02/10/2023
THE GREAT MARCUS GARVEY!!
Born in Jamaica, on 17 August 1887, the youngest of 11 children.
he was an Supporter for the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements
He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League.
He left school and became a printer's apprentice where he led a strike for higher wages. From 1910 to 1912, Garvey travelled in South and Central America and also visited London.
He travelled to London in 1912 and stayed in England for two years. During this time he paid close attention to the controversy between Ireland and England concerning Ireland's independence. He was also exposed to the ideas and writings of a group of black colonial writers that came together in London around the African Times and Orient Review. Nationalism in both Ireland and Africa along with ideas such as race conservation undoubtedly had an impact on Garvey.
He later remembered that the most influential experience of his stay in London was reading Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up From Slavery. Washington believed African Americans needed to improve themselves first, showing whites in America that they deserved equal rights.
Although politically involved behind the scenes, Washington repeatedly claimed that African Americans would not benefit from political activism and started an industrial training school in Alabama that embodied his own philosophy of self-help. Garvey embraced Washington's ideas and returned to Jamaica in 1914 to found the UNIA with the motto "One God! One Aim! One Destiny!"
After traveling in Central America and living in London from 1912 to 1914, he returned to Jamaica, where, with a group of friends, he founded (August 1, 1914) the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League, usually called the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which sought, among other things, to build in Africa a Black-governed nation.
After arriving in New York in 1916, he founded the Negro World newspaper, an international shipping company called Black Star Line to provide transportation to Africa.
He established the headquarters of the UNIA in New York in 1917 and began to spread a message of black nationalism and the eventual return to Africa of all people of African descent. His brand of black nationalism had three components—unity, pride in the African cultural heritage, and complete autonomy. Garvey believed people of African descent could establish a great independent nation in their ancient homeland of Africa.
He took the self-help message of Washington and adapted it to the situation he saw in America, taking a somewhat individualistic, integrationist philosophy and turning it into a more corporate, politically-minded, nation-building message.
and the Negro Factories Corporation and the Black Star Line (1919), as well as a chain of restaurants and grocery stores, laundries, a hotel, and a printing press.. Garvey advanced a Pan-African philosophy which inspired a global mass movement, known as Garveyism.
Marcus Garvey and his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), represent the largest mass movement in African-American history.
By 1919 the rising “Black Moses” claimed a following of about 2,000,000, though the exact number of association members was never clear. From the platform of the Association’s Liberty Hall in Harlem, he spoke of a “new Negro,” proud of being Black. His newspaper, Negro World, told of the exploits of heroes of the race and of the splendours of African culture. He taught that Blacks would be respected only when they were economically strong, and he preached an independent Black economy within the framework of white capitalism.
Proclaiming a black nationalist "Back to Africa" message, Garvey and the UNIA established 700 branches in thirty-eight states by the early 1920s.
He reached the height of his power in 1920, when he presided at an international convention in Liberty Hall, with delegates present from 25 countries. The affair was climaxed by a parade of 50,000 through the streets of Harlem
To promote unity, Garvey encouraged African Americans to be concerned with themselves first. He stated after World War One that "[t]he first dying that is to be done by the black man in the future will be done to make himself free. And then when we are finished, if we have any charity to bestow, we may die for the white man. But as for me, I think I have stopped dying for him." Black people had to do the work that success and independence demanded, and, most important, they had to do that work for themselves.
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