Marcus Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. (17 August 1887 – 10 June 1940) was a Jamaican political activist. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL, commonly known as UNIA), through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa.

Ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist, Garvey's ideas are known as Garveyism. Garvey was born to a moderately prosperous Afro-Jamaican family in Saint Ann's Bay and was apprenticed into the print trade as a teenager. Working in Kingston, he became involved in trade unionism before living briefly in Costa Rica, Panama, and England. On returning to Jamaica, he founded UNIA in 1914. In 1916, he relocated to the United States and founded a UNIA branch in New York City's Harlem. Emphasising unity within the African diaspora, he campaigned to end European colonial rule in Africa and supported the continent's unification. He envisioned a unified Africa as a one-party state, led by himself, that would pass laws to promote black racial purity. Although he never visited Africa, he remained committed to the Back-to-Africa movement, arguing that part of the diaspora should migrate there. Garveyist ideas gained increasing popularity, and UNIA's membership expanded. As a black separatist, he established links with white racists such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) who shared his racial separatist views. This created a divide between Garvey and prominent African-American civil rights activists like W. E. B. Du Bois, who promoted racial integration. Believing that black people should be financially independent from white-dominated societies, Garvey launched various businesses in the U.S., including the Negro Factories Corporation and Negro World newspaper. In 1919, he became President of the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company, designed to forge a link between North America and Africa and facilitate African-American migration to Liberia. In 1923 Garvey was convicted of mail fraud for selling the company's stock, and was imprisoned in the United States Penitentiary, Atlanta for nearly two years. Garvey blamed Jews, claiming that they were prejudiced against him because of his links to the KKK.