In this biography, Ula Taylor explores the life and ideas of one of the most important, if largely unsung, Pan-African freedom fighters of the twentieth century: Amy Jacques Garvey (1895-1973). Born in Jamaica, Amy Jacques moved in 1917 to Harlem, where she became involved in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest Pan-African organization of its time. She served as the private secretary of UNIA leader Marcus Garvey; in 1922, they married. Soon after, she began to give speeches and to publish editorials urging black women to participate in the Pan-African movement and addressing issues that affected people of African descent across the globe. After her husband's death in 1940, Jacques Garvey emerged as a gifted organizer for the Pan-African cause. Although she faced considerable male chauvinism, she persisted in creating a distinctive feminist voice within the movement. In her final decades, Jacques Garvey constructed a thriving network of Pan-African contacts, including Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Taylor examines the many roles Jacques Garvey played throughout her life, as feminist, black nationalist, journalist, daughter, mother, and wife. Tracing her political and intellectual evolution, the book illuminates the leadership and enduring influence of this remarkable activist.

The patriarchal structure of the Nation of Islam (NOI) promised black women the prospect of finding a provider and a protector among the organization's men, who were fiercely committed to these masculine roles. Black women's experience in the NOI, however, has largely remained on the periphery of scholarship. Here, Ula Taylor documents their struggle to escape the devaluation of black womanhood while also clinging to the empowering promises of patriarchy. Taylor shows how, despite being relegated to a lifestyle that did not encourage working outside of the home, NOI women found freedom in being able to bypass the degrading experiences connected to labor performed largely by working-class black women and in raising and educating their children in racially affirming environments. Telling the stories of women like Clara Poole (wife of Elijah Muhammad) and Burnsteen Sharrieff (secretary to W. D. Fard, founder of the Allah Temple of Islam), Taylor offers a compelling narrative that explains how their decision to join a homegrown, male-controlled Islamic movement was a complicated act of self-preservation and self-love in Jim Crow America.

In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey was one of the most famous black men in the world. Marcus Garvey and the Back to Africa Movement examines the rise and fall of this charismatic leader from his days preaching from a soapbox in Harlem to his role as a spokesman for millions of black Americans who dreamed of a better life in Africa.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was once the most famous black man on earth. A brilliant orator who electrified his audiences, he inspired thousands to join his "Back to Africa" movement, aiming to create an independent homeland through Pan-African emigration--yet he was barred from the continent by colonial powers. This self-educated, poetry-writing aesthete was a shrewd promoter whose use of pageantry fired the imagination of his followers. At the pinnacle of his fame in the early 1920s, Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association boasted millions of members in more than forty countries, and he was an influential champion of the Harlem Renaissance. J. Edgar Hoover was so alarmed by Garvey that he labored for years to prosecute him, finally using dubious charges for which Garvey served several years in an Atlanta prison. This biography restores Garvey to his place as one of the founders of black nationalism and a key figure of the 20th century.--From publisher description.

Arguing that the accomplishments of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey and his followers have been marginalized in narratives of the black freedom struggle, this volume builds on decades of overlooked research to reveal the profound impact of Garvey’s post–World War I black nationalist philosophy around the globe and across the twentieth century. These essays point to the breadth of Garveyism’s spread and its reception in communities across the African diaspora, examining the influence of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Africa, Australia, North America, and the Caribbean. They highlight the underrecognized work of many Garveyite women and show how the UNIA played a key role in shaping labor unions, political organizations, churches, and schools. In addition, contributors describe the importance of grassroots efforts for expanding the global movement—the UNIA trained leaders to organize local centers of power, whose political activism outside the movement helped Garvey’s message escape its organizational bounds during the 1920s. They trace the imprint of the movement on long-term developments such as decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, the pan-Aboriginal fight for land rights in Australia, the civil rights and Black Power movements in the United States, and the radical pan-African movement. Rejecting the idea that Garveyism was a brief and misguided phenomenon, this volume exposes its scope, significance, and endurance. Together, contributors assert that Garvey initiated the most important mass movement in the history of the African diaspora, and they urge readers to rethink the emergence of modern black politics with Garveyism at the center.

This anthology contains some of the African-American rights advocate's most noted writings and speeches, among them "Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World" and "Africa for the Africans."

Amy Jacques Garvey was one of the most prolific women within any Black nationalist group, yet she has largely only been discussed in relationship to her husband, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, and as the editor of the Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Much of her writing has remained unavailable to the public, lost to the archives, until now. Amy Jacques Garvey: Selected Writings from the Negro World, 1923-1928 seeks to fill this void by making her writings in the Negro Worldwidely available for the first time. Editor Louis J. Parascandola compiles a wide swath of Jacques Garvey's work in this groundbreaking collection. Born and educated in Jamaica, Jacques Garvey's atypical opportunity to receive education at elite Jamaican schools, along with her later jobs as a clerk and secretary, prepared her for future positions as journalist and political administrator. She also possessed the rhetorical skills and independent thinking that would help her challenge Marcus Garvey and the other men in Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). In allowing Jacques Garvey's work to largely speak for itself, the volume reveals that she concerned herself with a diversity of important and often controversial political and social issues rather than the stereotypical domestic matters expected of most woman's pages of the time period. By examining her selected writings in the Negro World, this volume affords its readers a better understanding of Jacques Garvey's powerful contribution not only to Garveyism but also to the growth of Black radical thought, anti-imperialist ideology, and the rights of third-world women. This timely study sheds new light on Jacques Garvey's pivotal role as a Black female writer and thinker during the twenties.

From 1927–1948, the Universal Ethiopian Students’ Association (UESA) mobilized the African diaspora to fight against imperialism and fascist Italy. Formed by a group of educated Africans, African-Americans, and West Indians based in Harlem and shaped by the ideals of Ethiopianism, communism, Pan-Africanism, Black Nationalism, Garveyism, and the New Negro Movement, the UESA sought to educate the diaspora about its glorious African past and advocate for anti-imperialism and independence. This book focuses on the UESA’s literary organ, The African, mapping a constellation of understudied activists and their contributions to the fight for Black liberation in the twentieth century.

A groundbreaking exploration of Garveyism's global influence during the interwar years and beyond Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917. By the early 1920s, his program of African liberation and racial uplift had attracted millions of supporters, both in the United States and abroad. The Age of Garvey presents an expansive global history of the movement that came to be known as Garveyism. Offering a groundbreaking new interpretation of global black politics between the First and Second World Wars, Adam Ewing charts Garveyism's emergence, its remarkable global transmission, and its influence in the responses among African descendants to white supremacy and colonial rule in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Delving into the organizing work and political approach of Garvey and his followers, Ewing shows that Garveyism emerged from a rich tradition of pan-African politics that had established, by the First World War, lines of communication among black intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. Garvey’s legacy was to reengineer this tradition as a vibrant and multifaceted mass politics. Ewing looks at the people who enabled Garveyism’s global spread, including labor activists in the Caribbean and Central America, community organizers in the urban and rural United States, millennial religious revivalists in central and southern Africa, welfare associations and independent church activists in Malawi and Zambia, and an emerging generation of Kikuyu leadership in central Kenya. Moving away from the images of quixotic business schemes and repatriation efforts, The Age of Garvey demonstrates the consequences of Garveyism’s international presence and provides a dynamic and unified framework for understanding the movement, during the interwar years and beyond.

Traditional accounts of Colorado's history often reflect an Anglocentric perspective that begins with the 1859 Pikes Peak Gold Rush and Colorado's establishment as a state in 1876. Enduring Legacies expands the study of Colorado's past and present by adopting a borderlands perspective that emphasizes the multiplicity of peoples who have inhabited this region. Addressing the dearth of scholarship on the varied communities within Colorado-a zone in which collisions structured by forces of race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality inevitably lead to the transformation of cultures and the emergence of new identities-this volume is the first to bring together comparative scholarship on historical and contemporary issues that span groups from Chicanas and Chicanos to African Americans to Asian Americans. This book will be relevant to students, academics, and general readers interested in Colorado history and ethnic studies.