Pan Africanist Marcus Garvey Continues to Inspire 134 Years After His Birth

By Neil Armstrong

 

One hundred and thirty-four years after his birth and one hundred and seven years after the international organization he founded, Marcus Mosiah Garvey is still positively influencing the lives of many people worldwide.

 

Garvey, who was born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica on August 17, 1887, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 in Kingston, Jamaica. Three years later, he did the same in Harlem, New York.

 

His life and work are documented in books, plays, documentaries and films. A new docufilm, African Redemption: The Life and Legacy of Marcus Garvey, by Jamaica-born, American filmmaker Roy T. Anderson will be screened at upcoming film festivals. A Facebook post on August 15, 2021, noted that “an exclusive invitation-only preview screening of our film in front of a live audience” would be held on August 16 in New York City, a day before Garvey’s birthday. Anderson, director and producer of Black Star Line Films, is also the creator of the 2015 documentary film, Queen Nanny: Legendary Maroon Chieftainess. It was co-created with history professor, Harcourt T. Fuller and “unearths and examine the mysterious figure that is Nanny of the Maroons; Jamaica's sole female National Hero, and one of the most celebrated, but least recognized heroines in the resistance history of the New World.”

A few months ago, Anderson allowed me to preview the film and told me that he was really proud of the Marcus Garvey film and had put his “blood, sweat and tears into it.” Garvey’s UNIA had chapters in many countries throughout the world and its work and influence, as well as its advocates, touched the lives of several Black leaders in Canada. The late Bromley Armstrong has included Garvey in his memoir, B. Denham Jolly tells the story of the Garveyite whose rooming house he lived in when he travelled to Toronto in his early years while on holiday breaks from the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, and Natasha Henry, president of the Ontario Black History Society documents Garvey’s visits to Canada and his support of Emancipation Day events. Cheryl Thompson, an assistant professor in the School of Creative Industries, Ryerson University wrote “Garvey’s place in Toronto history” in Spacing magazine on August 17, 2018. Carla Marano has also written the article “We All Used to Meet at the Hall”: Assessing the Significance of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Toronto, 1900-1950” in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Volume 25, Issue 1, 2014.

In Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, published by The University of the West Indies Press in 2014, Olive Senior notes that while the UNIA was founded in Jamaica in 1914, it “had not really taken off until he established it in the United States in 1917.”

“By the mid-1920s, the UNIA had approximately eleven hundred branches in over forty countries and millions of followers, and Garvey’s message of black self-reliance and racial pride crossed cultural and linguistic barriers.”

Senior states that Garvey’s “strongest support came from expatriate West Indians in places like Panama and Costa Rica, and, later, in Cuba (where there were fifty-two branches), as well as throughout the West Indies.” She notes that from 1918 onwards, Garvey’s ideas “were channelled through his newspaper, the New York-based Negro World.” 

“The fact that it was declared banned literature by many of the colonial governments did not prevent its widespread circulation in the islands, carried there by black seamen. Garvey himself had begun his journey to political consciousness as an emigrant in Costa Rica between 1910 and 1912, working as a timekeeper for the Unite Fruit Company, and he would later return to Central America to empower the workers in these places with his ideas of racial pride,” writes Senior.

So, at age 27, Garvey started the UNIA with his wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey, and twenty-six years later in 1940 at age 52, he died in London, England. He was buried there until his remains would later be re-interred in Jamaica in 1964 at the National Heroes Park. He also became Jamaica’s first national hero in 1969. Much of Garvey’s work in the UNIA was done alongside his wives, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, who were also very involved in the leadership of the organization.

Armstrong, who passed away on August 17, 2018, notes in his 2000 memoir, Bromley, Tireless Champion for Just Causes, written with Sheldon Taylor that when he met community leader Donald Moore in 1950, he enjoyed their discussions.

“Though nearing sixty when I met him, he still professed a commitment to the radical politics of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA. In fact, the Toronto branch of that organization was founded in 1919 in his tailor shop when it was located on Spadina Avenue,” he writes in book published by Vitabu Publications in 2000.

Armstrong notes that Toronto’s only Black lawyer, B.J. Spencer Pitt, became the president of the UNIA in the late 1920s and that its survival “was the product of a small number of men and women who laboured intensely to keep it solvent.” The UNIA members bought the building at 355 College Street and it became “a community centre where Black adults and children went to socialize, attend debates, danced, and played music.”

When B. Denham Jolly arrived in Toronto from his studies in Guelph, Ontario, he sought out “a rooming house on Manning Avenue, near Queen Street, run by a Jamaican woman named Violet Williams (later Blackman, when she married a Barbadian railway engineer.)”

Speaking of Violet, who immigrated to Canada in 1920 as a nanny, he notes that she became a community leader in 1924 when Marcus Garvey visited Toronto to set up a branch of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

“Violet joined the movement and eventually worked her way up to female president. The Toronto chapter grew in importance in the 1930s when the U.S. banned Garvey from entry, and he held his annual UNIA conventions in Toronto in 1936, 1937, and 1938. During the 1937 conference, he conducted a summer school in African philosophy in Toronto, and visited Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. His influence in Canada was enormous,” writes Jolly in his memoir, In the Black: My Life published in 2017 by ECW Press.

Jolly notes that Garvey’s “torch was still burning bright when I arrived in Toronto in spring of 1956, sixteen years after his death; UNIA and Garvey’s philosophy were still thriving in the city, an very much so at Violet’s house on Manning Avenue.” In his search for a summer job, she sent him to meet Harry Gairey, a fellow Jamaican, who was a railway porter, one of Toronto’s leading Black activists, and a leader in the Garvey movement.

The chair that Marcus Garvey sat in at the UNIA Hall in Toronto, Canada, now housed at the Jamaican Canadian Association

Meanwhile, historian Natasha L. Henry in her book, Emancipation Day: Celebrating Freedom in Canada, published by Dundurn Press in 2010 and reprinted recently, notes that Garvey toured Canada, visiting several branches of the UNIA, “including branches in Sydney, Nova Scotia; Toronto; and Montreal. He also fuelled the establishment of new branches.”

Henry notes that the UNIA also participated in Emancipation Day celebrations in Canada, and Marcus Garvey himself was a supporter of Emancipation Day commemorations.

“The aim of the formation of the UNIA was to provide a space in which Blacks could work cohesively to improve their social, political, and economic conditions; to address matters of concern to them locally and globally; and to foster racial pride,” writes Henry. She notes that Bob Marley’s lyrics in Redemption Song originated from a speech delivered by Garvey in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1937, in which he says: “We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind….”

In her doctoral thesis, “For the Freedom of the Black People”: Case Studies on the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Canada, 1900-1950, Carla Marano includes the voices of Garveyites such as Marjorie Lewsey, Gwen Johnston and Violet Blackman.

Referencing many sources, including No Burden to Carry: Narratives of Black Working Women in Ontario 1920s to 1950s, edited by Dionne Brand and published by Women’s Press, Toronto, 1991, and interviews done by others, Marano ensures that the voices of several Garveyites are telling the story of the UNIA in this city.

A tile from 355 College Street, once home of the UNIA Hall, on display at A Different Booklist Cultural Centre. It is imprinted with the UNIA abbreviation.

Tony Martin, the late Trinidad and Tobago-born scholar of Africana Studies and professor and chairman of Black Studies at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, has several and written several books about Garvey. He wrote a new preface for Amy Jacques Garvey’s The Philosophy & Opinions of Marcus Garvey or, Africans for the Africans. In Message to the People: The Course of African Philosophy, by Marcus Garvey, edited by Martin and published in 1986 by The Majority Press, the professor notes that Garvey’s “years of all-encompassing triumph coincided with his sojourn in the United States, from 1916-1927.”

“The immediate purpose of The Course of African Philosophy was to train a cadre of UNIA leaders who would carry on the great work of the organization after Garvey’s death. Garvey designed the twenty-two lessons in London and took them to Canada, where, from August 24^th to 31^st 1937 he conducted a regional conference for North American members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” writes Martin. For most of September 1937, Garvey trained a select group of UNIA organizers from North America.

The final resting place of Marcus Mosiah Garvey at the National Heroes Park in Kingston, Jamaica

Today, there are many Black community leaders in Canada who follow the philosophy of Garvey and the UNIA in their organizing. There are also authors who continue to reference him in their work. One such is Ian Williams, the Giller Prize-winning author of Reproduction, who in his new book, Disorientation: Being Black in the World, notes the disagreement between Garvey and W. E.B. Du Bois over Pan-Africanism. Published by Random House Canada, the new book will be out on September 21, 2021.