Black Moses

Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican who arrived in America, drew a fierce wave of race pride and self-determination from ordinary Black Americans in the early 1900s. Black intellectuals denounced him, and the white press treated him as a joke, yet his nationalist speeches left a striking impression on audiences. Within roughly four years he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which grew to hundreds of branches across the country and became the largest and most powerful organization of its kind. That achievement was also what eventually brought him public humiliation. Edmund David Cronon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, revisits this contested figure and examines why his life and work still matter.