Marcus Garvey

Early life

Marcus Garvey was born on August 17, 1887, at St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, the son of a mason and a domestic worker who also grew produce. He finished his schooling at a Church of England school and trained as a printer. Between 1910 and 1914 he lived and worked in Panama, Costa Rica and England, where he audited courses at Birkbeck College in London.

The UNIA and its enterprises

In July 1914, back in Jamaica, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He moved to the United States in 1916, built a branch in New York City, and incorporated the movement in New York State in 1918. From Harlem he launched the Negro World newspaper in August 1918, which became the UNIA's main voice.

In 1919 he started the Black Star Line, a Black-owned shipping company meant to carry passengers and trade between the Americas and Africa. He financed it by selling low-priced shares to Black investors rather than seeking white backers. The UNIA also formed the Negro Factories Corporation and sent delegations to Liberia in 1921 and 1923 as part of a colonization plan.

The Black Star Line struggled from the start. According to the Mariners' Museum, its ships were old and costly to repair, one sank and another suffered a fatal boiler explosion, and by 1922 the company was close to bankruptcy.

Conviction and deportation

Garvey was arrested in 1922 and indicted for mail fraud over fund-raising for a ship the company did not yet own. He was tried in May 1923 and convicted in June 1923. After his appeal failed in February 1925, he served time in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. President Calvin Coolidge commuted the rest of his sentence amid protests, and Garvey was deported to Jamaica in late 1927.

In Jamaica he kept publishing and organizing before moving to London in 1935. He died in London on June 10, 1940, and is now honored at a memorial in National Heroes' Park, Kingston.

Debate and legacy

Garvey was divisive in his own time. PBS's American Experience describes a bitter public feud with W. E. B. Du Bois, who first gave cautious support to the Black Star Line but by 1920 had published a critique of its finances; the two men exchanged personal attacks and disagreed over integration versus separatism. Garvey's 1922 meeting with a Ku Klux Klan leader also drew sharp criticism from other Black leaders, as the UCLA Garvey Papers Project notes.

Supporters have long argued that his prosecution was politically motivated, and the Mariners' Museum notes that the Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover pursued him. On January 19, 2025, President Joe Biden granted Garvey a posthumous pardon for the mail-fraud conviction, after members of Congress pressed for it. Martin Luther King Jr. credited Garvey with giving Black people a sense of dignity on a mass scale, and he is widely seen as an influence on Malcolm X and later Black nationalist movements.