Marcus Garvey: Negro Separation, Self-Improvement & Self-Sufficiency

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A man who wanted to be a King

Marcus Garvey (1887 –  1940)

Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887. According to Garvey, his father, a freed slave, earnestly counseled him on the necessity of getting an education. Whether inspired by his father or his own innate desire to learn, Marcus Garvey became a very well-read man by his early 20s. He was intelligent, a great orator, and also a very eloquent writer, though he never did finish high school. Oddly enough, Garvey’s lack of a high school diploma did not stop him from attending (or visiting?) colleges in England.  In 1914, Garvey decided to turn his attention and God-given abilities to help his people (people of African descent) achieve a sense of dignity and power over their lives … that he believed the European males were conspiring to deny them. To that end, in 1914, Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which he believed could be an instrument to unite all peoples of African descent, including the African continent and those in the Western Hemisphere.

       In 1916, Garvey arrived in the U.S. to promote his new ideology of African unification to America‘s Negroes.  Among Marcus Garvey’s concerns were the European powers that had colonized Africa, and by so doing, Garvey believed, deprived its native people from being their own rulers, thereby denying them the right to determine their own destiny. However, as vexed as he was at European powers seizing land in Africa, Garvey’s more important concern, which he would dedicate the next decade to, was the plight of the American Negro. Garvey believed the Negro in America could never achieve equality (i.e. integration rights). He believed the white man would not allow this. Over the course of the next eight years he would give hundreds of passionate speeches to Negro audiences in almost all of the major cites of North, Mid-West, and even the South. His speeches to America’s Negroes were some of the most well-honed diatribes on the Negro's state of affairs in America to that date.

            Marcus Garvey was not an integrationist. He was a black nationalist ... who wanted America’s Negroes to move back to their ancestral homeland (Africa). His stated destination for them was the state of Liberia. With that goal in mind, Garvey launched a shipping line called the Black Star Line in 1919.  In this same year, he was also able to convince a sufficient number of his people to loan him enough money to actually purchase a ship. However, the short of it is, this shipping line, managed and run entirely by Negroes, was continually plagued by internal corruption, as well as Garvey’s own mismanagement. Not surprisingly, it ran up massive debts in a very brief time and subsequently failed in 1922. It also never made a single voyage to Africa.  Garvey’s fault was not that he was corrupt. He just didn’t have the wherewithal to manage a company the size of Black Star - at least there is no evidence he was running a scam.  His shipping line, though was actually quite an audacious and fanciful idea, and not because he wanted to use it to transport people of African descent back to their ancestral homeland. Rather, it was so grandiose that even the biggest financial tycoons of the day would have scoffed at the possibility of launching such an endeavor.  Yet, Garvey actually did get his shipping line up and going. It took a man of extraordinary talents to get as far as he did, even though, in truth, his enterprise was certainly doomed from the beginning. Garvey, being a terrible businessman, simply accelerated the inevitable.

    As for Garvey’s inspiration to reunite the American Negroes with their ancestral homeland, he was up against two formidable challenges: 1) the economic boom of the 1920s; 2) the NAACP.  Concerning America’s economy in the 1920s, American Negroes were not in that bad a shape in urban America. At least most were working. And those that were unemployed, all Negroes certainly knew - for the evidence was all around them - it was only a matter of finding remunerative work to end their indigence.

     And regarding the NAACP at this time, its agenda was in direct conflict to what Garvey was preaching. Garvey was telling the Negro that it was his fault for his present predicament because he was failing to recognize his true home (Africa), and failing to do what was necessary to get there. The NAACP, however, was telling the Negro to seek integration into America’s Anglo power base; and that his present state of affairs was entirely the white man’s fault, i.e. for failing to provide the Negro integration and race-nullification.  Obviously, Garvey and the NAACP were simply canceling out the message of the other.  

      Finally, regarding Garvey's organization, he claimed a membership of 4 million members worldwide in 1920. The NAACP's membership stood at about 62,000 (the book Chronological History Of The Negro reports that the NAACP had 85,000 members in 1919 - pg. 387).

     Garvey's Conviction: Other than rumors,  there is no concrete evidence that I could find that exists today that the NAACP applied pressure (or money?) to U.S. government officials to pursue a fraud charge against Garvey.  Regarding the evidence presented against Garvey, and ultimately used to convict him, it was shockingly flimsy. Garvey received a five-year prison sentence. However, President Calvin Coolidge, perhaps perusing the evidence and wanting to do the right thing,  did intervene after two years of Garvey's sentence and commuted his  term. Upon Garvey's release, he was deported back to his native Jamacia (1927).    

Garvey's Conviction: "Garvey blamed Jewish jurors and a Jewish federal judge, Julian Mack, for his conviction.  He felt they had been biased because of their political objections to his meeting with the acting imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan the year before. In 1928, Garvey told a journalist: "When they wanted to get me they had a Jewish judge try me, and a Jewish prosecutor. I would have been freed but two Jews on the jury held out against me ten hours and succeeded in convicting me, whereupon the Jewish judge gave me the maximum penalty.""   Wikipedia

>>> Garvey forgot to mention two other Jewish males, who were also prominent members of the NAACP's Executive Committee at this time: Arthur and Joel Spingarn.  Jewish conspiracy? Possibly. There is one absolute certainty here: the NAACP, still a fledgling organization and economically destitute at this time, benefited the most when Garvey was deported. <<<

      Marcus Garvey remains the only man of African descent prior to 1964 that gained a substantial following among American Negroes…advocating for black separation, self-improvement and self-sufficiency. 

          Garvey: “At maturity the black and white boys separated, and took
                          different courses in life. I grew up then to see the
                          difference between the races more and more….” “I
                          asked, "Where is the black man's Government?" "Where
                          is his King and his kingdom?" "Where is his President, his
                         country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men
                         of big affairs?" I could not find them, and then I declared,
                         "I will help to make them.””