Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican-American political activist, publisher, and entrepreneur whose three-decade career produced one of the foundational figures of early-20th-century international Pan-Africanist movement — particularly his 1914 founding of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston, Jamaica. He was born Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. on August 17, 1887, in Saint Ann's Bay, Saint Ann Parish, Colony of Jamaica, into an Afro-Jamaican working-class family. His father Marcus Mosiah Garvey Sr. was a Jamaican stonemason, and his mother Sarah Jane Richards was a homemaker.

His early career across the early-1900s — across multiple Jamaican printer's-apprentice positions and his 1909 work as the foreman of the Benjamin's Limited printing shop in Kingston — and his 1910–1912 travel across Costa Rica, Panama, and Ecuador (where he observed the working conditions of Caribbean-immigrant laborers in the United Fruit Company banana plantations) launched his early-career Pan-Africanist political-activism public profile. His 1912 London arrival and his subsequent 1912–1914 work for African-and-Caribbean nationalist Duse Mohamed Ali's African Times and Orient Review produced his early-career international Pan-Africanist public profile.

His July 20, 1914 founding of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston, Jamaica — and his subsequent 1916 emigration to Harlem, New York City, with the UNIA — launched his 1916–1925 American international Pan-Africanist public profile. The 1918 founding of his Negro World newspaper at the UNIA's Harlem office produced his 1918–1933 international Pan-Africanist publishing public profile.

His August 1, 1920 First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World — held at the Madison Square Garden in New York City, with approximately 25,000 international Pan-Africanist delegates — produced his early-1920s international Pan-Africanist public profile. His 1919 founding of the Black Star Line shipping company — and the subsequent 1922 federal mail-fraud indictment over the Black Star Line stock-sale advertisements — shaped his later biographical narrative. The 1923 federal mail-fraud conviction (with a 5-year federal prison sentence at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary across 1925–1927), and the 1927 commutation by President Calvin Coolidge with subsequent November 1927 deportation to Jamaica, produced his late-career biographical narrative. He died on June 10, 1940, at age 52, in London, England, of a stroke.

His name Marcus derives from the Latin Marcus (an old Roman family name, possibly derived from the Roman war god Mars). Marcus has been a popular American boys' name across the late 20th century.