To some, Marcus Garvey was a visionary – prophet of Pan-Africanism, pioneer of black pride, freedom fighter. His influence sparked black power movements from the Nation of Islam to Rastafari and inspired anti-colonial thinkers around the world. To others, his authoritarian style, admiration for strongman politics, and commitment to racial purity veered dangerously close to fascism. Garvey’s legacy sits at a crossroads of liberation and authoritarianism, black empowerment and racial essentialism.
He rose from humble beginnings in colonial Jamaica to become one of the most influential black nationalist leaders of the twentieth century. His complex legacy is both inspirational and controversial.
What Was Marcus Garvey’s Background?
Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on August 17, 1887, in Saint Ann’s Bay, in the British colony of Jamaica. He moved to Kingston in 1905 and became a printer by trade. Garvey became a trade unionist and played a key role in the 1980 print workers’ strike. The strike was broken and Garvey was sacked and blacklisted.
Politically energized, he became involved in the Jamaican nationalist movement before leaving Jamaica in 1910 to travel to Central America. He returned briefly to Jamaica in 1911 before leaving for London – the heart of the British Empire – where he studied law and philosophy at Birkbeck College.
What Was the UNIA?
In 1914, Garvey returned to Jamaica and founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). By 1916, he had relocated to Harlem, New York, where he built the UNIA into a mass movement. In a sense, the UNIA functioned as a shadow state, with its own parallel courts, passport service, civil service, education system, paramilitary wings, national anthem, and flag. It had its own cooperative, the Negro Factories Corporation, and shipping company, the Black Star Line, created to transport goods and facilitate repatriation to Africa.
It’s newspaper, Negro World, became a major platform for the dissemination of black culture and the politics of the Harlem Renaissance. Thus, at its peak, the UNIA galvanised millions with the message of “Africa for the Africans home and abroad”. In Garvey’s lifetime, the UNIA had offices in 40 countries on 4 continents, from Australia to the United Kingdom (Shilliam, 2012). All together, Garveyism came to inspire leaders and movements worldwide – from Kwame Nkrumah and the African National Congress (ANC), to the Rastafari movement and the Black Panther Party. Today, Marcus Garvey is widely regarded as a Jamaican national hero.
What Was the Ideology of Garveyism?
Marcus Garvey’s rallying cry – “Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad” – spoke to a deep yearning for dignity, autonomy, and self-rule among the global black diaspora. His legacy endures as a cornerstone of modern black consciousness and transnational solidarity.
Nonetheless, the ideology of ‘Garveyism’ is multilayered and complex. Garveyism was defined by a unique blend of black nationalism, economic empowerment, and anti-colonial politics. Garvey spoke to the Pan-Africanism of black Marxists such as Aimé Césaire, George Padmore, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Yet he rejected socialism in favor of a vision of progress which took “capital accumulation of the [black] races as the first order of business” (Stein, 1986).
The UNIA thus harboured profound contradictions. As a business empire, it was dependent on the exploitation of working-class blacks to succeed. Yet it fiercely championed black self-reliance, the self-determination of peoples of African heritage, and their unconditional freedom from racism and colonial oppression.
Above all, Garveyism was underpinned by the argument that “a race without authority and power is a race without respect.” Interpreting the history of black-white relations as one of systemic violence, exploitation, and genocidal intent, Garvey understood racism as inseparable from imperialism. Black independence was paramount on the basis that “the white man has got his share and more than his share” (Younis, 2022).
Race, Power, and the Question of Fascism
Garvey’s essentialist conception of race was central to his politics. Drawing on a critique of white supremacy, he envisioned the black ‘race’ as a global black ‘nation’ yet to be realised, not built on geography per se but on shared ancestry and historical suffering. This racial solidarity became the basis for his calls for a sovereign black empire.
In this sense, Garveyism occupied a complicated position within the broader Pan-Africanist movement. Even as he called for African independence and black self-rule, he remained committed to the ideal of Imperial citizenship and envisioned a grand black “Racial Empire upon which ‘the sun shall never set” (Getachew, 2019).
Garvey’s vision of racial purity and authoritarian leadership raised alarm bells among his fellow Pan-Africanists. He believed in a united people, animated by a single ideology, led by a single leader. Further still, he spoke of an authoritarian vision for a united Africa: an all-black society governed by laws to maintain racial separation, ruled under a single party system with himself installed as “Provisional President” (Gregor, 2015).
Freedom Fighter or Fascist?
Marcus Garvey was a freedom fighter who recognized political power as essential to the cause of black liberation. His ideology – Garveyism – occupied a distinct position in the history of Pan-Africanism, where attachments to arcane imperial forms co-mingled with emerging ideas of anti-colonial nationalism (Getachew, 2019). The UNIA was a product of the imperial moment in which it emerged.
Though Garvey’s declared goal was liberation, his politics were unapologetically authoritarian and based on a crude form of racial essentialism. When the historian J. A Rodgers wrote in 1927 that “Mussolini and fascism is like Garvey and Garveyism”, Garvey celebrated the comparison and published it in the UNIA newspaper Negro World (Taylor, 2003).
What Was Garvey’s Legacy?
Like Mussolini, Garvey crudely insisted on the predictability of conflict. “Mankind,” he claimed, had always been engaged in “universal warfare, tribe against tribe, clan against clan, race against race, [and] nation against nation” – failure to prepare politically and militarily, he argued, was “suicidal” (Gregor, 2006).
However, to simply label Garvey a ‘Fascist’ is to flatten the nuances of his political project. Unlike European fascism, which emerged from a position of imperial dominance, Garveyism was born in the context of racial subjugation and colonial exploitation. In this sense, Garvey’s call for black racial pride and self-determination might be read as a response to global disenfranchisement, rather than an assertion of supremacy.
Still, Garvey’s embrace of empire, self-aggrandizement, and racial essentialism complicate his legacy. Yet, few figures of his era did more to articulate a coherent vision of black empowerment and imagine a future where black people ruled their own destinies. A titan of the black power movement and a pivotal figure in the anti-colonial politics of the twentieth century, the legacy of Marcus Garvey remains as vital as it is contested.
