Marcus Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was born on 17 August 1887 in St Ann's Bay, Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children, most of whom died in childhood. His father was a stonemason with a large personal library, and Garvey later credited his own love of reading and self-education to childhood access to those books. He left school around age fourteen to apprentice as a printer, a trade that would later prove essential to his career as a publisher and organiser.

Garvey travelled through Central America in his early twenties, working on banana plantations and railways, where he witnessed the harsh treatment of Black workers under colonial and corporate employers. He later travelled to London, where he attended lectures at Birkbeck College and worked for the pan-African journal African Times and Orient Review, an experience that sharpened his political thinking around race, colonialism and the economic exploitation of Black labour worldwide.

Returning to Jamaica in 1914, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), initially a modest self-help and educational organisation. In 1916 he relocated to Harlem, New York, then a rapidly growing centre of Black cultural and political life, and rebuilt UNIA there with dramatically greater ambition: economic self-sufficiency, racial pride, and eventual political self-determination for people of African descent worldwide.

Under Garvey's leadership UNIA grew explosively, claiming over a thousand branches across more than 40 countries and millions of members and supporters at its peak — making it the largest Pan-African organisation in history. Garvey founded the newspaper Negro World, held massive annual conventions in Harlem drawing tens of thousands of attendees, and launched the Black Star Line, a shipping company intended to facilitate trade among Black communities across the Americas, Caribbean and Africa, and eventually to support emigration to Africa.

The Black Star Line ultimately failed financially, undermined by mismanagement, sabotage from opponents, and outright fraud by some employees. In 1923 Garvey was convicted of mail fraud connected to the shipping venture, in a trial that many historians regard as politically motivated and marked by an inadequate defence; he served two years in prison before President Coolidge commuted his sentence and had him deported to Jamaica in 1927 as an undesirable alien.

Garvey continued his political organising from Jamaica and later London, though UNIA never regained its earlier scale. He died in London in 1940, in relative obscurity by comparison to his earlier fame. His influence, however, proved enduring: his philosophy of Black pride and self-reliance directly shaped later leaders including Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey's ideas fed into the Rastafari movement's veneration of him as a prophet, and Malcolm X's own father was a Garveyite organiser. In 1969 Garvey was posthumously named Jamaica's first National Hero.