1887-1940
Black Nationalist, Editor

Early Years.

Although he lived in the United States a mere eleven of his fifty-three years, Marcus Garvey had a tremendous impact on African American consciousness after 1917, as well as in the years after his death in 1940. He was born in Jamaica in 1887 and raised in Saint Ann's Bay. In 1901 he left school and began life as an apprentice printer with his father in Kingston. By 1907 he was a master printer working at a large Kingston print shop, where he led an unsuccessful strike that year. Blacklisted, he spent the next years traveling. In 1910 he was in Costa Rica working for the United Fruit Company; he then traveled to Peru and Panama. In all three places he witnessed the harsh and difficult life of working blacks. In 1912 Garvey moved to London, where he met the Egyptian activist Duse Mohammed Ali, publisher of...