The Marcus Garvey Movement

The purpose of this essay is to explain why the Garvey Movement can be considered an anticipation of the Black Nationalist movement of the 1960s. It will cover Garvey's life and the history of the UNIA, and will discuss how the more recent movement both resembled and differed from Garvey's.

Marcus Garvey was born in 1887 in a small town in Jamaica, and his early years gave no hint of his later prominence and controversial ideas. His search for a career sent him to Central America, England, and, in 1916, the United States. In the course of this trip he discovered that his own frustrated ambitions were not his alone, but were part of the problem facing the entire African race. He conceived the idea that these problems could be solved by means of Pan-African politics, and accordingly founded the UNIA in Jamaica. It was extended to other West Indies islands and to Africa, but became strongest in the U.S.

In the years during and after the First World War, Marcus Garvey led the largest international movement of African-related people in the twentieth century. Garvey and other UNIA leaders were part of an international elite of African-Americans who applauded the triumph of capitalism, although they denounced racial discrimination, which denied people like themselves places of prestige in the capitalist system. Their response to exclusion from the mainstream Western economic world was to construct African-American institutions modeled on those of white elites. From 1919-19

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ult, most of his personal papers were destroyed in the London blitz. A small UNIA survives today. Many diverse African-American leaders have testified to Garvey's continuing influence. He has been virtually canonized by the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica, along with Emperor Haile Selassie, whom Garvey detested. However, there is little consensus on the degree of importance or even the exact nature of his legacy, although all seem to agree that he was among the first to raise the level of race consciousness in the direction of what would be called "Black pride" in the 1960s and 1970s. The rise of African-American militancy in the 1960s rekindled the debates of the Garvey movement despite the relative lack of historical materials. Theodore Vincent and Tony Martin, sympathizers with the "Black Nationalism" of the 1960s took up Garvey's cause, and proceeded to catalog the UNIA's businesses, newspapers, political organization, and protest activities in the United States. Both asserted that Garvey and the UNIA were in the vanguard of African-American and Pan-Africa politics in the 1920s. Stein agrees with their conclusion that Garvey addressed and attempted to solve the real economic, political, and social problem of African-Ame

Category: History - T