Born: 17 August 1887
Died: London, England, United Kingdom, June 10th 1940
Activity/Profession: Black Nationalist (1887–1940)
Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in his native Jamaica in 1914, and moved it to Harlem in 1916. The organization encouraged self-help and ethnic pride, sponsored black-owned business enterprises, and promoted Pan-African unity. Thanks to Garvey's flamboyant leadership, his popular Negro World newspaper, and colorful parades and mass rallies, the UNIA's membership soared to perhaps a million worldwide in the early 1920s. While Garvey's dream of a mass return of American blacks to Africa remained unfulfilled, he did establish, in 1920, the Negro Factories Corporation, which sponsored black businesses, and organized the ocean-going Black Star Line in 1919 to transport passengers and facilitate trade among black businesses in Africa and the Americas. Amid accusations by critics of corruption and mismanagement in these enterprises—the Black Star Line folded in 1922—Garvey was indicted on federal charges of mail fraud and, in 1925, sentenced to five years in prison. President Calvin Coolidge commuted Garvey's sentence in 1927 and deported him to Jamaica. Historians disagree over whether Garvey's undoing resulted from his own failings or from attacks by other civil rights leaders and the U.S. In either case, Garvey's urban mass movement, the first among African Americans, marked a significant chapter in the history of black nationalism. He attracted many working-class blacks who were lukewarm to middle-class civil rights leaders and organizations like W.E.B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He combined the militancy of Du Bois with the capitalistic practicality of Booker T. Washington, one of Garvey's sources of inspiration. Though some scholars place Garvey outside the main current of African-American nationalism, some later black nationalists—notably Malcolm X—traced their roots to the Garvey movement.
