Marcus Mosiah Garvey

Well known for his exploits abroad than at home, Marcus Garvey is not only a national hero but also a mythic figure in Jamaica. Garvey’s arrival on the socio-political scene epitomized by White supremacy, White privilege, and racism in the United States was reminiscent of Moses’ arrival in Egypt with the mandate to Pharaoh to “let my people go.” The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) founded by Garvey was a symbol of Black pride, intelligence, entrepreneurship, and solidarity fueled by his philosophy which postulates that the time had come for people of African descent to cease from hero worship and idolatry of other races and to create and emulate Black heroes of their own (Hill and Bair, Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons; A Centennial Companion to The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1987). This chapter seeks to analyze the sociological impact of Marcus Garvey’s work using the Content Analysis methodological approach. The focus is on the following questions: (a) What was the push-pull factor that precipitated the migration of Garvey’s ideology from Jamaica to the United States? (b) How did the transition of Garvey’s philosophy and works and the UNIA form a subculture to a counterculture entity? (c) What impact did Garveyism have on the development of social movements in the Diaspora and Africa? (d) What is the potential influence of Garveyism as an ideological and philosophical antithesis to the reemergence of the thesis of White supremacy and White privilege? Answers to these questions lead to suggestions on how Garvey’s ideas can be employed to help build a new Africa.