Marcus Garvey Biography

Social activist. Born Marcus Mosiah Garvey on August 17, 1887 in St Ann's Bay, Jamaica. Largely self-educated, he worked as a printer in Jamaica, edited several short-lived newspapers in Costa Rica and Panama, then founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica (1914).

In 1916 Garvey moved to New York City where he established UNIA headquarters and began the Negro World, a popular weekly newspaper that con- veyed his message of black pride. Launching several other African-American capitalist ventures, he presided over an international convention of black people in New York (1920), where he called for freedom from white domination in Africa.

Garvey's later life, however, was anticlimatic. In 1923 he was convicted of mail fraud when selling stock in his failed Black Star steamship line, which was launched for maritime trade between black nations, and he was sentenced (1923) to a five-year prison term. Other ventures also failed, including an attempt to foster black colonization to Liberia.

After his release from prison (1927) he was deported to Jamaica, and in 1934 moved to London, but he never regained prominence. However, in stirring African-Americans with his message of pride in ancestry and prospects of self-sufficiency, he prefigured a later generation of African-American leaders such as Malcolm X.

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