Jamaica Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr.President-General Universal Negro Improvement

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. ONH was a Jamaican political activist, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, one of the most influential 20th Century black nationalist and Pan-Africanist leaders, was born on August 17, 1887 in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica.  Greatly influenced by Booker T. Washington’s autobiography Up From Slavery, Garvey began to support industrial education, economic separatism, and social segregation as strategies that would enable the assent of the “black race.” In 1914, Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston, Jamaica, adopting Washington’s inspirational phrase “Up, you mighty race; you can conquer what you will.”  By May of 1917, Garvey relocated the UNIA in Harlem and began to use speeches and his newspaper, The Negro World, to spread his message across the United States to an increasingly receptive African American community.  His major audience included the thousands of Southern blacks who were then migrating from the “shadow of slavery and the plantation” to the urban North.  Black veterans of World War I were another Garvey audience.  Most of them had experienced both French equality and US military bigotry and returned home as militant “race men.”  They were attracted to Garvey’s calls.   The UNIA grew larger still following the race riots in the Red Summer of 1919.