Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH
17 August 1887 – 10 June 1940
Marcus Garvey Jr. was a Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). He founded the Black Star Line, which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands.
Prior to the twentieth century, leaders such as Prince Hall, Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Henry Highland Garnet advocated the involvement of the African diaspora in African affairs. Garvey was unique in advancing a Pan-African philosophy to inspire a global mass movement and economic empowerment focusing on Africa known as Garveyism. Promoted by the UNIA as a movement of African Redemption, Garveyism would eventually inspire others, ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement (which proclaims Garvey as a prophet).
Garveyism intended persons of African ancestry in the diaspora to “redeem” the nations of Africa and for the European colonial powers to leave the continent. His essential ideas about Africa were stated in an editorial in the Negro World entitled “African Fundamentalism”, where he wrote: “Our union must know no clime, boundary, or nationality… to let us hold together under all climes and in every country
In 1914 Garvey returned to Jamaica, where he organized the UNIA. Historian Rashid suggests that the UNIA motto, “One God, One Aim, One Destiny”, was derived from Dusé Ali’s Islamic influence (Rashid, 2002). Garvey named the organization the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities (Imperial) League. The UNIA held an international convention in 1921 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Also represented at the convention were organizations such as the Universal Black Cross Nurses, the Black Eagle Flying Corps, and the Universal African Legion. Garvey attracted more than 50,000 people to the event and in his cause.
After corresponding with Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and a national African-American leader in the United States, Garvey traveled by ship to the U.S., arriving on 23 March 1916 aboard the S.S. Tallac. He intended to make a lecture tour and to raise funds to establish a school in Jamaica modeled after Washington’s Institute. Garvey visited Tuskegee, and afterward, visited with a number of black leaders.
After moving to New York, he found work as a printer by day. He was influenced by Hubert Harrison. At night he would speak on street corners, much as he did in London’s Hyde Park. Garvey thought there was a leadership vacuum among African Americans. On 9 May 1916, he held his first public lecture in New York City at St Mark’s Church in the Bowery and undertook a 38-state speaking tour.
The next year in May 1917, Garvey and thirteen others formed the first UNIA division outside Jamaica. They began advancing ideas to promote social, political, and economic freedom for black people. On July 2nd, the East St. Louis riots broke out. On 8 July, Garvey delivered an address, entitled “The Conspiracy of the East St. Louis Riots”, at Lafayette Hall in Harlem. During the speech, he declared the riot was “one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind”, condemning America’s claims to represent democracy when black people were victimized “for no other reason than they are black people seeking an industrial chance in a country that they have laboured for three hundred years to make great”. It is “a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.” Marcus Garvey worked to develop a program to improve the conditions of ethnic Africans “at home and abroad” under UNIA auspices. On 17 August 1918, he began publishing the Negro World newspaper in New York, which was widely distributed. He used this as his public relations to encourage the growthof the UNIA .Doing this platform allowed the membership of the organization to gwo over two million as records show.
On 27 June 1919, the UNIA set up its first business, incorporating the Black Star Line of Delaware, with Garvey as President. By September, it acquired its first ship. Much fanfare surrounded the inspection of the S.S. Yarmouth and its rechristening as the S.S. Frederick Douglass on 14 September 1919. Such a rapid accomplishment garnered attention from many. During the first year, the Black Star Line’s stock sales brought in $600,000. This caused it to be successful during that year. It had numerous problems during the next two years: mechanical breakdowns on its ships, what it said were incompetent workers and poor record keeping. The officers were eventually accused of mail fraud.
Edwin P. Kilroe, Assistant District Attorney in the District Attorney’s office of the County of New York, began an investigation into the activities of the UNIA. He never filed charges against Garvey or other officers. After being called to Kilroe’s office numerous times for questioning, Garvey wrote an editorial on the assistant DA’s activities for the Negro World. Kilroe had Garvey arrested and indicted for criminal libel but dismissed the charges after Garvey published a retraction.
On 14 October 1919, Garvey received a visit in his Harlem office from George Tyler, who claimed Kilroe “had sent him” to get the leader. Tyler pulled a .38-caliber revolver and fired four shots, wounding Garvey in the right leg and scalp. Garvey’s secretary Amy quickly arranged to get Garvey taken to the hospital for treatment, and Tyler was arrested. The next day, Tyler committed suicide by leaping from the third floor of the Harlem jail as he was being taken to his arraignment.
By August 1920, the UNIA claimed four million members. The number has been questioned because of the organization’s poor record keeping.That month, the International Convention of the UNIA was held. With delegates from all over the world attending, 25,000 people filled Madison Square Garden on 1 August 1920 to hear Marcus Garvey speak. Over the next couple of years, Garvey’s movement was able to attract an enormous number of followers. Reasons for this included the cultural revolution of the Harlem Renaissance, the large number of West Indians who immigrated to New York, and the appeal of the slogan “One Aim, One God, One Destiny,” to black veterans of the first World War.
Garvey also established the business, the Negro Factories Corporation. He planned to develop the businesses to manufacture every marketable commodity in every big U.S. industrial center, as well as in Central America, the West Indies, and Africa. Related endeavors included a grocery chain, restaurant, publishing house, and other businesses.
Convinced that black people should have a permanent homeland in Africa, Garvey sought to develop Liberia. It had been founded by the American Colonization Society in the 19th century as a colony for free blacks from the United States. Garvey launched the Liberia program in 1920, intended to build colleges, industrial plants, and railroads as part of an industrial base from which to operate. He abandoned the program in the mid-1920s after much opposition from European powers with interests in Liberia. In response to American suggestions that he wanted to take all ethnic Africans of the Diaspora back to Africa, he wrote, “We do not want all the Negroes in Africa. Some are no good here, and naturally will be no good there.
Garvey died in London on 10 June 1940, at the age of 52, having suffered two strokes, putatively after reading a mistaken, and negative, obituary of himself in the Chicago Defender in January earlier that same year, which stated, in part, that Garvey died “broke, alone and unpopular”. Due to travel restrictions during World War II, his body was interred within the lower crypt in St. Mary’s Catholic cemetery in London near Kensal Green Cemetery. Twenty years later, his body was removed from the shelves of the lower crypt and taken to Jamaica, where the government proclaimed him Jamaica’s first national hero and re-interred him at a shrine in the National Heroes Park.
In London, there are no markings at the cemetery where his body was held for many of those of the African and Caribbean diaspora to pay tribute to this Jamaican national hero. However, a blue plaque was placed outside the house where Garvey once resided at 53 Talgarth Road, Kensington, and a second blue plaque was placed outside 2 Beaumont Crescent, London, the offices of the UNIA where Marcus Garvey and UNIA members conducted their important work. There is also a small park named after him between North End Road and Hammersmith Road near Olympia.
Garvey is remembered through a number of memorials worldwide. Most of them are in Jamaica, England and the United States; others are in Canada and several nations in Africa. The first of which is the Garvey statue and shrine in Kingston’s National Heroes Park. Among the honors to him in Jamaica are his name upon the Jamaican Ministry of Foreign Affairs; a major highway bearing his name and the Marcus Garvey Scholarship tenable at the University of the West Indies sponsored by The National Association of Jamaican and Supportive Organizations, Inc (NAJASO) since 1988.
Garvey’s birthplace, 32 Market Street, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, has a marker signifying it as a site of importance in the nation’s history.His likeness is on the 20-dollar coin and 25-cent coin. Garvey’s recognition is probably most significant in Kingston, Jamaica. Garvey’s memory is maintained in several locations in Africa. Nairobi, Kenya and Enugu, Nigeria have streets bearing his name, while the township of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa, put his name on an entire neighborhood. Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, Nigeria has a library named for him. A bust of Garvey was created and is on display at a park in the central region in Ghana, along with one of Martin Luther King.
Honors, Awards, and Legacy
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The Marcus Garvey Library is inside the Tottenham Green Leisure Centre building in North London.
There is a street named Marcus Garvey Way in Brixton, London.
A blue plaque marks 53 Talgarth Road, Hammersmith, London, as his residence.
GARVEY, Marcus (1887–1940) Pan-Africanist Leader, died here, 53 Talgarth Road, W14. [Hammersmith and Fulham 2005]
The Marcus Garvey Centre in Lenton, Nottingham, England, is named in his honorThere is a statue of Garvey in Willesden Green Library, Brent, London.
There is a memorial park behind Hammersmith Road, named after him called Marcus Garvey Park
The United States is the country where Garvey not only rose to prominence but also cultivated many of his ideas.
Harlem, in New York City, was the site of the UNIA Liberty Hall and many events of significance in Garvey’s life. There is a park bearing his name and a New York Public Library branch dedicated to him, as well. A major street bears his name in the historically African-American Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
A Marcus Garvey Cultural Center, University of Northern Colorado (Greeley, Colorado). The National Association of Jamaican and Supportive Organizations Inc. (NAJASO) founded on 4 July 1977 in Washington DC), based in the United States, named the Annual Scholarship tenable at the University of the West Indies since 1988, the Marcus Garvey Scholarship. Marcus Garvey Festival every year on the third weekend of August at Basu Natural Farms, in Pembroke Township, Illinois. The Universal Hip Hop Parade is held annually in Brooklyn on the Saturday before his birthday to carry on his use of popular culture as a tool of empowerment and to encourage the growth of Black institutions. Since 1980, Garvey’s bust has been housed in the Organization of American States’ Hall of Heroes in Washington, D.C
In Canada, Marcus Garvey Day is held annually on 17 August in Toronto; there is a Marcus Garvey Centre for Unity, in Edmonton, Alberta, and the Marcus Garvey Centre for Leadership and Education in the Jane-Finch area of Toronto.