Marcus Garvey is probably the most important and influential black person of the twentieth and ultimately the twenty first century. His relationship to England is not often known or spoken about.

He was born in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, on 17th August, 1887. After seven years of schooling he worked as a printer. He became an active trade unionist and in 1907 was elected vice president of compositors' branch of the printers' union. He helped lead a printer's strike (1908-09) and after it collapsed the union dissolved.

In 1911 Garvey moved to England and briefly studied at Birkbeck College in London, where he met other blacks who were involved in the struggle to obtain independence from the British Empire. He also met and worked for Duse Mohammed Ali the editor of the African Times and Orient Review staying with him whilst he was in London. Marcus Garvey was a frequent speaker and visitor to Speakers Corner in Hyde Park. In 1913 in Southampton (England) he came up with the name of Universal Negro Improvement Association whilst talking to a man who had recently arrived from South Africa. Inspired he returned to Jamaica and established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and published the pamphlet, The Negro Race and Its Problems. Garvey was influenced by the ideas of Booker T Washington and made plans to develop a trade school for the poor similar to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

Garvey arrived in the United States on 23rd March 1916 and immediately launched a year-long tour of the country. He organized the first branch of UNIA in June 1917 and began publishing the Negro World, a journal that promoted his African nationalist ideas. Garvey's organization grew quickly and by1919 UNIA they had 30 branches all over the world in Cardiff Wales, London England and even Australia, as well as all over America, Africa and the Caribbean, South America and Europe. At that time they had 2 million members. But at the organisation’s height it had 11 million members (Royal Albert Hall Speech 1940), although other estimates put the figure at around six million.

Garvey campaigned against lynching, Jim Crow laws, denial of black voting rights and racial discrimination. Where UNIA differed from other civil rights organizations was on how the problem could be solved. Garvey doubted whether whites in the United States would ever agree to African Americans being treated as equals and argued for segregation rather than integration. Garvey suggested that African Americans should see Africa as their shinning star and building it up and ultimately plan to settle and control the whole continent, ‘Europe for the Europeans, Asia for the Asiatics Africa for the Africans at home and abroad".

Garvey began to sign up recruits who were willing to travel to Africa and "clear out the white invaders". He formed an army, equipping them with uniforms and weapons. Garvey appealed to the new militant feelings of black that followed the end of the First World War and asked those African Americans who had been willing to fight for democracy in Europe to now join his army to fight for their rights.

In 1919 Garvey formed the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Company. With $10,000,000 invested by his supporters Garvey purchased two steamships, Shadyside and Kanawha, to take African Americans to Africa. At a UNIA conference in August, 1920, Garvey was elected provisional president of Africa. He also had talks with the Ku Klux Klan about his plans to repatriate African Americans and published the first volume of Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.

After making a couple of journeys to Africa the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Company ran out of money. Several people in the UNIA had been involved in corruption, perhaps as part of the general plan launched by the US federal Government to discredit him under the young J Edgar Hoover (later head of the FBI). Or perhaps because of the general jealousy that seemed to infect his opposition and even some of his followers regarding his achievements. This was most pronounced with educators like WB Dubois (NAACP) and A Philip Randolph (later head of the Union of Sleeping Car Porters), Cyril Briggs (of the African Blood Brotherhood and later the communist party) and CLR James (Marxist historian).

Marcus Garvey survived an assassination attempt on his life, in which his stalwart wife Amy Ashwood actually knocked the attacker to the ground and saved him. The assailant George Tyler an unemployed African-American from the South was never allowed to confess who had put him up to it. He was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs. But the entire incident had all the hallmarks of a conspiracy at the highest level.

Garvey was arrested and charged with mail fraud and in 1925 was sentenced to five years imprisonment. He had served half of his sentence when President Calvin Coolidge commuted the rest of his prison term and had him deported to Jamaica.

In 1928 Garvey went on a lecture tour of Britain, France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada. On Garvey's return to Jamaica he established the People's Political Party and a new daily newspaper, The Blackman. The following year Garvey was defeated in the general election for a seat in Jamaica's colonial legislature.

In July, 1932, Garvey began publishing the evening newspaper, The New Jamaican. The venture was unsuccessful and the printing presses were seized for debts in 1933. He followed this with a monthly magazine, Black Man. He also launched an organization that he hoped would raise money to help create job opportunities for the rural poor in Jamaica.

The project was not a success and in March, 1935, Garvey moved back to England where he worked again with Duse Mohammed. With Duse he published The Tragedy of White Injustice. Marcus Garvey continued to hold UNIA conventions and to tour the world making speeches on civil rights until his death in London on 10th June 1940 at Number 2 Beaumont Crescent, West Kensington, London.

Garvey’s influence on Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta; Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, etc was vast. He was certainly the forerunner for the black movements in Africa, Caribbean, America and Europe, including the independence movement in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, ANC in South Africa, and a direct influence on the Nation of Islam through Elijah Muhammad and the Little family including Malcolm (X) his sisters Ella Collins and his brothers Wilfred, Reginald, and Philbert. Marcus Garvey’s work initiated the Nationalist movements including the Black Power movement and the changes that took place in the Student Non-Violent (later National) Co-ordinating Committee and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). Marcus Garvey was instrumental in the development of the modern Pan Africanist ideology and the rebirth in the love of African culture and history. The two stalwarts of the Pan Africanist books revolution Professor John Henrik Clarke and Dr Joseph Ben Jochnanon were very closely associated with Garvey. The former actually attended his school of African philosophy studies in Canada.

Garvey’s impact and importance on what is now considered modern black history cannot be overstated. In fact it is often understated, because of the political ends that those who have in discrediting him. But those who wish to learn more will do so and in turn will realise that he ahs had a landmark impact on the future destiny of the African/black race.

MAN KNOW THYSELF

For man to know himself is for him to feel that for him there is no human master. For him Nature is his servant, and whatsoever he wills in Nature, that shall be his reward. If he wills to be a pigmy, a serf or a slave, that shall he be. If he wills to be a real man in possession of the things common to man, then he shall be his own sovereign. When man fails to grasp his authority he sinks to the level of the lower animals, and whatsoever the real man bids him do, even as if it were of the lower animals, that much shall he do. If he says "go." He goes. If he says "come," he comes. By this command he performs the functions of life even as by a similar command the mule, the horse, the cow perform the will of their masters. For the last four hundred years the Negro has been in the position of being commanded even as the lower animals are controlled. Our race has been without a will; without a purpose of its own, for all this length of time.

Because of that we have developed few men who are able to understand the strenuousness of the age in which we live. Where can we find in this race of ours real men. Men of character, men of purpose, men of confidence, men of faith, men who really know themselves? I have come across so many weaklings who profess to be leaders, and in the test I have found them but the slaves of a nobler class. They perform the will of their masters without question. To me, a man has no master but God. Man in his authority is a sovereign lord. As for the individual man, so of the individual race. This feeling makes man so courageous, so bold, as to make it impossible for his brother to intrude upon his rights.

So few of us can understand what it takes to make a man - the man who will never say die; the man who will never give up; the man who will never depend upon others to do for him what he ought to do for himself; the man who will not blame God, who will not blame Nature, who will not blame Fate for his condition; but the man who will go out and make conditions to suit himself. Oh, how disgusting life becomes when on every hand you hear people (who bear your image, who bear your resemblance) telling you that they cannot make it, that Fate is against them, that they cannot get a chance. If 400,000,000 Negroes can only get to know thesmelves, to know that in them is a sovereign power, is an authority that is absolute, then in the next twenty-four hours we would have a new race, we would have a nation, an empire, - resurrected, not from the will of others to see us rise, - but from our own determination to rise, irrespective of what the world think