Marcus Garvey

3 Pages 760 Words

Marcus Garvey, was born in Jamaica in 1887 and is considered to be the father of the Black Nationalism Movement. During the early 1900’s, after reading Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, Garvey pledged to organize Blacks throughout the world with an agenda of Black unity and pride. Moreover, Garvey achieved his greatest influence in the Untied States where there was a growing ambition among Blacks for justice, wealth, and a sense of community. From the time of World War I, up until the mid-1920’s, Gravey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association(UNIA) was the largest Black organization in African-American history. An estimated million men and women from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa belonged to it. When Garvey arrived in the United States in March 1916, the Black populace was about to suffer a severe blow that would make them ideal candidates for Gravey’s movement. During the Reconstruction period that followed the American Civil War, many African-Americans lost faith in the American political process. They were promised many reforms and reparations that were never realized. However, World War 1 bought a new sense of prosperity to blacks because they felt they had a second chance to prove themselves as well as attain their piece of the proverbial American pie. Implementing Alger’s philosophy which states “...heroes prove themselves through inspired acts of heroism and devotion,” many blacks believed if they fought in World War I, it would deliver them their second emancipation1 . Nonetheless, after entering the war, African-Americans were subjected to segregation, indignities in training camps, and assigned to labor battalions far out of proportion to their skills and intelligence2 . In addition, black soldiers were told that when they return home they should not expect the same privileges they enjoyed aboard. When the war ended in 1919, the African-American community was outraged. Their soldiers were...