Black Jamaican Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914, in Jamaica, as a self-improvement organization intended to promote black pride in the face of white discrimination that Garvey knew from his travels existed worldwide. Visiting the United States on a speaking tour in 1916, the charismatic Garvey, president of the UNIA, ended up staying and continued to organize. By 1919, he had more than a million followers.
In the 1920s the UNIA provided a number of self-help and other services, including lectures, socials, classes for adults, death benefits, and start-up assistance for small businesses, such as laundries, restaurants, and dry goods stores. (INTRO NOTE African Americans) It advocated the goal of resettlement of American blacks in Africa and preached a philosophy of black separatism. In 1921, Garvey established the African Orthodox Church to institutionalize the belief that God was black.
Most whites and many blacks regarded Garvey as a radical and he was under government surveillance from 1918 on. Arrested for mail fraud in 1922, he was convicted in 1923 on slender evidence and imprisoned in 1925. From the federal prison in Atlanta, he continued to edit his newspaper, Negro World, official voice of the UNIA. In 1927, through the intervention of President Coolidge, his sentence was commuted and he was deported. He died in London in 1940.
His name figures in correspondence in the Coolidge Papers case file African-American Economic Issues.