Marcus Garvey: Pan-Africanism and the Rise of the New Negro Movement

"Our union must know no clime, boundary, or nationality… let us hold together under all climes and in every country." (Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. 1887-1940).

Born in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, Garvey's father was a mason; his mother a farmer. Of the many siblings Garvey had, only his sister survived to adulthood. When Garvey reached 16, he had cultivated his passion for reading, having benefited from the extensive libraries his father and uncle kept. Throughout his young adulthood, Garvey kept varied jobs as a master printer and foreman for a printing house; then as a printer for a Government publication. He later commenced his own newspaper, The Watchman, but it lasted only a short time. Garvey traveled from Jamaica to Costa Rica, where he worked as a timekeeper on a banana plantation. His travels throughout the Caribbean and Latin America convinced Garvey that to unite the Africana population was the only way to advance the diaspora beyond its current socio-economic condition (1).

Galvanized by the writings of Booker T. Washington, Garvey set out for the United States in 1916, to found a school for blacks in Jamaica that was tailored along the precedent of Washington's Tuskegee Institute. When he arrived, Garvey was dismayed to learn that Washington had already passed away. However, Garvey began his school in a "dingy Harlem lodge" with a core student body of thirteen (2). Though he arrived in the states penniless and virtually unknown, in the span of one decade Garvey had rallied a following that was unprecedented by any black leader before or since. By 1916, Garvey became the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the African Communities League (UNIA-ACL), in which he espoused a Pan-African philosophy that advocated the involvement of the African diaspora in the politico-economic affairs of African countries, and the unity among diasporic cultures locally--and globally. This philosophy later became known as Garveyism

With Harlem as his primary base, Garvey emerged during a confluence of social and political movements that gave way to the rise of the "New Negro Movement." As Garvey was the next up-and-comer orator of his kind, he would be considered another of the great "ebony sages" that William H. Ferris identified, who would usher in the incipient Harlem Renaissance. During this boon of artistic frenzy during the late twenties, writers, poets, artists, and musicians of Harlem would bring forth new modes of defining African American culture and identity. Garvey was not content to limit his focus on a new, emergent African American identity, but one that was primarily informed by a unified, pan-African sensibility and vehement anti-colonial rancor. As a stump speaker on Lenox Avenue, Garvey took effective advantage of the movements among newly-arrived immigrants who demanded their rights. UCLA's site devoted to Garvey's life and career quotes Garvey as having observed that "other races were engaged in seeing their cause through---the Jews through their Zionist movement and the Irish through their Irish movement---and I decided that, cost what it might, I would make this a favorable time to see the Negro's interest through" (3). His message was reaching millions worldwide before the end of the WWI era; and though his followers enthusiastically heralded him as the "Moses" of the African diaspora, others denounced him as a zealot at best, a madman at worst. Leader W.E.B. DuBois commented ruefully that Garvey had been under the influence of "very serious defects of temperament and training." As if these weren't sufficiently damning words, DuBois continued by describing Garvey's personality as "dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain and very suspicious" (UCLA). Though Garvey had his formidable detractors, his message to unite the African Diaspora and to "redeem" it from centuries of colonial rule, resonates today. His message has inspired such movements as those connected to Malcolm X's Black Nationalist affiliations; as well as the Rastafarian movements in Jamaica that herald his name.

Lastly, the words of his biographer in Life and Lessons succinctly articulates the man's legacy:

"The name Garvey has come to define both a discrete social phenomenon, organized under the banner of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and African Communities League (ACL), and an era of black renaissance, in which Garveyism and the concept of black racial pride became synonymous. Before white America fell enraptured before the spell of what Claude McKay termed "the hot syncopated fascination of Harlem" in the Jazz Age, black America had already traversed the age of Garvey and the New Negro.^1 Garveyism as an ideological movement began in black Harlem's thirty or so square blocks in the spring of 1918, and then burgeoned throughout the black world---nearly a thousand UNIA divisions were formed, and tens of thousands of members enrolled within the brief span of seven years. The reign of the Garvey movement, as Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., wrote, 'awakened a race consciousness that made Harlem felt around the world'" (Excerpted from Marcus Garvey: Life & Lessons 3)