Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917. By the early 1920s, his program of African liberation and racial uplift had attracted millions of supporters, both in the United States and abroad. "The Age of Garvey" presents an expansive global history of the movement that came to be known as Garveyism. Offering a groundbreaking new interpretation of global black politics between the First and Second World Wars, Adam Ewing charts Garveyism's emergence, its remarkable global transmission, and its influence in the responses among African descendants to white supremacy and colonial rule in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.

Delving into the organizing work and political approach of Garvey and his followers, Ewing shows that Garveyism emerged from a rich tradition of pan-African politics that had established, by the First World War, lines of communication among black intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. Garvey's legacy was to reengineer this tradition as a vibrant and multifaceted mass politics. Ewing looks at the people who enabled Garveyism's global spread, including labor activists in the Caribbean and Central America, community organizers in the urban and rural United States, millennial religious revivalists in central and southern Africa, welfare associations and independent church activists in Malawi and Zambia, and an emerging generation of Kikuyu leadership in central Kenya. Moving away from the images of quixotic business schemes and repatriation efforts, "The Age of Garvey" demonstrates the consequences of Garveyism's international presence and provides a dynamic and unified framework for understanding the movement, during the interwar years and beyond.

Collected for the first time, the foundational contributions of a scholar and activist who shaped the study of Garveyism and pan-Africanism. This volume brings together Robert A. Hill's most important writings for the first time, highlighting his intellectual contributions to the history of pan-Africanism. A pioneering scholar and activist, a ground-breaking builder of pan-African archives, and the editor of the multivolume Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Hill remains under-acknowledged for his influence on the field. This collection is a long-overdue testament to his legacy. Adam Ewing showcases Hill's ground-breaking writings on Garveyism, the pan-African, anticolonial movement that spread across the globe following World War I. Hill's essays trace Marcus Garvey's evolving thought and illuminate the resonance of the movement in the Caribbean and its diaspora, in the United States, and across sub-Saharan Africa. The volume also includes Hill's writings on diverse aspects of pan-Africanism, including the imposter figure in diaspora history, Cyril Briggs's African Blood Brotherhood, the Rastafarian movement, the fiction of George Schuyler, George Beckford and the Abeng collective in Jamaica, the theories of Walter Rodney, the life and thought of C.L.R. James, and the music of Bob Marley. This volume not only demonstrates Hill's intellectual praxis and its roots in his academic influences and personal experiences but also reveals the breadth, diversity, complexity, and centrality of the pan-African tradition in African diasporic politics and thought. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917. By the early 1920s, his program of African liberation and racial uplift had attracted millions of supporters, both in the United States and abroad. The Age of Garvey presents an expansive global history of the movement that came to be known as Garveyism. Offering a groundbreaking new interpretation of global black politics between the First and Second World Wars, Adam Ewing charts Garveyism's emergence, its remarkable global transmission, and its influence in the responses among African descendants to white supremacy and colonial rule in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Delving into the organizing work and political approach of Garvey and his followers, Ewing shows that Garveyism emerged from a rich tradition of pan-African politics that had established, by the First World War, lines of communication among black intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. Garvey's legacy was to reengineer this tradition as a vibrant and multifaceted mass politics. Ewing looks at the people who enabled Garveyism's global spread, including labor activists in the Caribbean and Central America, community organizers in the urban and rural United States, millennial religious revivalists in central and southern Africa, welfare associations and independent church activists in Malawi and Zambia, and an emerging generation of Kikuyu leadership in central Kenya. Moving away from the images of quixotic business schemes and repatriation efforts, The Age of Garvey demonstrates the consequences of Garveyism's international presence and provides a dynamic and unified framework for understanding the movement, during the interwar years and beyond.

Arguing that the accomplishments of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey and his followers have been marginalized in narratives of the black freedom struggle, this volume draws on decades of overlooked research to reveal the profound impact of Garvey's post-World War I black nationalist philosophy around the world and across the twentieth century. These essays examine the influence of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Africa, Australia, North America, and the Caribbean. They highlight the poorly recognized work of many Garveyite women and show how the UNIA played a key role in shaping labor unions, political organizations, churches, and schools. They also trace the imprint of the movement on long-term developments such as decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, the civil rights and Black Power movements in the United States, and the radical pan-African movement. Rejecting the idea that Garveyism was a brief and misguided phenomenon, this volume exposes its scope, significance, and endurance. Together, contributors assert that Garvey initiated the most important mass movement in the history of the African diaspora, and they urge readers to rethink the emergence of modern black politics with Garveyism at the center.