the name of Marcus Garvey.”
Under the name of the Black Star Line, the UNIA launched an abortive attempt to open up the world to black-owned commerce. The organization sold impressive amounts of stock in this enterprise, mostly in small amounts to ordinary working people, and purchased several steamships, unfortunately in dilapidated condition.
Garvey believed in separation of the races and was willing to cooperate with leaders of white racist organizations, notably the Ku Klux Klan. After meeting with Klan leadership, he came under attack from several already-hostile black leaders. A. Philip Randolph, founder and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, America’s earliest successful, predominantly black labor union, was particularly hostile.
Randolph accused Garvey of cooperating with white racists in a scheme to repatriate American blacks back to Africa. Garvey denied any such ambitions, but he did send emissaries to the Republic of Liberia to investigate the prospects of new business undertakings, and he found considerable sympathy for his ideas among young African intellectuals.
In 1925, Garvey was imprisoned on federal charges of using the mails to defraud. He denied the charge, and even some of his critics found it unfair. President Calvin Coolidge pardoned Garvey in 1927, but as a convicted felon who was not a U.S. citizen, Garvey was immediately deported to his native Jamaica. W.E.B. Du Bois, one of Garvey’s severest critics, wished him well, encouraging him to pursue his efforts in his own country.
Establishing himself in London, England, Garvey launched a new magazine, The Black Man, which criticized such prominent black American figures as the heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, the entertainer and political activist Paul Robeson, and the controversial spiritual figure Father Divine for their failure to supply effective race leadership. But Garvey was unable there either to rebuild his organization to its previous membership levels. He retained sufficient U.S. popularity to draw an attentive audience to a meeting in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit, Michigan, a base for Garvey’s earlier activism. His final operations were conducted from London, England, where he died in 1940.
