Most of his followers in NYC were Black immigrants. Some Black Americans did support him -- but it was rooted in Caribbean immigrants.
"Although the movement developed here and was based in America, it was predominantly a Caribbean movement, at least until federal prosecution of Garvey in the early 1920s drew the attention of African Americans and galvanized their support of him," he said.
Garvey lived out his last years in Jamaica and England. Although he died in political obscurity in London in 1940, he eventually came to be considered the progenitor of the "black is beautiful" and Black Power movements in the U.S. in the 1960s.
"Garvey was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny and make the Negro feel he was somebody," Martin Luther King Jr. once said. Yet until the federal government's 1922 indictment on mail fraud charges and his 1923 trial, only a smattering of African Americans took a major interest in the man who many would come to refer to as the "Black Moses," Hill found.
Before that time, Garvey's followers were largely fellow Caribbean nationals here and abroad. Hill said the UNIA, which Garvey first founded in Jamaica two years before coming to the U.S. and which he launched in New York in 1917, "took off like a rocket" between the November 1918 armistice ending World War I and the UNIA's first major gathering in August 1920, which drew some 20,000 participants to New York's Madison Square Garden.
The bulk of UNIA members and followers in this critical period were immigrants from British colonies in the Caribbean, who, bitterly disillusioned with the experience of British racism after patriotically serving in World War I, turned to Garvey and the UNIA. Many had worked on the construction of the Panama Canal and, following its completion in 1914, had flowed into the United States. Some 150,000 Caribbean natives are estimated to have worked on the building of the canal.
Caribbean nationals not only constituted Garvey's main body of followers, but they served as the primary vectors for disseminating the message of the UNIA. Within the U.S., Caribbean immigrants spread Garvey's reach by introducing his message to widely scattered communities outside of large African American population centers, including Detroit; Pittsburgh; Newport News, Va.; New Orleans; Charleston, S.C.; New Madrid, Mo.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Miami; Los Angeles; and Riverside, Calif. Meanwhile, Caribbean nationals spread Garvey's message throughout the West Indies and the countries of Central and South America, where they had been employed on the Panama Canal and on the railroads and banana plantations of the United Fruit Company, a U.S. conglomerate that specialized in the tropical fruit trade.
"Without the immigrant base, it seems unlikely that the Garvey movement would ever have arisen on the scale that it did nor as rapidly as it did," Hill said. "The two were symbiotic."
"No matter where they lived, large numbers of immigrants from the Caribbean identified very strongly with the UNIA and with Garvey because the UNIA became a way of maintaining their cultural identity and connection with the rest of the Caribbean," Hill said. As a result, Garvey's efforts helped forge a common ethnic identity for immigrants from Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Antigua, Grenada, St. Vincent, St Lucia, the English-speaking Virgin Islands and the Bahamas.
"Even though Garvey was from Jamaica, citizens of other West Indian territories identified in large numbers with him," Hill explained. "The Caribbean diaspora's new sense of ethnic unity forged in the United States became the launching pad for this amazing movement, as well as reinforced the wider sense of Caribbean identity."
Source:
Marcus Garvey movement owes large debt to Caribbean expats, UCLA historian finds
...he did more for black ppl than u ever have...this is proven fact....spell check before u talk shyt
