Marcus Garvey was an important figure in black America in the era between the two World Wars, and he organized a black movement that had considerable influence over subsequent black movements. He was one of the leaders in the movement seeking an African homeland, and he achieved an international following because of his particular abilities as a showman as well as an organizer. Many of Garvey's ideas have been rejected as the civil rights movement has altered course over the years, but it is time to reconsider and to examine some of the important and valuable ideas set forth by Garvey.
Garvey was a native of Jamaica who started a Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in that country in 1914, and his first manifesto called on all people of African heritage to establish a "Universal Confraternity." He met with hostility or indifference, and two years later he came to New York and revived the UNIA. The organization had a slow start but became in time a major force as it stirred the imagination of the black masses. Garvey did this with a peculiar vision of Pan-African nationalism at a time when W.E.B. DuBois's form of Pan-Africanism could not get a foothold. Garvey and DuBois were indeed rivals and enemies, and each criticized the other in harsh terms.
Garvey was born in 1887 and first followed in his father's footsteps as an apprentice printer, becoming in time a journeyman and foreman in that trade. He was involved in a typographical union and printers' strike in 1907 and 1908, after which it was difficult for him to find employment in Jamaica. He traveled and worked in Costa Rica, Panama, and elsewhere in Central and South America before making his way to England in 1912. There, he attended college lectures and was much influenced by the writings of Booker T. Washington and other black writers of the period, works which introduced him to the early Pan-African movement. He came into contact with African natio...