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"NEGRO WOMEN ARE GREAT THINKERS AS WELL AS DOERS": Amy Jacques-Garvey and Community Feminism in the United States, 1924-1927
Amy Jacques-Garvey (1896-1973) was the second wife of Marcus Mosiah Garvey and unofficial leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest Pan-African movement in the twentieth century. Jacques-Garvey mastered what Taylor calls community feminism. Community feminism allowed black women to function within their communities as both helpmates and leaders. An examination of Jacques-Garvey's editorials published in the Negro World, the propaganda newspaper for the UNIA, reveals her brand of community feminism and how her choices were political--transforming her from a personal secretary, editor, and wife into an indispensable UNIA leader during the 1920s.
The 1920s marked the decade of the "new Negro," and nowhere was this more pronounced than in New York City. It was in Harlem that an intelligentsia, representing a range of organizations, produced layers of political commentary. Settled within the cauldron of activism was the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest Pan-African organization in the twentieth century. 1 Led by Marcus Mosiah Garvey and commonly known as Garveyism, this movement was based on the idea that the needs and interests of people of African descent throughout the diaspora were linked to Africans on the continent, since the collective identity of both groups lay in Africa.
In 1923, the UNIA was a thriving organization of six million members and at least nine hundred branches worldwide. 2 The black masses had responded to Marcus Garvey's platform, which highlighted the necessity of generating global economic connections and redeeming Africa from European colonists. However, the organization suffered a setback in July of that year, when Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in New York and sentenced to five years in federal prison. During Garvey's prison term, his second wife, Amy Jacques-Garvey (1896-1973), was an unofficial but fundamental leader of the UNIA. 3
The incarceration of her husband created a new set of circumstances for Jacques-Garvey. Up until this point, the married couple had been guided by their traditional Jamaican upbringing, which stipulated that wives were to be compromising helpmates. Jacques-Garvey was proud to claim the identity of helpmate to Garvey; but after his conviction, she became the focus of public attention, and, in time,...