Marcus Garvey and the Issue Term Paper

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Frazier described Garvey's brand of Black Nationalism as using contrived cultural devices to help establish a sense of solidarity among his constituents; further, Garvey was an astute student of human nature and seemed to know instinctively what people wanted to hear: "[Garvey] not only promised the despised Negro a paradise on earth, but he made the Negro an important person in his immediate environment. He invented honors and social distinctions and converted every social invention to his use in his effort to make his followers feel important" (237). In reality, though, Garvey's approach was diametrically opposed to the alternative solutions sought by liberal black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and reformist organizations like the NAACP (Marable 1998).

W.E.B. DuBois and Garvey. While W.E.B. Du Bois was frequently a hostile critic of the Black Nationalist movement, he agreed with Garvey's assessment that during the Great Depression, black America was "a nation in a nation" (Marable 3). When Garvey appointed himself the "provisional president of Africa," though, Marable reports that DuBois and other middle-class black leaders "found him ridiculous" (3). The white powers-that-were, though, did not share Du Bois's opinion and the organization and its publication was outlawed in a number of countries and territories throughout Africa and the Caribbean (Marable 1998).

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The leaders of the UNIA leaders and its organizers were also subjected to harassment, arrest and, in some instances, even death. "The U.S. government launched an effort to destroy the UNIA from within, and successfully charged Garvey himself with mail fraud. The UNIA's leader was imprisoned and, in 1927, expelled from the U.S., never to return" (Marable 4).

Conclusion

The research showed that although Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association virtually disappeared as an organization, Garvey's legacy remains in the manner in which he transformed the ideology of Black Nationalism. Perhaps no other black leader could have accomplished what Garvey did at the time, but the time was right for some type of social reform to take place, and Garvey's version was simply a variation on a theme. The charismatic Garvey managed to build himself a small empire before collapsing under the weight of his own bizarre behaviors and increasing attacks from critics, but as Marable points out, "The charismatic legacy of Garveyism brought together a series of contradictory ideas and themes: racial awareness and cultural pride, social conservatism, black capitalism, anticolonial protest, political militancy" (4).

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