NEGRO WITH A HAT

Dazzling, definitive biography of the controversial activist who led the 1920s “Back to Africa” movement.

BBC radio producer Grant, himself the son of Caribbean immigrants, delivers a spellbinding portrait of Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), a printer who mobilized millions through his creation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey’s program of racial pride and economic uplift proposed an exodus of black people from the United States, the Caribbean and Central America to a colony in Liberia. Operating mainly from Harlem, he saw his dream of a thriving African homeland for blacks collapse in 1923 after he was convicted of mail fraud, an offense for which he later served a two-year prison sentence. Disgraced, dispirited and largely forgotten by the adoring throngs who once invested in his Black Star shipping line and other self-help business enterprises, the colorful self-styled “President-King” of Africa endured the agony of reading premature (and often vicious) obituaries published long before his death in London at age 52. The author notes that he was drawn to the myth and mystery of Garvey after accompanying his mother on a trip to her native Jamaica. Grant’s learned passion for his subject shimmers on every page, but that doesn’t prevent him from delivering a clear-eyed portrait of a man whose genuine commitment to bettering the lives of blacks was compromised by an outsized ego, a penchant for pageantry and unbridled disdain for mainstream crusaders such as NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois. Instead, Grant reveals, Garvey publicly and proudly claimed an ally in the Ku Klux Klan’s Imperial Wizard, who naturally cheered his “Back to Africa” scheme.

A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders.