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Rediscovering Marcus Garvey [1]

['Denise Oliver Velez']

Date: 2026-06-20  

Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. Hope you’ll join us here every Saturday. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.

This month is Caribbean American Heritage Month. The National Parks Service explains that on June 20,1965, “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. laid a wreath at Marcus Garvey’s grave in Jamaica and praised Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association as a powerful mass movement for human rights.”

As a Black History buff, it has always fascinated me about how little attention is paid here in the U.S. to Marcus Garvey. The focus on towering Black figures seems to be on Dr. King, Malcolm X, or W.E.B. Du Bois. Am I wrong to view this as classist? Garvey had over 4 million followers and most were working class.

Here’s what the Kennedy Center has to say in their bio on Garvey:

Leader of the first movement of the Black working class, Jamaican-born Marcus Mosiah Garvey galvanized African Americans with his inspiring speeches and his newspaper, Negro World. When Garvey spoke at the Bethel A.M.E. church in Harlem, 2,000 people raised the roof with shouts of approval. In 1914, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Its goal was to promote self-reliance among African Americans and solidarity among Black people worldwide. Five years later, Garvey set up UNIA headquarters at Liberty Hall in Harlem. The message and the movement spread like wildfire: By the early 1920s, the UNIA had opened 700 branches across the country. Garvey’s “back to Africa” movement aimed to instill a sense of Black pride—and to empower those of African descent to defy European domination and oppression. […] Garvey was frustrated not only with white hegemony, but with the racism he encountered among fellow African Americans. He challenged the aristocratic ideals of so-called Talented Tenth leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois—who, in Garvey’s eyes, rejected their African heritage and discriminated against those who were dark-skinned. Du Bois, for his part, considered Garvey both a traitor and a dictator; the two leaders traded frequent rhetorical barbs and blows in public.

I referenced Garvey in this diary about King paying tribute to him where I quoted the Jamaica Gleaner on June 23, 1965:

“Marcus Garvey was the first man of colour in the history of the United States to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions to Negroes and make the Negro feel he was somebody,” the Rev Dr Martin Luther King said at Marcus Garvey’s shrine in the George VI Memorial Park yesterday. Dr King had just laid a wreath at the shrine in the presence of His Excellency the Governor General, Sir Clifford Campbell; the Hon Edwin Allen who is acting as prime minister, other prominent public figures, and a crowd of 2,000.“You gave Marcus Garvey to the United States of America,” Dr King said, “and he gave to the millions of Negroes in the United States a sense of manhood, a sense of somebodiness.” “As we stand here, let us pledge ourselves to continue the struggle in this same spirit of somebodiness in the conviction that all God’s children are significant … that God’s black children are just as significant as his white children. And we will not stop until we have freedom in all its dimensions.

I’ve spent some time searching out Garvey materials online. Here are some of them:

“The Story of Marcus Garvey: A Documentary”:

From Biography is “Marcus Garvey: Strongest Voice for Black Nationalism in History”:

From Black Stories Untold is “Marcus Garvey: The Black Man Too Dangerous for America”:

“The Man Who Inspired MLK, Malcolm X, & The Black Panthers”:

Extra History’s “Marcus Garvey: Black Moses”:

And from recent history, WFAA’s look at the impact of former President Joe Biden’s pardon of Garvey before he left office:

Thanks for reading and please share your thoughts on this in the comments section below. Where have you learned about Garvey?

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