Marcus Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940), born in St Ann's Bay, arrived in Kingston in 1901 at fourteen to apprentice as a printer and became a labour organiser before emigrating. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which grew into a mass international Black-nationalist movement with its own newspapers, businesses and the Black Star Line shipping venture.

Convicted of mail fraud in the United States and deported to Jamaica, he returned to a hero's welcome before later settling in London, where he died in relative obscurity in 1940. He had no direct organisational role in Rastafari, which emerged independently in Jamaica in the early 1930s, but Garveyist ideas of Black pride and self-help, and a widely circulated prophecy about a crowned Black king, are treated by the movement's own tradition as its ideological foundation, and his name and image run through the music that followed as shorthand for that inheritance: Marcus Garvey Drive in Kingston, where much of the recording industry set up, and Burning Spear's 1975 album named for him, are both already in this archive.