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"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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