Marcus Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, and rose to become the most influential Black nationalist organizer of the early twentieth century. Largely self-educated after leaving school at fourteen, he traveled through Central America and Britain, where he witnessed the conditions of Black workers under colonial and plantation capitalism. These experiences, combined with his reading of Booker T. Washington's "Up From Slavery," convinced him that Black people needed economic self-sufficiency and political unity across the diaspora.

In 1914 he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica, and after relocating to Harlem in 1916 built it into the largest Black mass movement in history, claiming millions of members and sympathizers across the United States, Caribbean, Central America, and Africa. Through the newspaper Negro World, mass parades, and oratory, Garvey preached Black pride, African redemption, and economic independence. His Black Star Line shipping company, launched in 1919, aimed to create commercial links among Black communities worldwide and to eventually transport settlers to Liberia, embodying his doctrine of "Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad."

Garvey's philosophy, articulated in speeches later compiled by Amy Jacques Garvey as "Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey" (1923, 1925), fused race pride, Christian providence, and capitalist enterprise into a program he called the "Back to Africa" movement, though he more precisely sought African political sovereignty and diaspora investment rather than mass literal resettlement. He clashed bitterly with the NAACP and W.E.B. Du Bois, whom he accused of favoring integration and a "talented tenth" elite over mass Black self-determination.

The U.S. government, through J. Edgar Hoover's early Bureau of Investigation, targeted Garvey for mail fraud related to the Black Star Line's stock sales; he was convicted in 1923, imprisoned in 1925, and deported to Jamaica in 1927 after Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence. He continued organizing in Jamaica and London until his death in 1940. His ideas directly shaped the Nation of Islam, Rastafarianism, Kwame Nkrumah's Pan-Africanism, and later Black Power thought, making him a foundational figure in twentieth-century Black nationalist and Pan-African politics.