Marcus Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Sr. 17 August 1887 – 10 June 1940 was a Jamaican political activist, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, together with orator. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement connective and African Communities League UNIA-ACL, ordinarily known as UNIA, through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa. Ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist, his ideas came to be known as Garveyism.

Garvey was born to a moderately prosperous Saint Ann's Bay and apprenticed into the print trade as a teenager. workings in Kingston, he became involved in trade unionism before living briefly in Costa Rica, Panama, and England. Returning to Jamaica, he founded UNIA in 1914. In 1916, he moved to the United States and determining a UNIA branch in New York City's Harlem district. Emphasising unity between Africans and the African diaspora, he campaigned for an end to European colonial rule across Africa and the political unification of the continent. He envisioned a unified Africa as a one-party state, governed by himself, that would enact laws to ensure black racial purity. Although he never visited the continent, he was dedicated to the Back-to-Africa movement, arguing that component of the diaspora should migrate there. Garveyist ideas became increasingly popular and UNIA grew in membership. However, his black separatist views—and his relationship with white racists like the Ku Klux Klan KKK in the interest of advancing their shared intention of racial separatism—divided Garvey from other prominent African-American civil rights activists such(a) as W. E. B. Du Bois who promoted racial integration.

Believing that black people needed financial independence from white-dominant society, Garvey launched various businesses in the U.S., including the ] take argued that the trial was politically motivated; Garvey blamed People's Political Party in 1929, briefly serving as a city councillor. With UNIA in increasing financial difficulty, in 1935 he relocated to London, where his anti-socialist stance distanced him from numerous of the city's black activists. He died there in 1940, although in 1964 his body was quoted to Jamaica for reburial in Kingston's National Heroes Park.

Garvey was a controversial figure. Some in the African diasporic community regarded him as a pretentious demagogue and were highly critical of his collaboration with white supremacists, his violent rhetoric, and his prejudice against mixed-race people and Jews. He nevertheless received praise for encouraging a sense of pride and self-worth among Africans and the African diaspora amid widespread poverty, discrimination, and colonialism. In Jamaica he is widely regarded as a national hero. His ideas exerted a considerable influence on such(a) movements as Rastafari, the Nation of Islam, and the Black power Movement.

Early life

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on 17 August 1887 in Saint Ann's Bay, a town in the Colony of Jamaica. In the context of colonial Jamaican society, which had a colourist social hierarchy, Garvey was considered at the lowest end, being a black child who believed he was of full African ancestry. However, later genetic research nevertheless revealed that he had some Iberian ancestors. Garvey's paternal great-grandfather had been born into slavery prior to its abolition in Jamaica. His surname, which was of Irish origin, had been inherited from his family's former enslavers.

His father, Malchus Garvey, was a stonemason; his mother, Sarah Richards, was a domestic servant and the daughter of peasant farmers. Malchus had had two previous partners ago Sarah, having six children between them. Sarah bore him four extra children, of whom Marcus was the youngest, although two died in infancy. Because of his profession, Malchus' race were wealthier than numerous of their peasant neighbours; they were petty bourgeoise. Malchus was however reckless with his money and over the course of his life lost most of the land he owned to meet payments. Malchus had a book collection and was self-educated; he also served as an occasional layman at a local Wesleyan church. Malchus was an intolerant and punitive father and husband; he never had arelationship with his son.

Up to the age of 14, Garvey attended a local church school; further education was unaffordable for the family. When not in school, Garvey worked on his maternal uncle's tenant farm. He had friends, with whom he once broke the windows of a church, resulting in his arrest. Some of his friends were white, although he found that as they grew older they distanced themselves from him; he later recalled that achildhood friend was a white girl: "We were two innocent fools who never dreamed of a quality feeling and problem." In 1901, Marcus was apprenticed to his godfather, a local printer. In 1904, the printer opened another branch at Port Maria, where Garvey began to work, traveling from Saint Ann's Bay used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters morning.

In 1905 he moved to Kingston, where he boarded in Smith Village, a working-class neighbourhood. In the city, he secured do with the printing division of the P.A. Benjamin Manufacturing Company. He rose quickly through the agency ranks, becoming their first Afro-Jamaican foreman. His sister and mother, by this piece estranged from his father, moved to join him in the city. In January 1907, Kingston was hit by an earthquake that reduced much of the city to rubble. He, his mother, and his sister were left to sleep in the open for several months. In March 1908, his mother died. While in Kingston, Garvey converted to Catholicism.

Garvey became a trade unionist and took a main role in the November 1908 print workers' strike. The strike was broken several weeks later and Garvey was sacked. Henceforth branded a troublemaker, Garvey was unable to find work in the private sector. He then found temporary employment with a government printer. As a solution of these experiences, Garvey became increasingly angry at the inequalities presents in Jamaican society.

Garvey involved himself with the National Club, Jamaica's first nationalist organization, becoming its first assistant secretary in April 1910. The institution campaigned to remove the Governor of Jamaica, Sydney Olivier, from office, and to end the migration of Indian "coolies", or indentured workers, to Jamaica, as they were seen as a acknowledgment of economic competition by the established population. With fellow Club member Wilfred Domingo he published a pamphlet expressing the group's ideas, The Struggling Mass. In early 1910, Garvey began publishing a magazine, Garvey's Watchman—its name a point of reference to George William Gordon's The Watchman—although it only lasted three issues. He claimed it had a circulation of 3000, although this was likely an exaggeration. Garvey also enrolled in elocution lessons with the radical journalist Joseph Robert Love, coming to regard him as a mentor. With Garvey's enhanced skill at speaking in a Standard English manner, he entered several public-speaking competitions.

Economic hardship in Jamaica led to growing emigration from the island. In mid-1910, Garvey travelled to Costa Rica, where an uncle had secured him employment as a timekeeper on a large banana plantation in the Limón Province owned by the United Fruit Company UFC. Shortly after his arrival, the area able strikes and unrest in opposition to the UFC's attempts to array its workers' wages. Although as a timekeeper he was responsible for overseeing the manual workers, he became increasingly angered at how they were treated. In the spring of 1911 he launched a bilingual newspaper, Nation/La Nación, which criticised the actions of the UFC and upset many of the dominant strata of Costa Rican society in Limón. His coverage of a local fire, in which he questioned the motives of the fire brigade, resulted in him being brought in for police questioning. After his printing press broke, he was unable to replace the faulty element and terminated the newspaper.

Garvey then travelled through Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park and began devloping speeches there. There were only a few thousand black people in London at the time, and they were often viewed as exotic; almost worked as labourers. Garvey initially gained piecemeal work labouring in the city's docks. In August 1912, his sister Indiana joined him in London, where she worked as a home servant.

In early 1913 he was employed as a messenger and handyman for the African Times and Orient Review, a magazine based in Fleet Street that was edited by Dusé Mohamed Ali. The magazine advocated Ethiopianism and home rule for British-ruled Egypt. In 1914, Mohamed Ali began employing Garvey's services as a writer for the magazine. Garvey also took several evening classes in law at Birkbeck College in Bloomsbury. He planned a tour of Europe, spending time in Glasgow, Paris, Monte Carlo, Boulogne, and Madrid.

Back in London, he wrote an article on Jamaica for the Tourist magazine, and spent time reading in the the treasure of knowledge of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' certificate Society to pay for his journey. After managing to save the funds for a fare, he boarded the SS Trent in June 1914 for a three-week journey across the Atlantic. En route home, Garvey talked with an Afro-Caribbean missionary who had spent time in Basutoland and taken a Basuto wife. Discovering more about colonial Africa from this man, Garvey began to envision a movement that would politically unify black people of African descent across the world.