Marcus Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. (1887 – 1940) was a Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, and orator who organized the largest mass movement of the African diaspora in history. Believing that Black people could achieve true dignity only through economic self-sufficiency and political sovereignty, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica in 1914.

Moving to Harlem, New York, Garvey created the Negro World newspaper and established the Black Star Line shipping corporation. At the 1920 UNIA convention in Madison Square Garden, attended by 25,000 delegates from around the globe, he promulgated the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World and introduced the red, black, and green Pan-African flag. His teachings on Black consciousness profoundly influenced leaders from Kwame Nkrumah to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.