MARCUS MOSIAH GARVEY    

PROVISIONAL PRESIDENT OF AFRICA" AND MESSIAH (1887-1940)

MARCUS GARVEY, "Back-to-Africa" leader, was the most widely known of all the agitators for the rights of the Negro and one of the most phenomenal. Arriving in the United States poor and unknown, within four years he became the most talked-of black man in the United States and the West Indies, and perhaps in the world.

He was born in Jamaica, West Indies, of very humble parents. His father was a breaker of stones on the roadway. He himself went to the denominational school and dreamed of doing great things. He read Plutarch and worshipped Napoleon. On Sundays he pumped the organ in the Wesleyan Methodist Church at St. Ann's Bay, of which his parents were members. Later Garvey became a Catholic.

Leaving school at sixteen, he went to work as an apprentice in the printing plant of P. Austin Benjamin in Kingston. Six years later he was the foreman. In the meantime he had been organizing the printers of the city and soon afterward led them in a successful strike for better pay. An elocutionist also, he once won a first prize for his delivery of "Chatham on Liberty." Incited by this success, he began agitation for the political' rights of the blacks of the island, who, though in the majority, were of lower social caste than the mulattoes. He went also among the West Indian laborers who were recruited for work in the neighboring republics and urged them to demand more pay and better working conditions. He was arrested for this in Port Limon, Costa Rica.

In 1911 he went to England, where he attended London University. He then visited the Continent and parts of North Africa, observing social conditions. In 1914 he returned to Jamaica and organized the Jamaica Improvement Association with himself as president and his first wife as secretary. Three years later he came to the United States with the intention of collecting funds for a school on the lines of Tuskegee Institute in Jamaica. But he stayed on in America. His first meeting was held in a Catholic hall in Harlem. The audience was small; his address was badly put together, and the response was weak. However, after he fell from the rostrum to the floor, it was said from hunger, he obtained a better hearing. From New York he traveled southward along the Atlantic seaboard to New Orleans.

His addresses on the race problem aroused the Negroes until by many he came to be regarded as another Moses. In March 1917, he organized a movement, calling it the Universal Negro Improvement Association. He selected twelve disciples to assist him and announced that his aims were to establish a co-fraternity among Negroes the world over; to promote a spirit of love and pride; to assist in civilizing backward Africans; to establish schools and scholarships; and above all to found a strong Negro nation. As an organ for these aims, he founded a weekly newspaper, The Negro World. Contributions of from $1 to $25 were made by the thirteen persons at the first meeting. To build his Negro nation and carry out his program of "Africa for the Africans," he said that ships were necessary and he founded The Black Star Line. Factories were to be established m the United States the raw material of Africa and the West Indies was to be brought to America, manufactured there, and shipped back to those lands. The ships were also to be used to settle Negroes.

(Source:  MarcusGarvey.com)