Marcus Garvey, for the love of the black cause

It was in Saint Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, on August 17, 1887, that Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born. Having grown up in a city plagued by oppression and where racial segregation reigns, Marcus Garvey discovers with amazement the disastrous living conditions in which blacks live in his country.

His youth marked by a very religious life, he was part of the musical group of his church where he played the organ. Very quickly, he discovered a passion for reading, which allowed him to enjoy relative recognition within a mostly illiterate community.

His life takes another turn when he becomes a member of a union in which he is elected leader during a strike with the immediate consequence of his dismissal by his employer who ran a printing shop.

Aged 23, he undertook a long journey from 1912 to 1914 throughout Latin America and Europe to see the conditions in which men and women of color evolved. During his trip, he meets many people from various walks of life where he is sometimes taken for an African king. He co-founded numerous newspapers in Panama, Costa Rica and London where he participated in the writing of the famous London newspaper The African Times founded by the Egyptian Dusé Mohamed Ali.

On the strength of this new experience acquired during this journey, he returned to Jamaica and then settled in the United States in 1916. A year later, he founded with 13 of his companions the universal association for the improvement of the black condition ( UNIA) with its famous motto “One God! A goal ! A Destiny! (“One God! One aim! One destiny!”) which he directs. Through his organization, Marcus Garvey therefore posed as the greatest leader of the black cause of his time and made the emancipation of African-Americans his fight. This struggle sparked hostility from the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Legion, white supremacist terrorist secret societies in the United States, and cost the life of one of its most staunch followers, the Reverend Earl Little, father of Malcolm X.

“Garveyite” activists are organizing in the major European and American capitals where they are setting up branches and Marcus Garvey is campaigning in the United States for a return to Africa of Afro-Americans, to territories which would constitute a new “Promised Land” posing thus the milestones of Pan-Africanism of which he is considered the precursor. He firmly believes that blacks can find no better refuge elsewhere than in Africa.

“Look to Africa, where a black king will be crowned, who will lead the black people to their deliverance.” he declared.

He founded Negro World, a newspaper which gave news of the UNIA all over the world and which in 1920 had 1,100 sections in forty countries, published speeches by Garvey and news which were not reported in other newspapers, despite the many sanctions that prohibit the publication of this newspaper in France, Great Britain and America.

He founded a shipping company called the Black Star Line in 1919, with the aim of making the great move from America to Africa to which he had aspired for years. The creation of this company was possible thanks to the significant participation of African Americans.

Having become the symbol of a black elite around the world who campaign for the rights of enslaved men and women of color, the American federal government sees him as a potentially dangerous enemy. In 1925, he was convicted of fraud against the shareholders of the Black Star Line shipping company. On his release from prison, he was repatriated to Jamaica and banned from staying in America. He went into exile in London where he died in 1940 of a heart attack.