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, or UNIA, 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.
Marcus Garvey was an orator for the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. Garvey advanced a Pan-African philosophy which inspired a global mass movement, known as Garveyism. Garveyism would eventually inspire others, from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement.
Marcus Moziah Garvey, (born August 17, 1887, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica—died June 10, 1940, London, England), charismatic Black leader who organized the first important American Black nationalist movement (1919–26), based in New York City’s Harlem.
Largely self-taught, Garvey attended school in Jamaica until he was 14.
At age 14, Garvey became a printer's apprentice. In 1903, he traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, and soon became involved in union activities. In 1907, he took part in an unsuccessful printer's strike and the experience kindled in him a passion for political activism. Three years later, he traveled throughout Central America working as a newspaper editor and writing about the exploitation of migrant workers in the plantations. He later traveled to London where he attended Birkbeck College (University of London) and worked for the African Times and Orient Review, which advocated Pan-African nationalism.
After traveling in Central America and living in London from 1912 to 1914, he returned to Jamaica, where, with a group of friends, he founded (August 1, 1914) the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League, usually called the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which sought, among other things, to build in Africa a Black-governed nation.
After corresponding with Booker T. Washington, the American educator who founded Tuskegee Institute, Garvey traveled to the United States in 1916 to raise funds for a similar venture in Jamaica. He settled in New York City and formed a U.N.I.A. chapter in Harlem to promote a separatist philosophy of social, political, and economic freedom for Black people. In 1918, Garvey began publishing the widely distributed newspaper Negro World to convey his message.
The Story of Marcus Garvey A Documentary
The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) is a black nationalist fraternal organization founded by Marcus Garvey and Amy Ashwood Garvey. The organization was founded to work for the advancement of people of African ancestry around the world. Its motto is "One God! One Aim! One Destiny!" and its slogan is "Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad!" The broad mission of the UNIA-ACL led to the establishment of numerous auxiliary components, among them the African Legion (a paramilitary group), the African Black Cross Nurses, plus businesses such as the Black Star Steamship Line and the Negro Factories Corporation.
The Negro World was founded on August 17, 1918, as a weekly newspaper to express the ideas of the organization. Garvey contributed a front-page editorial each week in which he developed the organization's position on different issues related to people of African ancestry around the world, in general, and the UNIA, in particular. Eventually claiming a circulation of 500,000, the newspaper was printed in several languages. It contained a page specifically for women readers, documented international events related to people of African ancestry, and was distributed throughout the African diaspora until publication ceased in 1933.
By 1920 the association had over 1,900 divisions in more than 40 countries. Most of the divisions were located in the United States, which had become the UNIA's base of operations. There were, however, offices in several Caribbean countries, with Cuba having the most. Divisions also existed in Central and South America: Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Venezuela; in Africa: Gold Coast (now Ghana), Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, South West Africa (now Namibia), and the Union of South Africa; and in India and Australia.
The organization put forth a program based on this declaration, marking the evolution of the movement as one promoting black nationalism. It sought the uplift of the black race and encouraged self-reliance and nationhood. Among the declarations was one proclaiming the red, black and green flag as the official banner of the African race.
(Beginning in the 1960s, black nationalists and Pan-Africanists adopted the same flag as the Black Liberation Flag.) UNIA-ACL officially designated the song "Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers" as the official anthem of "Africa and the Africans, at home and Abroad".
Emphasising unity between Africans and the African diaspora, he campaigned for an end to European colonial rule across Africa and 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 UNIA grew in membership. However, his black separatist views—and his relationship with white racists like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the interest of advancing their shared goal of racial separatism—divided Garvey from other prominent African-American civil rights activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois who promoted racial integration.
In Jamaica he is widely regarded as a national hero. His ideas exerted a considerable influence on such movements as Rastafari, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marcus-Garvey
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/marcus-garvey
https://www.biography.com/activist/marcus-garvey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Negro_Improvement_Association_and_African_Communities_League
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