Marcus Garvey called himself Provisional President of Africa but never set foot there
Marcus Garvey built a mass movement urging people of African descent to unite, take pride in themselves and, for some, return to Africa. He launched a shipping line to carry them. Yet he never visited the continent, and his career ended with a fraud conviction, deportation and a death in London.
Saint Ann's Bay in colonial Jamaica was his birthplace, on 17 August 1887; he was the son of a self-taught stonemason and a domestic servant. His surname, of Irish origin, came from the family's former enslavers. School ended at 14 because the family could not pay for more, and he was apprenticed to his godfather, a printer. In Kingston he rose to become the first Afro-Jamaican foreman at a printing firm, survived the 1907 earthquake sleeping outdoors for months, and was sacked after helping lead a failed print workers' strike in 1908.
Wandering shaped his politics. As a timekeeper on a United Fruit Company banana plantation in Costa Rica he grew angry at how labourers were treated and started a bilingual paper. He then worked his way through Central America and in 1912 sailed to London, where he laboured at the docks, spoke at Speakers' Corner and worked for the African Times and Orient Review. In the British Museum library he read Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, and on the voyage home in 1914 conversations with a missionary about colonial Africa sparked his idea of a worldwide movement.
He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica that year and moved to Harlem in 1916. Believing Black communities should be economically independent, he created the Negro World newspaper and in 1919 headed the Black Star Line, meant to link North America with Africa. In 1923 he was convicted of mail fraud over its stock sales and spent nearly two years in an Atlanta penitentiary before President Calvin Coolidge commuted the sentence and he was deported in 1927.
His legacy cuts both ways. Critics such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who favoured integration, deplored his links with the Ku Klux Klan and his hostility towards Jews and mixed-race people. Others credit him with instilling pride amid poverty and colonialism. He died in London in 1940, and Jamaica later made him its first national hero; Rastafari and Black Power both drew on his ideas.
Source: Marcus Garvey
