Marcus Garvey, 1922.
Born in Jamaica this day in 1887, Marcus Garvey was a charismatic black leader who organized the first important American black nationalist movement (1919–26), based in New York City's Harlem. In August 1914 he and a group of friends in Jamaica founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which sought, among other things, to build in Africa a black-governed nation. Failing to attract a following in Jamaica, Garvey went to the United States (1916) and soon established branches of the UNIA in Harlem and the other principal ghettos of the North.
"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."
Marcus Garvey |
