Books about Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey, Hero: First Biography (1983) / Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion (1988)

Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1960)

Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1986)

Marcus Garvey: Black Nationalist Leader  (2004)  / Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (1996)

Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (1974) / Amy Ashwood Garvey: Pan-Africanist, Feminist, and Wife  (2000)

Books by Marcus Garvey

Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey or Africa for the Africans / Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons (1988) 

 Selected Writings and Speeches of Marcus Garvey (2005)  / The Poetical Works of Marcus Garvey

DVD

The American Experience - Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind (2001)

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Some New Light on the Garvey Movement

By Hughes Brisbane, Jr. 

In treating of the rise and decline of civilization, Arnold J. Toynbee in his monumental Study of History deals at length with a recurring social phenomena which he designates the internal proletariat. Some examples of this group were the Jews under the successive captivity of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Romans.; the slaves and disinherited of the Hellenic city states and the many tribes on the Italian peninsula held in submission by the Roman Republic. 

Coming closer to home, Toynbee has discovered two groups of internal proletariat in America. One of these he identifies as the American Indian who, as he says, has mostly died from the impact of European civilization and the other, the Negroes of tropical Africa whom he accuses of having set the Niger flowing into the Hudson and the Cong into the Mississippi.

This designation of the American Negro as an internal proletariat is at least plausible. For up until very recent times, there could have been but little doubt of his being in but not of American society. During the post Civil War period in the United States, the Radical Republicans and new England reformers entertained some hope of being able to assist the Negro in bridging the gap between in and of. This hope died slowly but it died nevertheless.

By 1900 the status of the black proletariat was being fixed. Southern states were stripping him of every vestige of political power and were isolating him through laws of segregation and discrimination. Some Northern intellectuals rationalized their condescension toward the Negro on the basis of the theories of J. B. de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Even the famed Albert Bushnell Hart could write: "The history of the Negro in Africa and America leads to the belief that he will remain inferior in race stamina and in race achievement."¹

As Toynbee's number one American internal proletariat, the Negro reacted non-violently but not passively to this situation. This reaction--the calls for race consciousness, race solidarity, and intra-racial cooperation--became known as Negro nationalism. It took root at about the time the pressures on the race were heaviest--the turn of the century.

The roots of this black nationalism paradoxically were watered by movements which at the time counseled different or even opposing strategies and tactics. Booker T. Washington hammered away at the necessity of self-help, intra-racial cooperation, and the creation of a black bourgeoisie. W.E.B. Du Bois strove for an increase in the size and activity of the Negro electorate as a prerequisite for obtaining full civil and political rights for the race. In the last analysis, however, these men and their followers were fashioning different tools for the same purpose--for the demolition of the walls which kept the black internal proletariat from becoming part of American society.

During the past generation, many theories have been offered in explanation of the unprecedented migration of Negroes from the South to Northern and eastern arenas of the United States. Among these is Gunnar Myrdal's "push and pull" theory: the northern pull of employment opportunities, civil and political rights; the Southern push of the boll weevil, poverty, and lynching.²

Whatever the cause, the years after 1914 witnessed hundreds of thousands of Negroes streaming up the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi River valley into the great Northern and eastern metropolises. The seaboard cities also served as debarkation points for thousands of Negroes fleeing the steaming plantations of the West Indian islands.

Once settled these newcomers lost little time in adapting themselves to their new environment. Indeed, the once passive Southern Negroes were swiftly metamorphized into assertive and often impatient colored citizens. The more abrasive aspects of Negro nationalism firmly and steadily repressed in Dixie were allowed freer expression in the North. In the decade following 1914, Negro nationalism seemed literally to explode upon the nation. Indicative of the spirit of the transplanted Southern Negro is the following taken from the New York Challenge, October 1919:

In attempting to give back the lash, Negroes traded blow for blow in at least twenty-nine race conflicts during and immediately following World War I.

This show of fangs, however, was merely one aspect of this new spirit. The so-called "New Negro" intruded upon almost every facet of American life, sometimes with a purpose and sometimes without a purpose. the urges to challenge, to assert, to create, and to move were often spontaneous and nearly always uncoordinated. In short, black nationalism was producing a cacophony. What was needed was a leader who could obtain harmony. 

Like the American states, the West Indian colonies of the United Kingdom also contained a Negro proletariat. And like their blood brothers in America, the West Indian Negroes, at the turn of the century, also began the long march to the status of full citizenship. Black nationalism in these islands erupted, however, into bloody violence; the systematic burning and destruction of plantations; and lastly, as we have mentioned, the emigration of colonies of Negroes to the United States. This was the environment that shaped the mind and destiny of Marcus Aurelius Garvey. Garvey was born on the Island of Jamaica, British West Indies on August 17, 1997, of lower middle-class parents. 

His education was standard for his class. He was exposed to tutors; he attended a grammar and high school, and spent some time in a Jamaican college. At some point in his teens, Garvey was shunted into the printing trade and at the age of twenty he had become a master printer.³

In 1909 a strike was called at one of the largest printing establishments in Kingston, Jamaica. Garvey was a foreman at this plant. Anxious to prove to himself that he was a leader of men, Garvey joined the strikers. Grateful, the men selected young Garvey to lead the walkout. he did his job effectively: he organized public meetings and for the first time he demonstrated those extraordinary talents which were one day to win for him international fame.

The employers broke the strike. this was accomplished by the introduction of the linotype machine and the importation of foreign operators. out of a job, Garvey began an odyssey which took him to several other West Indian islands, to Central and South America. On two occasions he established periodicals catering to Negroes. Both of these ventures were failures and in 1912 Garvey decided to emigrate to England.

The two years spent in London after 1912 were quite possibly the most decisive period in Garvey's life. in this city the young provincial West Indian, with his troubled but blurred sense of Negro rights, met the members of other darker races who also had their grievances against the Caucasian. These men -- followers of Gandhi, Mustapha Kemal Pasha, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, Saad Zaghlul, and Ibn Saud -- had definite, clear-cut programs to follow. Garvey heard such slogans as "India for Indians," and "Asia for Asiatics."

He became interested in the condition of the African Negro as a result of discussions with the followers of Chilembwe of Nyssaland and Kimbangu of the Congo. As a result of these experiences, Garvey's vision broadened perceptibly.

It became apparent to him that what he had once considered a local problem of the West Indian Negroes was in reality an international problem for the Negro, and as such it required an international solution. He saw too that no other darker races were demanding rights within, nor attempting to become part of, the Caucasian society. Instead they were asking for the return of lands that were historically theirs.

The Negroes, Garvey perceived, must do the same. They must cease their futile beating upon the stone walls of Western race prejudice and look homeward--homeward to Mother Africa. Out of such meditations, Garvey fashioned his gaudy but effective program of pan-Africanism the slogan of which was soon to be heard from the lips of millions of Negroes--"African for the Africans--at home or abroad."

Back in Jamaica in 1914, Garvey founded his Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities Imperial League. The purpose of this new body "was to unite all the Negro peoples of the world into one great body to establish a government absolutely their own." Garvey soon discovered, however, that Jamaica was no place to begin his empire building. The Natives of the island would have none of it. "I," complained Garvey, "really never knew there was so much color prejudice in Jamaica my own native home until I started the work of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. . . . Nobody wanted to be a Negro. . . . Men and women as black as I and even more so, had believed themselves white under the west Indian society."⁴

In 1916 Garvey sailed for the United States in search of more fertile soil for his plans.

In December 1920 just four years after Garvey had made his first appearance upon a soap box in Harlem, a New York periodical wrote of him as follows:

Garvey's success among American Negroes was not accidental. He has arrived in the United States when race activity was at a fever pitch. he brought with him an impractical but blue-printed program, an understanding of the psychological needs of the race, leadership, ability, and last but not least a ringing slogan.

For a people in whom the lore of the Old testament was so deeply ingrained, Garvey quite easily filled the role of a Messiah. the race had long likened its condition to that of the Hebrews held in Egyptian bondage. Pan-Africanism promised redemption and freedom which seemed forever denied in America. Thus Garvey could consistently evoke frenzied applause with such statements as the following:

The lack of genuine self-esteem and race pride was a problem for which Garvey also had a solution. he insisted that the Negro's inferiority complex was due, primarily to his acceptance of alien standards of beauty, that the race was foolishly overlooking its own gifts, grace and beauty in a frustrating emulation of the whites. Hence, there was to be no more intra-racial derision and caricaturing of the thick-lipped, kinky-haired black. These were nature's badges for the African; let him be proud of them.

To fill the apparent void of the Negro's past, Garvey resurrected and refurbished ancient African civilizations. For the first time in their lives, many American Negroes heard of the glories of Nubia and Ethiopia and learned that Ancient Egypt had had at least a Negroid population. Indeed, in Garvey's words, "when the great white race of today had no civilization of its own, when white men lived in caves and were counted as savage, this race of ours boasted a wonderful civilization on the banks of the Nile."⁷

In the early 1920s, Garvey occupied a disputed but firmly established place of leadership among the world's Negro population. Even his severest critics admitted that his followers were numbered in the millions. Every Garvey venture was supported enthusiastically. His newspaper, the Negro World, established in 1917, quickly became the word's leading Negro publication; the ships of his ill-fated Black Star Line carried millions of dollars in Negro investment to the ocean bottom with them and it was the money of his worshipers which equipped his abortive promised-land colony in Liberia.

For American Negroes, however, the really important thing about Garveyism was not its promised-land feature. While most American Negroes would have been proud of the existence of a powerful Negro nation in Africa, few of them actually contemplated migrating to the Dark Continent to aid in its erection. Basically Garveyism was a new creed, one which accelerated the re-education of the Negro, helped reconstruct his values and to re-orientate his outlook on his past and future. Under the stimulus of Garveyism, Negro nationalism became creative, constructive, boastful, and definitely more chauvinistic.

What has become known as the Negro Renaissance reached its full flowering during the high tide of the Garvey movement. in the field of literature, young Negro writers and poets turned to the Dark Continent for the subjects of new verses. Thus Langston Hughes chanted in his The Weary Blues:

And Countee Cullen queried

The serious study of the Negro's past begun in 1915 by Carter G. Woodson won several brilliant young recruits during the Garvey era.

To summarize and tie up the new trends, Opportunity, a negro periodical edited by Charles S. Johnson, produced in May 1924, an African art issue containing African inspired poems by Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Lewis Alexander. The publication ran other African Art numbers in 1926 and 1928.

The new pride in things black and things African fathered a drive on the part of the Negro press to substitute the term black men for colored men and Afro-American for American Negroes. Gradually, Negroes learned to refer to their African ancestry and heavy pigmentation less self-consciously.

In the realm of politics, Garveyism accelerated the shift of the Negro electorate from the republican to the Democratic Party. Among other things, the New Negro considered himself a radical. he was beginning to distrust the hide-bound traditionalism of Republican political leaders and specifically the Negro element in this group. The new self-confidence and spirit of independence among the black masses in the Northern and eastern metropolises was manifested in new allegiances between the black electorate and Democratic political machines.

On the economic front the teachings of Garvey ran parallel to those of Booker T. Washington. Both men were interested in the establishment of a sound and thriving Negro bourgeoisie. Garvey particularly hammered away at the necessity for the building of Negro factories, the organizing of cooperative markets among American Negroes, and the establishment of international trade among the world's black population. During his heyday numerous attempts were made by his followers to establish Negro enterprises.

In general, however, Garvey's economic doctrine produced little of lasting benefit to the race. For, existing off race loyalty in the main, black business enterprises could not maintain the wage levels or working conditions of their white competitors. On the other hand, the Negro consumer like everyone else bought where prices were cheapest. he should not have been expected to invest in race loyalty when it meant less for his dollar.

In passing, perhaps it should be mentioned that the followers of Garvey were among the leaders of the abortive Jobs For Negroes Campaigns which blossomed in Northern cities during the early 1930s.

To the clique of Negro leaders whom Garvey easily overshadowed during his sojourn in America, this West Indian figure was embarrassing, dishonest, and disruptive of the gradual progress they considered the race to be making under their guidance. For Garvey they reserved their most violent, vituperative, and scurrilous attacks. One of these men, Robert W. Bagnall, described Garvey as being "fat and sleek with protruding jowls; small bright piglike eyes and rather full doglike face."⁸

It was because of the initiative of these men that Garvey's career in America finally ended with a prison term and deportation.

In the long run, however, the meteoric flash of Garvey's rise awed even his bitterest enemies and some of the more thoughtful among them eventually paid him the high tribute of emulation. for one fleeting moment Garvey managed to turn the attention of America's black internal proletariat homeward to Africa. His most solid accomplishment, however, was to help gird this group with the confidence and self-esteem needed in the long hard struggle for its historical objective of full integration--the bridging of the gap between the in and of of American society.

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Notes

¹Quoted in Paul H. Buck, Road to Reunion 1865-1900 (Boston, 1937), p. 296.

²See his An American Dilemma, The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944), I, 193ff.

³Garvey never published an autobiography nor has anyone ever published a biography of him. For information of his early life the most authentic material is to be gathered from a publication by his wife Amy J. Garvey entitled Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey or Africa for the Africans, vol. 2, Universal Publishing House, 1925. A good supplementary source of information on this period of Garvey's life has been Claude McKay's Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York, 1940).

⁴Amy S. Garvey, op. cit., pp. 126-127.

⁵Truman H. Talley, "Marcus Garvey--Negro Moses?" World's Work, XLI (December, 1920), 153-156.

⁶Quoted in James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York, 1930), p. 254.

⁷Amy S. Garvey, op. cit., p. 19.

⁸The Messenger, V (March 1923), 638.

Source: Journal of Negro History, Vol. XXXVI, January 1951, no. 1

update 3 November 2007