Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey built the largest mass movement of Black people in history from a rented hall in Harlem, ran a shipping line on the subscriptions of the poor, and was deported from the United States for mail fraud. He was born in St Ann's Bay, Jamaica, in 1887, a mason's son, apprenticed as a printer, and he learned politics in the strikes of Kingston and the labour camps of Costa Rica and Panama, where he saw what the fruit and canal companies did to West Indian workers. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Kingston in 1914, moved it to New York in 1916, and by 1920 claimed millions of members in chapters across the Americas and Africa. The number is disputed; the scale is not. Its programme was race pride, Black-owned enterprise, and eventually a return to Africa under a Black government, and its instruments were a newspaper, the Negro World, a uniformed parade with Garvey in a plumed hat as Provisional President of Africa, and the Black Star Line, a steamship company sold in five-dollar shares to people who had never owned anything. The ships were old, badly bought and worse run, the line failed, and in 1923 the federal government convicted him of using the mails to sell stock in it; J. Edgar Hoover had wanted a charge against him for years. He served two years in Atlanta, was deported to Jamaica in 1927, founded a party there, won a seat on the Kingston council, and moved to London in 1935, where he died in 1940 after reading a premature obituary of himself. Jamaica made him its first national hero in 1969; Rastafari took him for a prophet; the red, black and green he designed became the colours of a continent's flags. He is the one man on this list who held no office and commanded no army, and the country pages could not be written without him.
- Lived: 1887 CE – 1940 CE
- Nationality: Jamaican
- Roles: activist, publisher, political_leader
