Marcus Garvey movement owes large debt to Caribbean expats, UCLA historian finds
Conventional wisdom has long held that Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, which advocated racial self-help and the unity of the African diaspora, grew out of the heady political and cultural environment of the Harlem Renaissance and benefited African Americans above all other black people. Any Caribbean role, according to this view, was separate and incidental to the primary legacy bequeathed to American race relations by the charismatic Jamaica native. Now a UCLA historian argues the reverse in the first book of a multi-volume series on the Garvey movement and the Caribbean. From the UNIA's organisational structure to its most valuable foot soldiers during its first half-decade, Garvey's Caribbean links were indispensable to the movement's success, and the region ultimately proved to be its most important theatre, contends Robert A. Hill in "The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers: The Caribbean Diaspora 1910-1920." Read more
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH (17 August 1887 - 10 June 1940) was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). Read more