"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.