Marcus Garvey’s Influences

Marcus Garvey’s influences

America has a long history of discrimination against non-white peoples. White Americans are responsible for the eradication of Native Americans from their native lands, and for the importation of Black people from Africa for enslavement. Today racism is not even close to what it had been 150 years ago, when slavery was still legal; however the changes have come gradually. The Harlem renaissance was a pivotal time for the recognition of black culture in the US, and Marcus Garvey emerged as a strong and cunning political leader. During the Harlem Renaissance, Marcus Garvey was instrumental in defining the black identity in the World, and the fundamental basis of this goal was black self-determination.

From his early days, Marcus Garvey was aware of political injustices. He was born in Jamaica in 1887, the youngest of 11 children. He experienced racism firsthand from a schoolmate that called him a derogatory name because of his race. When Garvey got older, he moved to Central America, where he worked to form unions that would help workers receive better working conditions. It was here, in Central America that Garvey began to see racism “on a worldwide scale” (BBC Historic Figures). Later on, Garvey attended college in England, where he gained knowledge of politics, and of other black political movements in the rest of the world. Garvey started from meager beginnings as a discriminated boy in poor Jamaica, and rose to be a powerful, educated man who was in a position to make an impact on the world stage.

Garvey lived during a difficult time for black people. Lincoln’s Emancipation had granted blacks freedom from slavery, but they were still treated as second class citizens. Black people had served in World War I, but there were race riots that showed that whites were not yet willing to treat blacks differently, thus denying them any respect for their contributions to the war effort (Van Leeuwen 1). Garvey looked for a method with which to gain the global respect that black people deserved.

Garvey had strong beliefs and expectations concerning blacks in the world. He saw potential in unification, and a major goal of his was to have all blacks unite together in order to gain power as a race. He formed the Universal Negro Improvement Organization (UNIA) in 1914 in Jamaica for the purpose of improving the black status in the world. The UNIA also served as a platform for Garvey to express his ideas. He opened a US branch of the UNIA in 1919 in Harlem. The institution spread rapidly throughout the country as Garvey made cunning use of modern communication methods in order to spread his message (Moses 254). He opened UNIA headquarters in major cities all over the US that had high black populations (BBC). These methods helped the UNIA gain a significant following because it appealed to so many people who were looking to gain knowledge on how to better themselves.

The UNIA was founded on a set of fundamental beliefs and goals that sought to bring blacks power. Garvey wanted to provide a sense of “Universal African Nationalism”, a sense of identity, for blacks that had been dispersed throughout the world because of the slave trade. He wanted to invoke pride in blacks by noting on previous black accomplishments in order to emphasize the respect that blacks deserve. In addition, He desired for blacks to possess self reliance in the responsibility of rehabilitating their political and racial status in the world. Finally, He wanted blacks to gain economic power by means of controlling and developing themselves in “commercial, industrial, and financial enterprises” (Garvey, Marcus Jr.). With the tools of identity, pride in being black, self reliance, and black economic power, “Garveyism and the UNIA represented the desire of [blacks] to determine their own status from a position of power rather than relying on the condescending charity of outsiders” (Moses 251). Blacks would be able to determine