Marcus Garvey
Historians familiar with Garvey's career generally regard him as the
preeminent symbol of the
insurgent wave of black nationalism that developed
in the period following World War I.
Although born in Jamaica, Garvey
achieved his greatest success in the United States. He did so
despite the
criticism of many African-American leaders and the covert opposition of the
United
States Department of Justice and its Bureau of Investigation
(forerunner of the FBI). As a young
man, Garvey had preached accommodation
and disavowed political protest, advocating loyalty
to the established
colonial government. His views, however, underwent a radical
transformation
shortly
after he arrived in the United States in 1916. The
emergence of the radical New Negro
movement, which supplied the cultural and
political matrix of the celebrated Harlem
Renaissance, to a large extent
paralleled Garvey and his post-World War I "African
Redemption"
movement.
Garvey established the first American branch of the UNIA in
1917--1918 in the midst of the
mass migration of blacks from the Caribbean
and the American South to cities of the North. It
was also a time of
political awakening in Africa and the Caribbean, to which Garvey
vigorously
encouraged the export of his movement. In the era of global black
awakening following World
War I, Garvey emerged as the best known, the
most controversial, and, for many, the most
attractive of a new generation of
New Negro leaders. Representative Charles B. Rangel of
New York has noted
that "Garvey was one of the first to say that instead of blackness being
a
stigma, it should be a source of pride" (New York Times, 5 April
1987).
Black expectations aroused by participation in World War I were
dashed by the racial violence
of the wartime and postwar years, and the
disappointment evident in many black communities
throughout the U.S., Africa,
and the Caribbean allowed Garvey to draw dozens of local leaders
to his side.
Their ideas were not always strictly compatible with Garvey's, but their
sympathy
with his themes of "African redemption" and black self-support was
instrumental in gathering
support for the movement from a vast cross-section
of African-American society. Similarly,
Garvey's message was
adopted
by a broad cross-section of educated and semi-literate Africans and West
Indians
hungry for alternatives to white rule and oppression.
The
post--World War I years were thus a time when a growing number of Africans and
West
Indians were ready for change. In most colonial territories,
Africans, like African Americans,
were disappointed when expected postwar
changes failed to materialize. The Garveyist
message was spread by sailors,
migrant laborers, and travelling UNIA agents, as well as by
copies of its
newspaper, the Negro World, passed from hand to hand.
In the Caribbean,
what has been termed the "Garvey phenomenon" resulted from an
encounter
between the highly developed tradition of racial consciousness in
the African-American
community, and the West Indian aspiration toward
independence. It was the Caribbean ideal of
self-government that provided
Garvey with his vocabulary of racial independence. Moreover,
Garvey
combined the social and political aspirations of the Caribbean people with the
popular
American gospel of success, which he converted in turn into his
gospel of racial pride.
Garveyism thus appeared in the Caribbean as a
doctrine proposing solutions to the twin
problems of racial subordination and
colonial domination.
By the early 1920s the UNIA could count branches in
almost every Caribbean,
circum-Caribbean, and sub-Saharan African country.
The Negro World was read by thousands
of eager followers across the African
continent and throughout the Caribbean archipelago.
Though Caribbean and
African Garveyism may not have coalesced into a single movement, its
diverse
followers adapted the larger framework to fit their own local needs and
cultures. It is
precisely this that makes Garvey and the UNIA so relevant in
the study of the process of
decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean. As
if
in confirmation of the success with which Garveyism implanted itself in
various social settings,
when Garvey himself proposed to visit Africa and the
Caribbean in 1923, nervous European
colonial governors joined in recommending
that his entry into their territories be banned. Many
modern Caribbean
nationalist leaders have acknowledged the importance of Garveyism in
their
own careers, including T. Albert Marryshow of Grenada; Alexander
Bustamante, St. William
Grant, J. A. G. Smith, and Norman Washington
Manley of Jamaica; and Captain Arthur
Cipriani, Uriah Butler, George
Padmore, and C. L. R. James of Trinidad.
Before the Garvey and UNIA
Papers project was established, the only attempt to edit Garvey's
speeches
and writings was the Philosophy & Opinions of Marcus Garvey, a
propagandistic
apologia compiled in two successive volumes in the early 1920s
by his second wife, Amy
Jacques Garvey. As Lawrence Levine notes, "It is
always unwise to rely too exclusively upon a
collection edited by the
subject, especially in the light of recent indications that the
Garveys
altered a number of speeches and articles to conform with his later
views" (Levine, op. cit.).
While the Philosophy & Opinions volumes
served to plead Garvey's legal case, they also
created a politically
distorted picture of the UNIA, an image that for a long time
severely
handicapped research.
In this context, the Marcus Garvey and
UNIA Papers provides a full, objective account of the
movement and its
leader, as it chronicles how the movement achieved a global dimension
by
awakening the political consciousness of African and Caribbean peoples to
the goals of racial