As an activist who promoted Black pride, Marcus Garvey founded one of the largest mass movements of Black Americans. Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) offered new hope for working-class Blacks in the 1920s. At the same time, Harlem Renaissance artists also encouraged racial pride like Garvey, but within that movement opportunities came to only a limited number of creative African American individuals. Garvey's clarion call for Black nationalism resonated primarily among lower-and working-class blacks and inspired numerous Black mass-appeal leaders and movements. The appeal of Garvey himself faded by the late 1920s, but he remained a complex and controversial figure for his views on Black nationalism and cultural militancy, which energized many Black Americans in the post-World War I era.

Marcus Garvey

Although he would become a pioneering Black nationalist in the United States, Garvey grew up in rather inauspicious surroundings in Jamaica...