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Garvey, Marcus Moziah

5 articles on Garvey, Marcus Moziah

  • Garvey, Marcus

    Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

    (b. 17 August 1887; d. 10 June 1940), Jamaican-born political activist. A charismatic black nationalist whose political activism, impassioned rhetoric, and disciplined pursuit of individual greatness inspired women and men from various parts of the world, Marcus Mosiah Garvey contributed mightily to the black liberation struggle in the years between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression. Suspicious of integrationist solutions to the problem of global white supremacy, Garvey preached a message of race pride, Pan-African unity, and economic self-reliance. “It is of no use for the Negro,” Garvey once asserted, “to continue to depend on the good graces of the other races of the world, because we are living in a selfish, material age, when each and every race is looking out for itself” (Hill, vol. 3, p. 55). To facilitate his people's struggle for independence, Garvey formed the ...
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  • Garvey, Marcus Moziahimage available

    Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

    Word Count: 1414      Includes:  Bibliography

    1887–1940
    Founder and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest organization dedicated to black economic self-determination and racial pride. Photographs exist of Marcus Moziah Garvey in the full regal uniform that he wore during marches and rallies. These photographs are still sold on the streets of Harlem, where the UNIA had its headquarters in the years during and after World War I. Garvey, called a “black Moses” during his lifetime, created the largest African American organization, with hundreds of chapters across the world at its height. While Garvey is predominantly remembered as a “Back to Africa” proponent, it is clear that the scope of his ideas and the UNIA's actions go beyond that characterization.

    Marcus Garvey was born in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica,Kingston ...
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  • Garvey, Marcusimage availableimage available

    Source: African American National Biography

    Word Count: 1806      Includes:  Further Reading | Obituary:

    (17 Aug. 1887–10 June 1940), black nationalist, was born Marcus Moziah Garvey in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, the son of Marcus Moziah Garvey, a stonemason, and Sarah Jane Richards. He attended the local elementary school and read widely on his own. Difficult family finances forced him into employment at age fourteen as a printer's apprentice. Three years later he moved to Kingston, found work as a printer, and became involved in local union activities. In 1907 he took part in an unsuccessful printers' strike. These early experiences honed his journalistic skills and raised his consciousness about the bleak conditions of the black working class in his native land.

    After brief stints working in Costa Rica on a banana plantation and in Panama as the editor of several short-lived radical newspapers, Garvey moved to London, England, ...
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  • Garvey, Marcus

    Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History

    Word Count: 376     

    (1887–1940), black nationalist leader. Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in his native Jamaica in 1914, and moved it to Harlem in 1916. The organization encouraged self-help and ethnic pride, sponsored black-owned business enterprises, and promoted Pan-African unity. Thanks to Garvey's flamboyant leadership, his popular Negro World newspaper, and colorful parades and mass rallies, the UNIA's membership soared to perhaps a million worldwide in the early 1920s. While Garvey's dream of a mass return of American blacks to Africa remained unfulfilled, he did establish, in 1920, the Negro Factories Corporation, which sponsored black businesses, and organized the ocean-going Black Star Line in 1919to transport passengers and facilitate trade among black businesses in Africa and the ...
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  • Garvey, Marcus

    Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature

    Word Count: 465     

    (1887–1940), social activist and journalist. As a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Marcus Garvey was in the vanguard of the new awakening among African Americans. Although his philosophy was at odds with other leading figures of the era, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, his influence could not be abated. Promoting his ideals in the art of oratory and through his newspapers, first Negro World and later the Blackman, Garvey has influenced almost every generation of African American writers since.

    Images depicting the destructive element in racial prejudice, one of the cornerstones of Garvey's ideology, were initially seen when major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Nella Larsen, grappled with the infirmities of ““color”” prejudice. In Larsen's so-called passing novels, Quicksand ...
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