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Turn of the Century · Organizing

Marcus Garvey

1887 – 1940

Jamaican-born founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which from Harlem built the largest Black mass movement of the early 20th century.

Marcus Garvey seated at a desk, full-length photograph, 5 August 1924
George Grantham Bain Collection, 5 August 1924. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

Marcus Garvey arrived in New York from Jamaica in 1916 and within five years had built the Universal Negro Improvement Association into the largest organized mass movement of people of African descent in the early twentieth century. From Harlem, through a weekly newspaper, a steamship company, and spectacular conventions and parades, he preached race pride, economic independence, and the redemption of Africa — until a federal mail-fraud prosecution sent him to prison and out of the country.

At a Glance

Born
17 August 1887, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica
Died
10 June 1940, London, England
Birth name
Marcus Mosiah Garvey
Known for
Universal Negro Improvement Association (founded 1914); Negro World (1918); the Black Star Line (1919); the 1920 International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World
Fields
Organizing · Journalism · Enterprise
Era
Turn of the Century

Early Life

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on 17 August 1887 in St. Ann’s Bay, on the north coast of Jamaica, then a British colony. His father, also named Marcus, was a stonemason with a large personal library; his mother, Sarah Jane Richards, was a domestic worker and farmer. Garvey left school in his early teens and apprenticed as a printer, and by his late teens he was working as a printer in Kingston, where he became involved in trade-union activity and began publishing a small paper, The Watchman.

Around 1910 he traveled through Central America, working in Costa Rica and Panama, where he saw West Indian laborers on plantations and at the canal working under harsh conditions with no government to protect them. From about 1912 to 1914 he lived in London, where he worked for The African Times and Orient Review, a journal edited by the Sudanese-Egyptian writer Dusé Mohamed Ali, and studied African history and colonial politics. There he also read Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, which he later said convinced him to become a race leader.

Back in Kingston, on 20 July 1914 Garvey and Amy Ashwood founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), with the motto “One God! One Aim! One Destiny!” He corresponded with Washington about visiting Tuskegee to study its model of industrial education, but Washington died in November 1915, before Garvey could make the trip.

Life and Work

Garvey arrived in New York on 24 March 1916 and found work as a printer while lecturing on street corners in Harlem and touring Black communities across the country. In 1917 a small group formed the UNIA’s New York division, which grew rapidly amid the Great Migration, wartime race riots, and the disillusionment of returning Black soldiers. On 17 August 1918 he launched the Negro World, a weekly that carried sections in Spanish and French and circulated throughout the Caribbean, Central America, and Africa, where colonial authorities in several territories banned it. The UNIA’s headquarters, Liberty Hall on West 138th Street, became a center of Harlem life.

In 1919 Garvey launched the Black Star Line, a steamship company capitalized by selling five-dollar shares to Black investors, to carry trade and passengers among the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. Its first vessel, the Yarmouth, renamed the Frederick Douglass, sailed that November. The UNIA also started the Negro Factories Corporation, which operated groceries, restaurants, and other businesses. In October 1919 a gunman shot and wounded Garvey in the UNIA offices.

In August 1920 the UNIA held its first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, opening with a parade through Harlem and a mass meeting at Madison Square Garden. Delegates adopted the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World and elected Garvey Provisional President of Africa. The association claimed millions of members and hundreds of divisions in dozens of countries; historians regard the membership figures as inflated but agree that its following, sympathizers included, numbered in the hundreds of thousands at least. The UNIA also negotiated with the government of Liberia for land for Black settlers from the Americas, a plan that collapsed by 1924.

The Black Star Line was badly managed, bought unseaworthy ships at inflated prices, and suspended operations in 1922. Garvey’s program also drew bitter critics. W. E. B. Du Bois attacked his finances and his politics, and A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen of The Messenger led a “Garvey Must Go” campaign, which intensified after Garvey met in Atlanta in June 1922 with a senior official of the Ku Klux Klan, arguing that the Klan’s separatism was more honest than white liberal hypocrisy. Federal agents, under a Bureau of Investigation effort in which the young J. Edgar Hoover played a central role, had been seeking grounds to prosecute him since 1919.

In early 1922 Garvey and three Black Star Line officers were charged with mail fraud in connection with the sale of stock. At trial in 1923 Garvey, who conducted much of his own defense, was convicted on a single count and on 21 June sentenced to five years in prison; his co-defendants were acquitted. After his appeals failed he entered the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in February 1925. President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence on 18 November 1927, and as a noncitizen convicted of a felony he was deported to Jamaica the following month.

Legacy

Garvey never returned to the United States. In Jamaica he founded the People’s Political Party in 1929 and won a seat on the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation council, but the UNIA splintered. He moved to London in 1935 and died there on 10 June 1940, after a series of strokes. In 1964 his remains were returned to Jamaica, where he was proclaimed the country’s first National Hero and reinterred in National Heroes Park in Kingston. On 19 January 2025 President Joe Biden granted him a posthumous pardon for the 1923 conviction.

Garvey’s influence far outlasted his organization. The red, black, and green flag the UNIA adopted in 1920 remains a symbol of Black nationalism. His ideas shaped anticolonial leaders, including Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who credited Garvey’s writings, and a later generation of Black nationalists in the United States; the parents of Malcolm X were UNIA organizers. His second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, compiled his speeches and writings as The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923–1925). The multivolume documentary edition of his papers directed by the historian Robert A. Hill has made the UNIA among the best-documented mass movements in Black history.

For Educators

Garvey built the largest Black mass movement of his era by linking racial pride, economic enterprise, and Pan-African politics, and his ideas outlasted the collapse of his organizations. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. 17 August 1887 Born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica.
  2. 20 July 1914 Founds the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Kingston with Amy Ashwood.
  3. 24 March 1916 Arrives in New York.
  4. 17 August 1918 Publishes the first issue of the Negro World.
  5. 1919 Launches the Black Star Line; the Yarmouth sails in November.
  6. August 1920 First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World adopts the Declaration of Rights.
  7. 21 June 1923 Sentenced to five years in prison after a mail-fraud conviction.
  8. February 1925 Enters the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
  9. November–December 1927 Sentence commuted by President Coolidge; deported to Jamaica.
  10. 10 June 1940 Dies in London.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
  2. Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
  3. E. David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955).
  4. PBS American Experience, “Marcus Garvey Timeline.” Link
  5. National Archives, Prologue blog, “Caribbean American Heritage Month: Marcus Garvey” (2019). Link
  6. Jamaica Information Service, “Marcus Mosiah Garvey.” Link

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By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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