Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey, the charismatic organizer of the Back-to-Africa Movement and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), remains a revered and disparaged figure whose influence on African American history and thought is profound. In this comprehensive biography, BBC radio producer Grant follows Garvey from his childhood and early peregrinations through Central America and England to his ventures in the United States-the phenomenal growth of the UNIA, the tortuous history of the Black Star Line, the collapse of both. Convicted of mail fraud, later deported, Garvey died in London. Garvey biographers have tended to focus on the UNIA, but Grant's book is richly evocative of the times and places in which he lived (pre-World War I Jamaica and England, the Harlem Renaissance) and the people who mentored, admired, and quarreled with him-Grant's attention to the exceptional women in Garvey's life, particularly his wives Amy Ashwood and later Amy Jacques is especially noteworthy. Garvey, the radical journalist and editor (The Negro World), emerges more fully than usual, with all his contradictions present. Dense with detail, but consistently readable, this splendid book is certain to become the definitive biography. Garvey was a dreamer and a doer; Grant captures the fascination of both.