Garvey: Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on August 17^th, 1887 in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, of humble parentage. His father, a master mason by trade and a deacon of the Methodist Church by calling, was also something of a “bush” lawyer, being unusually literate for one of his class. Marcus inherited his father’s love of words, both spoken and written, and after an elementary education became a printer’s apprentice in 1903. He left his home town in 1906 and moved to Kingston where he worked in the government printing office and took part in the printer’s strike in 1907. In the Jamaican capital he was influenced by the writings of Dr. Robert Love in the Jamaica Advocate and, seeking to widen his political experience, between 1910 and 1912 he traveled widely in Central America visiting Belize on two occasions. In 1912, desirous of furthering his education, he took himself to the United Kingdom where, in London, he attended lectures at Birbeck College, indulged in some journalism, and became interested in colonial problems through his association with the Egyptian nationalist, Duse Mohammad Ali and his Africa Times and Orient Review

On returning to Jamaica he founded the United Negro Improvement Association and the African Communities League (hereafter UNIA and ACL) in August, 1914, and proposed as a first step in his programme to set up a “Jamaica Tuskegee” on the lines of Booker T. Washington’s institute in the U.S.A. To further this end and to seek Booker T.’s aid, Garvey visited the U.S. in 1916. The visit, according to Lewis, was “the decisive factor in his political career.” After a few weeks in New York, his programme changed “from a reformist one to one of militant black nationalism” and, in 1917, the headquarters of the UNIA was moved from Kingston to Harlem as mass support for Garvey’s institution swept through blacks in the U.S.. This support stemmed not only from the innovative nature of Garvey’s ideas but also from the black diaspora which had taken place in the U.S. since 1914 and black disillusionment with white attitudes after 1918. In 1919, Garvey set up various black organizations within the UNIA as membership grew and as UNIA branches proliferated throughout the U.S., the Caribbean and Central America. The Black Star Line purchased three ships, the Negro Factories Corporations created and patronized black businesses, the Black Nurses brought succour to the black downtrodden and the African Orthodox church sought to set up a black church with a black god. Moreover, the redemption of Africa in the guise of the creation of a black homeland in Liberia was given substance by the encouragement of the Liberian Government, the various deputations of UNIA staff sent to Liberia to pave the way, and the ennoblement of Liberian Officials into the UNIA hierarchy.

     “One Aim, One God, One Destiny”, the motto of the UNIA was trumpeted around the world through the pages of Garvey’s newspaper, The Negro World. This paper “Devoted Solely to the Interests of the Negro Race” boasted a circulation of 50,000, a readership of 250,000 and in 1920 was announcing the 1^st Convention of the UNIA to be held in New York in August of that year. That Convention took the streets of Harlem by storm with demonstrations and parades from the 700 divisions of the UNIA in the U.S. and the attendance of 2,000 delegates from 25 countries. It produced a new constitution for the organization- a document more elaborate and aggressive than the “Aims and Objectives” laid down in 1914.The declaration of the rights of Negro People in the World emphasized black struggle against white discrimination and imperialism, it stressed self-determination and separation and looked forward to the establishment of an independent negro nation in Africa. In preparation for this eventuality Garvey was named as Provisional President of Africa and a system of African awards and honours was created.

The 1921 Convention was outwardly equally successful and impressive but the seeds of dissolution had already been sown. Much of the money raised for the Liberian project had been diverted to keep the Black Star Line afloat. There had been continual trouble with its three ships- he Yarmouth, Shadyside and Kawanha- and the whole business had been “badly managed, and by no means least, subject to discrimination and harassment’. The same problem had also beset the Liberian project, for the government of that country, while initially grateful for the inputs of the UNIA cash, came under increasing pressure from the U.S. and British governments to cut its connection with Garvey. Eventually, the Liberians submitted to imperial dictation and sold off the lands earmarked for the UNIA’s African homeland to the Firestone Rubber Company, a U.S. multinational.

These difficulties caused the UNIA leadership to throw good money after bad and it was the means by which Garvey raised money for the Black Star Line which landed him in court. In 1923 he was convicted on very dubious evidence of fraudulent use of the U.S. mail and, after an appeal was dismissed, given a five year prison sentence.

 His two years in the Atlanta penitentiary were to see the break up of his organization. Amy Jaques, his second wife, colleague and biographer sought to keep the UNIA intact by the publication of the two volumes of The Philosophy and Opinion of Marcus Garvey, but even this could not stem the internecine rivalry and division which broke out amongst the UNIA leadership after her husband’s incarceration. His release in 1927 after a pardon from the President Coolidge only exacerbated the situation as he was immediately deported to Jamaica where he reconstituted the UNIA. However, the leadership in the U.S. (Vinton Davis and Lionel Francis) claimed that their organization – the UNIA Incorporated – was the true church and Garvey’s UNIA Unincorporated in Jamaica was a heretical splinter group. It was this division which led to the litigation over the Mortar Estate in both Belize and the U.K. and the eventual passage to Belize of Lionel Francis.

In 1928, Garvey again came to Belize from Jamaica in order to consult his Belize lawyer and he followed this up with trips to Britain and Europe, where in Geneva, he petitioned the League of Nations calling for that body to establish a black African Independent State. That appeal went unheeded and the last ten years of his life are normally portrayed as an anti-climax after the heady events of 1920s. The Sixth Convention of the UNIA held in Kingston in 1929 was well attended but it was the last. Garvey thereafter became involved in Jamaican politics, creating a newspaper- The Blackman-, being elected to the Kingston City Council and standing unsuccessfully for the Jamaican Legislative Council. The disappointing turnout for the Seventh Convention in 1934 persuaded Garvey to move himself and the UNIA headquarter to London where he could better lobby colonial issues. In 1936 and 1938 he presided over small gatherings of the UNIA in Toronto and set up a short-lived school of African philosophy but illness was already sapping his vitality. In May 1940 he suffered a stroke and in June died at the age of 52. His death went largely unnoticed in a U.K. already at war with Germany, but later, the London County Council honoured him with a blue plaque in West Kensington and his organization and memory were kept alive by Amy Jaques until her death in 1973.

Much of Garvey’s teaching appealed as much to the psychological as it did to the practical and, as he was sometimes ambiguous to his writings or chose not to define his terms and as he modified his views over the decades, it is not easy to pinpoint his stand on every issue. However certain basic beliefs can be said to be the central to Garveyism.

Firstly and above all else, he sought to instill in his followers the belief that black was beautiful. “I shall teach the black man to see beauty in himself” was a constant theme and, indeed, the instillation of racial pride an underlying assumption. In an age where most black had been brought up to belief that the most opposite was the case, Garvey espoused a racial confidence and unity which expunged inferiority and the myth of white dominance, and which brought laboring blacks in town and countryside all over the Americas flocking to join the UNIA. The creation within the UNIA of many black agencies (the Black Cross Nurses, the African Orthodox Church, the UNIA militia), the stress on the teaching of black history and black heroes (George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman) and the supplanting of a white god with a black deity all served to foster racial pride in the individual and a collective belief in a black destiny.       

            Secondly, Garvey held that racial self- belief could only emerge from a strong black commercial and economic base. Although in the early years he held to certain socialist tenets and even had a short-lived love affair with U.S. communist groups, he came to belief that only a healthy and vigorous black capitalism could challenge white political and economic dominance. The foundation of the Black Star Line and African Factories Corporation were attempts to manifest his belief that “Capitalism is necessary to the progress of the world” and, while the UNIA experience of capitalism in action was to be less successful, Garvey held that the fortunes of black capitalist like that of Isaiah in Belize, when properly directed and utilized could serve as both an inspiration and as practical assistance to blacks everywhere. Morter left his fortune to the UNIA for the cause of African redemption and it was the eradication of colonial regimes and their replacements by independent black African states which was the third of Garvey’s objectives. He held that blacks living in Americas- their forefathers had been brought to the New World against their will- were living in an alien and hostile environment and only when an independent black homeland in Africa became a reality could they be fully free. Garvey insisted that “The negro needs a nation and a country of its own ability in the art of human progress.” African redemption was sometimes simplified by Garvey’s detractors as a utopian “Black to Africa” pipedream but Garvey was not so unrealistic as to believe that all American blacks could be repatriated. He “never did advocate for all Negroes to go back to Africa….he was teaching the Negroes that Africa is the only continent in which they could have a government of their own”. Rather, he believed that the bulk of American blacks should strive to end colonialism in Africa and work for African Independence. His many attacks on French and British colonialism, his petition to the League of Nations for the creation of independent African States and his Liberian project were all stepping-stones to the goal of a Pan-African Independence.

    Fourthly, Garvey espoused a racial purity and black nationalism which was at odds with the teachings of the NAACP, W.E.D. Dubois and other black “reformist” leaders of his day. Rejecting the NAACP as “white-aspiration organization” he condemned miscegenation and the values and institution of the liberal democracy in which the leaders of the NAACP sought to better the lives of blacks. Instead, the UNIA stressed the racial purity and exclusiveness; it condemned blacks who tried to distort or hide their blackness, it insisted on the efficacy of racial militancy, firm unequivocal leadership and vibrant demagogy. Indeed, Garvey’s statement that if he were faced with the choice of the NAACP and the KKK, he would opt for the Klan because “of their honesty of purpose towards the Negro” brought a deluge of criticism but he was not condoning the activities of the Klan but condemning the hypocrisy of the integrationist. For he was haunted by the spectre of a multi-racial U.S.A. with blacks and whites “mongrelized” in the same melting pot for, as he constantly insisted, the UNIA believed “in a pure black race just as how all self-respectening whites believe in a pure white race….”

             Finally, in the last analysis, when the rhetoric is dispensed with and the verbiage cut away, one concludes that while Garveyism was a simplistic philosophy which lacked the intellectual muscle of the teachings of the his black contemporaries, it did have a mass appeal. His enthusiastic and international following was due not only to what he said but the way he said it. Garveyism had something for all blacks – economic self-sufficiency, African redemption, militant anti-colonialism and racial pride-and Garvey was not afraid to trumpet his beliefs equivocally and unashamedly across the world. The Negro World and the Blackman delivered the word to the faithful and if much of the message proved utopian and the promises a chimera, the vision was grandiose, the inspiration revolutionary and the legacy unending. Let Sammy Haynes, Garvey’s Belizean lieutenant, have the last word, for, according to Haynes, Garvey “gave something to the Negro which neither time, nor place can retrieve” as he “brought the Negro people of the world into one family through the propagation of a program which gave birth to an international comity…”

1. Lewis, Rupert Marcus Garvey:

2. Ibid. p.57.
3. Ibid. p.69.
4. Cited in Mackie, Liz The Great Marcus Garvey, (Hansrib; London, 1987) p. 53.
5. Ibid. p.55.
6. Garvey, Amy Jaques Garvey and Garveyism (Macmillian; New York, 1974) p.24.
7. Mackie, op.cit. p.55
8.  Ibid. p.58.
9. Ibid. p. 59
10. Cronon, E. David Black Moses: the Story of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA (Univ. of Wisconsin Press; Madison, 1974) p. 40
11. Haynes quoted in Garvey op.cit.,p.226. The brief and superficial account of the man and his ideas can be supplemented by reference to the above cited works and A.J. Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (London; Cass, 1967), T.G. Vincent, Black Power and the Garvey Movement (san Francisco; Ramparts Press, 1968) and the monumental work of Robert Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UN IA papers, Vols.I-IV, (Los Angeles; UCLA Press, 1983-85). Lewis op.cit. Pp.287-98 has an excellent bibliography.

Source: SPEAReports5, Garveyism in Belize   (p. 7-11)