Marcus Garvey

1887–1940

Latest News: Marcus Garvey Pardoned 85 Years After Death

Marcus Garvey was granted a posthumous pardon by former President Joe Biden on his last full day in office, January 19. The late Jamaican-born activist, who was a prominent proponent of Black nationalism, was convicted of mail fraud in 1923.

Garvey served two years of his five-year prison sentence before he was deported back to Jamaica. Civil rights leaders, lawmakers, and his descendants have long requested he be pardoned, claiming his conviction was unjust and politically motivated.

Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to help advance economic opportunities for people of African descent with the goal of establishing an independent government for Black people in Africa. While in the United States, the orator was targeted by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who hired Black agents to infiltrate Garvey’s UNIA, leading to his conviction and eventual deportation.

Marcus Garvey was a prominent orator and activist who advocated for Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Born in Jamaica, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association that was dedicated to promoting African Americans and their resettlement in Africa. This reflected his philosophy of Black separation and the establishment of Black nations in Africa, known as Garveyism, which sparked a global movement and went on to inspire members of the Nation of Islam and the Rastafari and Black Power movements. After launching several businesses in the United States, Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and deported back to Jamaica. He continued his work for Black repatriation to Africa until his death in 1940 at age 52. Garvey received a posthumous presidential pardon in his mail fraud case in January 2025.

FULL NAME: Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr.
BORN: August 17, 1887
DIED: June 10, 1940
BIRTHPLACE: St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica
SPOUSE: Amy Ashwood Garvey (1919–1922) and Amy Jacques Garvey (1922–1940)
CHILDREN: Marcus III and Julius
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was born on August 17, 1887, in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. He was the last of 11 children born to Marcus Garvey Sr. and Sarah Jane Richards. His father was a stonemason, and his mother was a domestic worker and farmer. Marcus Sr. was a great influence on young Marcus, who once described his father as “severe, firm, determined, bold, and strong, refusing to yield even to superior forces if he believed he was right.” His father was known to have a large library where Marcus Jr. learned to read.

At age 14, young Marcus became a printer’s apprentice. In 1903, he traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, and soon became involved in union activities. In 1907, he took part in an unsuccessful printer’s strike, and the experience kindled in him a passion for political activism. Three years later, he traveled throughout Central America, working as a newspaper editor and writing about the exploitation of migrant workers in the plantations.

In 1912, Garvey moved to London, where he attended the University of London’s Birkbeck College and worked as a messenger for the African Times and Orient Review. It was there he was exposed to Pan-African nationalism, an ideology that promotes unity among people of African descent. During this time, Garvey also discovered Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up From Slavery, which greatly influenced his philosophy. He believed that Black people should be economically self-sufficient and establish an independent nation in Africa. This ideology became known as Garveyism.

Universal Negro Improvement Association

Garvey returned to Jamaica after two years in London. In August 1914, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), with the goal of uniting all of African diaspora to “establish a country and absolute government of their own.” Inspired by Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Garvey traveled to the United States in 1916 to raise funds for a similar vocational school in Jamaica. He settled in New York City and formed a UNIA chapter in Harlem to promote a separatist philosophy of social, political, and economic freedom for Black people.

In 1918, Garvey began publishing the widely distributed newspaper Negro World to convey his message. He later purchased Harlem’s Liberty Hall auditorium, where he held meetings to help spread his philosophy.

Black Star Line

In 1919, Garvey and UNIA launched his most well-known business venture, a shipping company called the Black Star Line that established trade and commerce between people of African descent around the globe and transported passengers to Africa. He viewed the shipping company as a symbol of tangible success and economic potential for Black people. At the same time, Garvey started the Negros Factories Association, a series of companies that would manufacture marketable commodities in every big industrial center in the Western hemisphere and Africa. While these ventures helped facilitate the spread of Garveysim, they ultimately failed as businesses due to mismanagement and corruption.

Marcus Garvey found support for his Black nationalist ideology in the United States after establishing a Universal Negro Improvement Association chapter in New York City’s Harlem borough.

In August 1920, UNIA claimed an estimated 4 million members and held its first International Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Before a crowd of 25,000 people from all over the world, Marcus Garvey spoke of having pride in African history and culture. Many people found his words inspiring but not all. Some established Black leaders thought his separatist philosophy ill-conceived. W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent Black leader and cofounder of the NAACP, called Garvey “the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America.” Garvey, meanwhile, felt Du Bois was an agent of the white elite.

W.E.B. Du Bois wasn’t the worst adversary of Garvey; history would soon reveal FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s fixation on ruining Garvey on account of his radical ideas. Hoover felt threatened by the Black leader and feared he was inciting Black people across the country to stand up in militant defiance. He referred to Garvey as a “notorious negro agitator” and, for several years, desperately sought ways to find damning personal information on him, even going so far as to hire the first Black FBI agent in 1919 to infiltrate Garvey’s ranks and spy on him.

“They placed spies in the UNIA,” historian Winston James said. “They sabotaged the Black Star Line. The engines... of the ships were actually damaged by foreign matter being thrown into the fuel.” Decades later, Hoover would use similar methods to obtain information on Black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Marcus Garvey began his prison sentence for mail fraud in 1925. A century later, then-President Joe Biden pardoned his conviction.

In 1922, Garvey and three other UNIA officials were charged with mail fraud involving the Black Star Line. Trial records indicate several improprieties occurred in the prosecution of the case. It didn’t help that the shipping line’s books contained many accounting irregularities. On June 23, 1923, Garvey was convicted and sentenced to prison for five years. Claiming to be a victim of a politically motivated miscarriage of justice, Garvey appealed his conviction but was denied. He served two years of his five-year sentence, starting in 1925, before he was released from prison and immediately deported to Jamaica. More than a century after his conviction, Garvey was posthumously pardoned by President Joe Biden in January 2025.

Also in the 1920s, Garvey wrote three books. His first was The Philosophy and Opinion of Marcus Garvey, initially published in 1923. He went on to pen Aims and Objects of Movement for Solution of Negro Problem the following year before delivering his final work, The Tragedy of White Injustice, in 1927.

The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

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Garvey continued his political activism and the work of UNIA in Jamaica and then moved to London in 1935. But he didn’t command the same influence he had earlier. Perhaps in desperation or maybe in delusion, Garvey collaborated with outspoken segregationist and white supremacist Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi to promote a reparations scheme. The Greater Liberia Act of 1939 outlined a plan to deport 12 million African Americans to Liberia at federal expense to relieve unemployment. The act failed in Congress, and Garvey lost even more support among the Black population.

Garvey was married twice. He met his first wife, Amy Ashwood, at a debate program in Jamaica in 1914. The two were a decade apart in age, and she was 17 years old at the time of their meeting. Ashwood later became Garvey’s personal secretary and a member of the UNIA board of management. The two became secretly engaged in 1916 but were briefly separated when Ashwood’s parents sent her back to Panama, where she spent much of her childhood. After reuniting in the United States, the pair got married in a private Catholic ceremony in December 1919, followed by a public ceremony and reception at Liberty Hall. Just months after their wedding, however, Garvey filed for an annulment, citing his new bride’s infidelity as the cause of the split. Their divorce was finalized in July 1922.

That same month, Garvey married his second wife, Amy Jacques, who was Ashwood’s friend and maid of honor. At the time of their marriage, Jacques had already taken over Ashwood’s secretarial duties and later became Garvey’s personal representative while he was in prison. In 1930, she gave birth to their first child, Marcus Mosiah Garvey III. Three years later, their second son, Julius, was born.

Garvey died in London on June 10, 1940, after several strokes. Due to travel restrictions during World War II, his body was interred in the United Kingdom’s capital city. In 1964, his remains were exhumed and taken to Jamaica, where the government proclaimed him Jamaica’s first national hero and reinterred him at a shrine in the National Heroes Park.

His memory and influence remain—his message of pride and dignity inspired many Americans in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In tribute to his many contributions, Garvey’s bust has been displayed in the Organization of American States’ Hall of Heroes in Washington D.C. The country of Ghana named its shipping line the Black Star Line and its national soccer team the Black Stars, both in honor of Garvey. In addition, a park in Harlem, New York, was named after him in 1973.

• Hungry men have no respect for law, authority or human life.
• If you have no confidence in self you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence you have won even before you have started.
• [Poverty is] a hellish state to be in. It is no virtue. It is a crime.
• Our union must know no clime, boundary, or nationality... let us hold together under all climes and in every country.
• We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.
• The question may start in America, but [it] will not end there.
• Just at that time, other races were engaged in seeing their cause through—the Jews through their Zionist movement and the Irish through their Irish movement—and I decided that, cost what it might, I would make this a favorable time to see the Negro’s interest through.
• My garb is Scotch, my name is Irish, my blood is African, and my training is half-American and half-English, and I think that with that tradition I can take care of myself.
• The Negro’s chance will come when the smoke from the fire and ashes of 20^th century civilization has blown off.
• There are two classes of men in the world, those who succeed and those who do not succeed.
• Be not deceived. Wealth is strength, wealth is power, wealth is influence, wealth is justice, is liberty, is real human rights.
• If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.

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