Marcus Garvey was born on this day in 1887.

We have no animus against the white man. All that we have as a race desired is a place in the sun.

—Marcus Garvey, from The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Volume II, August 1919 - 31 August 1920

Marcus Garvey was one of the earliest leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, though he never fought for integration the way many of the leaders of the 1950s and 1960s did. Garvey believed in separation of races, and in fact argued for a separate nation for African Americans, known as the “back to Africa” movement. Starting with few resources when he came to the United States in 1916, Garvey nonetheless built, over the next eleven years, the largest black nationalist movement the United States had seen. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which aimed to promote self-reliance and solidarity among blacks. He was a popular lecturer whose often incendiary speeches won him both a large following and heated detractors, such as African American leader and writer W. E. B. Du Bois, with whom Garvey fought publicly on many occasions. Garvey published the newspaper Negro World, and owned and operated Black Star Lines, a steamship company catering to blacks in the U.S., Africa and the Caribbean. Mistrusted by the American government, Garvey was arrested in 1925 for mail fraud and deported to Jamaica. Years after his death in 1940, Marcus Garvey remains a legend and a hero, immortalized in numerous reggae songs. His writings and his vision, rediscovered during the World War II era and again during the Civil Rights movement in the United States, continue to influence individuals and governments around the world.

ARTSEDGE
Students can learn about Garvey and about the place he and many other famous African Americans shaped in Drop Me Off in Harlem (K–12), an ARTSEDGE Mini-Site focused on the Harlem Renaissance.

Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League, usually called the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), are among the civil rights organizations students examine in Organizations that Create Change (5–8). By studying various civil rights organizations and their accomplishments, students learn how groups of individuals can effect social change.

EDSITEment
In After the American Revolution: Free African Americans in the North (6–8), students meet African American individuals who lived in the North in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War. In addition, they practice the techniques authors use to transform information about individuals into readable biographies. This lesson increases student awareness of the role of literary techniques and historical accuracy in biography and offers students the opportunity to deal with both issues in practice.