Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey: Provisional President of a Continent He Never Saw

In August 1920, delegates gathered in Harlem for the First International Convention of the Negro Peoples and declared a Jamaican printer the Provisional President of Africa. He had never been there. He never would go. Within two years his shipping line was bankrupt, and within three he was in a federal courtroom defending himself against a charge of selling stock in a ship he did not own.

Saint Ann's Bay to Kingston

He was born on 17 August 1887 in Saint Ann's Bay, Jamaica, into a moderately prosperous Afro-Jamaican household — his father Malchus a stonemason, his mother Sarah Richards a domestic servant. He attended the local church school until fourteen, then was apprenticed to a printer in 1901. In 1905 he moved to Kingston and became the first Afro-Jamaican foreman at the P. A. Benjamin Manufacturing Company. A printers' strike in 1908 failed and cost him that position, after which he worked across Central America and in England before returning to Jamaica in 1914. The itinerary matters: by thirty he had seen Black labour exploited under three different flags, which is the observation his entire politics was built on.

One Aim, One God, One Destiny

In July 1914 he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, under a motto of admirable economy: "One Aim. One God. One Destiny." In March 1916 he emigrated to the United States, and in May 1917 he opened the Harlem branch that would become the movement's engine. Within three years the UNIA had become the largest mass organisation of Black people the world had yet seen, with a philosophy — Garveyism — that fused Black nationalism, economic self-sufficiency and Pan-Africanism into a single programme. He championed the Back-to-Africa movement and worked to build links between North America and Africa, especially Liberia, while privately envisioning a unified Africa as a one-party state governed by himself.

The Black Star Line

The boldest expression of the programme was a shipping company. In 1919 Garvey became president of the Black Star Line, conceived to connect Africa and the Americas in vessels owned and crewed by Black people. In October 1919 the SS *Yarmouth* was formally launched on the Hudson River before crowds who had bought its shares in small denominations. It was a superb symbol and a poor business. Mechanical failures and financial hemorrhage dogged the line from the start, and it collapsed in 1922.

The Fall

In January 1922 Garvey was arrested for mail fraud, the charge being that he had advertised stock for a ship the Black Star Line did not yet own. The trial ran for a month in June 1923; Garvey represented himself. The jury convicted him of conspiracy to defraud while acquitting all three co-defendants — a verdict that has always looked less like a judgement on the company than on the man. Judge Julian Mack sentenced him to five years and a $1,000 fine. He was granted bail of $15,000 that September pending appeal. In 1927 President Calvin Coolidge commuted the sentence, and Garvey was deported to Jamaica.

The Self-Inflicted Wounds

In June 1922 Garvey travelled to Atlanta and met Edward Young Clarke, Imperial Wizard pro tempore of the Ku Klux Klan, on the reasoning that avowed white separatists were more honest interlocutors than white liberals. "I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race," he said. The historian Colin Grant calls the meeting the most significant turning point in his popularity; prominent Black leaders launched a "Garvey Must Go" campaign. His feud with W. E. B. Du Bois turned poisonous — Garvey called the NAACP leader "a reactionary under the pay of white men," while Du Bois in 1923 dismissed him as "a little fat black man, ugly but with intelligent eyes." After his conviction Garvey shouted in court that the judge and district attorney were "damned dirty Jews" and later blamed a "Jewish cabal"; by 1933 he had reversed himself, writing that "the Jewish race is a noble one" and condemning Nazi persecution. Darkest of all, he expelled the Reverend James Eason from the UNIA in 1922; Eason was assassinated by Garveyites in New Orleans in January 1923. Garvey denied involvement, but he established a defence fund for the assassins, and J. Edgar Hoover suspected senior UNIA figures of ordering the killing.

Exile

Back in Jamaica with his wife Amy Jacques, he founded the People's Political Party in 1929 and served briefly as a Kingston city councillor. The UNIA's finances never recovered. In 1935 he relocated to London, where his anti-socialist positions alienated the Black activists already there, and he died in the city on 10 June 1940, far from both the island of his birth and the continent he had promised to lead.

Why Marcus Is Called a Genius

The faculty is organisational imagination — a rare ability to see a scattered, humiliated population as a single constituency and then build the machinery to address it as one. Nobody before him had assembled a Black international on that scale, and he did it in five years, from a standing start, in a country he had only just entered. His second gift was symbolic: a people are persuaded less by arguments about self-sufficiency than by the sight of a ship flying its own flag, crewed by people who look like them. The Black Star Line was terrible business and superb theology, and the small shareholders were buying a proof, not a dividend. Even Du Bois, who loathed him, conceded the intelligent eyes.

The counter-case is heavy. Garvey's genius was for mobilisation, not administration or ethics: the shipping line failed because it was badly run, and the fraud conviction, however politically motivated the prosecution, rested on stock advertised for a vessel not yet owned. He negotiated with the Ku Klux Klan and made antisemitic accusations before retracting them. He established a defence fund for the men who murdered a former colleague. And he proposed to govern a continent he had never visited as a one-party state under his own presidency — indistinguishable in structure from the imperialism he opposed. He was an originator of ideas whose execution he repeatedly wrecked.

Legacy

In 1964 his body was returned to Jamaica and reburied in Kingston's National Heroes Park; he became the country's first official national hero. His ideas run directly into Rastafari, the Nation of Islam and the Black Power movement, which is to say that a great deal of twentieth-century Black political thought is downstream of a bankrupt shipping company and a motto of six words.