Marcus Garvey
Born August 17, 1887
St. Anns Bay, Jamaica
Died June 10, 1940
London, England
Leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which preached black pride and advocated a return to Africa
"I saw before me then, even as I do now, a new world of black men, not peons, serfs, dogs and slaves, but a nation of sturdy men making their impression upon civilization and causing a new light to dawn upon the human race."
Marcus Garvey burst onto the African American scene in March 1916. He had come to Harlem, a black neighborhood in northern Manhattan in New York City, to seek financial support for a school he was trying to establish in his homeland, Jamaica, an island in the Caribbean. He soon went on to promote a mass return to Africa by the descendants of black slaves. Garvey was one of the first effective promoters of black pride, emphasizing the historical dignity of black people.
Marcus Garvey addressed a central issue in American society: the failure, after three hundred years, to include descendants of Africans in a society that prided itself as a "melting pot." (The term "melting pot" refers to a process in which the habits and characteristics of immigrants from many different countries merge together and become a new nationality.) Arriving in New York just after World War I (1914–18), Garvey offered a range of solutions to what he saw as an absence in African Americans of the ancestral pride exhibited by European Americans.
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