Content area
Full Text
In the period after Marcus Garvey's return to Jamaica from the United States, the civil rights leader was welcomed as a hero by the poorer classes but was viewed with suspicion by the authorities, who feared his popularity and his reputation. In 1930, he was charged, prosecuted, and convicted of seditious libel. Although his conviction was ultimately overturned in the Court of Appeal for procedural reasons, his trial and conviction for sedition was one way in which the authorities tried to abort his controversial political programs to uplift the black race. This article traces his trial as an example of how the legal system in post-emancipation colonial Jamaica was used to abort Garvey's fledgling political movement.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jamaica's first national hero, was born on August 17, 1887, in St. Ann on the north coast of the island. A black child in post-emancipation Jamaica, he grew up in a community where black and white children played together, and it was not until his teen years that he recognized the difference between die two races and that he, unlike his white friends, "had to make a fight for a place in the world," according to historian Lawrence Levine. A printer by trade, he moved to Kingston to pursue his occupation and became interested in debating and politics before launching his controversial international career.1
Garvey is best known for his international impact as a humanrights leader after his migration to the United States in 1916. In the U.S., as the leader and the founder of the United Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I A.), which became a large and controversial international organization aimed at uplifting the black race, he advocated repatriation of blacks to Africa. Because of his work with the U.N.I.A., he gathered a large following of black supporters from around the world and gained the enmity of white governments in the U.S. and Europe because of his controversial stance on black repatriation to Africa.2
The story of Garvey's life in the U.S. and abroad, along with his conviction for mail fraud in 1925, is well chronicled.3 However, little is known of his contribution to Jamaican politics after his deportation in 1927. He formed a political party that advocated several reforms that were progressive in the...