Amy Jacques Garvey

Amy Euphemia Jacques was born on 31 December 1895 in Kingston, Jamaica, to George Samuel and Charlotte Henrietta Jacques, a middle-class family. Her father urged her to read newspapers and periodicals to broaden her knowledge of the world, and she attended St Patrick's School and Deaconess High School. In 1917 she left Jamaica for the United States, and settled in Harlem.

After hearing Marcus Garvey speak, she became involved in the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the UNIA, and soon became his private secretary and office manager at its New York headquarters. She served as secretary of the Negro Factories Corporation and was part of the work behind the Negro World, the UNIA's weekly newspaper, which at its peak had a circulation of about 200,000. They married in 1922.

In the Negro World she edited the women's page, Our Women and What They Think, which gave space to the struggles of Black women, and from 1924 to 1927 she served as associate editor. When Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud she took on a leading role in the movement, raising money for his legal defence and speaking across the country. She compiled and edited the two volumes of The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, in 1923 and 1925, which she personally marketed to raise funds.

After Garvey was deported from the United States in 1927, she joined him in Jamaica, where their sons Marcus Jr and Julius were born, in 1930 and 1933. When he died in London in 1940 she carried on his work. In the 1940s she was a contributing editor of the Black nationalist journal The African in Harlem, and she founded the African Study Circle of the World in Jamaica.

Later in life she wrote Garvey and Garveyism (1963) and Black Power in America (1968), and she visited Nigeria in 1963. Jamaica's Institute of Jamaica awarded her the Musgrave Medal in 1971 for her work on the philosophy of Garveyism. She died in Kingston on 25 July 1973, aged 77, and is remembered as the architect of the Garvey legacy, one of the first Black women journalists and publishers of her day.