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The Birmingham Times
Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, led the largest organized mass movement in Black history. His Back-to-Africa movement earned him nicknames like “Black Moses,” and his ideas of racial pride are seen as a precursor to the “Black is Beautiful” ideals of the 1960s. Garvey encouraged Black Americans to celebrate their African heritage and be proud of how they looked. In 1922, he married his second wife, Amy Jacques, an editor, feminist, and race activist who shared his beliefs and worked to spread Garvey’s message, even after his death.
Garvey was born on August 17, 1887, in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. He left school at 14, worked as a printer, joined Jamaican nationalist organizations, toured Central America, and spent time in London. Inspired by Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, Garvey aspired to open a similar industrial training school. In 1916, he came to America at Washington’s invitation, but he arrived just after Washington died.
Garvey arrived in the United States during the rise of the “New Negro” era, a period marked by growing Black activism and racial unrest, including the 1917 East St. Louis riots and the 1919 Red Summer. After traveling and lecturing, Garvey settled in New York City, where he established a chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.), which he had founded in Jamaica. Through powerful oratory, he promoted Black racial pride, economic independence, and freedom from racism and colonialism. His philosophy, known as Garveyism, inspired millions of Black people worldwide.
Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, led the largest organized mass movement in Black history. (Public Domain)One of Garvey’s most ambitious projects was the Black Star Line, a shipping company created in 1919 to promote Black-owned trade and connect people and businesses between the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. The company became an important symbol and recruiting tool for the U.N.I.A., but financial problems, labor disputes, mismanagement, and corruption eventually led to its collapse.
By 1920, the U.N.I.A. had hundreds of chapters worldwide and published The Negro World, a widely circulated newspaper. However, internal disagreements, opposition from Black critics, and government harassment weakened the movement.
Amy Jacques was the associate editor of The Negro World (1924-1927), and introduced a new page, called “Our Women and What They Think.” (Public Domain)Born in Jamaica, Amy Jacques moved to the United States in 1917 and joined the Universal Negro Improvement Association the following year after hearing Garvey speak. In 1920, she became Garvey’s personal secretary and traveling companion, as well as the office manager at U.N.I.A. headquarters and secretary of the Negro Factories Corporation.
Jacques and Garvey married in July 1922, shortly after his divorce from his first wife, Amy Ashwood.
But less than a year into their marriage, Garvey was indicted for mail fraud related to the Black Star Line and later imprisoned. During his incarceration in an Atlanta penitentiary from 1925 to 1927, Jacques served as Garvey’s principal lieutenant. She assumed leadership of U.N.I.A., continued publishing Garvey’s philosophies and raised funds for his release.
She became the associate editor of The Negro World (1924-1927), and introduced a new page, called “Our Women and What They Think,” which carried international news about the status of women, poetry, profiles of leading Black women and Black female historical figures, and columns by and about members of the women’s auxiliaries.
Garvey’s sentence was eventually commuted, and he was deported to Jamaica in 1927.
Jacques returned to Jamaica with Garvey and continued as a contributing editor of the U.N.I.A. paper in 1927-1928. She and Garvey toured England, France, and Germany in the spring and summer of 1928, and she wrote articles for The Negro World about her impressions.
In 1929, Garvey established the People’s Political Party, Jamaica’s first modern political organization.
Garvey and Jacques had two sons – Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr., born in 1930, and Julius Winston Garvey, born in 1933.
Garvey rebuilt the U.N.I.A. in Jamaica but eventually moved to London in the mid 1930s. His family stayed behind in Jamaica, and they reunited only briefly before his death in 1940.
In his final years, Garvey had lost most of his followers and fell into obscurity, but Jacques became a contributing editor to a Black nationalist journal, the African, published in Harlem in the 1940s, and established the African Study Circle of the World in Jamaica in the late 1940s. In 1963, she published Garvey and Garveyism.
Although Garvey failed to realize all his objectives, his movement, strongly supported by his wife, still represented freedom from internalized ideas of racial inferiority.
Source: PBS.org
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