Marcus Mosiah Garvey Sr. was a Jamaican political activist, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa. Ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist, his ideas came to be known as Garveyism.
The Pan-African flag is a tri-color flag consisting of three equal horizontal bands of red, black, and green. The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) formally adopted it on August 13, 1920, in Article 39 of the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, during its month-long convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Variations of the flag can and have been used in various countries and territories in the Americas to represent Garveyist ideologies.
The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) is a black nationalist fraternal organization founded by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant to the United States, and Amy Ashwood Garvey. The Pan-African organization enjoyed its greatest strength in the 1920s, and was influential prior to Garvey's deportation to Jamaica in 1927. After that its prestige and influence declined, but it had a strong influence on African-American history and development. The UNIA was said to be "unquestionably, the most influential anticolonial organization in Jamaica prior to 1938," according to Honor Ford-Smith.
The Black Star Line (1919−1922) was a shipping line incorporated by Marcus Garvey, the organizer of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and other members of the UNIA. The shipping line was created to facilitate the transportation of goods and eventually African Americans throughout the African global economy. It derived its name from the White Star Line, a line whose success Garvey felt he could duplicate. The Black Star Line became a key part of Garvey's contribution to the Back-to-Africa movement, but it was mostly unsuccessful, partially due to infiltration by federal agents. It was one among many businesses which the UNIA originated, such as the Universal Printing House, Negro Factories Corporation, and the widely distributed and highly successful Negro World weekly newspaper.
Negro World was the newspaper of the Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). Founded by Garvey and Amy Ashwood Garvey, the newspaper was published weekly in Harlem, New York, and distributed internationally to the UNIA's chapters in more than forty countries. Distributed weekly, at its peak, the Negro World reached a circulation of 200,000.
Henrietta Vinton Davis was an African-American elocutionist, dramatist, and impersonator. In addition to being "the premier actor of all nineteenth-century black performers on the dramatic stage", Davis was proclaimed by Marcus Garvey to be the "greatest woman of the Negro race today".
The Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World was drafted and adopted at the Convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association held in New York City's Madison Square Garden on August 13, 1920. Marcus Garvey presided over the occasion as Chairman. It was at this event where he was duly elected Provisional President of Africa.
J. Fred. Helf was an American composer and sheet music publisher during the early 20th century.
Negro Factories Corporation was one of the business ventures of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League recognized by 125 countries worldwide with its own Constitution and flag. The UNIA-ACL is a black nationalist fraternal organization founded in 1919 by Marcus Garvey, a North American Jamaican-born activist in New York. It eventually had chapters on three continents and in the Caribbean.
"Four Eleven Forty-Four", or "4-11-44" is a phrase that has been used repeatedly in popular music and as a reference to numbers allegedly chosen by poor African Americans for the purpose of gambling on lotteries. It was a well-known phrase in the 19th and early 20th century in the United States.
William A. Heelan was an American lyricist during the early 20th century. He collaborated with a number of composers and lyricists including E. P. Moran, Seymour Furth, J. Fred Helf and Harry Von Tilzer.
Coon songs were a genre of music that presented a stereotype of black people. They were popular in the United States and Australia from around 1880 to 1920, though the earliest such songs date from minstrel shows as far back as 1848, when they were not yet identified with "coon" epithet. The genre became extremely popular, with white and black men giving performances in blackface and making recordings. Women known as coon shouters also gained popularity in the genre.
Emory J. Tolbert is an American historian, educator, and activist. His scholarship centers on Marcus Garvey and Garveyism, as well as wider aspects of African American history.
Lecba Elizier Cadet was a Haitian Vodou priest who, in 1919 attended the Paris Peace Conference and First Pan African Congress on behalf of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
The Peace Movement of Ethiopia was an African-American organization based in Chicago, Illinois. It was active in the 1930s and 1940s, and promoted the repatriation of African Americans to the African continent, especially Liberia. They were affiliated with the Black Dragon Society.
Robert A. Hill is a Jamaican historian and academic who moved to the United States in the 1970s. He is Professor Emeritus of History and Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Visiting Fellow at The Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES), University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. A leading scholar on Marcus Garvey, Hill has lectured and written widely on the Garvey movement, and has been editor-in-chief of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers for more than 30 years. Reviewing the first volume in 1984, Eric Foner wrote: "'The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers' will take its place among the most important records of the Afro-American experience."
Laura Adorkor Kofi, commonly known as Mother Kofi, was a Ghanaian minister and activist associated with the Universal Negro Improvement Association. She was assassinated while preaching in Miami, Florida.
The SS Yarmouth was a steamship notable for its part in developing Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and connecting it to Boston, Massachusetts. Later in life it had a central role as the flagship of the Marcus Garvey initiative the Black Star Line. Marcus Garvey, known as the "black Moses", was a "back to Africa" radical, and his ideas, although radical and controversial in his own time and today, still remain influential. The Black Star Line's name, a play on the White Star Line, is remembered in the flag of Ghana.
The Daily Negro Times was a short-lived African-American newspaper published in New York by Marcus Garvey in 1922. Garvey bought a second hand newspaper press on which to print the paper and equipped the editorial office with a United Press ticker tape, probably the first African-American newspaper to have such a facility.
J. R. Ralph Casimir was a Dominican poet, editor, journalist and bookseller. A pioneering Caribbean pan-Africanist, he was a founding member of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), organising its Dominica branch. Casimir also compiled Dominica's first poetry anthologies.
