# Marcus Garvey **Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. (17 August 1887, St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica – 10 June 1940, London)**, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and organiser of what the UCLA Garvey Papers Project calls "the largest organized mass movement in black history." He is in this vault because three separate threads run through him: the [[Ethiopianism]] tradition that produced [[Rastafari]], the surveillance-state precedent set by the case against him, and the uncomfortable fact that his racial separatism found white-supremacist admirers in his own lifetime and he did not refuse them. ## The movement The **Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League** was founded in Jamaica in **July 1914** with Amy Ashwood. Garvey reached the United States on **24 March 1916**; the New York division was established in **May 1917**, beginning with seventeen members in a basement. **Liberty Hall** — a former church at 114 West 138th Street in Harlem, seating 6,000 — was dedicated on **27 July 1919** as international headquarters. The **First International Convention**, held throughout **August 1920** at Madison Square Garden with roughly 20,000–25,000 participants, adopted the **Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World** on **13 August 1920** — a preamble of eleven complaints (employment discrimination, racial violence, [[Lynching]], the colonisation of Africa, disenfranchisement, unequal courts) followed by **54 articles** of demands, signed by **122 delegates**. It also proclaimed the **red, black and green** as the flag of the African race. The convention named Garvey **Provisional President of Africa**. The ***Negro World***, founded in 1918, reached a claimed peak circulation of **200,000** and published until 1933. **Britain, France and the United States all worked to suppress it**; colonial administrations banned its sale and even its possession across the Caribbean and Africa, and it circulated anyway, carried by Black seamen aboard the ships of empire. > [!warning] The membership numbers are the least reliable thing about Garvey > Garvey claimed **two million members** in June 1919. Published estimates range from "nearly one million" to "more than ten million." Wikipedia states flatly that he "often exaggerated numbers" and that the UNIA "remained smaller than the better established" [[NAACP]]. > > **What is actually documentable is charters, not members**: divisions rose **from 95 in 1920 to 418 in 1921**, with 422 more awaiting charters; **480 were chartered at the 1921 convention and only 230 at the 1922 convention** — a decline the Garvey Papers editors read as the movement's turn. Jake Thorold's granular study of Britain found the UNIA there "likely never exceeding one hundred members across four divisions." **Cite charters; treat every membership figure as a claim.** ## The Black Star Line and the prosecution The **Black Star Line** was announced 27 April 1919 and incorporated that June, selling shares at **$5** with an initial authorised capital of $500,000, raised within six months to $10 million. Documented sales: **96,285 shares between July 1919 and August 1920**, roughly $481,000, and a further $55,147 in the following year. The ships were the problem. The *Yarmouth* was a worn wartime collier; the *Shadyside*, an excursion boat, sprang a leak and was abandoned on the mudflats at Fort Lee; the *Kanawha* was a deteriorated steam yacht that "blew a boiler and killed a man." By late August 1921 the *Yarmouth* was not operational, the *Kanawha* was disabled and the *Shadyside* was losing money. At trial Garvey admitted **"$600,000 had been blown to the wind."** **The specific fraud charged** was narrow: a Black Star Line brochure carried a photograph of the ship *Orion*, captioned as the *Phyllis Wheatley* — a vessel the company was negotiating to buy and did not own. Garvey was arrested **12 January 1922**, indicted in February, tried from **18 May 1923** before Judge Julian Mack, and convicted on **18 June 1923** on a single count. He had dismissed his lawyer and represented himself without legal training. **All three co-defendants were acquitted.** He was sentenced on 21 June 1923 to five years and a $1,000 fine, entered Atlanta Federal Penitentiary on **8 February 1925**, and served about 33 months before **Calvin Coolidge commuted the sentence on 18 November 1927** and he was deported on 2 December. ### Was it political? **For:** [[J. Edgar Hoover]], then running the Bureau's General Intelligence Division, had decided by 1919 that Garvey was subversive and targeted him for deportation despite acknowledging no federal law had been broken; Robert A. Hill records that the government "began plotting his deportation from at least 1919" and infiltrated the UNIA; the sentence was harsher than comparable convictions of the period; and **nine of the twelve jurors who convicted him later supported commutation**. **Against, or complicating:** the prosecution was actively urged by Black political opponents — on **15 January 1923** eight prominent African Americans petitioned Attorney General Daugherty to continue it, calling Garvey "an unscrupulous demagogue"; and Garvey blamed his conviction on a "Jewish cabal" during the trial, which may itself have affected the sentence. > [!note] On the Bureau's first Black agent — a claim to state carefully > That the Bureau of Investigation infiltrated the UNIA with Black undercover agents is well established. The popular version — that Hoover hired the Bureau's *first* Black agent specifically to do it — is **contested**: Wikipedia asserts it of **James Wormley Jones** (appointed 19 November 1919, "agent 800," who rose to Adjutant General of the UNIA's African Legion), while **the FBI's own history does not**, describing Jones's work as bomb investigations and naming a different agent, **Earl F. Titus** (joined 9 January 1922), as the one assigned to the Garvey investigation. Carry both. See [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]]. ### The pardon **Joe Biden posthumously pardoned Marcus Garvey on 19 January 2025**, 101 years after the conviction, following a fifteen-year campaign led by Howard University law professor **Justin Hansford** with Garvey's son **Dr. Julius Garvey**, and a letter from **21 members of Congress**. Earlier attempts include congressional hearings and resolutions by **John Conyers and Charles Rangel in 1987**. **A pardon is not an exoneration**, and campaigners had sought the latter. Hansford's framing is that the pardon "acknowledges the wrongful nature of his trial and conviction," but advocates continued pressing afterwards for a formal vacatur. ## Two things commonly got wrong **"Back to Africa" is a misstatement.** Garvey did not advocate the mass return of Black people to Africa. In 1923: *"We are not preaching any doctrine to ask all Negroes to leave for Africa. The majority of us will remain here, but we must send our scientists, our artisans..."* And: *"We do not want all the Negroes in Africa. Some are no good here, and naturally will be no good there."* What he wanted was African political independence — "Africa for the Africans" — with a selective skilled vanguard. Britannica notes drily that the UNIA "did not transport a single person to Africa"; the Liberia settlement plan collapsed when **the Liberian government banned the UNIA outright in July 1924**, under Anglo-French pressure and because the Americo-Liberian elite feared UNIA immigrants would challenge its position. **The Klan meeting happened and he defended it.** On **25 June 1922** in Atlanta, Garvey met **Edward Young Clarke**, acting Imperial Wizard of the [[Second Ku Klux Klan]], for two hours. Clarke's account: "We believe America is a white man's country. And we believe the Negro should have a country of his own in Africa." Garvey afterwards told Liberty Hall he had gone "because I wanted to know the truth about the Klan's attitude," characterised the Klan as representing "the spirit, the feeling, the attitude of every white man in America," and said: **"You cannot blame any group of men for organizing in their interest. The Klan is honest."** Colin Grant calls the revelation "the most significant turning point in his popularity." > [!important] ⭐ The separatism was real, and the alliance it produced ran both ways > Garvey wrote in 1924 that "the white race should uphold its racial pride and perpetuate itself, and that the black race should do likewise," opposed racial intermixing as a "race destroying doctrine," and argued against "the constant introduction of mongrel types." In **September 1924** the Virginia white-supremacist writer **Earnest Sevier Cox** formed a working partnership with him on the shared premise that repatriation was the only solution to America's racial question, and **dedicated his 1925 booklet *Let My People Go* to Garvey**. > > This is not a gotcha and it is not a refutation of Garveyism. It is the vault's cleanest demonstration that **a premise, not a purpose, is what makes an alliance possible** — Garvey and Cox wanted opposite futures and agreed completely on the mechanism, and that agreement was enough to work together for three years. Any framework built on the claim that peoples should be territorially separate is available to whoever wants to do the separating, and the [[Remigration]] argument in contemporary European and American politics is the same premise with a different sponsor. Compare [[Great Replacement Theory]]. ## The feud with Du Bois [[W.E.B. Du Bois]] called Garvey "the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world" and asked in *The Crisis* whether he was "either a lunatic or a traitor." Garvey called Du Bois a "misleader," questioned his racial identity — "a little Dutch, a little French, a little Negro... a mulatto" — and concluded "he is a monstrosity." The substance underneath the invective: Du Bois wanted integration into American political and economic life and worked through a "talented tenth"; Garvey wanted Black independence and organised the working-class masses. Du Bois moved toward Marxism; Garvey was emphatically pro-capitalist. **Both were pan-Africanists**, which is what made the fight so bitter. The **"Garvey Must Go"** campaign was run by the Friends of Negro Freedom — A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen and Du Bois — and escalated to threats on both sides; Randolph received a severed hand in the mail. ## Legacy Martin Luther King Jr. called Garvey "the first man of color in the history of the United States to lead and develop a mass movement." Malcolm X's parents were both UNIA organisers — his father **Earl Little** led the Omaha division, his mother **Louise Little** was division secretary and wrote up local activities for the *Negro World*. Kwame Nkrumah credited *The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey* as "the book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm." His body was returned to Jamaica in **1964** and he lies in National Heroes Park, Kingston; the Order of National Hero was conferred in **1969**. ## Garvey and Rastafari [[Rastafari]] treats Garvey as a prophet and holds Nyabinghi assemblies on his birthday. **Garvey rejected the movement.** When Leonard Howell tried to sell pictures of the Emperor at Edelweiss Park, the UNIA's Jamaican headquarters, **Garvey refused permission**; he found Howell's doctrines "un-Christian and degrading to the true African personality" and criticised "fanatical religions" that were "running the people crazy." In ***The Black Man*, Vol. 2 No. 6 (March–April 1937)**, in an editorial titled "The Failure of Haile Selassie as Emperor," he wrote that [[Haile Selassie]] was "a great coward who ran away from his country to save his skin," that "like an imbecilic child he followed every advice and then ultimately ran away," and that "Haile Selassie has proved the incompetence of the Negro for political authority." > [!caution] "Look to Africa, where a black king shall be crowned" — do not attribute this to Garvey > **The line is not authenticated.** No documented Garvey speech or publication contains it, and the date wanders across accounts — 1916, 1920, 1927, "the late 1920s" — which is itself diagnostic of an unsourced quotation. The leading scholarly explanation is **Barry Chevannes, *Rastafari: Roots and Ideology* (Syracuse University Press, 1994)**, which traces the legend not to a speech but to a **1929 UNIA theatrical production, "The Coronation of the King and Queen of Africa,"** a dramatization ending with the crowning of an African king — conflated a year later, by Jamaicans without access to print media, with Haile Selassie's actual coronation. A competing attribution to the Rev. James Morris Webb is weakly evidenced. This vault carries the correction, not the quote. ## See also [[Ethiopianism]] · [[Rastafari]] · [[Haile Selassie]] · [[Ethiopian History Hub]] · [[W.E.B. Du Bois]] · [[NAACP]] · [[Second Ku Klux Klan]] · [[J. Edgar Hoover]] · [[Great Migration]]