As we continue our celebration of Caribbean American Heritage Month in a political climate where Black history is censored and under attack, today we explore a key figure in the struggle to establish solidarity between and among the Black peoples of the United States, the Caribbean, and the African continent: Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr.
Garvey was an adherent of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism, and his movement challenged white supremacist views of Black racial inferiority. Garvey’s movement would influence the entire “Black is Beautiful” movement, the Rastafari movement, and inspire a cross-section of Black leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Shirley Chisholm, and Kwame Ture (also known as Stokely Carmichael).
Garvey is a national hero in Jamaica, and his adherents and descendants here in the U.S. are lobbying President Joe Biden—as they did unsuccessfully with President Barack Obama—for Garvey to be granted a posthumous pardon for his 1923 conviction for mail fraud. The conviction was engineered by a young J. Edgar Hoover, who was at that time the director of the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division.
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The U.S. National Archives has a brief biography of Garvey on their Pieces of History blog with related archival documents, posted for Caribbean-American Heritage Month and written by Vincent Bartholomew from the National Archives History Office.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., was born on August 17, 1887, in Saint Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. As a son of a stone mason in the British colonial West Indies, he experienced oppression and was considered in the lowest position in the colonialist social hierarchy. In 1914, however, after he learned about colonial Africa from Booker T. Washington’s book Up From Slavery, Garvey envisioned a movement that would unify black people around the world.
After the establishment the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica in 1914, Garvey moved to Harlem and established the New York branch of the UNIA in 1917. Through this forum Garvey’s Pan-African and Black Nationalist message became known as “Garveyism.”
Pan-Africanism is the principle or advocacy of the political union of all the indigenous and dispersed ethnic groups of African descent. Garvey asked, “‘Where is the black man‘s Government?’ ‘Where is his King and his kingdom?’ ‘Where is his President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?’ I could not find them, and then I declared ‘I will help make them.’” In order to answer these questions Garvey and the UNIA began the Black Star Line in 1919.
The mission of the Black Star Line was to “foster black trade, to transport passengers between America, Caribbean, and Africa, and to serve as a symbol of black grandeur and enterprise.” By 1920, the Black Star Line had three ships, and its flagship, the SS Yarmouth, made its maiden voyage in November 1919. The Black Star Line promoted the UNIA as its most prominent and powerful recruiting asset and sold a total of 96,285 shares of the Black Star Line.
Garvey died in England in exile from the United States on June 10, 1940.
Biography.com explained his deportation to Jamaica and the end of his life:
In 1922, Garvey and three other U.N.I.A. officials were charged with mail fraud involving the Black Star Line. The trial records indicate several improprieties occurred in the prosecution of the case. It didn’t help that the shipping line’s books contained many accounting irregularities. On June 23, 1923, Garvey was convicted and sentenced to prison for five years. Claiming to be a victim of a politically motivated miscarriage of justice, Garvey appealed his conviction, but was denied. In 1927 he was released from prison and deported to Jamaica.
Garvey continued his political activism and the work of U.N.I.A. in Jamaica, and then moved to London in 1935. But he did not command the same influence he had earlier. Perhaps in desperation or maybe in delusion, Garvey collaborated with outspoken segregationist and white supremacist Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi to promote a reparations scheme. The Greater Liberia Act of 1939 would deport 12 million African Americans to Liberia at federal expense to relieve unemployment. The act failed in Congress, and Garvey lost even more support among the Black population.
Garvey died in London in 1940 after several strokes. Due to travel restrictions during World War II, his body was interred in London. In 1964, his remains were exhumed 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. But his memory and influence remain. His message of pride and dignity inspired many in the early days of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In tribute to his many contributions, Garvey’s bust has been displayed in the Organization of American States’ Hall of Heroes in Washington, D.C. The country of Ghana has named its shipping line the Black Star Line and its national soccer team the Black Stars, in honor of Garvey.
Here are two short videos covering his life, movement, and impact. The first is from Dr. Henry Louis Gates’ “Black History in Two Minutes” series.
Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica and experienced the impacts of colonization at the hands of the British. As a result, he developed a passion for improving race relations and launched a Black Nationalism movement that would seek to elevate black people throughout the world. In 1914, Garvey created the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). This revolutionary social movement came at a time when black Americans were being lynched and ridiculed in the media. After immigrating to the United States in 1916, Garvey’s mission offered hope to black Americans with the promise of emigrating black people back to Africa. As his movement grew, the United States government monitored him. He was eventually arrested, convicted, and banned from entering the country.In this episode of Black History In Two Minutes or So … we take a closer look at Garvey’s legacy and his contribution to the largest black political movement ever.
The second is a short biographical clip from Biography.com, which profiles him in print on their website:
Marcus Garvey: Look For Me in the Whirlwind, the first comprehensive documentary to tell the life story of this controversial leader, uses a wealth of material from the Garvey movement-written documents, film and photographs to reveal what motivated a poor Jamaican to set up an international organization for the African diaspora, what led to his early successes, and why he died lonely and forgotten. Among the most powerful sequences in the film are articulate, fiery interviews with the men and women whose parents joined the Garvey movement more than 80 years ago. Together they reveal how revolutionary Garvey’s ideas were to a new generation of African Americans,West Indians and Africans and how he invested hundreds of thousands of black men and women with a new-found sense of racial pride.
There is also a full transcript.
This is a short review of the documentary, with clips, after a screening of the film at the Marcus Garvey Centre in Tottenham, England, in 2012:
Efforts to clear Garvey’s name and gain him a posthumous pardon have been spearheaded by his son, Dr. Julius Garvey. The Washington Post’s DeNeen L. Brown covered the story in 2021:
The request by Garvey’s family comes as the Biden administration confronts increasing pressure to grant presidential pardons to correct historic racial injustices and counter former presidents’ issuances of pardons and sentence commutations to wealthy allies and political supporters.
White House officials did not respond to requests for comment on a potential pardon of Garvey for his 1923 conviction for mail fraud.
“President Biden has made statements in his inaugural address about the dream for justice not to be delayed any longer,” said one of Garvey’s sons, Julius Garvey, 88, a vascular surgeon who lives in New York. “We will take him at his word. Racial injustice was done to my father more than 100 years ago. He committed no crime. What he was trying to do was elevate the status of African Americans and Africans across the world.”
Author and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates talks with Dr. Garvey about his father and his efforts to clear his name in this video, posted in August 2022. A key point raised in the discussion is the role of Hoover and the FBI in setting up Garvey, and Hoover’s obsession with going after Black leaders.
You can get more information about Dr. Garvey’s efforts at the Justice4Garvey website.
Wax Poetics covers another aspect of Garvey’s impact: music.
Who besides Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, Mother Mary, or Jah has inspired the musical or poetic output of artists such as Max Roach, Burning Spear, Randy Weston, Sinéad O’Connor, Culture, Tarrus Riley, Majek Fashek, the Skatalites; various calypso performers of solid reputation in New York (the “Calypso King” Wilmoth Houdini among them), Panama, and Costa Rica; the Mighty Diamonds, Big Youth, Mutabaruka, and one quietly fiery Faybiene Miranda?
…
Burning Spear first paid homage to the early Black nationalist firebrand in 1975 in his masterpiece of an album titled, appropriately, Marcus Garvey. That was after he had already won notice working out of the stable of producer Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One in Kingston. Marcus Garvey was produced by Ruby, known as the operator of a sternum-shaking sound system in Ocho Rios. (Sound systems, with tube-driven strato-volume and bottomless bass, were fixtures for dancing and serious music-listening in yards in the capital and elsewhere.) Backers on the LP’s tracks were the hard-working Black Disciples. …
When the Marcus Garvey LP was brought out on the Island label in 1975, sales flew past those for Marley’s Natty Dread, Wallace recalled, speaking to longtime reggae writer David Katz for the liner notes of the 2010 reissue of Marcus Garvey. “It was unbelievable,” he said. Burning Spear became an international star, touring the U.S. and the U.K., among other places. He—for Winston Rodney soon became synonymous with Burning Spear, the singing core of which was a trio at the time—put on a memorable concert in New York’s Central Park in 1976.
Here’s Winston Rodney/Burning Spear’s “Marcus Garvey.” Give it a listen.
I hope that Garvey will at some point in time receive that pardon. Until then, it is important that more people understand his history and impact.
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