Born: August 7, 1887, St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica

Education: St. Ann's Bay Common School

Died: June 10, 1940, London, England

Vendors still sell pictures of a regally attired Garvey in New York City, where he appealed to black pride like no others. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston, Jamaica (1914) and its Harlem headquarters (1917). Urging blacks to be proud of their color and history, build black enterprises, and even go “Back-to-Africa,” Garvey enlisted thousands of Caribbean emigrants and southern black migrants in UNIA. It formed hundreds of chapters in the North, South, and West Indies. Membership rose to several million by the1920s. Many observers called Garvey the “Black Moses” of his people.

Black nationalism is the foundation of Africa's liberation and of self-determination in America, he preached, rejecting the NAACP's pursuit of civil rights and racial integration. W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, and others denounced him as a misleader. But he continued to oppose them and recruit members. His arrest for mail fraud involving Black Star Line ships, incarceration, and deportation (1925) hurt his movement. Garvey's ideology persisted not only in UNIA but also among black nationalists such as black Muslims.