Originally published in two volumes between 1923 and 1925, Africa for Africans: Or, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey is a compilation of letters, speeches and essays by one of the Fathers of Pan-Africanism. Hailed by Martin Luther King, Jr. as, "the first man of color. . . to make the Negro feel like he was somebody," Marcus Garvey was a polarizing yet influential figure whose legacy continues to be felt today. These philosophies, collected by Amy Jacques Garvey, his second wife and a pioneering journalist, chronicle Garvey's initial impressions and recollections of America, the formation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), his imprisonment and subsequent trial over the Black Star Line, and his scathing opinions of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Including such pieces as, "An Appeal to the Soul of White America," "The Negro's Greatest Enemy," and "Declaration of Rights of the Negroes of the World," Africa for Africans; Or, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey is an essential piece of Black history, professionally typeset and reimagined for modern readers.

A controversial figure in the history of race relations around the world, Marcus Garvey amazed his enemies as much as he dazzled his admirers. This anthology contains some of the African-American rights advocate's most noted writings and speeches, including "Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World" and "Africa for the Africans."

Originally written during his two year imprisonment in Atlanta, The Tragedy of White Injustice and Other Meditations is a collection of short thoughts or, impromptu poetry, from one of the Fathers of Black Nationalism, Marcus Garvey. In 1925, Garvey was tried and sentenced for the crime of mail fraud in relation to his business with the Black Star Line. Left to the mercy of the United States Federal Penitentiary of Atlanta, Garvey had not much to do except write-to his wife, to the U.N.I.A, and to anyone who could help spread his message of total and complete independence for Black people across the world. With the support of his wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, he was able to publish, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey in 1925, and The Meditations of Marcus Garvey in 1927. Beginning with the lines, "Lying and stealing is the white man's game / For rights of God nor man he has no shame / (A practice of his throughout the whole world) / At all, great thunderbolts he has hurled," Garvey penned "The Tragedy of White Injustice," a cry for the people of the world to wake up to the atrocities of colonialism and racism. Described by Garvey as neither verse nor orthodox prose, "The Tragedy of White Injustice" as well as his other meditations, showcased his never-ending pursuit of worldwide Black independence and his everlasting Black pride even in the face of the harshest of circumstances.Including such pieces as, "Keep Cool," "The Black Woman," and "Hail! United States of Africa!," The Tragedy of White Injustice and Other Meditations is an essential piece of Black history, professionally typeset and reimagined for modern readers.

"Africa for the Africans" was the name given to the extraordinary movement led by Jamaican Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940). Volumes I-VII of the "Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers "chronicled the Garvey movement that flourished in the United States during the 1920s. Now, the long-awaited African volumes of this edition demonstrate clearly the central role Africans played in the development of the Garvey phenomenon.
The African volumes provide the first authoritative account of how Africans transformed Garveyism into an African social movement. The most extensive collection of documents ever gathered on the early African nationalism of the interwar period, Volume X provides a detailed chronicle of the spread of Garvey's call for African redemption throughout Africa.

Volume XIII of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers covers the twelve months between the UNIA's second international convention in New York in August 1921 and the third convention in August 1922. It was a particularly tumultuous time for Garvey and the UNIA: Garvey’s relationship with the UNIA's top leadership began to fracture, the U.S. federal government charged Garvey with mail fraud, and his Black Star Line operation suffered massive financial losses. This period also witnessed a marked shift in Garvey's rhetoric and stance, as he retreated from his previously radical anticolonial positions, sought to court European governments as well as the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan, and moved against his political rivals. Despite these difficult and uncertain times, Garveyism expanded its reach throughout the Caribbean archipelago, which, as Volume XIII confirms, became the UNIA's de facto home in the early 1920s. The volume's numerous reports from the UNIA's Caribbean divisions and chapters describe what it was like for UNIA activists living and working under extremely repressive circumstances. The volume's major highlight covers the U.S. military's crackdown on the UNIA in the Dominican Republic, as documented in the correspondence between John Sydney de Bourg—whom Garvey had dispatched to monitor the situation—and U.S. and British government officials. In addition to UNIA divisional reports and de Bourg's extensive correspondence, Volume XIII contains a wealth of newspaper articles, political tracts, official documents, and other sources that outline the complex responses to Garveyism throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, all the while documenting this watershed moment for Garvey and the UNIA.

With Volume XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920, Duke University Press proudly assumes publication of the final volumes of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. This invaluable archival project documents the impact and spread of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the organization founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914 and led by him until his death in 1940. Volume XI is the first to focus on the Caribbean, where the UNIA was represented by more than 170 divisions and chapters. Revealing the connections between the major African-American mass movement of the interwar era and the struggle of the Caribbean people for independence, this volume includes the letters, speeches, and writings of Caribbean Garveyites and their opponents, as well as documents and speeches by Garvey, newspaper articles, colonial correspondence and memoranda, and government investigative records. Volume XI covers the period from 1911, when a controversy was ignited in Limon, Costa Rica, in response to a letter that Garvey sent to the Limon Times, until 1920, when workers on the Panama Canal undertook a strike sponsored in part by the UNIA. The primary documents are extensively annotated, and the volume includes twenty-two critical commentaries on the territories covered in the book, from the Bahamas to Guatemala, and Haiti to Brazil. A trove of scholarly resources, Volume XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920 illuminates another chapter in the history of one the world’s most important social movements.Praise for the Previous Volumes: “The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers will take its place among the most important records of the Afro-American experience. . . . ‘The Marcus Garvey Papers’ lays the groundwork for a long overdue reassessment of Marcus Garvey and the legacy of racial pride, nationalism and concern with Africa he bequeathed to today’s black community.�—Eric Foner, the New York Times Book Review “Until the publication of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, many of the documents necessary for a full assessment of Garvey’s thought or of his movement’s significance have not been easily accessible. Robert A. Hill and his staff . . . have gathered over 30,000 documents from libraries and other sources in many countries. . . . The Garvey papers will reshape our understanding of the history of black nationalism and perhaps increase our understanding of contemporary black politics.�—Clayborne Carson, the Nation “Now is our chance, through these important volumes, to finally begin to come to terms with the significance of Garvey’s complex, fascinating career and the meaning of the movement he built.�—Lawrence W. Levine, the New Republic

The fifth volume of this monumental series chronicles what was perhaps the stormiest period in the history of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA: the aftermath of the tumultuous 1922 convention. Outside the UNIA a growing list of opponents, including the black Socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, and the NAACP's Robert Bagnall and William Pickens, were turning their criticism of the controversial Jamaican into a "Garvey Must Go" campaign. Meanwhile, Garvey's former UNIA ally, Rev. J. W. H. Eason-who had been impeached at the 1922 convention-was emerging as a dangerous rival. Eason was assassinated in January 1923, just as he was to testify against Garvey in the latter's mail-fraud trial. Though it may be impossible to determine if Garvey had a role in the killing, the murder generated negative publicity that did untold damage to Garvey and his organization. Throughout all this, the federal government pressed its case against Garvey and his co-defendants on mail-fraud charges stemming from irregularities in the sale of Black Star Line stock. In June 1923 a jury found Garvey guilty and he was sentenced to five years in prison. Internecine feuds wracked the movement while Garvey languished in New York City's Tombs prison, awaiting bail so that he could mount an appeal. As soon as he was released in September 1923, he turned his energy to reconsolidating the UNIA. while considering the best appeal strategy. For the UNIA Garvey resurrected an old commercial message: that economic salvation was to be found in ships. In March 1924 he reconstituted the defunct Black Star Line as the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Co. and bought a ship, the S. S. General Goethals, in time for a tour of it by convention delegates. The shipboard tour proved to be a highlight of the 1924 convention, during which UNIA leadership was stunned by the Liberian government's formal repudiation of the movement's African colonization plans. Despite the UNIA's unexpected setback in Liberia, the movement continued to spread into new places, particularly in America's southern states. Generously illustrated with photographs and facsimile documents, Volume V of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers upholds the impeccable editorial standards of the first four volumes. Once again, a wealth of new sources collected from around the world demonstrates how vitally important Marcus Garvey and the mass movement he controlled were to Afro-American history.

"I do not speak carelessly or recklessly but with a definite object of helping the people, especially those of my race, to know, to understand, and to realize themselves."--Marcus Garvey, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1937
A popular companion to the scholarly edition of "The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers," this volume is a collection of autobiographical and philosophical works produced by Garvey in the period from his imprisonment in Atlanta to his death in London in 1940.

The publication of Volume VII marks the completion of the American series of "The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers," This final book in the seven-volume set charts the magnetic, controversial Pan-African leader's career from his deportation from the United States in November 1927 to his death in England in 1940.
The volume begins with Garvey's triumphant welcome in Jamaica, his tour abroad, and his entry into Jamaican party politics. It traces his reshaping of the organizational structure of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the late 1920s, and his management of UNIA affairs from Kingston and London in the 1930s. Though typically seen as a time of decline, this final period of Garvey's life appears, in editorials drawn from his publications, as a fruitful one in which some of his strongest political writings were produced. Surveillance reports filed by Jamaican police and British colonial officials provide a rich account of Garvey's speeches and activities. Although he was banned from the United States and restricted from traveling or speaking in many areas under colonial supervision, Garvey nevertheless traveled widely after his deportation, visiting and influencing affairs in Geneva, Paris, and London, and making organizational tours of Canada and the Caribbean. He chaired UNIA conferences in Toronto and inaugurated the School of African Philosophy, a series of lectures designed to train UNIA leaders. In the mid-1930s he moved the headquarters of the UNIA to London.
In the final months of his life, correspondence between Garvey in England and his young sons in Jamaica shows the personal side of the public leader. The tragedy ofGarvey's personal demise is framed by the cataclysmic events of Europe entering a world war and by the decline of the movement he had worked so diligently to build. The long financial hardships of the previous decade and the loss of Garvey's presence had winnowed the membership of the UNIA. Garvey suffered a disabling stroke in January 1940. He died in London the following June, as Italy invaded France and Germany prepared to occupy Paris. Volume VII ends with the reconstitution of the UNIA in the months immediately after Garvey's death and the establishment of a new headquarters with new leadership in Cleveland.

The fourth volume of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers marks the period of deepening crisis in the UNIA's political and economic fortunes. After September of 1921, membership declined and morale in the UNIA began to weaken. Underlying it all, however, was the final failure of the Black Star Line that resulted when negotiations with the United States Chipping Board for the purchase of the long proposed African ship collapsed in March 1922. The movement also suffered a major setback when the first Liberian colonization plan aborted in the summer of 1921. On the political front, Garvey's African program had to compete with W.E.B. Du Bois's Second Pan-African Congress. The were also major shifts in Garvey's political strategy during this period, his speeches reflecting a desire to placate the U.S. government, while simultaneously assailing his lef-wing critics for promoting "social equality." This disavowal of radicalism earned him further enemies on the left. One of his chief black critics, Cyril V. Briggs, the leader of the African Blood Brotherhood, unwittingly supplied federal investigators with evidence that led to Garvey's indictment on charges of mail fraud in February 1922. By prosecuting him, however, the Department of Justice did not discredit Garvey in the eyes of his followers; rather, it temporarily strengthened his hold over the movement as the appearance of persecution intensified the loyalty of the UNIA membership. But later in 1922 Garvey did lose favor among many of his followers when it was disclosed that he had met secretly in Atlanta with the Acting Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. What Garvey had thought was a diplomatic triumph proved instead to be anathema to most blacks. At the Third UNIA Convention in 1922, Garvey repudiated the entire executive council of the UNIA, while expressing his anger of "plots" against him from within the UNIA leadership. Loyalty to Garvey thus became a more urgent issue than ever before. But although Garvey was once again able to silence his critics within the UNIA, the price was to be a badly fractured and demoralized movement. At the same time, his political adversaries outside the UNIA were steadily gaining ground against him. As meticulously documented as the three previous volumes, Volume IV provides the first extended record of Garvey's emergent social philosophy, particularly as it relates to his conception of "racial purity" and the metaphysics of the human condition. It stands as an impressive record of the Garvey movement.