Marcus Garvey - One of Jamaica's Finest

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, national hero of Jamaica, (August 17, 1887– June 10, 1940) was a publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, Black nationalist crusader, and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL).

Garvey, born in St. Ann's Bay, Saint Ann, Jamaica, is best remembered as an important proponent of the Back to Africa movement, which encouraged those of African descent to return to their ancestral homelands. This movement would eventually inspire other movements ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement, which proclaimed him a prophet. Garvey said he wanted those of African ancestry to "redeem" Africa and for the European colonial powers to leave it.

Founding of the UNIA-ACL

After years of working in the Caribbean, Garvey left for two years in London in 1912. There he worked for the African Times and Orient Review, published by Dusé Mohamed Ali, and sometimes spoke at Hyde Park's Speakers' Corner. During his travels, he had become convinced that uniting Blacks was the only way to improve their condition, and so he formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and African Communities League (ACL). As the groups' first president-general, his goal was to "unite all people of African ancestry of the world to one great body to establish a country and absolute government of their own."

After corresponding with Booker T. Washington, Garvey arrived in the U.S. on March 23, 1916, for a lecture tour and to raise funds for establishment of a school in Jamaica modeled after Washington's Tuskegee Institute. Unfortunately, Washington had died in 1915 before Garvey reached the U.S., but he did visit Tuskegee and afterward, he visited a number of Black leaders. It was then that Garvey perceived a leadership vacuum among people of African ancestry, and so on May 9, 1916, he held his first public lecture in New York City at St. Mark's Church Hall and undertook a 38-state speaking tour.

Then Garvey set about the business of developing a program to improve the conditions of those of African ancestry "at home and abroad" under UNIA auspices. In New York, he organized the first UNIA chapter outside Jamaica and advanced ideas designed to promote social, political, and economic freedom for Blacks. He launched the now notorious Black Star Line Steamship Corporation and its successor Black Cross Navigation and Trading Company. However, the line failed owing to mismanagement and charges of fraud.

Another venture of his was the Negro Factories Corporation. His plan called for creating the infrastructure to manufacture every marketable commodity in every big U.S. industrial center, as well as those in Central America, West Indies, and Africa. Related endeavors included a grocery chain, restaurant, publishing house, and other businesses.

Convinced that Blacks should have a permanent homeland in Africa, Garvey sought to develop Liberia. "Our success educationally, industrially and politically is based upon the protection of a nation founded by ourselves. And the nation can be nowhere else but in Africa."

The Liberia program, launched in 1920, was intended to build colleges, universities, industrial plants, and railroads as part of an industrial base from which to operate. However, it was abandoned in the mid-1920s after much opposition from European powers with interests in Liberia. Interestingly, in response to suggestions that he wanted to take all Americans of African ancestry back to Africa, he once proclaimed, "I have no desire to take all black people back to Africa; there are blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there."

Garvey was not necessarily a believer in Black supremacy. Rather he seemed to have been a believer in racial segregation and autonomy. He recognized the influence the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) on some white Americans, and in early 1922, he went to Atlanta, Georgia, for a conference with Edward Young Clarke, KKK imperial giant.

According to Garvey, "I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together. I like honesty and fair play. You may call me a Klansman if you will, but, potentially, every white man is a Klansman, as far as the Negro in competition with whites socially, economically and politically is concerned, and there is no use lying."

Charged with mail fraud

After an investigation by J. Edgar Hoover and the U.S. Post Office, the Attorney General brought a charge of mail fraud against Garvey for selling stock in the failed Black Star Line. It was revealed that, contrary to representations, the corporation did not own the ship pictured on the company's stock brochure. However, the Black Star Line did own and operate several ships over the course of its history and was in the process of negotiating for the disputed ship at the time of the controversy.

Of all those charged in connection with the enterprise, only Garvey was found guilty of using the mail service to defraud. His supporters called the trial fraudulent. While there were serious accounting irregularities within the Black Star Line and the claims he used to sell Black Star Line stock were misleading, Garvey's prosecution may still have been politically motivated. In any case, in 1925, Garvey was convicted and sentenced to a five-year term in the Atlanta Federal Prison.

To this day, efforts to exonerate him continue. His sentence was eventually commuted by President Calvin Coolidge. Since Garvey had been convicted of a felony and was not a U.S. citizen, federal law required his immediate deportation. Upon his release in November 1927, Garvey was deported via New Orleans to Jamaica, where a large crowd met him at Orrett's Wharf in Kingston. A huge procession and band converged on UNIA headquarters.

Other controversies

Around 1921, Garvey proclaimed a belief in racial purity. He admired the efforts toward independence of Catholics in Ireland, so he was not a racist in the usual sense. Instead he feared encouragement of miscegenation would prove a disadvantage to those who did not mix or were not of mixed blood. This belief led him to praise President Warren G. Harding's speech against miscegenation and to suggest that the races might be better off separate.

For not entirely unrelated reasons, he had a strong antagonism toward W.E. B. Du Bois, who had expressed hostility to the Black Star Line and other ideas of his. Garvey began to suspect that Du Bois was prejudiced against him because he was a Caribbean with darker skin. By the late 1920s, his antagonism had turned to almost pathological disdain. To Du Bois, Garvey was "a lunatic or a traitor." Garvey called Du Bois "purely and simply a white man's nigger" and "a little Dutch, a little French, a little Negro ... a mulatto ... a monstrosity." This led to an acrimonious relationship between Garvey and the NAACP. Garvey would later accuse Du Bois of paying conspirators to sabotage the Black Star Line and destroy his reputation. Du Bois was, nevertheless, a strong supporter of Pan-Africanism.

Later years

Garvey traveled to Geneva in 1928 to present the Petition of the Negro Race, which outlined the worldwide abuse of Africans, to the League of Nations. In September 1929, he founded the People's Political Party (PPP), Jamaica's first modern political party, which focused on workers' rights, education, and aid to the poor.

In 1929, Garvey was elected Councillor for the Allman Town Division of the Kingston
and St. Andrew Corporation (KSAC). He lost his seat, however, because of having to serve a prison sentence for contempt of court, but in 1930, he was re-elected, unopposed, along with two other PPP candidates.

In April 1931, Garvey launched the Edelweiss Amusement Company, which he set up to help artists earn their livelihood from their craft. Several Jamaican entertainers -- Kidd Harold, Ernest Cupidon, Bim & Bam, and Ranny Williams -- went on to become popular after receiving initial exposure the company gave them.

In 1935, Garvey left Jamaica for London, where he lived and worked until his death in 1940. During these last five years, he remained active and in touch with events in war-torn Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) and the West Indies. In 1938, he gave evidence before the
West Indian Royal Commission on conditions there. Also in 1938, he set up the School
of African Philosophy to train UNIA leaders. He continued to work on the magazine The Black Man.

Garvey's political views in his later years were increasingly right wing. In 1937, a group of his American supporters, called the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, openly collaborated with Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo in the promotion of a repatriation scheme introduced in the U.S. Congress as the Greater Liberia Act. Garvey also expressed considerable sympathy for fascism and speculated about its positive application in Africa.
However, shortly before his death Garvey expressed solidarity with Britain during the
Blitz.

On June 10, 1940, Garvey died after a stroke, apparently after reading a mistaken, and negative, obituary of himself. Because of travel conditions during World War II, he was interred at Kensal Green Cemetery in London. In November 1964, the government of Jamaica, having proclaimed him Jamaica's first national hero, brought his remains home and ceremoniously re-interred him at a shrine in National Heroes Park.

Influence

Garvey's memory has been kept alive worldwide. Schools, colleges, highways, and buildings in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States have been named in his honor. The UNIA red, black, and green flag has been adopted as the Black Liberation Flag. Since 1980, Garvey's bust has been housed in the Organization of American States'
Hall of Heroes in Washington, D.C.

Burning Spear, a well-known Jamaican reggae artist, has done much to keep his memory alive through song, including his albums, Garvey's Ghost and Marcus Garvey. African American novelist Ralph Ellison used Garvey as the basis for Ras the Exhorter, the West Indian black nationalist demagogue in his award-winning Invisible Man. In Neuromancer, William Gibson named the tug piloted by Maelcum the Marcus Garvey.

Garvey and Rastafari

Rastafarians consider Garvey a religious prophet, and sometimes even the reincarnation of John the Baptist. This is partly because of his frequent statements uttered in speeches throughout the 1920s, usually along the lines of "Look to Africa, for there a king will be crowned."

His beliefs deeply influenced the Rastafari, who took his statements as a prophecy of the crowning of Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. Early Rastas were associated with his Back-to-Africa movement in Jamaica, and the Rastafari movement can be seen as an offshoot of Garveyite philosophy. As his beliefs have greatly influenced Rastafari, he is often mentioned in reggae music, including that of Bob Marley.

Harshly critical of Haile Selassie I in the wake of the invasion of Ethiopia before World
War II, Garvey himself never identified with the Rastafari movement, and was, in fact, raised as a Methodist who went on to become a Roman Catholic.

Memorials to Garvey at home and across the world

• Statue on the grounds of St. Ann's Bay Parish Library.Secondary school in his name in St. Ann.
• Major highway in his name in Kingston.Bust in Apex Park in Kingston.
• Likeness on the Jamaican 50 cent coin and 20 dollar coin.
• Building in his name housing the Jamaican Ministry of Foreign Affairs in New Kingston.
• Park in his name in New York City's Harlem.Street in his name in Brooklyn, N.Y.
• Major street in his name in Nairobi, Kenya.Small park in his name in Hammersmith, London, UK.
• Marcus Garvey Centre in Lenton, Nottingham, UK.
• Park in his name in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, California.
• Marcus Garvey Library inside the Tottenham Green Leisure Centre building in North London, UK.
• Marcus Garvey Cultural Center, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, Colorado.
• Spoken word introduction to The Orb's track "Towers of Dub" from the album U.F.Orb, which features a prank call made by satirist Victor Lewis-Smith to London Weekend Television: Smith claims to be Garvey leaving a message for Haile Selassie, whom he claims will be arriving there shortly.
• Secondary school in Trenton, N.J.

Garvey Quotes

"Up, you mighty race, accomplish what you will."
"Whatsoever things common to man, that man has done, man can do."
"One God! One aim! One destiny!"
"Africa for the Africans ... At home and abroad!"
"We Negroes believe in the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God – God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the one God of all ages. That is the God in whom we believe, but we shall worship him through the spectacles of Ethiopia."
"A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots."
"Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm."
"A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact."
"There shall be no solution to this race problem until you, yourselves, strike the blow for liberty."
"If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won before you have started."
"Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people."

See you in Jamaica.