Who is Marcus Garvey?
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) is a Jamaican National Hero, whose work included founding the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and creating a movement of inspiring blacks in the US and elsewhere to return to their ancestral home of Africa. For some, his suggestions and black separatist attitudes were controversial and for others, his movement and ideas were considered heroic. Garvey was born in Jamaica, and in early life cultivated an interest in books. He learned early that society tended to discriminate against blacks, and in his teen years, he began to work hard for fair wages for printers, when he became a printer’s apprentice. Though Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica, he traveled extensively in South America and England. In 1914, he returned to Jamaica, where he began to garner the support of many Jamaican blacks, and he was able to form UNIA. With UNIA successfully gaining power, Marcus Garvey moved to Harlem in the USA in 1916, and brought a powerful message to many reside
Some called him a madman, a loser, a lunatic, a thief, a con artist and many other derogatory names. No different from what they said about Jesus the Christ or Nelson Mandela. But as we shall see truth crushed to earth as the saying goes, always rises again. It must be said however to the disappointment of those who tried, that they have all failed to obliterate his memory, and he remains even more famous in death, than he was in life, today Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on August 17th 1887 in late 19th century Jamaica. The year of his birth was almost half a century after the Emancipation Proclamation in the British West Indies, today’s Caribbean. The region remained in a purely colonial mode, with high unemployment, low wage, hunger, malnutrition, poor and virtually no education, not to mention colonial oppression of the native population especially the African. The social structure at the time of Garvey’s birth was a pyramid in structure with 3 layers. The first layer was the Europe
