Moon Author's Review
Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born in St. Ann's Bay in 1887 to humble but educated parents. After completing elementary school, he moved to Kingston, where he worked in a print shop and became increasingly interested and engaged in organized movements aimed at improving conditions for black Jamaicans. Black Jamaicans, while free from the bonds of slavery since 1838, were far from equal to their white counterparts and denied suffrage, among other basic rights. In 1907 Garvey was elected vice president of the Kingston Union, a charge that would cost him his job at the printer when he became involved in a strike. At the age of 23 Garvey left the island to work in Central America, as many Jamaicans in search of opportunity did at the time. His travels around the region gave Garvey an awareness of the common plight faced by the black race, seeding in him what would become a lifelong struggle to unite Africans of all nations under one common aim. In 1912 Garvey traveled to England, where he became engaged with black Africans and further broadened his vision of seeing black people take control of their destiny across the globe. In 1914 Garvey returned to Jamaica and founded the first chapter of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) whose motto, "One God! One Aim! One Destiny!" summed up the broad goal of the organization to improve the lot of black people through solidarity and self-determination.
While Garvey's message was well received by his followers in Jamaica, it was in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City that he was first lauded as a prophet. Garvey is credited as the father of the Black Power movement, which would take Harlem, and ultimately the entire United States, by storm and eventually lead to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Garvey sought to enfranchise black people by generating black-owned businesses that would be linked on an international level. To facilitate this project he established the Black Star Line, an international shipping company that was to promote commerce.
Garvey's following numbered four million members worldwide in 1920, a movement large enough to catch the attention of both the U.S. and British governments. When Garvey began to sell the notion of a mass return to Africa, however, he met resistance at the highest level of government. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and imprisoned for a five-year term on what his followers considered trumped-up charges. After two years, he was released on an executive pardon and deported back to Jamaica. Local authorities were none too happy to see Garvey continue agitating for increased rights by forming the People's Political Party (PPP) in an effort to bring reform to Jamaica's colonial system. Garvey ran for a seat in Parliament and lost; later he won a seat on the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation (the local government) from a jail cell, where he'd been placed for contempt of court. At the time, suffrage was limited to landowners, a class to which many of Garvey's followers did not belong, and his political support was accordingly stifled. Frustrated by the slow pace of change in Kingston, Garvey returned to London in 1935, where he would remain until his death in 1940. In 1964 Garvey was declared a national hero in Jamaica, and his remains were reinterred at Heroes Memorial in Kingston.
Garvey's legacy has been mixed in Jamaica, to say the least. Perhaps the greatest disservice to his teachings lies in the fact that his pleas for universal education have never been answered at an institutional level. At the same time, there is no doubting the impact he has made in certain circles. Rastafarians claim Garvey repeatedly iterated the call, "Look to the east for the crowning of a black king." It was one of Garvey's followers, Leonard Howell, who first cited the crowning of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie on November 2, 1930, as a fulfillment of that prophecy, leading to the birth of the Rastafarian movement. Even today, it is the Rastafarian community both in Jamaica and abroad that has embraced Garvey's teachings to the greatest extent, often comparing him to John the Baptist.
