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Marcus Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He was the leader of the largest organized mass movement in black history. In his own time he was hailed as a redeemer, a "Black Moses." Though he failed to realize all his objectives, his movement still represents a liberation from the psychological bondage of racial inferiority. Garvey's movement was not the first. As far back at the 18th Century there have been organized efforts to re-settle slaves, former slaves, and free blacks to lands of their own. Some experienced some success, but most, like Garvey's failed.

Garvey was born on 17 August 1887 in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica. He left school at 14, worked as a printer, joined Jamaican nationalist organizations, toured Central America, and spent time in London.  On his return to Jamaica, he aspired to open a Tuskegee-type industrial training school. In 1916 he came to America at Booker T. Washington's invitation, but arrived just after Washington died.

Garvey arrived in America at the dawn of the "New Negro" era. Black discontent, punctuated by East St. Louis's bloody race riots in 1917 and intensified by postwar disillusionment, peaked in 1919's Red Summer. Shortly after arriving, Garvey embarked upon a period of travel and lecturing. When he settled in New York City, he organized a chapter of the UNIA, which he had earlier founded in Jamaica as a fraternal organization. Drawing on a gift for oratory, he melded Jamaican peasant aspirations for economic and cultural independence with the American gospel of success to create a new gospel of racial pride. "Garveyism" eventually evolved into a religion of success, inspiring millions of black people who sought relief from racism.

To enrich and strengthen his movement, Garvey created a shipping line to transport passengers between America, the Caribbean, and Africa, and to serve as a symbol of black grandeur and enterprise. The UNIA incorporated the Black Star Line in 1919. The line's flagship, the S.S. Yarmouth, made its maiden voyage in November and two other ships joined the line in 1920. The Black Star Line became a powerful recruiting tool for the UNIA, but it was ultimately sunk by expensive repairs, discontented crews, and top-level mismanagement and corruption.

By 1920 the UNIA had hundreds of chapters worldwide; it hosted international conventions and published the Negro World, a widely disseminated weekly that was soon banned in many parts of Africa and the Caribbean. Over the next few years the movement began to unravel under the strains of internal dissension, opposition from black critics, and constant government harassment. In 1922 the federal government indicted Garvey on mail fraud charges stemming from Black Star Line promotional claims and he suspended all BSL operations. (Two years later, the UNIA created another line, the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Co., but it, too, failed.) Garvey was sentenced to prison. The government later commuted his sentence, only to deport him back to Jamaica in November 1927. Beaten down by U.S. hypocrisy Garvey never returned to America. In his last years he slid into such obscurity that he suffered the final indignity of reading his own obituaries a month before his 10 June 1940 death.

Copyright © 1995 The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers Project, UCLA

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