Meet the legendary black leaders in history who never saw eye to eye

Marcus Garvey vs. WEB Dubois

Marcus Garvey is famed for being Jamaica’s first national hero who advocated for Black nationalism in Jamaica and particularly in the United States. He and DuBois had been against the stance taken by Washington and had pushed for what Washington probably couldn’t – the advancement of civil rights.

But Garvey and DuBois would have differences that were mainly ideological and this would ruin any relationship the two influential black political leaders of the 1920s had. Garvey, who grew up in an impoverished Jamaican community, believed that whites would never come to accept blacks and thus, he proposed that black Americans return to Africa, “where they would live as part of a majority population and perhaps have real political power,” an article on NPR noted.

DuBois, however, “wanted to push shining examples of black citizenry front and center for white America to see, people so accomplished it would be hard to deny them their rightful place in society,” the article added.

DuBois felt that Garvey’s program of complete separation, which was a form of surrender to white supremacy, threatened the gains made by his own NAACP movement. Hence, by the early 1920s, DuBois started an active campaign aimed at getting Garvey out, including investigating controversies surrounding his Black Star Line, the all-black steamship company. In the long run, Garvey was accused of running the company into liquidation, and he was quickly convicted.