The controversies that ended the rise of Pan-African leader Marcus Garvey

KKK movement

Garvey’s meeting with the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, America’s most infamous racist organization, in 1922 was perhaps his last straw.

Garvey used the said meeting to attack his opponents and went ahead to commend the Klan for its honesty in proclaiming America to be “a white man’s country” and agreeing that “the Negro should have a country of his own in Africa.”

After his meeting, scores of African-American leaders appealed to U.S. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty to have Garvey incarcerated.

This would eventually lead to his conviction of mail fraud and his deportation to Jamaica as a condition of his release after his sentence was commuted.

Within this period, his UNIA had also crumbled and Garvey would later head to London where he died “alone in poverty” in 1940.

Colin Grant’s “Negro With a Hat” is known as the first serious biography of Garvey to appear in years.

He described Garvey as an “occasionally delusional figure whose arrogance, incompetence, belligerence and combativeness, and inability to accept responsibility contributed substantially to his personal downfall as well as to the collapse of his movement.”