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Jamaican activist and orator (–)

This article is about the political leader. For the album by Burning Spear, see Marcus Garvey (album).

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr.ONH (17 August &#;&#; 10 June ) was a Jamaican political activist. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL, commonly known as UNIA), through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa.

Garvey was ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist. His ideas came to be known as Garveyism.

Garvey was born into a moderately prosperous Afro-Jamaican family in Saint Ann's Bay and was apprenticed into the print trade as a teenager. Working in Kingston, he got involved in trade unionism before living briefly in Costa Rica, Panama, and England.

On returning to Jamaica, he founded the UNIA in In , he moved to the United States and established a UNIA branch in New York City's Harlem district. Emphasising unity between Africans and the African diaspora, he campaigned for an end to European colonial rule in Africa and advocated the political unification of the continent.

He envisioned a unified Africa as a one-party state, governed by himself, that would enact laws to ensure black racial purity. Although he never visited the continent, he was committed to the Back-to-Africa movement, arguing that part of the diaspora should migrate there. Garveyist ideas became increasingly popular and the UNIA grew in membership.

His black separatist views—and his relationship with white racists like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the interest of advancing their shared goal of racial separatism—caused a division between Garvey and other prominent African-American civil rights activists such as W.&#;E.&#;B.&#;Du&#;Bois who promoted racial integration.

Believing that black people needed to be financially independent from white-dominated societies, Garvey launched various businesses in the U.S., including the Negro Factories Corporation and Negro World newspaper.

In , he became President of the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company, designed to forge a link between North America and Africa and facilitate African-American migration to Liberia. In Garvey was convicted of mail fraud for selling the company's stock and he was imprisoned in the United States Penitentiary, Atlanta for nearly two years.

Many commentators^[who?] have argued that the trial was politically motivated; Garvey blamed Jewish people, claiming that they were prejudiced against him because of his links to the KKK. After his sentence was commuted by U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, he was deported to Jamaica in Settling in Kingston with his wife Amy Jacques, Garvey established the People's Political Party in , briefly serving as a city councillor.

With the UNIA in increasing financial difficulty, he relocated to London in , where his anti-socialist stance distanced him from many of the city's black activists. He died there in , and in his body was returned to Jamaica for reburial in Kingston's National Heroes Park.

Garvey was a controversial figure. Some in the African diasporic community regarded him as a pretentious demagogue and they were highly critical of his collaboration with white supremacists, his violent rhetoric and his prejudice against mixed-race people and Jews.

He received praise for encouraging a sense of pride and self-worth among Africans and the African diaspora amid widespread poverty, discrimination and colonialism. In Jamaica he is recognized as a national hero being the first to be recognized as such.^[1] His ideas exerted a considerable influence on such movements as Rastafari, the Nation of Islam and the Black Power Movement.

In , Garvey was formally posthumously pardoned by U.S. President Joe Biden.^[2]

Early life

Childhood: –

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on 17 August in Saint Ann's Bay, a town in the British colony of Jamaica. In the context of colonial Jamaican society, which had a colourist social hierarchy, Garvey was considered at the lowest end, being a black child who was of full African descent.

However, later genetic research nevertheless revealed that he had ancestors from the Iberian Peninsula.^[5] Garvey's paternal great- grandfather had been born into slavery prior to its abolition in Jamaica. His surname, which was of Irish origin, had been inherited from his family's former enslavers.

His father, Malchus Garvey, was a stonemason; his mother, Sarah Richards, was a domestic servant and the daughter of peasant farmers.

Malchus had had two previous wives before Sarah, having six children between them. Sarah bore him four additional children, of whom Marcus was the youngest, although two died in infancy. Because of his profession, Malchus' family were wealthier than many of their peasant neighbours; they were petite bourgeoise. Malchus was however reckless with his money and over the course of his life lost most of the land he owned to meet payments.

Malchus had a book collection and was self-educated; he also served as an occasional layman at a local Wesleyan church. Malchus was an intolerant and punitive father and husband; he never had a close relationship with his son.

Up to the age of 14, Garvey attended a local church school; further education was unaffordable for the family.

See full list on archives.lib.duke.edu Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. ONH (17 August – 10 June ) was a Jamaican political activist. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL, commonly known as UNIA), through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa.

When not in school, Garvey worked on his maternal uncle's tenant farm. He had friends, with whom he once broke the windows of a church, resulting in his arrest. Some of his friends were white, although he found that as they grew older they distanced themselves from him; he later recalled that a close childhood friend was a white girl: "We were two innocent fools who never dreamed of a race feeling and problem." In , Marcus was apprenticed to his godfather, a local printer.

In , the printer opened another branch at Port Maria, where Garvey began to work, traveling from Saint Ann's Bay each morning.

Early career in Kingston: –

In he moved to Kingston, where he boarded in Smith Village, a working-class neighbourhood. In the city, he secured work with the printing division of the P.A.

Benjamin Manufacturing Company. He rose quickly through the company ranks, becoming their first Afro-Jamaican foreman. His sister and mother, by this point estranged from his father, moved to join him in the city. In January , Kingston was hit by an earthquake that reduced much of the city to rubble. He, his mother, and his sister were left to sleep in the open for several months.

In March , his mother died. While in Kingston, Garvey converted to Catholicism.

Garvey became a trade unionist, vice president of the compositors' section of the Printers' Union,^[28] and took a leading role in the November print workers' strike. The strike was broken several weeks later and Garvey was sacked. Henceforth branded a troublemaker, Garvey was unable to find work in the private sector.

He then found temporary employment with a government printer. As a result of these experiences, Garvey became increasingly angry at the inequalities present in Jamaican society.

Garvey involved himself with the National Club, Jamaica's first nationalist organization, becoming its first assistant secretary in April The group campaigned to remove the Governor of Jamaica, Sydney Olivier, from office, and to end the migration of Indian "coolies", or indentured workers, to Jamaica, as they were seen as a source of economic competition by the established population.

With fellow Club member Wilfred Domingo he published a pamphlet expressing the group's ideas, The Struggling Mass. In early , Garvey began publishing a magazine, Garvey's Watchman—its name a reference to George William Gordon's The Watchman—although it only lasted three issues. He claimed it had a circulation of , although this was likely an exaggeration.

Garvey also enrolled in elocution lessons with the radical journalist Joseph Robert Love, coming to regard him as a mentor. With Garvey's enhanced skill at speaking in a Standard English manner, he entered several public-speaking competitions.

Travels abroad: –

Economic hardship in Jamaica led to growing emigration from the island.

In mid, Garvey travelled to Costa Rica, where an uncle had secured him employment as a timekeeper on a large banana plantation in the Limón Province owned by the United Fruit Company (UFC). Shortly after his arrival, the area experienced strikes and unrest in opposition to the UFC's attempts to cut its workers' wages. Although as a timekeeper he was responsible for overseeing the manual workers, he became increasingly angered at how they were treated.

In the spring of he launched a bilingual newspaper, Nation/La Nación, which criticized the actions of the UFC and upset many of the dominant strata of Costa Rican society in Limón. His coverage of a local fire, in which he questioned the motives of the fire brigade, resulted in him being brought in for police questioning.

After his printing press broke, he was unable to replace the faulty part and terminated the newspaper.

Garvey then travelled through Central America, undertaking casual work as he made his way through Honduras, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. While in the port of Colón in Panama, he set up a new newspaper, La Prensa ("The Press").

In , he became seriously ill with a bacterial infection and decided to return to Kingston. He then decided to travel to London, the heart of the British Empire, in the hope of advancing his informal education. In the spring of he sailed to England. Renting a room along Borough High Street in South London, he visited the House of Commons, where he was impressed by the politician David Lloyd George.

He also visited Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park and began making speeches there. There were only a few thousand black people in London at the time, and they were often viewed as exotic; most worked as labourers. Garvey initially gained piecemeal work labouring in the city's docks. In August , his sister Indiana joined him in London, where she worked as a domestic servant.

In early he was employed as a messenger and handyman for the African Times and Orient Review, a magazine based in Fleet Street that was edited by Dusé Mohamed Ali.

The magazine advocated Ethiopianism and home rule for British-ruled Egypt. In , Mohamed Ali began employing Garvey's services as a writer for the magazine. Garvey also took several evening classes in law at Birkbeck College in Bloomsbury. He planned a tour of Europe, spending time in Glasgow, Paris, Monte Carlo, Boulogne, and Madrid.

Back in London, he wrote an article on Jamaica for the Tourist magazine, and spent time reading in the library of the British Museum.

There he discovered Up from Slavery, a book by the African-American entrepreneur and activist Booker T. Washington. Washington's book heavily influenced Garvey. Now almost financially destitute and deciding to return to Jamaica, he unsuccessfully asked both the Colonial Office and the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society to pay for his journey.

After managing to save the funds for a fare, he boarded the SS Trent in June for a three-week journey across the Atlantic. En route home, Garvey talked with an Afro-Caribbean missionary who had spent time in Basutoland and taken a Basuto wife. Discovering more about colonial Africa from this man, Garvey began to envision a movement that would politically unify black people of African descent across the world.

Organization of the UNIA

Forming the UNIA: –

Garvey arrived back in Jamaica in July There, he saw his article for Tourist republished in The Gleaner. He began earning money selling greeting and condolence cards which he had imported from Britain, before later switching to selling tombstones.

Also in July , Garvey launched the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, commonly abbreviated as UNIA.

Adopting the motto of "One Aim. One God. One Destiny", it declared its commitment to "establish a brotherhood among the black race, to promote a spirit of race pride, to reclaim the fallen and to assist in civilising the backward tribes of Africa." Initially, it had only few members. Many Jamaicans were critical of the group's prominent use of the term "Negro", a term which was often employed as an insult: Garvey, however, embraced the term in reference to black people of African descent.

Garvey became UNIA's president and travelling commissioner; it was initially based out of his hotel room in Orange Street, Kingston.

It portrayed itself not as a political organization but as a charitable club, focused on work to help the poor and to ultimately establish a vocational training college modelled on Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Garvey wrote to Washington and received a brief, if encouraging reply; Washington died shortly after.

UNIA officially expressed its loyalty to the British Empire, King George V, and the British effort in the ongoing First World War. In April Brigadier General L. S. Blackden lectured to the group on the war effort; Garvey endorsed Blackden's calls for more Jamaicans to sign up to fight for the Empire on the Western Front. The group also sponsored musical and literary evenings as well as a February elocution contest, at which Garvey took first prize.

In August , Garvey attended a meeting of the Queen Street Baptist Literary and Debating Society, where he met Amy Ashwood, recently graduated from the Westwood Training College for Women.

She joined UNIA and rented a better premises for them to use as their headquarters, secured using her father's credit. She and Garvey embarked on a relationship, which was opposed by her parents. In they secretly became engaged. When she suspended the engagement, he threatened to commit suicide, at which she resumed it.

Garvey attracted financial contributions from many prominent patrons, including the Mayor of Kingston and the Governor of Jamaica, William Manning. By appealing directly to Jamaica's white elite, Garvey had skipped the brown middle-classes, comprising those who were classified as mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons.

They were generally hostile to Garvey, regarding him as a pretentious social climber and being annoyed at his claim to be part of the "cultured class" of Jamaican society. Many also felt that he was unnecessarily derogatory when describing black Jamaicans, with letters of complaint being sent into the Daily Chronicle after it published one of Garvey's speeches in which he referred to many of his people as "uncouth and vulgar".

One complainant, a Dr Leo Pink, related that "the Jamaican Negro can not be reformed by abuse". After unsubstantiated allegations began circling that Garvey was diverting UNIA funds to pay for his own personal expenses, the group's support began to decline. He became increasingly aware of how UNIA had failed to thrive in Jamaica and decided to migrate to the United States, sailing there aboard the SS Tallac in March

Moving to the United States: –

Arriving in the United States, Garvey initially lodged with a Jamaican expatriate family living in Harlem, a largely black area of New York City.

He began lecturing in the city, hoping to make a career as a public speaker, although at his first public speech he was heckled and fell off the stage. From New York City, he embarked on a U.S. speaking tour, crossing 38 states. At stopovers on his journey he listened to preachers from the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Black Baptist churches.

While in Alabama, he visited the Tuskegee Institute and met with its new leader, Robert Russa Moton. After six months traveling across the U.S. lecturing, he returned to New York City.

In May , Garvey launched a New York branch of UNIA. He declared membership open to anyone "of Negro blood and African ancestry" who could pay the 25 cents a month membership fee.

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He joined many other speakers who made speeches on the street, standing on step-ladders; he often did so at Speakers' Corner on th Street. In his speeches, he sought to reach across to both Afro-Caribbean migrants like himself and native African Americans. Through this, he began to associate with Hubert Harrison, who was promoting ideas of black self-reliance and racial separatism.

In June, Garvey shared a stage with Harrison at the inaugural meeting of the latter's Liberty League of Negro-Americans. Through his appearance here and at other events organized by Harrison, Garvey attracted growing public attention.

After the U.S. entered the First World War in April , Garvey initially signed up to fight but was ruled physically unfit to do so.

He later became an opponent of African-American involvement in the conflict, following Harrison in accusing it of being a "white man's war". In the wake of the East St. Louis Race Riots in May to July , in which white mobs targeted black people, Garvey began calling for armed self-defense. He produced a pamphlet, The Conspiracy of the East St Louis Riots, which was widely distributed; proceeds from its sale went to victims of the riots.

The Bureau of Investigation began monitoring him, noting that in speeches he employed more militant language than that used in print; it for instance reported him expressing the view that "for every Negro lynched by whites in the South, Negroes should lynch a white in the North."

By the end of , Garvey had attracted many of Harrison's key associates in his Liberty League to join UNIA.

Garvey also secured the support of the journalist John Edward Bruce, agreeing to step down from the group's presidency in favor of Bruce. Bruce then wrote to Dusé Mohamed Ali to learn more about Garvey's past. Mohamed Ali responded with a negative assessment of Garvey, suggesting that he simply used UNIA as a money-making scheme.

Bruce read this letter to a UNIA meeting and put pressure on Garvey's position. Garvey then resigned from UNIA, establishing a rival group that met at Old Fellows Temple. He also launched legal proceedings against Bruce and other senior UNIA members, with the court ruling that UNIA's name and membership—now estimated at —belonged to Garvey, who resumed control over the organization.

The growth of the UNIA: –

UNIA membership grew rapidly in In June that year it was incorporated, and in July a commercial arm, the African Communities' League, filed for incorporation.

Garvey envisioned UNIA establishing an import-and-export business, a restaurant, and a laundry. He also proposed raising the funds to secure a permanent building as a base for the group. In April, Garvey launched a weekly newspaper, the Negro World, which Edmund David Cronon later noted remained "the personal propaganda organ of its founder".

Financially, the Negro World was backed by philanthropists such as Madam C. J. Walker, but six months after its launch was pursuing a special appeal for donations to keep it afloat.

Various journalists took Garvey to court for his failure to pay them for their contributions, a fact much publicized by rival publications; at the time, there were over black-run newspapers and magazines in the U.S.

Unlike many of these, Garvey refused to feature adverts for skin-lightening and hair-straightening products, urging black people to "take the kinks out of your mind, instead of out of your hair". By the end of its first year, the circulation of Negro World was nearing 10,; copies circulated not only in the U.S., but also in the Caribbean, Central, and South America.

Several British West Indian islands banned the publication.

Garvey appointed his old friend Domingo, who had also arrived in New York City, as the newspaper's editor. However, Domingo's socialist views alarmed Garvey, who feared that they would imperil UNIA. Garvey had Domingo brought before UNIA's nine-person executive committee, where the latter was accused of writing editorials professing ideas at odds with UNIA's message.

Domingo resigned several months later; he and Garvey henceforth became enemies. In September , Amy Ashwood sailed from Panama to be with Garvey, arriving in New York City in October. In November, she became General Secretary of UNIA. At UNIA gatherings, she was responsible for reciting black-authored poetry, as was the actress Henrietta Vinton Davis, who had also joined the movement.

After the First World War ended, President Woodrow Wilson declared his intention to present a point plan for world peace at the forthcoming Paris Peace Conference.

Garvey joined various African Americans in forming the International League for Darker People, a group which sought to lobby Wilson and the conference to give greater respect to the wishes of people of color; their delegates nevertheless were unable to secure the travel documentation. At Garvey's prompting, UNIA sent a young Haitian, Eliezer Cadet, as its delegate to the conference.

Despite these efforts, the political leaders who met in Paris largely ignored the perspectives of non-European peoples, instead reaffirming their support for continued European colonial rule.

In the U.S., many African Americans who had served in the military refused to return to their more subservient role in society and throughout there were various racial clashes throughout the country.

The government feared that African Americans would be encouraged toward revolutionary behavior following the October Revolution in Russia, and in this context, military intelligence ordered Major Walter Loving to investigate Garvey.

Garvey marcus biography of william hill When did Marcus Garvey die? Marcus Garvey died on June 10, , in London after suffering several strokes. His body was initially interred in London due to travel restrictions during World War II. However, his remains were exhumed in and returned to Jamaica, where he was honored as the first national hero.

Loving's report concluded that Garvey was a "very able young man" who was disseminating "clever propaganda". The Bureau of Investigation's J. Edgar Hoover decided that Garvey was politically subversive and should be deported from the U.S., adding his name to the list of those to be targeted in the forthcoming Palmer Raids.

To ratify the deportation, the Bureau of Investigation presented Garvey's name to the Labor Department under Louis F. Post, however Post's department refused to do so, stating that the case against Garvey was not proven.

Success and obstacles

UNIA grew rapidly and in just over 18 months it had branches in 25 U.S.

states, as well as divisions in the West Indies, Central America, and West Africa. The exact membership is not known, although Garvey—who often exaggerated numbers—claimed that by June it had two million members.

Marcus Garvey - Wikipedia: When did Marcus Garvey die? Marcus Garvey died on June 10, , in London after suffering several strokes. His body was initially interred in London due to travel restrictions during World War II. However, his remains were exhumed in and returned to Jamaica, where he was honored as the first national hero.

It remained smaller than the better established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), although there was some crossover in membership of the two groups. The NAACP and UNIA differed in their approach; while the NAACP was a multi-racial organization which promoted racial integration, UNIA had a black-only membership policy.

The NAACP focused its attention on what it termed the "talented tenth" of the African-American population, such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers, whereas UNIA included many poorer people and Afro-Caribbean migrants in its ranks, seeking to project an image of itself as a mass organization. To promote his views to a wide audience, Garvey took to shouting slogans from a megaphone as he was driven through Harlem in a Cadillac.

There were tensions between UNIA and the NAACP and the latter's supporters accused Garvey of stymieing their efforts at bringing about racial integration in the U.S.

Garvey was dismissive of the NAACP leader W. E. B. Du Bois, and in one issue of the Negro World called him a "reactionary under [the] pay of white men". Du Bois generally tried to ignore Garvey, regarding him as a demagogue, but at the same time wanted to learn all he could about Garvey's movement. In , Garvey twice reached out to Du Bois, asking him to contribute to UNIA publications, but the offer was rebuffed.

The Robert A. Hill Collection covers the period of to and documents Hill's research, writing, and publications about Marcus Garvey's life and work and the founding of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), as well as Hill's many other projects.

Their relationship became acrimonious; in , Du Bois described Garvey as "a little fat black man, ugly but with intelligent eyes and big head". By , historian Colin Grant has suggested, the two hated each other.

UNIA established a restaurant and ice cream parlor at 56 West th Street, and also launched a millinery store selling hats.

With an increased income coming in through UNIA, Garvey moved to a new residence at West st Street; in , a young middle-class Jamaican migrant, Amy Jacques, became his personal secretary. UNIA also obtained a partly-constructed church building at West Street in Harlem, which Garvey named "Liberty Hall" after its namesake in Dublin, Ireland, which had been established during the Easter Rising of The adoption of this name reflected Garvey's fascination with the Irish independence movement.

Liberty Hall's dedication ceremony was held in July During the hunger strike of Terence MacSwiney Garvey supported solidarity strikes in support of MacSwiney and made appeals to the British government on his behalf.

Garvey also organized the African Legion, a group of uniformed men who would attend UNIA parades; a secret service was formed from Legion members, providing Garvey with intelligence about group members.

The formation of the Legion further concerned the Bureau of Investigation, who sent their first full-time black agent, James Wormley Jones, to infiltrate UNIA. In January , Garvey incorporated the Negro Factories League, through which he opened a string of grocery stores, a restaurant, a steam laundry, and publishing house.

According to Grant, a personality cult had grown up around Garvey within the UNIA movement; life-size portraits of him hung in the UNIA headquarters and phonographs of his speeches were sold to the membership.

In August , UNIA organized the First International Conference of the Negro Peoples in Harlem. This parade was attended by Gabriel Johnson, the Mayor of Monrovia in Liberia.

As part of it, an estimated 25, people assembled in Madison Square Gardens. At the conference, UNIA delegates declared Garvey to be the Provisional President of Africa, charged with heading a government-in-exile that could take power in the continent when European colonial rule ended via decolonization. Some of the West Africans attending the event were angered by this, believing it wrong that an Afro-Jamaican, rather than a native African, was taking this role.

Many outside the movement ridiculed Garvey for giving himself this title.

The conference then elected other members of the African government-in-exile, resulting in the production of a "Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World" which condemned European colonial rule across Africa. In August , UNIA held a banquet in Liberty Hall, at which Garvey gave out honors to various supporters, including such titles as the Order of the Nile and the Order of Ethiopia.

UNIA established growing links with the Liberian government, hoping to secure land in the West African nation on which it could settle African-American migrants.

Liberia was in heavy debt, with UNIA launching a fundraising campaign to raise $2 million towards a Liberian Construction Loan. In , Garvey sent a UNIA team to assess the prospects of mass African-American settlement in Liberia. Internally, UNIA experienced various feuds. Garvey pushed out Cyril Briggs and other members of the African Blood Brotherhood from UNIA, wanting to place growing distance between himself and black socialist groups.

In the Negro World, Garvey then accused Briggs—who was of mixed heritage—of being a white man posing as a black man. Briggs successfully sued Garvey for criminal libel. This was not the only time he faced this charge; in July Garvey had been arrested for comments in the Negro World about Edwin P. Kilroe, the Assistant District Attorney in the District Attorney's office of the County of New York.

When this case eventually came to court, the court ordered Garvey to provide a printed retraction.

Assassination attempt, marriage, and divorce

In October , George Tyler, a part-time vendor of the Negro World, entered the UNIA office and told Garvey that Kilroe "had sent him" and tried to assassinate Garvey.

Garvey was shot at four times with a calibre revolver, and received two bullets in his right leg and scalp but survived. Tyler was soon apprehended but committed suicide by leaping from the third-tier of the Harlem jail; it was never revealed why he tried to kill Garvey.^[] Garvey soon recovered from his wounds; five days later he gave a public speech in Philadelphia.

After the assassination attempt, Garvey hired a bodyguard, Marcellus Strong.

Shortly after the incident, Garvey proposed marriage to Amy Ashwood and she accepted. On Christmas Day, they had a private Catholic wedding, followed by a major ceremonial celebration in Liberty Hall, attended by UNIA members. Jacques was Ashwood's maid of honor.

After the wedding, Garvey moved into Ashwood's apartment. The newlyweds embarked on a two-week honeymoon in Canada, accompanied by a small UNIA retinue, including Jacques. There, Garvey spoke at two mass meetings in Montreal and three in Toronto. Returning to Harlem, the couple's marriage was soon strained. Ashwood complained of Garvey's growing closeness with Jacques.

Garvey was upset by his inability to control his wife, particularly her drinking and her socializing with other men. She was pregnant, although the child was possibly not his; she did not inform him of this, and the pregnancy ended in miscarriage.

Three months into the marriage, Garvey sought an annulment, on the basis of Ashwood's alleged adultery and the claim that she had used "fraud and concealment" to induce the marriage.

She launched a counter-claim for desertion, requesting $75 a week alimony. The court rejected this sum, instead ordering Garvey to pay her $12 a week. It refused to grant him the divorce. The court proceedings continued for two years. Now separated, Garvey moved into a th Street apartment with Jacques and Henrietta Vinton Davis, an arrangement that at the time could have caused some social controversy.

He was later joined there by his sister Indiana and her husband, Alfred Peart. Ashwood, meanwhile, went on to become a lyricist and musical director for musicals amid the Harlem Renaissance.

The Black Star Line

From 56 West th, UNIA also began selling shares for a new business, the Black Star Line. Seeking to challenge white domination of the maritime industry, the Black Star Line based its name on the White Star Line. Garvey envisioned a shipping and passenger line traveling between Africa and the Americas, which would be black-owned, black-staffed, and utilized by black patrons.

He thought that the project could be launched by raising $2 million from African-American donors, publicly declaring that any black person who did not buy stock in the company "will be worse than a traitor to the cause of struggling Ethiopia".

Garvey incorporated the company and then sought about trying to purchase a ship.

Many African Americans took great pride in buying company stock, seeing it as an investment in their community's future; Garvey also promised that when the company began turning a profit they would receive significant financial returns on their investment. To advertise this stock, he traveled to Virginia, and then in September to Chicago, where he was accompanied by seven other UNIA members.

In Chicago, he was arrested and fined for violating the Blue Sky Laws which banned the sale of stock in the city without a license.

With growing quantities of money coming in, a three-man auditing committee was established, which found that UNIA's funds were poorly recorded and that the company's books were not balanced.

This was followed by a breakdown in trust between the directors of the Black Star Line, with Garvey discharging two of them, Richard E. Warner and Edgar M. Grey, and publicly humiliating them at the next UNIA meeting. People continued buying stock regardless and by September , the Black Star Line company had accumulated $50, (~$, in ) by selling stock.

It could thus afford a thirty-year old tramp ship, the SS Yarmouth. The ship was formally launched in a ceremony on the Hudson River on 31 October. The company had been unable to find enough trained black seamen to staff the ship, so its initial chief engineer and chief officer were white.

The ship's first assignment was to sail to Cuba and then to Jamaica, before returning to New York.

After that first voyage, the Yarmouth was found to contain many problems and the Black Star Line had to pay $11, for repairs. On its second voyage, again to the Caribbean, it hit bad weather shortly after departure and had to be towed back to New York by the coastguard for further repairs. Garvey planned to obtain and launch a second ship by February , with the Black Star Line putting down a $10, (~$, in ) deposit on a paddle ship called the SS Shady Side.

In July , Garvey sacked both the Black Star Line's secretary, Edward D. Smith-Green, and its captain, Joshua Cockburn; the latter was accused of corruption. In early , the Yarmouth was sold for scrap metal, bringing the Black Star Line less than a hundredth of its original purchase price. The worn-out steamboat Shady Side was abandoned on the mud flats at Fort Lee, New Jersey in the fall of , when the Black Star Line collapsed.^[][]

In , Garvey traveled to the Caribbean aboard a Black Star Line ship, the newly-acquired Antonio Maceo.

While in Jamaica, he criticized its inhabitants as being backward and claimed that "Negroes are the most lazy, the most careless and indifferent people in the world". His comments in Jamaica earned many enemies, who criticized him on multiple fronts, including the fact he had left his destitute father to die in an almshouse. Attacks back-and-forth between Garvey and his critics appeared in the letters published by The Gleaner.

From Jamaica, Garvey traveled to Costa Rica, where the United Fruit Company assisted his transportation around the country, hoping to gain his favor.

There, he met with President Julio Acosta. Arriving in Panama, at one of his first speeches, in Almirante, he was booed after doubling the advertised entry price; his response was to call the crowd "a bunch of ignorant and impertinent Negroes. No wonder you are where you are and for my part you can stay where you are." He received a far warmer reception at Panama City, after which he sailed to Kingston.

From there he sought a return to the U.S., but was repeatedly denied an entry visa. This was only granted after he wrote directly to the State Department.

Criminal charges: –

In January , Garvey was arrested and charged with mail fraud for having advertised the sale of stocks in a ship, Orion, which the Black Star Line did not yet own.

He was bailed for $2, Hoover and the BOI were committed to securing a conviction; they had also received complaints from a small number of the Black Star Line's stock owners, who wanted them to pursue the matter further. Garvey spoke out against the charges he faced, but focused on blaming not the state, but rival African-American groups, for them.

As well as accusing disgruntled former members of UNIA, in a Liberty Hall speech, he implied that the NAACP were behind the conspiracy to imprison him. The mainstream press picked up on the charge, largely presenting Garvey as a con artist who had swindled African-American people.

After his arrest, Garvey announced that the activities of the BSL were being suspended.

He also made plans for a tour of the western and southern states. This included a parade in Los Angeles, partly to woo back members of UNIA's California branch, which had recently splintered off to become independent. In June , Garvey met with Edward Young Clarke, the Imperial Wizardpro tempore of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) at the Klan's offices in Atlanta.

Garvey made a number of incendiary speeches in the months leading up to that meeting; in some, he thanked the whites for Jim Crow.^[] Garvey once stated:

I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.

Marcus Garvey - New World Encyclopedia Marcus Garvey, charismatic Black leader who organized the first important American Black nationalist movement (–26), based in New York City’s Harlem. He reached the height of his power in , when he presided at an international convention, with delegates present from 25 countries.

I like honesty and fair play. You may call me a Klansman if you will, but, potentially, every white man is a Klansman as far as the Negro in competition with whites socially, economically and politically is concerned, and there is no use lying.^[]

News of Garvey's meeting with the KKK soon spread and it was covered on the front page of many African-American newspapers, causing widespread upset.

When news of the meeting was revealed, it generated much surprise and anger among African Americans; Grant noted that it marked "the most significant turning point in his popularity". Several prominent black Americans—Chandler Owen, A. Philip Randolph, William Pickens, and Robert Bagnall—launched the "Garvey Must Go" campaign in the wake of the revelation.

Many of these critics played to nativist ideas by emphasising Garvey's Jamaican identity and sometimes calling for his deportation. Pickens and several other of Garvey's critics claimed to have been threatened, and sometimes physically attacked, by Garveyites. Randolph reported receiving a severed hand in the post, accompanied by a letter from the KKK threatening him to stop criticising Garvey and to join UNIA.

also brought some successes for Garvey. He attracted the country's first black pilot, Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, to join UNIA and to perform aerial stunts to raise its profile. The group also launched its Booker T. Washington University from the UNIA-run Phyllis Wheatley Hotel on West th Street.

He also finally succeeded in securing a UNIA delegation to the League of Nations, sending five members to represent the group to Geneva.

Garvey also proposed marriage to his secretary, Jacques. She accepted, although later stated: "I did not marry for love. I did not love Garvey. I married him because I thought it was the right thing to do." They married in Baltimore in July She proposed that a book of his speeches be published; it appeared as The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, although the speeches were edited to remove more inflammatory material.

That year, UNIA also launched a new newspaper, the Daily Negro Times.

At UNIA's August convention, Garvey called for the impeachment of several senior UNIA figures, including Adrian Johnson and J. D. Gibson, and declared that the UNIA cabinet should not be elected by the organization's members, but appointed directly by him. When they refused to step down, he resigned both as head of UNIA and as Provisional President of Africa, probably in an act designed to compel their own resignations.

He then began openly criticising another senior member, Reverend James Eason, and succeeded in getting him expelled from UNIA.

With Eason gone, Garvey asked the rest of the cabinet to resign; they did so, at which he resumed his role as head of the organization. In September, Eason launched a rival group to UNIA, the Universal Negro Alliance.

In January , Eason was assassinated by Garveyites while in New Orleans. Hoover suspected that the killing had been ordered by senior UNIA members, although Garvey publicly denied any involvement; he nevertheless launched a defense fund campaign for Eason's killers.

Following the murder, eight prominent African Americans signed a public letter calling Garvey "an unscrupulous demagogue who has ceaselessly and assiduously sought to spread among Negroes distrust and hatred of all white people".

They urged the Attorney-General to bring forth the criminal case against Garvey and disband UNIA. Garvey was furious, publicly accusing them of "the greatest bit of treachery and wickedness that any group of Negroes could be capable of." In a pamphlet attacking them he focused on their racial heritage, lambasting the eight for the reason that "nearly all [are] Octoroons and Quadroons".

Du Bois—who was not among the eight—then wrote an article critical of Garvey's activities in the U.S. Garvey responded by calling Du Bois "a Hater of Dark People", an "unfortunate mulatto who bewails every drop of Negro blood in his veins".

Trial:

Having been postponed at least three times, in May , the trial finally came to court, with Garvey and three other defendants accused of mail fraud.

The judge overseeing the proceedings was Julian Mack, although Garvey disliked his selection on the grounds that he thought Mack an NAACP sympathiser. At the start of the trial, Garvey's attorney, Cornelius McDougald, urged him to plead guilty to secure a minimum sentence, but Garvey refused, dismissing McDougald and deciding to represent himself in court.

The trial proceeded for more than a month. Throughout, Garvey struggled due to his lack of legal training. In his three-hour closing address he presented himself as a selfless leader who was beset by incompetent and thieving staff who caused all the problems for UNIA and the Black Star Line. On 18 June, the jurors retired to deliberate on the verdict, returning after ten hours.

They found Garvey himself guilty, but his three co-defendants not guilty.

Garvey was furious with the verdict, shouting abuse in the courtroom and calling both the judge and district attorney "damned dirty Jews". Imprisoned in The Tombs jail while awaiting sentencing, he continued to blame a Jewish cabal for the verdict; in contrast, prior to this he had never expressed antisemitic sentiment and was supportive of Zionism.