Jamaica - Marcus Garvey
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a black activist and labor leader, founded one of Jamaica's first political parties in 1929 and a workers asociation in the early 1930s. The so-called Rastafarian Brethren (commonly called the Rastafarians), which in 1935 hailed Ethiopia's emperor Haile Selassie as God incarnate, owed its origins to the cultivation of self-confidence and black pride promoted by Garvey and his black nationalist movement.
Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914, in Jamaica, as a self-improvement organization intended to promote black pride in the face of white discrimination that Garvey knew from his travels existed worldwide. Visiting the United States on a speaking tour in 1916, the charismatic Garvey, president of the UNIA, ended up staying and continued to organize. By 1919, he had more than a million followers.
In the 1920s the UNIA provided a number of self-help and other services, including lectures, socials, classes for adults, death benefits, and start-up assistance for small businesses, such as laundries, restaurants, and dry goods stores. (INTRO NOTE African Americans) It advocated the goal of resettlement of American blacks in Africa and preached a philosophy of black separatism. In 1921, Garvey established the African Orthodox Church to institutionalize the belief that God was black.
Most whites and many blacks regarded Garvey as a radical and he was under government surveillance from 1918 on. Garvey, a controversial figure, was the target of a four-year investigation by the United States government. The predecessor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was a section of the Department of Justice called the Bureau of Investigation (BOI). Within the BOI there was a General Intelligence Division called the “anti-racial division” which was headed by J. Edgar Hoover. In the aftermath of World War I, Hoover began investigating Garvey’s activities, looking to deport him as an undesirable alien.
He was called a “Negro Agitator” in the long tradition of “Negro Agitators” that came before him and after him such as Ida B. Wells and Martin Luther King, Jr. His organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), was labeled an unAmerican organization that incited racial violence. Sections of the United States government watched everyone and everything connected to him.
Arrested for mail fraud in 1922 in connection with some of business and organizational activities in which he was involved, he was convicted in 1923 on slender evidence and imprisoned in 1925. From the federal prison in Atlanta, he continued to edit his newspaper, Negro World, official voice of the UNIA.
He had served most of a five-year term in an Atlanta penitentiary when, through the intervention of President Coolidge, his sentence was commuted and he was deported to Jamaica in 1927. After his deportation in 1927, the organization rapidly lost membership and influence. Garvey left Jamaica in 1935 to live in Britain, where he died heavily in debt five years later in London in 1940.
He was proclaimed Jamaica's first national hero in the 1960s after Edward Seaga, then a government minister, arranged the return of his remains to Jamaica. In 1987 Jamaica petitioned the United States Congress to pardon Garvey on the basis that the federal charges brought against him were unsubstantiated and unjust.
Dissatisfaction with crown colony rule reached its peak during the period between the world wars, as demands for responsible self-government grew. A growing mulatto middle class with increasingly impressive education, ability, and even property identified with British social and political standards. Nevertheless, Jamaicans, including whites, began to feel offended by a perceived British indifference to their economic difficulties and political opinions. They also resented British monopoly of high positions and the many limitations on their own mobility in the colonial civil service, especially if they were of mixed race.
Obama, who made an unannounced visit to reggae icon Bob Marley’s museum during his two-day visit in 2015, never mentioned Garvey in public statements. Nor did he visit Garvey’s grave when he stopped at National Heroes’ Park to lay a wreath for Jamaican soldiers who fought and died in both World Wars.
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