Marcus Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, known as "Black Moses," was a Jamaican-born Pan-Africanist and Black nationalist leader. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica on August 1, 1914, moved to the United States in 1916, and built UNIA branches across Northern Black communities. By 1919 he claimed a following of about two million. He built UNIA's economic arm, including the Negro Factories Corporation and the Black Star Line, a Black-owned shipping line, and published the newspaper Negro World. The UNIA's first international convention opened at Liberty Hall on August 1, 1920, drew roughly two thousand delegates, met throughout August, and closed on August 31. An estimated 25,000 people heard Garvey speak at Madison Square Garden. The convention adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, which PBS calls one of the world's earliest and most comprehensive human rights documents. It denounced lynching, segregated transit, job discrimination, and inferior Black schools. Delegates elected Garvey "Provisional President of Africa." Garvey built the largest mass movement of people of African descent in U.S. history to that point and seeded the ideology of Pan-Africanism and Black self-determination. The UNIA's Red, Black, and Green became a banner of the African diaspora. His ideology was contested in his own time: he clashed with W.E.B. Du Bois, the NAACP, and A. Philip Randolph. Per Britannica, as a racial purist and Black separatist he approved of the Ku Klux Klan because it sought to separate the races. His teachings later shaped Rastafarianism, whose followers read his 1916 call to "Look to Africa for the crowning of the Black king" as prophecy fulfilled by the 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie.