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Marcus Garvey Facts

Marcus Garvey Facts
Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican born early twentieth century political activist and businessman who advocated such ideas as black empowerment, black nationalism and separatism, and the "back to Africa movement." The totality of Garvey's ideas were at the time and still today often referred to as "Garveyism." Garvey was born Marcus Mosiah Garvey on August 17, 1887 in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica to working class parents. As a boy and young man, Garvey traveled extensively in the Caribbean and Latin America receiving formal education and then job training. He gradually became a political activist and moved to the United States in 1916, shortly after forming the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica in 1914. Garvey married twice, first to Amy Ashwood (1919-1922) and then to Amy Jacques, with whom he had two children and remained married to until his death.
Interesting Marcus Garvey Facts:
Although Marcus' father was a mason by trade, he amassed a sizable library, which is how the young Garvey developed an interest in politics and history.
UNIA may have had up to four million members during its peak in the early 1920s.
Garvey was deeply influenced by African-American Booker T. Washington, who started the Tuskegee Institute in order to educate blacks about economic self-empowerment.
Like Washington, Garvey believed that black people would never be truly free until they controlled their own economic destinies.
The mission of the UNIA was to improve the conditions of ethnic Africans, both "at home and abroad."
Beginning in 1918, UNIA published Negro World as its primary periodical.
In October 1919, Garvey was shot in his Harlem office by a would be assassin.
During the 1920s, Garvey's public style was influenced by European fascism as he and his men often marched in black uniforms reminiscent of Mussolini and his Black Shirts.
Garvey disagreed with many other notable black leaders of the era, such as W.E.B Dubois, whom he regarded as weak and disliked the fact that he was racially mixed.
Despite being an ardent black nationalist, or possibly because of that, numerous American segregationists, such as Earnest Sevier Cox and Theodore Bilbo, showed at least outward support for Garvey.
Garvey's highest achievement and biggest failure was the creation of the Black Star Line. The Black Star Line was a shipping company that operated from 1919-1922 that was intended to give blacks jobs and help them move people and goods back to Africa.
In 1919, a young Justice Department prosecutor named J. Edgar Hoover charged Garvey with mail fraud over a misleading caption on a Black Star brochure.
Garvey attended a meeting with notable members of the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta in 1922 to discuss racial separatism, which some scholars believe led to the Justice Department initiating its investigation of him.
Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1923, sentenced to five years in federal prison, and deported from the United States back to his native Jamaica when he was released in 1927.
Garvey died on June 10, 1940 from multiple strokes at the age of fifty-two in London, England.


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